Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People - Richard Coles

[Applause] I've covered my tattoos ladies and gentlemen you'll be glad to hear they're in places we wouldn't want to see them believe me so interesting listening to what you were saying Nadia particularly I think because as someone who wears a dog collar as a matter of course as indeed you do on duty I'm so conscious not only of the relentless habits of others to protect project upon us certain assumptions about our expertise in precisely reconciling the ideal and the actual life a process fraught with pitfalls but much more insidious is in fact the way we do that to ourselves the way when we kind of dress in our dog collars away when we go about our parishes doing our our priestly things how dangerous it is that we to lapse into this notion that we do that from a position of expertise in matters in which there is no expertise I'm very cheered always by the statement of sharp eggy that the sinner stands at the heart of Christianity no one is more competent in the matter of Christianity than the sinner no one except the saint my own predilections for believing my own propaganda are notorious perhaps but one of the realities of parochial ministry is that you simply can't sustain that for long and for me it came early on in my ordained career when I was called out to a deathbed of a parishioner a man who I loved very much who was a great and faithful Christian a salty character with a particularly grainy view of life but deeply deeply faithful he was dying of prostate cancer and he was on a morphine driver in the nursing home where he spent the last days of his life on this earth and so off I dutifully went rather a traditionalist he was very fond of the Book of Common Prayer so I took that with me went into his room where he was receiving a regular dose of morphine to deal with pain that was evident and he was a little bit in and out of consciousness so I opened my Book of Common Prayer and I turned to the Psalter and I read to him soothing Psalms in the Coverdale version thinking knowing that that would be something that he would like to hear I got through quite a few of them he stirred occasionally so I thought I would add as an interpolation my own comfortable words if I can put it that way to him he stirred again I carried on eventually he sort of came to a version of consciousness and kind of indicated to me to come nearer so I approached his bed he had an oxygen mask on which he removed and I bent down he whispered I couldn't at first hear him so I knelt next to him put my ear to his mouth and he said shut up you stupid they were his last words [Applause] it was a lesson well learned that there are certain realities into which we blunder even equipped with all the expertise that we bring with us to these tasks even after three years of theology degree two years of postgraduate studies two years at the caf-co stroke Hogwarts finishing school of Theological College nonetheless there's a realities we've bumped into and those realities are always jagged realities which always remind us of in that in God's dispensation such things count for nothing we discover ourselves we rediscover ourselves constantly as not the person we thought we were and that is of course our great hope and our salvation I remembered again going to when I arrived at Villa I have an unusual induction into the life of the church even having been in a pop band in the eighties and then having worked in the BBC for 10 years which is as near to ordination in the Church of England as you can get without automation in the Church of England and I remember going for my selection conference those of you who know the clergy of the Church of England may be surprised to hear that there's any selection process but nonetheless there is and so I kind of left behind me my career in broadcasting my former career in pop music my comfortable life and turned up for a three-day conference in which I was so depressed and poked and prodded by various people to see if I was suitable for this this fate and it culminated with an interview with the senior selector who was the Archdeacon of Lindisfarne just that we have an Archdeacon of Lindisfarne is reason enough to get ordained i sat in front of him he looked at me and he had a folder in front of him and he said I've looked at your file and I want to know this why does somebody like you want to get mixed up with a broken-down failing institution that's lost any sense of where it's going and doesn't know its future I said I'm thinking of leaving the BBC [Laughter] but it was a note of reality I mean so often I think in our church discourse we generate a sort of breathless excitement about what we do this sense of you know the extraordinary adventure of vocation which we're about and that's indeed true but it is never what we think it will be because it's about reality it's not about those fantasies that we all too readily imported I got to Theological College I can remember in after about three weeks going to see my spiritual director and him saying how getting on and me saying awful because I went to train in an Anglican monastic foundation in Yorkshire thinking that within those hallowed halls I would discover depth swells of my own serenity in which the ineffable love of God would bathe me in its golden rays and and all would be well it didn't quite work out that way fantasy of course to think that it is in seclusion it's through going to those misty marginal places that we will truly encounter the risen Lord and discover who we really are I'm absolutely fed up of going into church bookshops or cathedral book not this one of course obviously and seeing on the racks all those greeting cards filmed of a soft focused photograph of a misty stream tinkling down a hillside that's not really where I encounter God I encounter God in the reality of places so I remember going along to see my spiritual director he said Harry getting on and I said not very well he said what's the problem and I said well these people and he said won't you be in these field I said well they're not they're not really doing it properly and they're not here for the right reason and they're not doing it in the right way they're venal they're not focused they're not committed and he said what else and I thought about and they said I'm not as nice as I thought I was and he said that's good and so it was the beginning of wisdom isn't it seriously that's so often our Christian lives the moment when it gets interesting in relation to us is the moment when absolutely we reach those near horizons of our own competence our sense of our own self-worth and