More Tea, Jesus?

by James Lark

  He sighed. At times like this, he started to wonder why he’d become a priest in the first place. There had been a reason, once. But he couldn’t remember what. He was so used to being a priest that his motivation for becoming one had completely slipped his mind.

  He knew that he liked helping people. Sorting out issues for people like Gerard Feehan. But a niggling voice in his head was telling him that there must be a better reason for his being a priest. Liking to help people – that was hardly the strongest rationale behind the vocation; in fact, it was rather pathetic. You didn’t need to be a priest to help people. In all honesty, you probably had more time to help people if you weren’t a priest. You just didn’t get paid for it.

  In any case, the extent of his actual helpfulness was at the moment looking rather dubious. He hadn’t helped Gerard Feehan, that was certain. As far as he could gather, the most help he’d given anyone in the parish recently was advice on how to stop an omelette sticking to a frying pan. Oh, it was good advice, that wasn’t in dispute – but it wasn’t really helping people. Not like Alex Milne helped people, for example. Biddle felt sure Alex hadn’t been exaggerating about cleaning toilets, but cleaning toilets was only one physical expression of something Alex had made a successful career as a priest in – giving people actual reasons to carry on living.

  Perhaps that was why Alex always seemed so weary, so preoccupied. In many ways, he’d sacrificed years of his life for the sake of other people. So what does it say about me, Biddle thought, that I feel perfectly happy most of the time? That the biggest thing on my mind at the moment is why I haven’t got anything bigger on my mind?

  Biddle had spent years worrying about Milne, praying for him with more feeling than for most things, yet he was realising that Alex had earned something that he had never known himself. It wasn’t a thing to be pitied, it was something to be admired.

  In an attempt to push aside these dangerously morose thoughts, Biddle lifted his book again, but one glimpse of the first sentence brought back the sense of tedium. Perhaps now was the time to give up on it. Not forever, of course – he would leave it for a time when his mind was less cluttered, add it to the pile he had pushed to the back of his bedside cabinet for similar reconsideration, on top of The Cloud of Unknowing and a tedious ‘new approach to ecumenism’ called A Heart-Shaped Church and – what was that big book? Oh – the Bible.

  Had it really been so long since he’d read his Bible? He didn’t really need it to write sermons, since he could get all the information he needed from a concordance. He read other Bibles all the time, needless to say, mostly in church from church Bibles. (There was also a strategically placed copy of The Message next to the toilet, in which he had been known to immerse himself occasionally. The Message, that is.)

  Probably his lack of personal scriptural devotion was another failing, another thing that he wasn’t doing very well. There was clearly no real excuse – the Bible might not be ideal for reading in the bath, but at least it didn’t involve any dull Indian villagers. He would pick it up again soon. But not tonight – he was already very tired. With an immediate sense of release, he added Weaving the Spell of Civilisation to the pile of books, turned off his bedside lamp and let the softness of his pillow embrace him. He could worry about reading God’s word, being a helpful vicar and the actual point of existing in the morning.

  As he closed his eyes, he remembered what he had forgotten to do.

  Less than a second later he was leaping out of bed, wondering how he could have been so stupid. He desperately racked his brain in the hope that he was just confused and somebody else was doing it. He raced through the options in his mind – a trainee priest called Ali Coshutt was currently attached to the church so it could conceivably be her, but she tended not to go to services as they were ‘too early’, so it seemed unlikely. Dr Barrett was doing it at some point this month, but Biddle was fairly certain that he was still lecturing in Edinburgh. Biddle hurried downstairs with a growing feeling of sickness and checked the rota on his noticeboard.

  It was as he had feared. He was definitely meant to be preaching in the morning. He couldn’t even blame Mrs Hall’s prize-winning window box this time; true, the slightly obscured rota on the noticeboard was his only reminder that he was expected to preach the next day, but it scarcely felt like the kind of thing he should need reminding about – he was, after all, the vicar.

