Licensing of Robin Coutts
HOLY TRINITY, BLENDWORTH (ST HUBERT’S, IDSWORTH, ST MICHAEL AND ALL ANGELS, CHALTON)
and as
DIOCESAN DIRECTOR OF NON-STIPENDIARY MINISTRY
15 JUNE 2004 AT 7.30 PM
Reading: Ephesians 3:8-11, John 16:12-15
Before he died, Edmund Ivens, the priest who prepared me for confirmation, gave me two special gifts. But before I tell you what they were, I want to say something about him. He was an outwardly friendly man, who gave me a great deal of encouragement as a boy. When my friends at school laughed at me because I said I wanted to be ordained, Edmund took me seriously in the right rather than the wrong way. He had a whole range of hobbies, from sailing, and horse-riding to gardening, and all this put him in touch with many people who seldom darkened the doors of our church. In the pulpit, he was not exactly scintillating – I think he felt out-gunned by a very powerful father. He was almost certainly gay, and lonely with it. And no-one in the hierarchy of the church or in the congregation really helped him to understand the shift in 1960 between the boom decade of post-war church-going, and the radical questioning that has haunted both church and society ever since.
So what were his presents to me? The first was his father’s ordination stole, dating from about 1902 – which he himself used to wear on special occasions. The embroidery is very beautiful and very elaborate (not always the same thing). I have since had it remounted on a piece of silk that was given to me a few years ago. The other present was totally different: a small book, published back in the 1920’s called ‘Five Years of Hell in a Country Parish’. It was written by a priest called Edward Synnott, and the parish in question was Rusper, in Sussex. Edmund had indeed a wonderful and – sardonic – sense of humour. He was, in every sense a backwoodsman, a non-joiner, who hid from Bishops, and retained his eccentricities right to the very last. Soon after I became a bishop, these two treasures came into my possession. The stole, he gave me in person, with affectionate tears in his eyes. The book, he sent through the post. He wore the stole, or any stole, or any liturgical vestments, with detached devotion. But the book told me something about just how his sensitive nature suffered at the barrage of gossip and criticism – in which we all took part – that sometimes came his way. They were by no means anything like as bad as that Sussex village, which led to a Consistory Court case led by the influential people of the parish who wanted to take their parson down a few pegs. Of course, exaggeration is the style of the cartoon, and the book is no exception. But cartoons often communicate more effectively than a balanced, cool narrative. And, frankly, it is not rocket-science to realise, on reading the book, that the successful, suburban London Vicar clearly crashed into that country parish, and each brought out the worst in the other.
Tonight, Robin is being given neither a treasured antique stole, nor an account of five ghastly years anywhere, nor is he a smooth cleric who comes to take you by storm! Robin’s warm personality, spiritual perception, and sheer experience that can just as easily take the adrenaline out of heated situations as ‘tell it how it is’, means that these three parishes, and candidates for the Non-Stipendiary Ministry in the diocese, will find themselves loved, challenged and genuinely cared for. The ministry which is being begun tonight will nonetheless have dimensions that will symbolically recall those two gifts: the priestly work offering the parishes and the ordinands to God in prayer, as well as the agonies that are part of being human; and by that I don’t mean the church at its most (shall we say) churchy, but coping creatively with human experience at its most tragic. In that sense, the stole leaves the confines of the sanctuary, where, of course it really belongs, in order to inform the life of faith, so that every day living is punctuated by the conviction that it is about much more than we can see or grab or control. The book, on the other hand, becomes a transcript of another kind altogether, in which our struggles, our fears, our uncertainties, so far from being projected onto ‘church life’ at its most banal and inward-looking, are faced down for what they are, and offered to God as his story, his enduring love, his redemptive life in us.
The 15th June is sometimes kept as a commemoration of Evelyn Underhill, who died today in 1941, and about whom Edmund, my old priest, used to speak from time to time. How she would have laughed at the combination of that stole and that book. She was a shrewd observer of people in all their hopes and fears, and often used to suggest in retreat addresses and lectures that we are far too fluent about living on the surface, but far too reluctant about living in depth. She was, in some ways, a photographer of human nature – focussing her listeners onto some aspect of life that is easily ignored and which needs to be attended to. Perhaps that explains why so much popular contemporary Christianity, even at its most enthusiastic and successful, can at times seem a bit superficial. It can play to the gallery of the slick culture of the rest of peoples lives, but because it lacks depth, it doesn’t always seem to get very far either. Evelyn Underhill knew about prayer: not arguing about which liturgy to use, or which was the best version of the Lord’s Prayer (she always suspected the cult of the beautiful for its own sake because she knew how easily the Church can sometimes absorb new snobberies). No: for Evelyn Underhill, prayer is situated elsewhere. One could hazard a guess that she meant somewhere between that stole and that book: she would describe prayer as like crawling through a fog on one’s hands and knees, not always aware of where one was going (so there are no ‘managed outcomes’); not always able to see a great deal - and when one does, whatever it is, whether a pine tree or a rock, it stands up boldly on its own. She once wrote the following wise words: “Behind every closed door which seems to shut experience from us, He (Jesus) is standing; and within every experience which reaches us, however disconcerting, His unchanging presence is concealed.”
I never knew Evelyn Underhill – she died before I was born. But I have come to know her through her writings, and from people who encountered her in her lifetime. Both she and Edmund, different as they were, keep impressing upon me the importance of what might be called the ministry of the off-beat, which can help us to see ourselves in a new light: to tease us a bit, to make us both laugh heartily and think deeply. Both of them were off-beat people; and if heaven can be construed at all in our terms, I think of Evelyn sitting in a corner talking with a group of people who are being ignored, while Edmund is going around filling up the champagne glasses, and quietly learning a great deal about people in the crowd. Neither of them, of course, would relish much of what I am saying about them to you now. All that they would lay claim to is the assertion by the apostle, in tonight’s epistle reading, of being the least of the saints, yet called, in some kind of a way, to help people see something of the mystery of God (Eph 3:8-9), and confident, too, in the promise from Jesus in the gospel passage, that the Spirit will indeed teach us at his pace, and in his way – not ours (Jn 16:12-13).
KENNETH PORTSMOUTH
