‘The dying never wish they’d been THINNER or had a TIDIER HOUSE’
Have A Little Faith
If you want to cringe so hard you shrink several dress sizes, watch the YouTube video of Reverend Kate Bottley leading a flash mob in 2013. In the video, Bottley declares a couple husband and wife, then leads them in an exuberant dance. Not long after the video went viral, she got a call to be on Channel 4’s Gogglebox. She’s been on TV and radio ever since – and has now released a book, about ‘love, death, and how lasagne always helps’.
Twee subtitle aside, it’s not bad at all. Part self-help manual, part memoir, the book argues that we need faith – the hope it confers, the sense of community it can help create – more than ever.
The most absorbing and challenging parts of the book are about death. Bottley has led hundreds of funerals, and she has also been at the bedsides of the dying. They never wish they had been thinner, she notes, or that they had kept a cleaner, tidier home. They talk about the people they loved, the relationships that gave their lives meaning.
Remarkably, her first funeral as a qualified vicar was that of a baby who had been killed by his father, who was out on bail. She went to see the family before the funeral, as she always does. Bottley decided that her role was to offer compassion, and a fitting send-off for the baby. She ended up hugging both parents, even the father, who was eventually found guilty and sent to jail. Other tales are jollier. Once, when asked to administer last rites, Bottley realised she had forgotten her holy oil, so anointed a man’s head with hand cream. (No one noticed.)
As a woman in the public eye, Bottley has been subjected to eye-watering amounts of abuse. People tell her that she looks prettier in real life, or less fat than on TV. Once, in a Tesco car park, someone called her the ‘whore of Babylon’. Much of this abuse, Bottley says, comes from people who are unhappy themselves – they’re lonely, or embittered, or full of self-loathing. But a lot of it, you suspect, is rooted in a feeling that women like her – ‘chatty’, as she admits, not thin, not posh – shouldn’t be afforded a public platform.
The wisdom that shines through this unshowy book suggests that public life is much enriched by her presence.