  It was too late to write a sermon now. The only option at this stage was to re-use an old one. Recycling old material, particularly wholesale, was not something he favoured; in the richness of life’s tapestry, it was a kind of duty for him to write a new sermon each week to ensure that his ministry fully encapsulated the multifaceted complexity of God and to maintain a freshness and relevance to everything he said. But this was an emergency.

  He lifted a large white plastic ring-binder down from the top of the bookshelf in his study and opened it. If he was lucky, he might find a sermon into which he could shoehorn the omelette motif, to make it look as though it was part of a coherent series.

  He automatically opened the binder towards the front where the least heretical sermons were filed. His system ordered his archived sermons from messages of encouragement designed to make people feel happy, through to more challenging material designed to make people think, and finally to the very back of the file where he kept sermons that would upset people. This last category consisted entirely of youthful writings, dating back to when he was a trainee priest and then a recently ordained Deacon; he had hoped, in those days, to make people consider their faith in different ways, to turn their idea of God upside down and dispute widely accepted approaches to Christianity with more maverick ideas. Except that, gradually, he had come to feel that he was being maverick mainly for the sake of being maverick. Also, that much of what he was saying was wrong. Parish life had quickly taught him that upsetting people was not necessarily a sign that he was doing his job successfully – indeed, it tended to make his job considerably more difficult. As a result, it had been over a decade since he had filed a sermon in the back part of the ring-binder.

  However, he had for many years continued striving to challenge people to think about what they believed; the sermons he had considered ‘challenging’ were those in which he had addressed more uncomfortable areas of Christianity, or things that he felt were wrong with the church. Before long, he had realised that these sermons had a tendency to upset people as well. He had struggled to coax congregations into revising their blinkered (or, at the very least, non-committal) views of morality, of scriptural literalism, of social and political issues – and congregations had largely had their blinkered views reinforced by the fact that they were being opposed by the young heretical priest they didn’t like.

  Perhaps Biddle had simply worked in the wrong kind of churches, but eventually the strain of being disliked and subtly undermined by his congregations had made him reconsider his views on what his role really was as a priest. And then he had become conscious of the main deficiency in his ministry, his failure to give people in church something to feel happy about. It was all very well trying to change what people thought, to maintain a thoughtful, challenging approach to Christianity, but if he couldn’t give people something to hope for, then what reason did they have to be in church at all?

  So Biddle had experimentally preached on subjects such as God’s overflowing love for the people who turned up to church on time and only missed it with a good excuse; or resting in God’s peace; or casting all of life’s cares on God so that there was nothing to worry about. All good, scripturally sound messages, with an inbuilt feel-good factor and not too much thought required. The kind of sermon known informally by clergy as a ‘fanny tickler’.

  It had worked. Suddenly, Biddle found his messages being received with gentle nodding; instead of blanking him on their way out of church, members of the congregation would grasp his hand and say, ‘Lovely sermon, vicar’. He had always hoped to maintain a balance between the
se ‘fluffy’ sermons and the more challenging material, but it was so much easier to give people something nice to think about than to upset them with more disturbing issues.

  Ultimately, Biddle had grown to believe that there were far too many priests abusing the pulpit with their own agenda, when it was much better to let people develop their own opinions (guided by God, of course). So he tried instead to make his church feel open and friendly, warm and inviting – anything that might put people off or cause offence was to be pushed into the background.

  Biddle frowned. Was that where he had been going wrong? Had he made his own approach so user-friendly that it had ceased to be relevant? He had once been so ambitious, had wanted to change so much; was it time to reawaken his old fervour and open the minds of his congregation to something outside their limited perspectives?

