Broken, Dibley, Rev and Calvary

Broken has rightly been called a flawless depiction of a good priest. Jo Siedlecka writes that:

'Jimmy McGovern’s pitch perfect writing and Sean Bean’s hypnotic, understated performance as Fr Michael Kerrigan did not disappoint. This drama portrays one of those many good priests, who has really taken to heart the advice of Pope Francis to bring the healing power of God’s grace to everyone in need, to stay close to the marginalised and to be “shepherds living with the smell of the sheep.”

We are used to seeing clergy depicted performing their sacramental roles. But the huge amount of pastoral work the average Catholic priest does often goes unrecognised - the visits to the housebound, those in prison or in hospital, accompanying people in times of crisis. All those deaths, weddings, baptisms and funerals. All those problems. All that listening! This series has gone behind the scenes for what feels like a very authentic portrayal of life in a run down north country parish.'

It's worth pointing out, however, that seeing the dramatic and comedic potential of 'good priests' began in recent years firstly with The Vicar of Dibley followed by Rev. Set in a fictional small Oxfordshire village 'which is assigned a female vicar following the 1992 changes in the Church of England that permitted the ordination of women', The Vicar of Dibley has all the elements which characterise the phenomenon of the 'good priest' in comedy or drama i.e. a committed but flawed priest struggling with personal failings and the demands of contemporary ministry. Rev is a grittier reworking of the comedic value of the 'good priest' in being 'a contemporary sitcom about the daily frustrations and moral conflicts of Reverend Adam Smallbone - a Church of England Vicar who was 'promoted' from a sleepy rural parish to the busy, inner-city world of St Saviour's, in East London':

'It is an impossibly difficult job being a good, modern, city vicar. And, equally, it's a very hard job being married to one. Alex - Adam's long-suffering wife - does her best to support him, but she's got her own career as a solicitor to worry about. And she is no-one's idea of a conventional vicar's wife ... Every day throws up a moral conflict for the vicar. Adam's door must always be open to urban sophisticates with ulterior motives, the chronically lonely, the lost, the homeless, the poor and the insane. All are welcome at St Saviour's and Adam can't turn any of them away - even if they're clearly lying, mad or just very annoying.'

'Heavily researched and supported by anecdotes from a number of working city vicars and Church insiders, Rev lifts the lid on how the modern Church actually functions and what life is really like in a dog collar.'

Dramas featuring good priests continued with 'Calvary, a 2014 Irish drama film written and directed by John Michael McDonagh.' 'McDonagh explained the intentions he had for the film: "There are probably films in development about priests which involve abuse. My remit is to do the opposite of what other people do, and I wanted to make a film about a good priest."' He has also said, “The idea was a good man, a good priest, and what that would entail in a modern life where everything is ironic and insincere. Let’s follow a sincere man through to the end.”

'Calvary is a blackly comedic drama about a priest tormented by his community. Father James is a good man intent on making the world a better place. When his life is threatened one day during confession, he finds he has to battle the dark forces closing in around him.'

'McDonagh has called the film “basically Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest with a few gags thrown in,” and the film name-checks Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos, whose novel Bresson’s film is based on.

Like Diary of a Country Priest, Calvary is about a good priest in a small village where attitudes toward him range from benign indifference to contempt and abuse.

Yet where Bresson’s saintly protagonist was a wan young consumptive who could be wounded by something as minor as a saucy schoolgirl impudently flirting with him, Father James — played by the physically imposing Brendan Gleeson in a grizzled beard and cassock that makes him an even more formidable presence — is a battered Celtic warrior who seems impossible to rattle ...

it is Father James, alone among the cast, who offers a persuasive, integral, authentic example of what a human being should look like: too honest for cant, too jaded for naiveté, too self-aware for illusions, too solicitous for self-absorption, too fallen for self-righteousness, too down to earth for self-importance.'

The development of 'good priest' stories has gone hand-in-hand with reality TV series such as A Country Parish and An Island Parish which, again, demonstrate significant levels of interest in the demands of the priestly role within contemporary culture. This is a phenomenon that would reward more research and review as it would seem true the case that, rightly depicted or dramatised (i.e. with a honest focus on the commitment, struggle and integrity of the priest) authentic portrayals of parish life can generate significant interest and empathy. This is, in part, as Jo Siedlecka notes, because of the huge amount of pastoral work the average priest does; the visits to the housebound, those in prison or in hospital, accompanying people in times of crisis, all those deaths, weddings, baptisms and funerals, all those problems, all that listening!

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Ray Davies - Broken.

Rev: Holding a big mirror up to the Church

The current series of Rev continues, as it should, to provoke debate about the nature of ordained ministry and the state of the Church of England. Informed comment on the series so far can be found here and here.


In the comments to Angus Ritchie's Fulcrum piece, David Runcorn says, Rev "is certainly touching a church and particularly its clergy in a very personal and vulnerable way."


Ritchie and Runcorn have a significant debate about interpretations of 1 Corinthians 1. 25-28, with Ritchie arguing that:


"To focus only on whether we ‘mean well’ is to focus entirely on ourselves.  In a world where people hunger for meaning and hope (and in which increasing numbers at home as well as abroad hunger for food), the Gospel demands more than good intentions.  While we can all smile at Adam Smallbone’s antics, it would be a grave mistake to become sentimental about his ineffectiveness."


and


"It seems clear from St Paul’s own ministry and impact that what means by “God’s foolishness” and his “weakness” is not the kind of ineffectiveness which (I feel) Rev sentimentalises."


