Dear Bishop
Tim,
I’d like to
talk to you about your rejection of Canon Jeremy Davies’ request for Permission To Officiate
(P.T.O.) in Winchester Diocese. I hope you don’t mind, especially as I don’t
know you or Jeremy. You certainly won’t know me. I’m a pretty ordinary parish
priest in the north of England who occasionally writes. Like you I enjoy
reading, walking and films. I am especially fond of poetry. I also happen to be
transgender and a lesbian.
I suspect
you’ve received a lot of letters from people in the past few days. Many will
have been critical of your decision. Some will have been outraged. I also
imagine that you will have received a fair few letters supporting your
decision. From the little I know of the workings of Bishop’s offices, I guess
your chaplain has been fielding a lot of flak and making difficult decisions
about what to pass your way and what to consign to the ‘green ink’ pile. It
must be a tiring situation for your chaplain and for you, especially after all
the media attention.
You must be
hoping that soon you'll get an opportunity to re-focus on diocesan Christmas celebrations
and your wider national role. I trust that the time you and your fellow bishops
are spending together at the House of Bishops meeting is grace-filled.
Given all
that, you probably don’t need another person shouting at you about injustice.
You also probably don’t need someone cheering you on. Nobody likes a
lickspittle. (Though, as someone who’s received the occasional letter myself,
one generally prefers the cheerleading ones!).
I’m also
not writing to try to change your mind. I think it would be an even bigger
story if, after all the media shenanigans, you decided to let Jeremy have
P.T.O. I also sense that – for good or ill – you would argue that your position
is entirely in keeping with one reading of the House of Bishops advice.
So why am I
writing? I guess I want to reiterate what I trust we both know: rejection is
horrible and is especially painful when one is simply trying to be as faithful
and loving and authentic as one can. As I’ve picked through the media reports,
it’s the human impact that I keep thinking on. I’ve tried to imagine how it
feels to be Jeremy and his husband right now. And, if I’m honest, I’ve thought quite
a lot about you.
I speak as
someone who, from time to time, has paid quite a high price for trying to be
faithful and loving and authentic. I mean, I don’t want to strain it or
anything, but life can be a bit tough when you don’t fit into the conventional,
easy patterns of church or society.
So, for
example, twenty+ years ago, when I was first trying to be authentically ‘me’ as
a trans person, I faced a lot of prejudice and took my share of abuse. Thank
goodness I had an amazing family, but I lost friends, and suffered abuse and
threats from both kids and adults. It was – I trust you appreciate the
understatement – a bit wearing.
Since
coming to faith in my mid-twenties, I’ve seen how, again and again, God is
amazing, but I still get some horrible abuse from time to time. From
Christians. From people who should know better and be able to live on what Abraham
Lincoln called ‘the better angels of our nature.’ Life is hard enough without
one’s co-religionists treating one as either second-class, saved ‘under
sufferance’, or so-dangerously ‘other’ that one’s attempts to live and love
need to be carefully regulated and restricted.
So when I
heard about Canon Jeremy my thoughts turned to how it might feel to get that message,
that letter or email of rejection from you and your office. How it might feel to
be told that – despite one’s ministry being affirmed and acknowledged over
decades and despite already receiving a formal rebuke from another bishop &
that being the end of it – I wasn’t welcome to occasionally serve church
communities I’d already been helping for a while.
Goodness,
that can’t have been a great feeling, opening that letter. I mean, even if it
had occurred to Jeremy that one possible outcome of his decision to convert his
Civil Partnership to Marriage was refusal of P.T.O., it must have been bad
morning. After all, he’s not just some over-gobby troublemaker like me. He’s
not some johnny-come-lately who’s seeking to stir up trouble and become a cause
célèbre. At least as far as I can tell. That narrative will not do, even if one
tells it to oneself as a justification for action.
This is a
man who’s served the Church and God for decades. This is a man who was, prior
to his retirement, Precentor of one our great cathedrals. You don’t get to
occupy those sorts of roles by being a loud-mouthed campaigner or agitator. One
has to be serious, sober and talented, able to relate to the great and the good
as well as the passing wayfarer. And, yes, I think one has to be faithful.
