More propriety, vicar
Touching Cloth
By Rev Fergus Butler-gallie
Transworld £16.99
Touching Cloth is Butler-gallie’s memoir of his first year, mainly in a Liverpool parish, after his ordination to the Anglican priesthood.
He writes like an overpraised teenager with breathless literary aspirations and determined to keep on saying, ‘Boo!’ to his maiden aunt.
His style is unusual, perhaps unique, and might be termed ecclesiastical-scatological; and for a parson, his vocabulary is rather unexpected, pickled with arse, arsehole shit, crap, pee, piss, pissheads, bastard, sod, wazz, f**k and f**ked.
He tells what I think is a joke, in which a nun says, ‘F**k off!’ and he even quotes his mother as having said ‘f**king’.
He recalls a bishop whose only advice to his ordinands the night before he lays hands on them is ‘Never enter a public lavatory while wearing a dog collar.’
It’s like Round the Horne, with Jules and Sandy, where one of them – usually Kenneth Williams – exclaims, ‘Ooh, you are bold!’
I get the sense that this is what Butler-gallie would like us all to admire about him: such language, such a mucky mind – and I’m a clergyman, too!
But … behind the pretentious theatricality and the narcissistic posing, there are better things in this story. Throughout my priesthood, I have endured the sham antique produced by the illiterate, tin-eared concocters of new liturgies. So I was cheered by Fergus’s saying, ‘When it comes to Common Worship – the Church of England’s famously complex and supposedly more accessible liturgy devised in 2000 – while I’m sure it does for some people, I’d rather praise God using a dishwasher manual.’
And he captures the effete, primping and preening of those priests in the Anglo-catholic daisy chain ‘in outfits so extravagant they make Liberace look like an odd-job man’.
Bishops and that procession of cliché-mongers who turn up on Thought for the Day wax squeamish when it comes to Remembrance Sunday parades because these might seem ‘to glorify war’.
Fergus sees the point of these rites in allowing us to express our gratitude to people such as ‘… the veteran of Arnhem who had seen friends, barely older than boys, die in front of him and had willingly jumped out of an aeroplane on to a continent under the grip of Nazism to bring about its end’.
Now that is reassuring. But, a few pages on, in a discussion about what constitutes sanctity, we are back in Round the Horne with Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick: ‘Would a saint have accepted a fourth gin?’
Or we’re in the public lavatory again with that bishop and his advice to his ordinands: ‘Would a saint, as I did later on, jump the barriers to avoid paying 20p for a wazz at Euston?’
Come on, Fergus. You can do better than that! And, bless him, he does do better than that. There are stories here to hint at what priesthood is at its core; about the meaning of sacramental living.
But sentimentality and what Dietrich Bonhoeffer described as ‘cheap grace’ trickle all down the next page: ‘Sharing memories inevitably mixes grief and joy.’
And – no substitute for pastoral care – there’s the psychobabble of ‘sharing’ and ‘coping mechanisms’.
But we come to Fergus’s epilogue – a reminder that only one letter separates bathos from pathos. His story does not end well.
After his initial post-ordination parish experience, Fergus sought a permanent, salaried post but, ‘In the Church’s own words, I had failed to find enough experience and so I am, I hope temporarily, leaving ministry.’
He is understandably bitter. ‘I’m filling in at a parish where there is no vicar, but I’m not considered up to scratch to take it on full time.’
Fergus’s bitterness was compounded by his treatment at the hands of ‘clerics who delighted in sidelining their juniors or volunteers, those who were sweetness and light to people’s faces, then dealt in calumnies behind their backs’.
As a priest who has more than once over these last 50 years got on the wrong side of bishops and other superfluous ecclesiastical hindrances, I know exactly the sort of treatment meted out to Fergus. And, for all his occasional childishness and temperamental silliness, I believe he has priestly qualities.
I hope he comes back soon.