While Runcorn responds:


"The character of Adam Smallbone is found in the long honourable religious and dramatic tradition of the ‘fool’. As such he is a sign of contradiction. His vulnerabilities are ours. In his very weakness and clumsiness he is all our dilemmas, larger than life. That’s what fools are for."


and


"I do still wonder just how publically compelling a church that is sheep among wolves, common clay pots, weak and foolish to shame the wise etc can ever look in the midst of a society. There is something in these vocational descriptions that is surely intended to subvert cultural norms of power, status, impressiveness and credibility. There can be a certain attempt to be compelling to the world that is itself corrupting. I don’t see any way round it."


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The Frames - Dance The Devil Back Into His Hole.

Food, Song and Vocations

Revd. Canon Philip Ritchie & I before our Vocations Service

Jack & June with their sumptuous buffet

 Chapel End Savoy Players

We have had a busy but valuable weekend at St John's Seven Kings. Yesterday we had an excellent fundraising event featuring the Chapel End Savoy Singers performing a programme of songs from musicals and Gilbert & Sullivan and a sumptuous buffet prepared by church members Jack and June Weedon, both of which were greatly enjoyed by all who came. The event was ably organised once again by our Social & Fundraising committee.

Using our gifts and talents in the service of God and the mission of the church was our focus today in a Vocations Service organised as part of Stewardship Month at St Johns. Philip Ritchie, Lay Ministry Education Co-ordinator in the Diocese of Chelmsford, was our preacher and spoke about the sense of inadequacy that characterises those whom God often calls, using the final episode of Rev as an example having seen Tom Hollander at Greenbelt. Philip encouraged all of us to say yes to God's call in our lives despite our personal sense of inadequacy. We then gave our congregation the opportunity to explore ministry and volunteering opportunities in the Church and community with representatives of children's, lay, ordained and youth ministries in the Diocese, Christian Education Project, Downshall Pre-School Playgroup Trustees, Gideon's International, Redbridge Night Shelter, Redbridge Street Pastors, Redbridge Voluntary Care, SKNPRA, TASK, various workplace ministries, and various ministries at St Johns.

We prayed together: Lord, my God and my loving Father, You have made me to know You, to love You, to serve You, and thereby to find and to fulfil myself. I know that You are in all things, and that every path can lead me to You. But of them all, there is one especially by which You want me to come to You. Since I will do what You want of me, I pray You, send your Holy Spirit to me: into my mind, to show me what You want of me; into my heart, to give me the determination to do it, and to do it with all my love, with all my mind, and with all my strength right to the end. Amen.

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Larry Norman - I Am A Servant.

Rev.ived

Bit late in the day for a post on Rev but, as I've been commenting on other people's posts, here's one bringing my thoughts together.

Firstly, I don’t think, as some have suggested, that Adam Smallbone was portrayed as either a fanatic or a wimp. That has often been the stock portrayal of clergy on TV but this Rev certainly wasn't held up for ridicule. Instead much of the comedy in the series came from moments when Smallbone's experience and expectations of ministry were at odds and, in my experience at least, that seemed an authentic reflection on an aspect of being in ministry.

While some of the storylines weren't as sharply observed as could have been the case (Episode 2 in particular), Smallbone throughout has been a nuanced character oscillating humanly between faith and doubt, integrity and failure, and for me that aspect of his portrayal has been the secret to the success of the series.

For example, his “I'm tired of having to tell people what they want to hear all the time” in the final episode was something that I would guess most of us who are ordained think at some stage in our ministry. In the context of the story told in that final episode, this comment was then deliberately undercut by the writers in the denouement to the episode where Smallbone said exactly what his dying parishioner wanted and needed to hear and this was restorative both for the parishioner and himself.

When the Last Rites are given to someone who has requested them, the person receiving is being given what they want, expect and need. This doesn't mean, though, that there is a simple continuity between this action and Smallbone's earlier statement. What Smallbone surely learnt to acknowledge, as his vocation was reaffirmed by administering the Last Rites, was that there are situations where it absolutely the right thing to tell people what they want to hear (this being one of them) and that to do so is to be a channel for God's grace. Prior to this point he only thought negatively of telling people what they want to hear and condemned himself for doing so.

What he learnt to acknowledge (and this was, I think, often the resolution of many of the episodes) was that his expectations of what ministry is and can be have to continually be nuanced because grace can be received and shared in wholly unexpected ways. The weakness of the man became a means of grace, which I think is absolutely right both theologically and in terms of comedic resolution in this series.

Finally, in the context of the series, his statement was not a fully accurate description of what we actually saw Smallbone doing and saying. Much of the comedy in the series came from a number of significant moments in the series where he does not tell people what they want to hear.

The fact that he was portrayed as doing both - showing a lack of backbone and acting with integrity - and the reality that we saw both cut both ways at different times (i.e. sometimes grace came through weakness and sometimes through strength of character) is part of what leads me to say that he is a nuanced character oscillating humanly between faith and doubt, integrity and failure.

The prayers in each episode acted as key turning points in each narrative. They are one of the plot devices which mean that Smallbone could not be a social worker or government bureaucrat and the comedy remain wholly in place. Prayer was portrayed as reorienting him to his vocation and triggering the moments in the narratives when he either grew in faith or became a channel for grace.

It is in the nature of a sitcom that the central character be fallible. Were this not so, from where would the comedy derive? The success of this series was that we identified with Smallbone’s weaknesses and that these same weaknesses were revealed as vehicles for grace or growth.

More interesting discussion of the series can be found here, here, here, here, here, ad infinitum.


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Sufjan Stevens - Casimir Pulaski Day.