The BBC short series Broken has dominated the thoughts of British Christians over the last month. It is very rare for such an accurate depiction of Christianity to be shown on prime time TV, and even rare to be invited to peek into the interior life of a priest questioning his ministry, rather than his faith. I’m preparing to be chaplain to a Christian conference over the weekend, in which we will be looking at the idea of ‘sorrow to joy’, and a group of people known as the ‘Fathers of the Church’. The programme, by screenwriter Jimmy McGovern, of Brookside fame, has caused me to reflect on the sorrow and joy of ‘being a father’ to a community.
Sean Bean’s character, the Catholic priest Michael, is a father to his community. He rarely uses the term ‘Father Michael’, and many of the characters treat him as he should be, as a real human being rather than a saint. His character is richly drawn and well informed, focussing on his struggle to be a whole human being, on caring for all the people in his neighbourhood whether they like him or not. His struggle with faith is not a struggle with God, or a belief in God, but a struggle with himself. He doubts. He doubts himself, he doubts that he cares. He struggles with an upbringing quite common to a Catholic in his 50s, the memories of his childhood coming to mind at the most important and profound parts of the mass, distracting him and distressing him. He fears being found out. He isn’t experiencing ‘imposter syndrome’, instead he truly is unworthy of his exalted position as a priest. He truly is unworthy, and yet he is deemed worthy because he doesn’t understand his own holiness. That is a paradox that is so often lost in public discussions of religion. Religious people are expected to be perfect, to know what is good and bad, and to stick to it. And yet they fail, again and again, they fail. Fr Michael doesn’t do bad things, but he fails everyone, with his own doubt and inability to say and do the right things. Several times I found myself shouting at the screen ‘you should have said this’, or ‘act man, stand up for yourself’, before sinking back and realising that I too would have said and some similar things. Indeed, as a priest, and academic, I have found myself in this position many times, and failed to meet expectations. But being a ‘Father’ to a community isn’t about meeting expectations or being perfect. Being a ‘Father’, and this isn’t a gendered role really, is to be like Michael in this programme- to care, to struggle with one’s own failings, and yet to be on the fringes of the lives whom he cares for. Fr Michael isn’t a parent, he cannot make his parishioners do what he wants them to. He can’t bring them up the way he wants. Indeed, he can barely influence their decisions at all. But he is there, separate but profoundly there for them. He fails them, he fails himself, and yet he is a wonderful priest and father, offering up his brokenness to the true God and Father. The Fathers of the Church are a group of leaders of a global family of the Orthodox Christian Church. Their influence on the church is most often understood as dogmatic. They made decisions of doctrine through meetings known as the ‘Ecumenical Councils’, from the Greek term ‘ecumene’, which means ‘household’. They ensured that we today are able to say that a Christian is a person who must assent to the idea that Jesus of Nazareth is human and God, not just a prophet or a nice rabbi who heals people. But, we most often think of the Fathers of the Church in terms of their doctrine, their theology, rather than their fatherhood. They are not known as ‘teachers’ or ‘lawyers’ of the church, but Fathers. Before anything, before we are willing to listen to them. Before we are able to assent to their doctrines, they must be fathers to us. They must have been fathers to their communities. In reality, they must have been Father Michael’s to the communities that they served. They must have taken the wrong steps, they must have failed to speak or act at the right time, hundreds of times. They must have doubted their worthiness as pastors. If they hadn’t, they would not have earned the love and respect of their parishes and dioceses. Their words, once published, would have echoed through those communities with the emptiness of arrogance, and been ignored. Representing Christianity in the arts is a difficult thing to do, and Jimmy McGovern did a rare job. Mostly God gets to be misrepresented as something it has never been in Christianity. As the former Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams said at a conference recently ‘Mostly God gets depicted as a strange ‘thing’ in this universe’. Need I mention the funny but wholly inaccurate America Gods, in which multiple Jesuses appear with the goddess Eostre and bicker over whose Easter is most popular or Preacher, in which God goes missing on earth, somewhere in a jazz club in New Orleans’ French Quarter? It’s easy then to dismiss God as an improbable all-powerful demi-god that just doesn’t match up to logic or empirical science. God rarely gets communicated as beyond space/time, or as humility. Father Michael, in Broken, reminds us that the public discourse about religion has to be about brokenness, not perfect morality. He reminds us that it should be about humility, not arrogance that we religious people have all the right answers but none of the right actions. Only when we are truly aware of our brokenness, will we be able to turn sorrow into joy. Fr Timothy Curtis, 14th July 2017
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