self-importance those stratagems for self-promotion which we all deploy run into them you'll run into them soon enough and that's where it gets interesting when you encounter the reality of other people I loved your book not sure about unexpected Saints and thought about the unexpected Saints who I'd met and who'd formed me some of them not in the least bit suitable at all I'm afraid the irony for me as someone who came out as gay when I was 16 in 1978 and then spent a lot of time involved in activism in the gay movement people might think that's kind of an odd preparation for ministry in a church which finds so much of that very difficult and intractable and embarrassing and awkward but his nonetheless true that I think the basic rudiments of living in community I learnt in the gay community and it was those that really took me forward to a place where I began to think how that would inhabit a wider context than the one I'd lifted one of the most influential people in that was a chair called mawkish and I don't know if anyone saw the film pride which came out a couple of years ago which was about an unusual collision of cultures in the 1980s 1984 the miners strike and I was in London there in London was course with a very divided place at that time Margaret Thatcher her government formed in 1979 in the houses of parliament across the Thames on the other side County Hall where Ken Livingstone presided over a very different culture indeed and it was London release it felt like a battlefield and in that people like me had run away from the provinces kettering in my case arriving in London in 1980 battle was joined notions of sexual identity notions of gender the politics of feminine the politics of class a very heady febrile time it was and all those things joined together and to be a combatant in that well police wanted in that dorm to be alive and so we formed a support group called lesbians and gays support the miners I don't think lesbians engage had ever supported miners before in any organized word and so there was his extraordinary meetings we would get in our minibus and drive down to the de life alley in South Wales and go to the the miners social club and they'd be confronted by a working-class community in some ways very traditional who looked at us and we looked at them and after a while fortunately an extraordinary friendship happened largely brokered I think through the tireless and courageous and holy efforts of Mark Ashton who was not a Christian although he'd grown up in a fiercely contested Christian world in sectarian Northern Ireland in the 1970s someone who was deeply engaged in politics he was general secretary as the young Communist League before that was embarrassing and someone who had this extraordinary I think it was an extraordinary he what is the saint a saint is someone it seems to me who anticipates persuasively the life of heaven before you get there not always a consistent thing not always easy to see very often unobserved it seems to me but mark in spite of all his commitments and in spite of all his his ideological convictions was someone who just managed to somehow with him you sensed that there was a kind of possibility beyond the narrow political possibilities in which we then lived of achieving change without that costing any diminution of your sense of the dignity of the other there's an extraordinary capacity for empathy I think which was the most striking thing about him and to be part of his world which was kind of I mean not only he was what not only was he general secretary at the young Communist League but he was also a barman at the conservative and unionist Club in Argyll square in King's birth so there was a certain kind of breath to his range but he was somebody who just made light come on in places that had normally been in shadow and make sort of possibilities unfurl unfold that you hadn't seen before mark not very not very long mark made me go - do you remember the when Rupert Murdoch closed the prints are the printers in Fleet Street and moved it to whopping and there was a huge dispute with the with the NGA the National graphically I think it was a mark made me go down there to stand on the picket line to protest at this event so we stood on one side saying that inevitable refrain the workers United will never be defeated which usually is a prelude to a massive defeat for organized labor than there you go but there we were going the workers United will never be defeated awkwardly for me among the ranks of the police mast opposite with their riot shields was my older brother Andrew and so in the middle of the thing we were going the workers United will never be defeated the police were beating back on their shields and all of a sudden he looked over his shield and he said are you going home for mums birthday [Laughter] I've never been more embarrassed in all my life but even in that divided world even across those battle lines there was a sense that was a kind of transcendent way of being together that offered possibilities possibilities of transformation possibilities of new life those that I mean that's one of the reasons I think why I tried to do what I do now my clerical career began in in Lincolnshire at Boston stump where I was ordained deacon served my title as as curate and that was a fascinating place wonderful medieval church surrounded by beautiful eighteenth-century buildings in a sort of English town out of central casting but behind those facades were lifes life we've being lives were being lived that were as tough as any I've come across anywhere poverty deprivation marginalization heroine in particular and its destructive effects on a community really sort of defined what we did there I learned an awful lot about what it was like to be somebody who woke up in the morning not as I wake up in the morning with the expectation that the day will be part of the continuing story of improvement of betterment that life gets better a sense that you can invest resources time commitment ever it is now and that will bring forth a fruit in the future to your benefit and the benefit of humankind most of the people I was dealing with in those rough estate housing in Boston didn't they woke up in the morning just trying to get through the day thinking about the basic elements of survival very useful lesson for a clergyman to learn and I remember once being called out to a funeral visit and I went to the meanest street in town and one of the meanest houses over council house behind a very untidy garden where one of the windows had been boarded up and the door was semi kicked in and there I found the son of the deceased who was around with