Simon Marsh

AMONGST THE VERY MANY JOYS directly attributable to my calling to be a parish priest are the daily conversations I enjoy with God’s people. Here is the anvil upon which is hammered into shape our theology - our learning about God - and the ideals of our Christian praxis. It’s these conversations that bring me back to my knees and reaching for the book shelf. It’s these conversations that bring me back to the priestly “chewing of the cud”. These conversations that call me back, afterwards, to contemplation.

Yesterday I enjoyed a happy couple of hours with a delightful would-be ordinand. What richness of experience, what breadth of heart and mind this man (who by rights would be entitled, in his early sixties, to a taste of the quiet life, by now) brings to the ministry of his local church. If the wider Church comes to discern in this man a future priest then I, for one, will applaud the recognition. I recommended (for the second time in a week) Richard Giles’ fabulous little “Here I Am - Reflections on the Ordained Life” - and having recommmended it turned again to, and learned again from, his Introduction …

The prayer life of a priest is essential if he or she is going to be someone who ‘is’, who has won through to that state of being in which we rest in God, healed and forgiven. The priest holds within himself the tension of being and doing, eschewing both self-indulgent spirituality and frantic, pointless activity. She lives the advice of St Ignatius of Loyola: “Pray as if everything depended on God, and act as if everything depended on you”.