  Biddle recalled, with a distant but perceptible tingle of satisfaction, his sense of achievement when several members of a congregation had got up and left in the middle of a sermon he had preached on human sexuality. He had still been training, on a brief attachment to a church in an obscenely rich area, which at the time clearly wasn’t ready to accept Biddle’s assertion that ‘everything we might consider sexual deviancy is still somehow flowing from and part of God’. It had disgusted several disgustingly rich people and afterwards, the vicar of the church (who was just plain disgusting) had given him a severe telling-off. In every respect, these results had made Biddle feel vindicated. His message had been necessary and justified, and what could be greater proof than the fact that nobody had liked it?

  On that day, and over the following days, when the church in question had taken steps to make sure he never set foot in it again and painfully laborious steps had been taken to find him a new attachment (accompanied by various disciplinary meetings with the staff of his theological college), Biddle had felt as though he had taken up his cross and been crucified with Christ. He had felt like a martyr.

  That had been satisfying.

  So when had his job stopped feeling like a battlefield and started being a picnic in a vicarage garden? Somewhere along the line, he had watered down his approach to church to the extent that it had lost all of its excitement – it was all about being happy and smiley and, God damn it, the world wasn’t like that!

  Was Alex Milne right, he suddenly wondered – did he need more misery in his religion? Having assumed that Alex was simply bitter and morose, Biddle hadn’t considered the possibility that there might be any truth in the observation. Where was the realism in being warm and fluffy all the time?

  He turned over the pages in his ring-binder with determination, looking for the sermons in the ‘upsetting’ category. Let’s see, he thought, if I can rekindle some of that old sense of danger in what I believe. After all, if anything was ever going to happen in Little Collyweston, he was going to have to initiate it himself, or they’d be waiting until the Second Coming. It was time to shake things up at St Barnabas.

  One of the titles caught his eye in passing – ‘Christ’s wounds: vaginal pathways for the foetus that is humankind’ – and he hurriedly turned back several pages. It wasn’t time to shake things up at St Barnabas that much.

  Biddle was rifling through the file fairly vigorously and concentrating very hard on finding a sermon – also the door had swung closed behind him as he went into his study – so perhaps it wasn’t surprising that, for the second time that week, he failed to respond to Jesus knocking on his front door. Either Biddle couldn’t hear the gentle sound or didn’t want to, but whatever the reason, Jesus was left standing on the doorstep again.

  Some would think that Jesus had better things to do than keep coming back to knock at the same door; certainly you’d imagine that by now he’d be a bit fed up of hanging around Little Collyweston without anybody even speaking to him. But there he was, patiently knocking as he had before and as he no doubt would again if the door wasn’t opened.

  It might have saved Andy Biddle a great deal of unpleasantness had he responded.

  Chapter 11

  Harriet Lomas poked her head around the door of her husband’s study. ‘I’m going to church now,’ she said.

  ‘See you later,’ Bernard Lomas answered, not looking up from his work. Harriet watched him drawing his latest diagram with a feeling of tender pride.

  ‘How is the plan going?’ she asked.

  ‘Mmm.’

  He would never get round to stealing Ted Sloper’s harpsichord, of course – this obsession would fade like all the others – but the fact that he had spent days creating these painstaking diagrams detailing how such a theft would take place was, she thought, extremely touching.

  And on a practical level, she was having much subtler ideas about triumphing over Ted Sloper.

  ‘Harley.’

  ‘Yes, Harriet!’ Harley Farmer nodded. ‘Yes, good morning.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about the French pronunciation we discussed in the rehearsal last week.’

  ‘Oh, er …’ Harley Farmer cast his mind back, desperately. He could rarely remember what music they had practised, let alone specific details of rehearsals – they always seemed so long ago.

  ‘In the Fauré,’ Harriet clarified.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he responded, uncertainly.

  ‘It’s the word “paisible” – I think it would be best if we pronounced it like “possible”, don’t you?’

  ‘Um … yes.’

  ‘Ted’s got a lot on his plate. I think it would be easier if we just pronounced it correctly, rather than bother him with small details.’

  ‘Um … yes. Yes, he has got a lot on his plate.’

