Enfolded in Christ. John-Francis Friendship

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      Introduction

      In my beginning is my end

      ***

      ‘Abide in me as I abide in you.’

      (John 15.4)

      Much of my ministry at present involves accompanying people who are seeking to develop their relationship with Christ through spiritual direction and it is exercised in the shadow of the Lloyds of London building in the City of London. Designed by Richard Rogers it excites a variety of opinions and, like it or loathe it, clearly flies in the face of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s famous observation in his book The Little Prince that ‘what is essential is invisible to the eye’. However, this book follows Lord Rogers’ desire to expose what is normally hidden.

      Not long ago I sat with a priest recalling her experience of a diocesan clergy conference when she suddenly exclaimed: ‘If I’ve lost God, what’s it all about?’ The conference had offered a breadth of workshops dealing with important matters – the work of a parish priest in changing times, youth ministry, church growth, etc. She’d chosen one facilitated by two Benedictine monks, one Anglican and the other Roman Catholic, because the subjects they offered spoke to her desire to deepen her relationship with God, something she knew she needed to look at in depth. This book is concerned with exploring that relationship and how it affects what I call our ‘being beneath the role’ – the person we are behind the position we occupy. This needs such care and attention that this book can only attempt to deal with it in a broad way.

All for Jesus

      Like every Christian the priest is simply and profoundly called to live out their baptismal vocation. Yet in being a public representative of the Church, a priest is not just representing that body as people see it and may experience it in all its fallibility and brokenness, but also what they see it, however dimly, as having the possibility of being. Priests carry people’s hopes, fears, projections – and fantasies. So when the priest visits a sick person, it’s not only a kind Christian who is visiting, but one who is seen in a very particular way as a sign of Christ in his mystical body. That can be an uncomfortable thought for some, but it can help us recall that we are called to have our heart centred on Jesus, and in humility give thanks when others see him through us.

      We ought not to be weary of doing little things for the love of God, who regards not the greatness of the work but the love with which it is performed. (Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection 1614–91)

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PRIESTLY SPIRITUALITY?

      I don’t think there is any spirituality unique to the priesthood, but there are aspects of spirituality that have relevance to ministers of word and sacrament, and even the word ‘spirituality’ itself can be difficult to define. But it can be taken to indicate that which enables us in the depths of our being to desire nothing more than to

      Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind (and) your neighbour as yourself. (Matthew 22.37ff.)

It involves the desire we have and the means we employ to respond to the Other, that we might be taken beyond ourselves and deepen our love of God and neighbour through our specific vocational calling to follow Jesus. Whether bishop, priest or deacon, we must all seek to have our hearts remade in his image and likeness: ‘The challenge of priestly spirituality is to develop rhythms of living in tune with the Spirit so that the Spirit can animate each aspect of priestly identity and transform the priest into a truly effective person-symbol of Christ.’1 There are many specific insights as to how this can be done, and we all have our exemplars in the faith who have highlighted for us aspects of that love of God and neighbour in which we’re called to grow in Christ.

The priest as a ‘walking sacrament’

      It’s in the Eucharist that this transformation is most profoundly realized. In a sermon preached in 1968, Austin Farrer, the late Dean of Keble College, Oxford, described the priest as a ‘living stem bearing sacraments as its fruit’, for the priest gives us the body and blood of Christ. He went on to say that because the priest bears the sacrament they are themselves sacramental: ‘walking sacraments’ who through their humanity celebrate and inhabit the words of Christ as they do what he did. I find that a deeply powerful reflection because it reminds me that I occupy a unique, mysterious and holy place. The priest is in some way perceived as the ‘threshold-minder’ of eternity, not a gatekeeper letting some in and keeping others out (although I’ve heard of ministers who act as if they had that power), but as one who holds open the door to the mysteries of God. And if I’m not prayerfully exploring that which lies beyond, how can I communicate something of the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of God that surpasses knowledge so that others may be filled with all that fullness (Eph. 3.18ff.)? It’s for this reason that we need to remember that while all Christians are called to a life of holiness the priest is called in a particular way, and their faults and failings will be shown up in a particular light.

My vocation

      My own sense of being called to the priesthood started to become apparent in 1963, and three years later I joined the pre-theological course run by the Society of the Sacred Mission (SSM) at Kelham, СКАЧАТЬ