At the time of writing, Christmas Day is still ahead of us, but the marathon of services is almost over. These days, the unwinding often takes the form of the Clergy Malt Club, where you pour yourself a dram, photograph it, and post the photo on the social media platform of your choice.
Formerly the dram was inevitably whisky and there was quiet competition for the cosiest photo, the most elegant glass and so forth. This has mostly ended, just as heavy drinking among the clergy has mostly gone out of style.
The dram now is almost as likely to be hot Ribena or Lemsip as it is to be the 21-year-old single malt (in my case, a gift from a friend) or the bottle of cooking brandy kept under the kitchen sink between the Drano and the plunger.
The idea is that we have been working nonstop until this moment of rest and the restorative sip of the water of life. You know and I know, though, that we can’t work nonstop.
Every day, multiple times a day, I need to stop briefly to unwind my thoughts and unburden my heart so that I can refocus and commit myself entirely to the next thing I have to do.
It might be that I have 10 minutes in the car between sitting beside the bed where a woman is dying and the time I’m due to arrive at the Baby Dragons toddlers’ group. There’s not much to do in those 10 minutes except to look, signal, manoeuvre, change gears, apply the brake, and maybe listen to the Pet Shop Boys. Other people, with a lifetime of experience, do it better: “I used to do a whole day of seeing people for CBT, one after another,” a friend says.
When I ask how on earth she managed it, she reminds me that the billable hour is 50 minutes, so she would take a break and have a hot drink and a few words with the tea lady.
Sometimes (she says with some embarrassment), she’d have a biscuit.
“The biscuit part of the ritual is important,” I say. My friend Nick, who’s now a psychoanalyst, has window boxes which he sometimes has a little faff with, watering or deadheading, or breaking up the soil with a big spoon when it gets compacted. Not wholly unlike the work he helps other people do, only made tangible.
Gardening is one of the best ways to make use of a few minutes between visits. Take the secateurs and go outside. Or, if you’ve just had half an hour with a blustering new head teacher at the parish school, a meditative journey round the rectory garden picking up dog poo is wonderful for restoring calm.
What else do we clergy do to be ready to offer the best of ourselves in all the many and varied things that make up our days?
Years ago, when I was new at all this, I was surprised to find a very fine priest heckling the idiocies of the characters on Neighbours: “Oh, you stupid man! You plonker! You’re in for it now!”
Then, the next day, he would go out into the parish and be his wise and compassionate self to everyone he met. He didn’t take up model railways, but many clergy do. Railways are known to be calming to the soul. As is the cultivation of roses, though it demands more time than I usually have.
And if I have an hour to take the dogs for a walk, chances are that I’ll find myself having at least two parish-related or pastoral conversations before I get back home. Proper resetting of the mental and spiritual gears needs solitude.
So, between one meeting and another, between a service and a visit and taking a school assembly and meeting with the director of music, and waiting for a call from the archdeacon, I may knit or read or have a cup of tea or get dirt under my fingernails in the garden.
What I don’t do is try to fit more work into these openings in the Jenga tower of minutes and half-hours.
When my husband was alive, he would say in the evening, “Bugger the Church of England! Haven’t you done enough for one day?”
I mention this because, of course, I have a great and unreasonable sense of guilt that I don’t use my time better, that I don’t fit the work to be done to the time I have as neatly as the Tailor of Gloucester cut his silks.
My sense is that this guilt is common among clergy. The Church gives us great freedom, and we use it to enslave ourselves.
Hence the Clergy Malt Club, and all those biscuits, cups of tea, wonderfully brainless TV shows, and moments in the car or the garden that allow us to be fully human and in the service of God and other people.