‘I was a millennial priest – and discovered the dark side of the CofE’
by Fergus Butler-Gallie, Telegraph:
In an exclusive extract from his memoir, The Reverend Fergus Butler-Gallie discusses dating with a dog collar – and meeting abusive clerics.
[…] Ordination is a strange business – part legal procedure, part celebration, part terrifying stare over the precipice of the rest of your life. Beforehand, I’d asked a friend how it felt to be ordained. Having drunk various spirits the night before, he replied that he felt like he was at his own funeral. I had not dissimilar feelings.
Not, alas, from a hangover, but because I knew it would change how people saw me: I’d no longer just be me, a young man who liked beer and lie-ins and watching stupid YouTube videos, but a symbol of hope to some and hate to others. I had vowed to do and be something more. I’d promised to ‘die to self and live to Christ and my neighbour’.
Of course I failed in this. All clergy do. I fail to die to self when I conceal my collar because I haven’t got the cash to buy a Big Issue; when I get off the bus a stop early to avoid a barrage of questions about death (normally of pets) from fellow passengers; when I recall all the drinks I had at a university party in 2013 instead of listening to a sermon. In short, I’m called to make God known while being all too human.
Imposter syndrome is also a very real thing for clergy – unsurprising, perhaps, since our ultimate boss is God, whose intangible, incomparable majesty it is our job to make known in no more than about 55 minutes once a week.
Read here (£)
Abridged extract from Touching Cloth, by the Reverend Fergus Butler-Gallie, out on 23 March (Bantam Press, £16.99). To pre-order from Telegraph Books for £14.99, call 0844 871 1515 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
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