Monica Furlong
Extract from The Parson's Role Today, a paper given at the Wakefield Diocesan Clergy Conference, April 1966.
I am clear what I want of the clergy. I want them to be people who can by their own happiness and contentment challenge my ideas about status, about success, about money, and so teach me how to live more independently of such drugs. I want them to be people who can dare, as I do not dare, and as few of my contemporaries dare, to refuse to work flat out (since work is an even more subtle drug than status), to refuse to compete with me in strenuousness. I want them to be people who are secure enough in the value of what they are doing to have time to read, to sit and think, and who can face the emptiness and possible depression which often attack people when they do not keep the surface of their mind occupied. I want them to be people who have faced this kind of loneliness and discovered how fruitful it was, as I want them to be people who have faced the problems of prayer. I want them to be people who can sit still without feeling guilty, and from whom I can learn some kind of tranquillity in a society which has almost lost the art.
I want other things too, which you can probably imagine for yourselves, but what I want most to stress now is that what I think is very dangerous is when the clergyman (sic) becomes so desperate that he is driven to trying to beat the layman (sic) at his own game.
Whereas the layman longs so much to bge shown how to break out of the iron grip of a society which cuts people off from one another, makes love difficult to practise, and which tries to tell him that his spiritual life is something unimportant.
I want other things too, which you can probably imagine for yourselves, but what I want most to stress now is that what I think is very dangerous is when the clergyman (sic) becomes so desperate that he is driven to trying to beat the layman (sic) at his own game.
Whereas the layman longs so much to bge shown how to break out of the iron grip of a society which cuts people off from one another, makes love difficult to practise, and which tries to tell him that his spiritual life is something unimportant.