I’m not
trying to portray Canon Jeremy as a saint. That would be foolish. I simply want
to indicate that Jeremy’s application to you was from someone of serious
commitment, held clearly in high respect beyond Salisbury Diocese, who wants to
serve God in word and sacrament. And in Salisbury Diocese he will continue to
do so. We’ve all known some hard calls in our lives. I’ve had my measure of
rejection. However, after decades of faithful service, and a quiet
determination to be faithful to the hope that was in him, for Jeremy to be told
his ministry is not welcome must have been a bit of a hit.
I guess,
one response is ‘So what? What else did he expect?’ I can be a bit naïve about
the church and its ways and means. I’m never going to be in the position of a
bishop who has to weigh up an appropriate and proportionate response to what
many might say was a willful departure from the current House of Bishops’
position on clergy and same-sex marriage. The Church of England qua Institution will, ultimately, come
to a mind on the place of civil marriage, both gay and straight, in its economy
of pastoral care and polity. In the meantime, I guess one must acknowledge that
some will say, ‘Jeremy broke ‘the rules’ and he has been duly punished.’
Nonetheless,
the human dimension does matter. In a world of great
troubles, the personal price paid by Jeremy (and his husband) as a result of
depriving him of P.T.O. may not appear great. But it will still be a real,
human price. And it is in those costs – ordinary, sometimes banal, mostly
ghastly – that we, the serving, pastoral Church, claim to find our weight,
focus and dignity. This situation is a reminder that the price is paid not in
the abstract, but in the particular. Among people who are simply trying to act
for the good as they see it.
I
said earlier I’ve been thinking about you, Tim. It’s extraordinary how one can
think and care about people one has never met and probably never will meet, isn’t
it? It applies as much to Jeremy as to you.
When
I speak of ‘you’ I am, of course, actually speaking of the ‘version’ of you I
have in my head. I hope and pray that this ‘version of you’ more or less
approximates to a human picture rather than the usual liberal caricature of
‘The Evangelical Bishop’. The writer in me wants you to be more than a cipher
for my disappointment, and my anger at your decision. I also want you to be
rounded because there is still a part of me that’s Evangelical. I keep trying
to remind myself that you – with your portion of faith, hope and love – are
seeking to act for the good as you see it. That we are more alike than we are
different.
I
pray to God that your decision was not an easy one. (Although, if it was, I
hope you have pause to ask ‘Why?’ in the weeks to come. Surely any decision
that can have costly emotional and personal fallout for others should not be
taken from the safety of ‘due process’ and ‘best legal advice’.) I also think
that these might be quite difficult weeks ahead for you. Even with the most
robust sense of self, negative press is wearing.
I
know it’s tempting in such circumstances to attempt to rework this emotional distress
into a kind of positive; that is, into an opportunity to participate in
Christ’s woundedness and sufferings. To ‘play’ a part that saves us from moral
culpability or villainy. You may well do this and I’m hardly in a position to
argue you shouldn’t do that. We all work out our salvation in fear and
trembling.
But
– I hope you can forgive my boldness – may I commend another aspect to
consider? In those distressing moments I think you will have (my constructed
version of you, my hopeful version of you, thinks you will have them) I ask you
to pause and pray. To think of Jeremy and Simon. To not lose sight of their
human being and their particularity and their distress. And though (I admit my
limitation here) I don’t think your distress is exactly commensurate (you being
a bishop with all the privilege that goes with that etc.) I hope there may be a
conversion to ‘the other’ in the mysteries of prayer and distress. The theatre
of Tragedy, after all, reminds us that there is some knowledge that only comes
through pain and wounds. And the Christian story reminds us that tragedy is
very close to comedy; to the possibility of a world in which wounds are bound
and the falsely imprisoned set free.
Forgive me.
I get carried away. Especially at Christmas. Christmas is so very cheesy, but
it can still startle me in the most extraordinary way. The Christ-child always
reminds me that God comes among us not with clever arguments or theological
constructions, but as that most fragile and defenceless thing, a baby. His only
power is to elicit love. The encounter we make with God in the Christ-child is
beyond the obvious delights of reason. It is in our shared humanity and holy
simplicity. A thousand theological and political arguments come crashing down
in Bethlehem on that Holy Night.
So may you
have a blessed Christmas, Tim. But also, - along with Canon Jeremy, his husband
Simon, me, and everyone who is simply trying to get on with being faithful and
hopeful – a disrupting one. Where the Saviour without Safety pulls down the
walls between us and we can never be the same again.
Rachel
