As we prepare to welcome Emma Smith as our new curate, BBC 2 is about to show a brand new ‘sitcom’ about a vicar called ‘Rev’. The first instalment is titled, ‘On your knees, forget the fees.’ and concerns a sudden increase in the congregation as the local school is rumoured to be receiving an excellent Ofsted report. The plot is based on an anecdote in which a west London vicar became a ‘celebrity dinner date’ when members of the shadow cabinet were trying to get their children into his school! This TV vicar of a parish in Hackney, the Revd Adam Smallbone, is played by Tom Hollander, whom I last saw on TV playing the part of Guy Burgess in ‘Cambridge Spies’ not perhaps a suitable preparation for playing a ‘well meaning’ but ‘sweetly ineffectual’ vicar with ‘rumpled charm’ (well this last bit might be related – see Alan Bennett’s ‘An Englishman Abroad’).
It is hard to tell whether yet another comedy Vicar will provide a bit more depth to the popular image of vicars – at least this one, ‘a conflicted person doing his best’ will be seen genuinely on his knees and sometimes in tears for the people he is trying to serve in the multicultural melting pot of a modern city. It’s an improvement on ‘All gas and gaiters’ but with respect to Tom Hollander for taking on such a role, I was depressed by his answer to a question about his own outlook. He describes his own understanding of ‘prayer’ as ‘ a random monologue with yourself’ – uncertain about who one might pray ‘to’. ‘There’s a yearning for there to be something for one to direct these feelings to; something supernatural, or super real beyond us. But I don’t know if it’s a man with a white beard or a sort of fate. I haven’t worked out the answers to that yet.’
And that depressed me. It vaguely reminded me of WB Yeats’ view of an Englishman’s idea of compromise: ‘Some people say there is a God. Some people say there is no God. The truth probably lies somewhere between these two statements.’
The problem of course is the juxtaposition of the man with a white beard and a sort of fate. If that is Mr Hollander’s view of the alternatives facing him he’s not going to spend much time thinking about it I suspect. Though it might earn me an accusation of being crudely ‘ageist’ I could happily lead a campaign to abolish the old man with the white beard. Was it in the Renaissance that artists began to depict God in this way and if so why? Is his age supposed to represent wisdom, venerability, sanctity? We must probably assume that he is painted like this so as to distinguish him as God, the Father, from God, the Son? But do any of us still think of God in this way? Are such references simply a way of demeaning the idea of God so as to avoid thinking about him? And if that is the way the church still allows our wider society to think, then we have our work cut out to ban the old man in the sky.
Perhaps we should go back to the artists to provide us with some new ways of thinking, or perhaps we should invoke the second commandment and ban all images of God from our churches that depict him in this way, replacing them perhaps with the Rublev icon of the Trinity, if we must have an image of God at all. For Christ is of course the image of God, and where the Holy Spirit is at work in our lives then we too become reflections of Christ and images of God.
So how might we help Mr Hollander think a little more deeply about the choice that faces him. We might begin by trying to show that the choice matters, that it is of fundamental importance. And sadly perhaps, the life of the church does not always make apparent its members’ belief in the importance of the question. The church does not show in its life our belief that what we believe about God makes a fundamental difference to who we are. If we believe in God then we are committed to self knowledge, repentance, reconciliation, and the continuous exploration of what it means to lead a good life, a life which is not just good for me but for everyone. If we believe in God then we are committed to the unmasking of delusion in our personal lives and in the life of our society. If we believe in God we will try every day of our lives, however briefly, to let go of our own preoccupations and launch ourselves out into the silence of God; and we will also regularly join in worship because it is only in that communal activity that we will hear over and over again, however little we may sometimes understand, the words of scripture and liturgy challenging us to think about these things and act upon these things, because if we don’t then we shall remain stuck in a veil of illusion and never discover the possibility of the life which our humanity is meant to lead in all its richness, humour, tragedy, grace and truthfulness.
Of course most of us, as I have often said before, are hypocrites in these matters in so far as our actuality fails a long way short of our aspirations, but in one sense that doesn’t matter because to fail at least implies we have taken the risk and that proves that we are at least to some extent alive. And priests are perhaps the most hypocritical of all, because we find ourselves constantly having to talk about things which people assume we know about, when we are of course just as aspirational as everyone else. We find ourselves isolated by our public role, unable to be anonymous, learning to separate our private selves from that role which can all too easily take over who we think we are and how we relate to people. And because we are all too often the focus of the church’s aspirations we live most of the time with a sense of failure. It is hard to be a happy hypocrite but that is the challenge which Emma takes up this Petertide and we welcome her warmly, wish her and her family well, and pray for her that she may find the grace to bear her role gracefully. And perhaps also we might pray for Mr Hollander that when he eventually puts down his temporary role as a TV vicar he may have learnt a lot more about the God who is searching for him too.
The Vicar Writes
Stephen Tucker