  ‘So, we’re singing “possible” then.’

  ‘Um … yes.’

  ‘Good.’ Harriet smiled and moved on to the next choir member.

  Ted Sloper did indeed have a lot on his plate. Gordon Spare, who represented the sum total of the choir’s tenor section, had phoned up a little before midnight to explain that he had just remembered that he was in Cornwall, so wouldn’t be able to sing this Sunday. Ted paced around St Barnabas as it began to fill with people, desperately searching for a replacement tenor. Only in St Barnabas, he thought to himself; only here could anybody find themselves looking for a tenor fifteen minutes before the start of the service.

  ‘Right,’ he said to himself, ‘the vicar wants me on a recruitment drive, does he?’ He looked around the building desperately. ‘Fine.’ He spotted one of the ‘newcomers’ Biddle had mentioned, a quiet-looking man sitting in the back pew. At least nobody else was paying him any attention so there would be no witnesses to what Sloper was sure would be an exercise in self-humiliation. He edged his way towards the man.

  It was Jesus’ fourth week at St Barnabas and nobody had yet spoken to him directly, so it was a welcome relief to see Ted Sloper hovering next to him with the look of someone about to speak. If the exchange that followed proved anticlimactic, Jesus was too polite to show it.

  ‘Look, er … sorry, I know we haven’t actually, er, and you don’t know me from Adam,’ Ted began, inaccurately, ‘and this might seem like an odd, er, but it’s one of those, er … you know.’ Ted cleared his throat, embarrassed. He had known this would be humiliating. He hated talking to strangers and this man’s gentle blue eyes seemed to be penetrating right through his attempt at being casual and laid back. ‘So, I don’t suppose you sing tenor,’ Ted continued, ‘and even if you had the sweetest tenor voice in the world, the choir here’s the last place you’d want to use it.’ He tried for an ironic laugh but it came out as a gulp. ‘I mean, if you’ve been here before you’ll have heard them – bloody dreadful – come to think of it maybe it’ll be an improvement not to have a tenor line – heh.’

  The man continued to gaze inscrutably at Ted, who was now feeling as uncomfortable as he could ever recall being. ‘It’s just there’s a bit of a tenor – erm – well, that’s to say, the tenors – in the piece we’re singing today, that is – they sort of have the tune,
’ Sloper haltingly explained. ‘I know that the word tune in the context of this choir’s a bit of an oxy … it’s an oxy … ah, bit of a contradiction in, you know,’ he valiantly continued, ‘but anyway, I’m sure you don’t want to sing an exposed tenor solo you haven’t rehearsed in a crap choir in a church you’re new to and you probably don’t even sing and if you did that would put you off doing it again but we’re a bit desperate and I thought it was worth – well, anyway, sorry for disturbing you and all that and – bye.’ Ted hurried away. So much for the recruitment drive; if he was going to find a tenor in the next ten minutes he needed to target someone he knew to be weak-willed and vulnerable, not a complete stranger with nerves of steel.

  ‘Robert.’ Robert Phair distractedly looked up from his youngest daughter, who had somehow managed to snag her corduroy dress on something in the car, with the result that part of it was hanging loose and the whole thing seemed in danger of falling off altogether. Lindsay was not going to be pleased.

  ‘Oh, Ted, hello.’

  ‘You don’t sing, do you?’

  ‘Ah …’ Robert chuckled awkwardly, ‘yes, well no, I haven’t, not for some time!’

  ‘But you have some experience?’

  ‘Stay still, Rebekah. No. Well, yes. I … er … I sang in a choral society, back when I – Esther, can you stay here, please? – not since I gave up teaching, really, it was a long time ago.’

  ‘Robert, I’m desperate – I don’t have a tenor this morning; if you could …’

  ‘The thing is, Ted – Rebekah, stand still – it’s a bit difficult, Lindsay isn’t here this morning, so I’ve got to look after the girls, and …’