By Cathy Galvin
Vulnerable and flawed, they are ordinary men who live at one remove from everyday life yet are witness to its secrets; they glimpse the spirit at work in the lives of others; they are at our baptism and they are at our burial; they are a link between our ancestors and our descendants.
This man is slight, gaunt almost: thin with thin clothing. The cigarettes don’t help: he knows he should have given them up a long time ago and I know he doesn’t eat enough. Roughly the same age as me, he hasn’t changed over the decades I’ve known him, though, of course, that can’t be the case. Looking at him more closely, I sense we are both grey-fading into the wings, the stage filling with more certain actors.
On that stage there are some lines you never want to speak. Neither of us could have known that, having baptised my four children, he would bury my son Connor 28 years later; “Dear Connor”, as he called him. Laying the white funeral pall over his coffin, recalling that baptism. Blessing him, blessing all of us at his grave.
Over the years, he has perfected his part as priest with close attention to liturgy and ritual. This performance – and it isn’t performance, it’s real – is not about him: it focuses only on the words, on the still spirit of what those words bring to sacrament, and does not extend to sentimentality beyond them. He expresses neither jollity nor a need for continuous human encounter. His faith, his books and those cigarettes appear enough to sustain him.
But what do I know of him, or others of our priests, these men at one remove from everyday life yet witness to its secrets, to our fragile intimate selves, but who can’t share their own inner selves with us?
Images come to me: as a child, of a priest’s embroidered back; of the confessional, so close to a priest in the dark, smelling a man’s breath and a deep sense of the fear of God. As a teenager, an almost glamorous teacher priest returned from South America … but … did he really ask me what shampoo I used? Tell me one day I would make someone a fine wife? That I had lovely hair? Boys and men on the altar. And later, as a woman, a place on that altar as reader and eucharistic minister, looking out at a congregation when as a child I could only have looked in.
Other images come to mind, again, of the smoky man who is not named and will be embarrassed by my writing: pouring water over the delicate heads of each of my babies. Turning up at our house intermittently just as dinner was being served and pulling up a chair with such precise timing, the children thought he had ESP. Standing by my son’s bed in hospital when he was a child; trying to talk to him when he was a more troubled young adult. The two of us strained and awkward, discussing the details of my son’s funeral Mass, me sensing his fear that I might impose something inappropriate on the set parameters of the liturgy and wondering how I might pull anything together at all.
Not understanding each other. Women and men, so different? I’m not sure. In his support of me at times of profound loss – death and divorce – there has never been anything gendered or judgemental about our conversations, only a sense of what is right in conscience and the spirit.
Age undoubtedly changes perception: this man, and my current parish priest in a town hundreds of miles away, are not my close friends but I can imagine them as the brothers I never had. There is now, in the passing of time in my life and the ongoing changes within the Church, something more equal, more comfortable at play in my conversations with them, and more broadly, being worked out as a synodal Church slowly begins to emerge.
I can’t know the difficulties my imagined brothers – let’s call them Simon and Peter – absorb within themselves, all they have prayed for that seems impossible to fulfil, what it means to be separate from and yet part of other people’s lives, perhaps even the person seen by some parishioners more regularly than anyone else – loneliness is not confined to once multi-occupied presbyteries.
Most particularly, I can’t know what, for my brothers, it means to be a Father in their roles as priests, nor they what it means to be a mother in this contemporary world. For theologians and contemplatives, the trinitarian relationships between the Father, Son and Spirit, the very essence of God, enlighten and challenge the limits of intelligence, imagination and love. In Looking East in Winter, Rowan Williams writes of St Gregory’s conviction that the Spirit is the mutual joy or bliss of Father and Son, turned in love to each other. It’s a beautiful image.
But does it leave the rest of us on the outside, looking in at an impossibly idyllic image of fatherhood, when we are increasingly aware of how many have been scarred by the experience of a brutal or cruel parent and at a time when the expectation of ideal fatherhood has shifted from a figure of stability and authority to a provider of emotional closeness? It leaves me reflecting whether my great-grandchildren will one day call a female priest “Mother”, and I can begin to see something emerging that was invisible when I was younger.
Simon and Peter, the imagined brothers I always address out of respect as “Father”, reflect a non-possessive love that is as constant and unshockable as that of the prodigal son’s father. It’s a love that turns up, bears witness and asks, it seems, very little and yet, at another level, absolutely everything: that we believe.
I see now that, without priests, whether remote or closer, I could not reach back in time to my ancestors who held the same beliefs, or forward to the point of handing my own son over in trust to God, a continuum of love and life in the living and dead. I could trust a priest, not because of his individual charisma, or his exceptionalism as a cleric, but because he too was part of that living and dead family and his role had been to try, with his own strengths and failings, to teach me, to keep the rumour of that continuum alive.
My other imagined brother, Peter, celebrated the fortieth anniversary of his ordination with three other priests, who had been his lifelong companions, officiating together at Sunday Mass. One of those friends, let’s call him Eric, because he had the deadpan delivery of a much-loved northern comedian, gave a memorable homily. He began by confessing a weakness: his inability to remember names, telling us about one woman who kept coming up to him expecting recognition until finally and embarrassed, he had to tell her, “I’m sorry love. I really am not going to remember your name.” “But Eric,” she said, “I’m your mother!”
Oh Eric. There was more. The story of another woman who came to Mass: Eric knew he had seen her before but didn’t quite know where, and of course he could not remember her name. The woman explained that she had come to see him many years before, when she was distressed. He said it was kind of her to tell him that but anything fruitful that had come from their conversation had very little to do with him: she had done the work, and so had the Holy Spirit. She explained that she had spoken to him about her daughter who had been considering an abortion; Eric had advised her to go home and give her daughter a hug. She insisted she wanted to thank him: her grandchild was now seven years old. Eric, you could tell, was so deeply moved by this encounter that it was hard to speak. It had shaped him as a priest.
He then spoke of the gift of priesthood, which he expressed as the immense privilege of glimpsing other people’s lives when the spirit was at work there. It was a joyful idea, far from the perception that contemporary priesthood is so often a vocation darkened by painful sacrifice and isolation: the calling Eric described was fulfilling, enlightening, warming.
He returned to that week’s gospel reading from Lk (11:1-13), in which Jesus is asked by one of his disciples how they should pray. We know the answer of course, because his suggested prayer begins with the Father. Jesus urges his followers to ask the Father for whatever they need. Eric quoted from the passage: “If you then, who are evil, know how to give your children what is good, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” In his encounter with this woman, said Eric, the Spirit was there.
When we discussed Connor’s unexpected funeral as a family, though his three sisters are far from regular Mass attendees, they were clear: the church where they had all been altar servers, often suppressing laughter or wriggling with boredom, was where we should begin to say goodbye to their brother. The man who had baptised them all in turn would be the one to help them do it. The Spirit would be there.
My Fathers – whom I would like to see as brothers because there is only one Father – Thank you. – The Tablet
