“Will you preach?” he asked.
“Yes.” Of course I’ll bloody preach. Women do that too.
I prepared something on the word “if ”. If God is three persons, what does that mean? “If ” is an enormous word for its size. It’s loaded with so much hope and expectation. Trouble is, nobody notices it much these days. It’s a cheap little word. Kipling must take the blame for that. Mention the word “if ” on its own and your mind defaults, like an internet search, to that ridiculous phallocentric verse.
I didn’t say that in the sermon, of course. I just said I visited his house once, an unfinished Jacobean pile in Sussex, with a colleague from a teaching agency. It was a sad place. Kipling had known so much of the world, created his own universes, was so very rich, and it came down to this rather poky, rambling house, surrounded by his books, where he grieved for his only lost son whom he had encouraged to go to war with the world. What would the Almighty know about that, eh?
That’s how I dealt with the first two persons of the Trinity. What I didn’t say was that I hate the poem. If you can take all the shame and disappointment that’s thrown at you and make a decent fist of pretending it’s not really there, then you’re a real man, my son. What do the little ladies do, I wonder – throw themselves at this lantern-jawed bovine, splattered with his own blood and disappointment, I suppose. Yes, Kipling really did for that word.
But it’s bigger and better than that, I said. It’s what our fantasy and faith hang on – and what separates one from the other. And that’s the Spirit. That’s what I thought, anyway. If this story is true, in any real sense of that word, then it’s the hugest thing that has ever happened and can ever happen. If it isn’t in any way true, then it’s the most unimaginably vast con-trick perpetrated on us in human history. Either way, that’s a great story. For the time being, by which I mean this mortal life, I opted for the former. It just made more sense.
“Will you cense the altar?” asked the churchwarden, who would have been called cadaverous by anyone who hadn’t worked in Sudan.
“If you’d like me to,” I said. Hugh had told me that they’d want “the smelly handbag”, the thurible in which we swing the burning incense.
My private vestry prayer at St Mary’s was a kind of alternative sermon. If there’s a God – and please God there is – this church isn’t about him, this vacuous act of self-reverence, aerated only by the bubbles of human endeavour: music, scripture and thought. Here it was Elizabeth Street, in what’s known by the lisping churchwarden as “the cheaper end of Belgravia”, but this emptiness pervaded the whole Church of England.
I had been put in a light cope, suitable for the slight shoulders of a lady, to process in behind the choir, whose tenors were now making a manful stab at a canticle. There was one tall and pale one, loose folds of skin marking his weak jawline, whose head rocked from side to side as he concentrated on marking time with his scriptural words. A lawyer, I thought, or a chartered surveyor. A Pharisee.
Dear God, I remember thinking, I’m the least in touch with the divine here, I feel no godly nexus as they apparently so effortlessly do. The way out of this thought pattern at critical times like these, I had learned from better-read colleagues, was to wager with Pascal that there was no God, but that this ritual at least made life bearable for those present, even joyful if you hit the right notes in the choir. Sitting in the sanctuary is difficult, watching His loyal servants at a distance, gathered together in the whimsy of the vain and ancient language of prayer and music, filling the void that He has evidently vacated.
The cherished Anglo-Catholic former incumbent of St Mary the Virgin, Father Tristram, had retired and the abandoned but lavishly pensioned congregants were searching for a replacement, some witless cleric to serve out half a dozen years inadequately in the shadow of his illustrious predecessor.
“There’s a woman dressed as a priest in our chancel,” I imagined Father Tristram saying.
From the embarrassed smiles of some of the regulars, women as well as men, heads snapping forward to stare non-committally into the middle distance as they felt me process past them, I guessed that their default position was rather more Catholic than Anglican. We must make her welcome in our household of faith. But what to say? We’ll ask her if she knew Father Tristram and tell her how lovely he was.
The women were the gilded trophies of flushed, pretend-busy men, who would escape to offices where they encountered other women only in servile roles, or else in the safe, faux-male stridencies of peer-group female colleagues who, they presumed, had sacrificed their womanhood on the altar of Mammon – who was a man, obviously.
To all of them here, men and women alike, sacramental ministry, if they knew the term at all, was a post of implicit and cunning authority. A priest had magic hands and a cool and assured manner for the “manual actions” – they really call them that – over the Eucharistic elements of bread and wine and it was the kind of cupped-hand movement that went with oratory, not cooking. Here they were, on this Sunday morning, to celebrate their sameness, not the infinite variety of creation, not the other, scandalous foolishness of a faith that dared to suggest that a leper, a paraplegic, the terminal baby, the shoplifter, the rioter, the
