“And is that why you like to be called ‘Father’?” Barbara asked him.
Father David felt the zinger rip into his chest, a direct hit. It was such a personal question. He struggled to gain control of his breathing, to appear calm and unruffled. But it was not a fair question. It was not a question at all. It was an attack, a public attack. Every eye in the room was now raised to monitor his response.
“I prefer to be called ‘Father’ because it emphasizes the role, not the person,” he said evenly.
“But you are a person,” Bob joined in from across the room, nodding and smiling encouragingly. The circle of clergy seemed to be closing in, like hyenas crouched on their haunches, holding back for the right moment to leap through the fire and tear him flesh from flesh, bone from bone. How long had they been lying in wait for this moment, he wondered.
Still, Father David kept his head. “I am a person called to play a role,” he answered. “When I preach, it is not my ideas that matter; it is the Gospel. When I give pastoral care, it is not my caring that matters; it is God’s. When I preside at the altar it is not my person that people want to see; it is Christ’s. I don’t apologize for this: it is the role to which we have been called. The clerical collar is not a fashion statement,” he said, being careful not to look over at Brewster. “It’s a sign of office. When I wear my stole, I cross it in front because I am bound, literally bound, by a higher authority than my own personality, than my own likes and dislikes. I am God’s representative through his church. I am, in that moment, the role, not the man.”
Barbara didn’t miss a beat, pushing things farther, upping the ante. “What else gives you life, David?”
But he wasn’t going there again. “That’s it,” he answered, definitively. It might have been taken as, “That’s it, I’ve just told you,” or “That’s it, I’ve had it with these stupid questions.” He didn’t offer to elaborate.
Barbara allowed a brief pause, sat back in her chair, let the moment linger, and then addressed the group, “Okay, then, let’s carry on.” She turned her body away from Father David and toward the priest seated next to her. “What about you, Claire?”
Something burned within Father David now. He was angry. He knew that on these matters he stood alone. No one shared his high notion of priesthood. The younger clergy approached their ministry through an adolescent need to change the world into their likeness. The older ones, especially those who had been ordained as a second career, saw their job simply as being nice people doing nice things for others. None of them had the slightest comprehension of the deep archetypal resonances of their priestly role.
Father David himself had no illusions about the power of the priesthood, and about the heavy burden of responsibility that fell on those who responded to the call, to take it up. But the church, his church, was going off in some other direction. On occasions like this he felt like a fossil, an object of curiosity, perhaps even of scorn. But it only strengthened his resolve.
As the meeting broke up, Bob strode purposefully across the room, his grinning face filled with interpersonal warmth. Father David saw him coming and tried to escape, avoiding his gaze. But Bob reached out and took hold of his shoulder. “Hey David,” he said. “A few of us are going to lunch. Do you want to join us?”
“No, thanks,” Father David replied, shaking him off. “I brought a lunch.”
Bob grew serious, looking at him now with what appeared to be deep pastoral concern. “You okay?” he asked.
“Yes, fine, thank you,” Father David said. “I’ll see you later.”
He made his way up and out into the noonday sun. With relief he pointed his car toward Holy Cross, his own church, ten minutes away but a million miles from here. The sign on the lawn had his own name painted on it — “Rector: The Reverend David F. Corcoran, BA, MDiv.” — along with the times of the Sunday services. Nowhere did it say anything about “caring and sharing.”
. . .
Back at Holy Cross, Margaret, the church’s secretary, who worked mornings, had already left for the day. He had the church to himself. He went into his office and sat down at his desk, turning on the CBC from the portable radio he kept on the bookshelf. He opened the lunch Beverley had packed. As he sipped through a straw from the little juice box, he tried to put the morning’s meeting behind him.
He was not displeased with what he had said about the role of a priest, though he knew it opened up a chasm between him and the others. But had he trusted them, had he been able to speak the whole truth, what he would have wanted to say was this: It was Beverley who gave him life. She was his wife but also his best friend, the only one who understood — the only one.
If it had been Beverley on the hot seat, she would have given clericus an earful. Father David loved this about her. She didn’t care what people thought. She said and did exactly what she felt. Even Barbara would have been no match for her.
Maybe she should have been the priest, he thought, something that had crossed his mind many times before. She certainly had the training for it, having been for two years a novice in the Anglican Order of St. Cecilia — a nun. She and David had met when he was the assistant curate at the cathedral. He had taken the youth group to the convent for a Christmas retreat. She had been assigned to work with him, supporting him in the daily Bible studies and lending her enthusiastic guitar-playing to their group singing.
Their chemistry was instinctive and immediate. They “fit,” though it took her departure from the order for them to be able finally to articulate it to one another. She did not leave the order for him, but she certainly left because of him. He had opened up in her the hope, and even the possibility, of finding a life-partner. She had done the same for him, and they were drawn to each other like children in a playground, the rest of the noise and laughter dissolving into the background as they bent their heads together, digging with their fingers in the sand.
But she was the plucky one. He himself was reserved, careful, circumspect — traits that had hardened in the mould of his strict upbringing. He had a sister, Paula, almost six years younger than he was. But he had always felt like an only child, caught up far too young in the serious world of his austere father and his quiet diminutive mother. By the time Paula came along it was too late, he was already one of them.
Beverley, on the other hand, was the oldest of five. Hers had been a raucous household, the back door slamming with a constant procession of people in and out, strangers showing up for supper at the last minute (friends of her brothers, mostly). Her mother was unflappable and contributed to the constant commotion by holding down a series of irregular part-time jobs. Her father was prone to falling off the wagon, though he was a happy drunk who filled the house with crude pranks and uproarious laugher. It was a house buoyed by chaotic abandon, every day bringing with it new calamities and fresh adventures. It might have been chosen by a panel of impartial judges as the household least resembling Father David’s.
How Beverley ever got the idea of entering a religious order was a bit of a mystery to those who knew her. But it had more to do with the liveliness of the order than with anything retiring or introverted about Beverley. It was true that she saw it as a place to exercise her growing vocation as a Christian leader. But also, as a plump woman with a flushed complexion and a loud voice, whose chances of marriage seemed slim, Beverley found in the religious life a sense of acceptance and belonging that eluded her in the outside world.
So through her years in the order, Beverley came to know the church well and the peculiar demands of being a “public” Christian, of being a “professional” minister marked by odd dress and unworldly practices. This meant that she not only sympathized with Father David’s world, she knew it, from the inside out, and this made all the difference.
The lunch she had packed him this day was a little sparser than usual, he