Vocation

Vocation

At my Ordination retreat the Bishop's Chaplain had led a session

on Vocation and he asked us to talk about how our vocations had started and how the call to which we were now responding had first made itself known.

On reflection I knew that I should have invented some story because the Chaplain was one of those top drawer career clergy heading for a Bishopric from the day they leave theological college and even now, in what was his second job, really just a second curacy, he was looking for new clergy, people with whom in due course he could staff his future diocese.

But no, amidst the stories of people who were inspired by the lives of saints, encouraged by faithful vicars and school Chaplains who recognised and encouraged their true vocations; I described how I went to the church youth club with a couple of friends from the local area and saw a girl called Susan Palmer, whose father ran a corner shop and who was from an altogether different social strata from me.

Realising that I stood little or no chance of her talking to me at the youth group and hearing that she was in the church choir, I decided to join the church choir myself in order to qualify for the choir outing to the seaside and the hoped for possibility of getting her alone on the back seat of the bus on the way home.

It was true and from this fairly unlikely starting place I began to attend church regularly, despite being thrown out of the choir because I couldn't sing to save my life.

If anyone had ever suggested the possibility, not that anyone had, I would have laughed uproariously. I certainly wasn’t the kind of person to think about the church and all the God stuff. I was no creeping Jesus. I had never been an altar boy, I had been baptized, and one thing led to another until I was attending a confirmation class and then talking seriously to the new curate about how you offered, that apparently was the word used, for ordination.

Looking back over the four years that it had taken from 1965 when I went to The Bernard Gilpin Society in Durham until 1969 when I graduated from Salisbury Theological College. Those four years of study, tutorials, essays, reading, interspersed with holiday jobs in bars, cleaning windows, whatever I could get, were to all intents and purposes an escape route from what working class future fate had in mind for me.

But it hadn’t been a sudden brain wave that had set me on the path towards ordination. By now my family were living in Stoke on Trent, I had left school with the Headmasters words following me down the corridor, ‘Smith, it will benefit neither you ‘nor the school for you to remain here a minute longer than is necessary’.

My Mother was mortified and dragged me down the hill to the Normeir Tyre Company who were advertising for a Trainee Salesman. I left school on the Friday and started work on the Monday.

That job was probably the most responsible job I ever had, given that rather than training as a salesman I was mending punctures, fitting tyres, balancing wheels and refitting them to cars that then went out on to the public roads.

After a year of that job I undertook the Civil Service open competition and was appointed as a Clerical Assistant the most junior Civil Service grade.

The job was in the Town Centre of another of the Five Towns, Longton and I used to take myself off for a walk around at Lunchtime. I would stare into shop windows, call into the record store to hear the latest music releases, buy the occasional LP and think as I walked about the future and where life was leading me.

Occasionally I passed a large austere building forming an island in the centre of a cross roads, with traffic passing on both sides. The Church was dedicated to the Saviour, it smelt sweetly of what in due course I learned was incense, but there was a back scent of beeswax and polish hiding a faint smell of human odours, sweat and socks, and something else that I couldn’t quite explain.

I would sit in the semi-darkness which was only barely lightened by daylight filtering through windows high above the central aisle, the main aisle windows themselves offering little light because of the dark stained glass that obscured the outside world which hummed away gently in the background. The mix of traffic noise and human voices formed the rhythm section of the city.

Sitting there became a daily ritual, I would leave the office at lunchtime, refusing various invitations to share a drink, play cards or football, and head down to the traffic island cross over and enter the dark sanctuary.

Despite confirmation class and attending services and listening to sermons I was completely untutored in religious matters but as I read various notices and magazines, I began to understand the clues and read the signs and symbols and it began to dawn on me that this strange ritual environment, its darkened interior embracing me with its soft, gentle, scented air held a clue to the dis-ease in the world outside.

The Saviour to which the church was dedicated was the Jesus of the New Testament and when I found a Bible and started to read, I would become so engrossed that on occasion I would be late for work.

But in a world where it was possible for monsters to emerge who so denied their humanness that they could visit wickedness on innocent children, the question had to be asked how could this be and how could a God who claimed to be good allow such a thing to happen.

Later I learned that this was called the Problem of Evil but as I read the pamphlets, read the history of the church and reflected on the idea of a saviour I began to understand that there was a connection between this large, warehouse of a building standing on its isolated and isolating traffic island and the events affecting people right now.

It began to become clearer to me, and I was as I say untutored in all of this arcane material and so was working all of this out for the first time for myself, that the goodness of God, is that he is prepared to let people work things out for themselves, get some things right and some things pretty dramatically and awfully wrong. Then rather than come steaming in to put things right sends another person to share in the mess and try to sort it out as a human being rather than as a god type.

According to the pamphlets I found at the back of St Saviours this character is the Jesus whose story is told in the gospels, in a sense he was there to help people become human, to hold on to their humanness, and to ensure that humanity triumphs in the end, or as that weird and wonderful last book in the bible claims in the end, God wins.

So I found myself reflecting as I walked back to work, whatever evil comes along, our humanness is guaranteed because of Jesus, the cross was a problem still and there was a lot that puzzled me, but if evil people have their way then our humanness will eventually be eroded, we will be less and less at ease with ourselves and our neighbours and eventually evil will win, so its not really all the mumbo jumbo or the hymns or the services or even the  incense that matters its that this Jesus person continues to stand up for truth at any price, even the high price of dying and absorbing into himself, the sinfulness.

I was still spending some lunch times, with work colleagues and some days the weather was too poor to be walking out and risking having to spend the afternoon in the office wearing damp clothes. But I still managed to get down to the church and to spend time in the semi-darkness trying to fathom out answers to the questions spinning around in my mind.

Sometimes I read from the New Testament, sometimes there was a new pamphlet in the small library at the back of the church, but sometimes I would just sit and reflect on the words of the pop songs that I enjoyed

Eventually a curate came to our parish. Horace Harper was a man almost ascetic in his quiet commitment and his sense of pastoral care began to make an impression on me. Eventually the sense of vocation arose as an expression of how I could spend my life in the pursuit of the worthwhile work in which Fr. Harper was clearly engaged.

The secret of Susan Palmer remained a mystery and my naive sexual experimentation was regularly forgiven by Fr. Hamer who counselled restraint but seemed able to live with the fact that his counsel was routinely ignored.

And it was this, as I explained, that had in the end made the most profound impression. That the church in the form of Fr. Harper, could live with the shortcomings and failings of the community he sought to serve. 

It seemed to me that as Fr Harper has expressed it, I had been loved into believing and eventually into offering myself for the Churches ministry an offer which to both our surprise had been accepted. My attendance at church was somewhat erratic and at that time I had no formal academic qualifications at all but nevertheless eventually I was successful at my Selection Conference and recommended for training.

The Chaplain with a raised eyebrow archly responded, to polite

ripples of laughter from the others present, by observing that it

had probably been a ' clerical error '.

In fact it had been more than that. Fr Harper later told me, when I was appointed as a Residentiary Canon and Vice-Provost of Bradford Cathedral, that he had been told in no uncertain terms to stop wasting his time with such a hopeless case as I was deemed to be, by his Vicar.