When I tell people I’m a priest they ask me two questions: “At what point did you know you had a calling?” and “Can you get married?” The second is easily answered. I am married with three children. To the other I want to respond: “Which calling: wife, mother, priest, friend, writer?”
Like many people I have several vocations and have discovered that shoe-horning them into one life is messy but wonderful, as each offers fertile new ground in which to uncover the sacred.
My father was a parish priest. He would cite colleagues whose marriage proposals included the caveat “Of course, you realise that the Church will always come first”. And frequently it did, with a good deal of fallout.
The legacy of that approach is the expectation that clergy will be available 24/7, living lives of unquestioning obedience to the demands of the institution. I am not alone in believing that a differently shaped priesthood might be possible.
Perhaps this is because I’m a differently shaped priest. Priests come in many varieties of course and bring with them a multiplicity of passions and perspectives. But in the great sweep of Church history it is relatively recent that some are young, female and occasionally pregnant.
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This change brings fresh insights and vulnerabilities as clergy relate to one another and to the rest of the world, and people wonder: if this is how the Church now looks and sounds, what new things might we learn about God?
As a curate in my 20’s I lost count of the times I was told ‘You’re not how I expected a priest to be’. In my 30’s, working in a city centre church, I navigated a careful path with the disenfranchised young men who found refuge there, acutely aware of the necessary limits of pastoral intimacy.
More recently when taking on a new role I was told with a loud guffaw ‘We don’t mind a bit of totty for our chaplain this year’! Our gender and sexuality are always present in the room.
Becoming a parent is by no means the only ground-shifting experience known to woman or man. However it does change your life. When in my mid-thirties I gave birth successively to two daughters the rest of the clergy team rose graciously to the challenge. Flexibility was the keyword for us all.
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But when I later considered taking on my own parish I felt I could only do it by significantly re-shaping people’s expectations of how a vicar might operate or taking a step back from the day to day care of my children.
Some clergy women have courageously done the former and women in all walks of life have skilfully managed the latter. Arguably fathers have always had to do it, but many have had wives who have made this possible and still others regret the sacrifices involved.
I genuinely rejoice in the achievement of those who live that particular juggling act, whilst choosing for myself a different way forward involving part-time and voluntary roles.
I now know numerous female clergy who are doing the same because they are perplexed by how to provide for pre-school children when your stipend doesn’t cover the cost of childcare, by the lack of part-time parish roles because two families cannot share one vicarage, and by how to construct a diary responsive to the needs of funeral directors and parishioners in crisis as well as your partner and children.
The Church has always sought to adapt its ministries to the needs and opportunities of the world around it. Traditional clergy jobs within parishes, cathedrals and chaplaincies are continually being reshaped by imaginative and energised priests. But some of us whose lives do not dovetail with such roles have begun to ask whether priesthood might unfold in us in other ways. We think about this as we chat with parents at the school gate, have dinner with friends, volunteer for a charity, walk the dog and engage in all sorts of activities that do not relate to church but are just as redolent with the sacred. We are also listening intently to questions that our children have reawakened and re-formed in us: questions about risk, about death, about what life is actually for, and about how to engage young people in a living, exploratory and intelligent dialogue with the idea of God.
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I continue to explore the new shape of my life post-parish, post-fulltime role and post-being-sure-what-comes-next. I discover others who are doing the same. Together we wonder whether the institution on whose edges we exist is beginning to notice our energy and restlessness. Whether it might sit with us in wonder and reflection. And whether it will encourage our tentative steps as we seek the sacred where many do not engage with the Church yet are alive to the idea of God.
Rosemary Lain-Priestley works on the development of female clergy in London. She is a regular contributor to ‘Thought for the Day’ on BBC Radio 4. Her latest book is Unwrapping the Sacred: Seeing God in the Everyday (SPCK. £9.49, Times’ Books).