Abstract
Lucid and concise, What Clergy Do introduces us to a rich store of work on motherhood, inviting us to enjoy a satisfying many layered metaphor for ministry which opens up well-defended areas of embattled priestly hearts. Each chapter states its aim, says it well, then summarizes it. That apparent tidiness, though, sets free all sorts of imagery. Motherhood’s ordinariness is, of course, pricelessly rich. A priest wouldn’t hesitate to encourage a mother who feels undervalued. The more Emma Percy compares it with the ordinariness of parish ministry, the more we are reminded how rich and moving is our calling.
For instance, using Arendt’s subtle differentiation between ‘labour, work and action’ in motherhood, she traces our shifting roles between completed tangible tasks, those sustaining, nurturing and impossible to measure, and those involving professional skill. We are offered a way of describing this odd combination that makes enough sense for us to carry on. Emma Percy hopes to move us away from ‘the rather empty language of leadership into richer metaphorical language which connects to what people do’ (p. 160). More than analysing what we ‘do’, in fact, she uncovers who we might crave being.
Understated feeling allows us to charge these images with our own emotional experience. Sometimes I felt I had read a series of truisms about ministry, then realized that I had been faced with some very challenging realities. Rather than solutions to particular predicaments, Emma Percy offers a way of tuning the heart. Infused with Sara Ruddick’s study of Maternal Thinking (1995) and workaday experience, pairs of qualities or risks mark out spaces in which we can take responsibility, finding our own place between ‘dependence and maturity’, ‘transitional dependency and generous inequality’, or, best of all, ‘the art of comforting and virtue of delight’. There is a challenging chorus line about not treating people as types (which I needed to hear) and an encouraging one, quoting Winnicott, about being ‘good enough’ mothers and priests.
It would be their real loss if some found relatively few biblical references in this work an excuse not to take it seriously. It rings with biblical chords: the section on weaning enriched my feeling for 1 Corinthians 3.2; Isaiah 49.15; 66.13. The powerful passage on body image (p. 155), exposing neuroses about church growth, gave 1 Corinthians 12 a new resonance. With the habits of mothering Emma Percy points us toward a virtue ethic which I found timely, providing an oblique critique of consequentialist tendencies in clergy selection.
Unqualified, such a powerful metaphor could develop unhealthy priestly superiority. We might egotistically conspire with a congregation’s desire to project group inadequacies onto an emotionally absorbent parent-priest, but Emma Percy knows this (Chapter 4). I would like her to explore more explicitly the most attractive, subversive word in the title: ‘nothing’. I wonder if the key theme of motherhood was omitted from the title in case defensive male clergy wouldn’t pick it up.
Who is it for? A hard-pressed archdeacon; a bullish chair of board of finance; DDOs lending it to enquirers before giving them grids of competencies that suck the Spirit out of discernment; the newly ordained; PCCs in interregnum tempted to pepper a Church Times advert with words like ‘energetic … communication skills … [and] … successful’. It is a gift for people who have slogged in parishes for a couple of decades and feel on a cusp of disappointment. Just when you wonder if anyone’s noticed, asking, ‘Is this it, then?’; when you’re tired, but still sure you are doing something good; when you’re unsure if your favourite metaphors for ministry can hold up for another decade, and you’ve finally admitted that no one else will organize your sabbatical: just then, this could be a wonderful read.
It is never hectoring, very encouraging and, as a male priest, it gave me permission to explore feminine imagery without a hint of pretence or awkwardness. Those of us who are not mothers should feel refreshed, not marginalized, by this exploration. If we use it to recalibrate priorities and retune our pastoral heart, noble but frustrated ministries may rediscover their calm integrity, offering our neighbours what they need in their priest. I have a hunch this book is written by a priest who is rather more than ‘good enough’.