learning difficulties I sat in the house it was a house that was thickly yellow with nicotine it was a house in which your feet stuck to the floor as you moved through it it seemed like a documentary about poverty I was slightly uncomfortable and awkward he was uncomfortable and awkward - he told me very little about his mother I did the basic necessities I had to do made my excuses and left turned up at the crematorium a week later or so to take the funeral and there was a huge crowd I assumed for a different funeral but no it was actually for the funeral of his mother the funeral of a woman about whom he'd been able to say nothing at all and for whom I did the most cursory eulogy imaginable but actually it turned out that she'd been a remarkable woman and the crowd that was there were there for her and they were the children abandoned neglected poorly looked after of that estate who she had taken in in various stages of distress and collapse and chaos in their lives some of them who had been as perhaps as wild as children could imaginably be nonetheless her door was open they would come to her and without sentimentality without a view to the opinion of the crowd she'd simply done just the basic discipline of loving someone and of caring for someone and had given them a sense of a structure a sense of their place in the world that took them to greater places one of them I remember the one I remember most of all was a guy and he stood out he was mixed-race guy and he was wearing the uniform of a British Army officer and I spoke to him and he'd been a kid who'd grown up without any real parenting on that estate who'd been taken in by her his life had turned around and it ended up becoming commissioned in the British Army provided you think that success it's up to you and I remember talking to him and I said what was the difference that she made in your life and he said it was simply that she just made me aware that a future was possible a future was possible somebody who just opened people's eyes to a future that they hadn't thought of before a possibility of light coming into a darkness that was so dark they didn't even know it was darkness didn't even know there was a perspective at the end of it much to my shame okay I used to do two eulogists for people in those days when no one would tell me anything about them one went dot loved the crossword and in a very real sense there's one word isn't it that makes sense of the whole pattern and that word is Jesus sorry about that and the other one was violent love to knit and often in a pattern there's one thread that holds the rest of that passes together I learned not to preach sermons like that anymore better to say nothing and to say something like that but also some of the Saints have effectively have been Saints I think one of the reasons why I do what I do now are try to do what I do now is because other people made it look possible simply that someone was doing serious committed Church Christian things without too great a sacrifice to their integrity while their honesty one of them as a prep Andheri of this Cathedral John Gaskin who I'm sure you'll remember very well mark I'm sure many of you remember him who was my first vicar when I came stumbling into a church in total distress and disarray at the age of 29 Sint Albans Hobart John was the vicar there in a remarkable man John played a huge part in getting me in landing me I think from the sort of chaotic final approach I made to faith and for that I'm eternally grateful years later Fern Britton decided to make a documentary about me for the BBC and one of the things she needed to do for that long interview with me was talk to people who would tell her how marvelous I am that took some finding it has to be said but particularly around that period in my life she said I want to talk to somebody who was there when you made this conversion when you went from your life and entered that church and events took a decisive turn and I said well John Gaskell's the person who told you I said what would you call him please and ask him so I did so I phoned John Gaskell and said - oh hello father had no father I'm nice to hear from you that was him not me and I said they're making a documentary about me for the BBC and they need someone who was around at the time of my conversion to talk about that part of my life that critical part of my life and I couldn't think of anyone better than you would you would you mind doing that he said Oh father I would so love to help you there's just one tiny problem and I said what's that he said I don't remember a thing about you that seems to me a kind of priestly exercise of safety virtues in a way reminding us again of who we are and where the limits of our marvelousness lie it's not really about us is it when we do our jobs properly it seems to me it's about vacating space it's we must decrease that he may increase not the kind of pious refrain but simply understanding that when we do our jobs best it's through the honest offering of who we are in all our brokenness in all our jaggedness and that's I often think of the story of the monster of glance gloms Castle you'll know where I think the Queen Mother was born notoriously has a chain der within where the monster of glom some miss shapen monstrous faulty product if you like of that exalted line a creature kept in a room which is locked away and whenever the next successor to gloms inherits than they're told the secret of the monster of grounds apparently once they hung sheets in all the windows of that castle to see if there was such a room and there was one window that was unhung and in that it's thought the monster resided and it's a very powerful image you find it in other folkloric stories too but it seems to me so often that's kind of us too and I love that bit where Jesus talks about in the Sermon on the Mount about when we go to pray about going to the private place and praying in secret there to the Father now sometimes think that what we need to do is to open within ourselves the door to the locked chamber that part of ourselves the most that awkward embarrassing difficult shaming part of ourselves that we keep so carefully away from public view to open that door and discover that there's no monster in there there's simply another window and through that window to let the like I've got on to longer than I thank you very much [Applause]

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Keywords: #God, #saints, #Richard Coles, #St Paul's Cathedral, #Mark Oakley, #Saturday Live, #Church of England

Id: PrlyxtsSKBo

Length: 22min 15sec (1335 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 14 2017