Photo: Church Times
'So I am now forced to face my own restless fidgety impatience.'

Giles Fraser looks at the difference between those leading church services and those listening to them

I wish it were not so, but I have a very high fidget factor in church.

As a parish priest, I found this fairly easy to disguise, as I was mostly taking services and so forever bobbing up and down doing liturgical stuff.

But in the choir stalls at St Paul’s (Cathedral), where often my task is simply to be there, there is nowhere to hide. So I am now forced to face my own restless fidgety impatience.

My son Felix brought all of this home to me at evensong recently. He twisted and squirmed for half an hour.

And then, somewhere about the Nunc Dimittis, he stopped wriggling and sat still for ten whole minutes. It was almost as if the magnificent rhythm of evensong had overwhelmed him, forcing him to submit to its calm and gentle pace.

Obedience

Evangelicals often speak of the spirituality of obedience. It is one of the three great counsels of perfection. Yet obedience has never been an enormously attractive idea to me.

Not, of course, that obedience is an inherently bad thing. To obey a red traffic light is right and proper. And, obviously, in the realm of morality, “Do as you like” is no sort of a Christian philosophy.

None the less, when anybody starts insisting upon obedience, thoughts of men in black shirts are never too far away.

Obedience may be a path to righteousness, but the relationship of power and moral corruption is so strong that a well-developed sense of suspicion about it is never out of place.

Yet the obedience demanded by the offices is something quite different.

For, while it seemed appropriate to use the language of power and submission to describe how evensong subdued my fidgety son — and, I think, is doing the same to me — nothing about that subjection has alerted my anxiety over misplaced obedience.

Streams

As the choir takes my imagination heavenwards, and the repetition of the psalms sends my mind off into spirals of prayerful streams of consciousness, I feel supremely and gloriously free.

Indeed, liturgical subjection is just the way in which my own clock is forced to tick in time with a very different beat, a beat that is not all about me and my next skittish must-have desire.

It is amazing that, during many years in parishes, this beat did not ever really make its way into my soul. I guess I was too busy being in charge.

And that, of course, is a terrible indictment of my own ministry.

Take care that it isn’t true of yours as well.

• This column was first published in, and appears courtesy of, The Church Times

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