Has an Archbishop ever confessed so much before?
Radio has always excelled in the long form one-to-one interview, and there were some particularly good examples over the past week. Something about the zoned-in nature of these exchanges enhances our ability to focus and absorb. Take The Archbishop Interviews (Sunday, Radio 4, 1.30pm), which saw the leader of the Church of England, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, begin a series of “deep conversations” with prominent people. His first guest was the bestselling novelist and deep thinker Elif Shafak.
It is very hard to imagine being the scheduler who listened to this and thought: this is ideal Sunday listening. This will slip down well with a roast.
Because, with all respect, it wasn’t the most easily digestible fare. The topics under discussion were big ones – faith, mysticism, organised religion, depression, hatred, sexuality, reconciliation. They touched on genocide once or twice.
A novelist of Shafak’s skill can make a complex, multi-layered thought such as “I want faith and doubt to dance together, to speak to each other, to challenge and question each other” easy to swallow. Far more likely to make a piece of Yorkshire pud catch in the throat is an Archbishop of Canterbury freely admitting to experiencing doubt with regard to his faith. Or being disarmingly open about his own self-lacerating experience of depression: “One of the symptoms of it is self-hatred, selfcontempt – a real, vicious sense of dislike of oneself.”
Even in an all-sharing, mentalhealth respecting modern world, that seemed a surprising admission from an Archbishop of Canterbury. And he followed it up with a fine expression of how his relationship with God saves him from despair in such moments.
“In my life [it] expressed itself almost as a safety net. I may be, I would say in my prayers, this terrible person, this failure as an archbishop, but I know you know me better than I know myself and I know you still love me and by that I am held.”
Even to someone who is not a person of faith, the honesty and openness of that sentiment was impressive. And so was so much else in this dialogue. Moving on to talk about Shafak’s experience of hatred
– as a result of speaking out in Turkey about the Armenian genocide and her declaration of bisexuality in a 2017 TED Talk – and of her difficult relationship with her father and her experience of the pandemic, Welby also shed light on more of his experiences, too. Of an alcoholic, abusive father, who he since discovered wasn’t his actual father. Of his own experience of the horrors of genocide in South Sudan, and the “profound effect” that his work as a chaplain to the dying during the pandemic has had on him.
One criticism that might be levelled at The Archbishop Interviews is that there was little in the way of real interrogation of each other’s beliefs. Welby and Shafak spoke like wellmatched oil and water, swirling in and curling round each other but never mixing. Always respectful, always polite. Then again, that was also the interview’s unique selling point – the determination to be nonconfrontational, to always find points of commonality. And we still learned plenty. As much about the interviewer as about the interviewee.
At one point Welby described reconciliation as being the ability to disagree well. If that’s his guiding principle then this promises to be a fascinating series with guests including, next, the psychologist Susan Blackmore, and, among others, writer Stephen King and (highly anticipated) Tony Blair. Heaven knows what the Archbishop will share with them.
T wo other one-on-one encounters impressed over the past week. John Wilson’s series This Cultural Life (Radio 4, Saturday) featured the composer Max Richter, whose description of a key childhood memory – the life-changing moment that he heard Bach’s Double Violin Concerto for the first time, before he was three, was notably powerful and atmospheric. As someone whose first memory is a jumbled blur of falling down the stairs, it made me feel deeply inadequate on behalf of my three-year-old self.
This came to mind again while listening to The Life Scientific (Radio 4, Tuesday). Jim Al-khalili’s guest was forensic psychologist Julia Shaw. Their conversation ranged over her unusual upbringing, her experiments in implanting memories, and a difficult relationship with her father that echoed Shafak’s. What she had to say about the “malleability” of memory, and how memory is a ball of clay rather than carved in stone, I found fascinating. It even allowed me to let my three-year-old self off the hook.