something and then to work alongside me as I clumsily tried to hammer in a nail or paint a wall. Sometimes there would be a slightly tense moment as I became as good at a particular task as he was, but without too much trouble he would soon hand over a project to me and allow me to get on with it, promising that he was there for me if I found myself in difficulty.
Interestingly, my father’s experience of his father was the opposite. Rather than releasing him into adulthood, his own father tried to constrain him in childhood. The loss of his wife in childbirth, the poverty of the 1930s and the trauma of the war had left my grandfather protective and possessive, unable to learn ‘How self-hood begins with a walking away. And love is proved in the letting go.’36 There is little more depressing than seeing mature and gifted members of a church, some of them perhaps already trained for particular ministries, distrusted or disempowered by a priest who cannot take the risk of working with others in ministry. But there is something very invigorating in a church where gifts are being discovered, different ministries being discerned and where people are being trained and then released to fulfil their part in the priestly ministry of Christ’s body. Where there are clergy confident enough to know that their priestly identity is fulfilled in the mentoring and mobilizing of others for ministry, the Church will grow into adulthood and come closer to its full stature in Christ. The ‘walking-away’ and the ‘letting go’ required of the priest is the sort of space-giving that a good father does for his child. It is a process of giving room for the other member of Christ’s family to find the calling that God has given and then permission to exercise that God-given ministry. And, like Paul with Timothy, his son in ministry, we discover that there is still much for us to do as we continue to support those we have trained and released into Christ’s work (Philippians 2:2). ‘What are the conditions for the growth of the Church into maturity? How can Christians be stretched to serve God in the ministry to which God is calling them? What is needed in this place for the development of the Church into adulthood in Christ? How can the Church be raised and released to propogate its own life? How can I discern and shape and support the giftings of others?’ These are critical questions for those called to preside over the priestly community.
Perhaps Gregory’s favourite image is of the priest as a physician. The largest part of his Pastoral Charge consists of detailed advice on how to approach seventy-two different pastoral cases. Each case is paired with its opposite: the joyful and sad, the patient and impatient, the quarrelsome and peaceful and so on. Gregory is not trying to establish some sort of immutable case law – a set of pastoral precedents to which we can always turn in whatever situation. Quite the opposite in fact – his pastoral advice is finely honed to particular situations. He begins each section by repeating his overriding pastoral principle – ‘different admonitions are to be addressed to . . .’ and then he shows how different people, with different problems need to be approached in different ways. At the same time, though, he is conscious of the importance of maintaining Christian integrity and consistency so that the care given to one person will not only help that individual but will be good for the community as a whole: ‘The speech therefore of teachers ought to be fashioned according to the condition of hearers, that it may both be suited to each for their own needs, and yet may never depart from the system of general edification.’37
With extraordinary insight Gregory skilfully diagnoses the way different dispositions can impede Christian growth and suggests treatment that goes to the heart of a problem, where necessary wielding the surgeon’s knife with purposeful precision. He combines fine psychological judgements about healthy human living with deep spiritual instincts about how the ordinary qualities of a wholesome life find their origin and fulfilment in God. Peace, for example, that human virtue for which most of us strive, is merely ‘a foot-print of peace eternal’, and what, he asks, ‘can be more mad than to love footprints left in the sand, but not to love Him by whom they are left’.38
Gregory is ‘a lover of souls’. He knows that only God will fulfil the deepest longings of human hearts and that Christ’s pattern of life is the definitive example of humanity fully alive, of life lived in welcoming openness to all that God intends for us. Committed to the ‘cure of souls’, Gregory attends to any signs of ill-health in people, any attitude or action that may restrict a person’s growth into the life of Christ, and suggests forms of ministry suited to each situation. He knew that the health of the Church depends upon the health of its members. Paul’s letters are a mirror image of Gregory’s charge. He was passionate about the health of church communities and was able to analyse the communal dynamics of healthy churches with startling accuracy, while at the same time giving very particular advice about how the members of the community should handle their relationships with each other and their life in the world. Those who study the growth of the Church today tell us, as if we needed reminding, that healthy churches are growing churches.39 It is not for nothing that the Church is called the body of Christ. Like human bodies, individual Christians and Christian communities have natural capacities to grow. ‘What are the conditions for the health of the Church? What is impeding the growth of the Church? How can the diseases of the soul be cured? How can members of the Church be helped “to grow up in every way into him who is the head, from whom the whole body . . . promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love” (Ephesians 4:16)?’
The priest as a navigator is another favourite image for Gregory. He describes the pastoral calling to be with people when they face ‘a storm in the soul, in which the vessel of the heart is ever tossed by gusts of feeling, and driven without ceasing hither and thither, so that it is wrecked by transgressions in word and deed, as though by rocks that meet it’.40 Much of his advice to pastors is about helping people to find their way through the difficult times of life, to steer their way through temptation and testing, to keep their sights set on the destination to which God is calling them. Again, Gregory has one eye on the person in particular need and the other on the well-being of the Church as a whole, but he knows that the ship as a whole cannot be steered unless all its parts are working well.
The navigator is a good image for the priest. It recognizes that Christian existence is never stationary. We are always moving in one direction. The only question is by which current we will allow ourselves to be propelled. It is an eschatological image that underlines that we are to be always on the move, looking ahead to the future that God has prepared for us and ready to set all the instruments by which we orientate ourselves, all the antennae we use to determine our direction, on the new way of living to which we are being called by Christ.
For Gregory navigators are similar to shepherds. They steer us through the vicissitudes of life, leading us into places of nourishment and then leading on to the next place in our journey with God. As we have seen, the shepherd is one of the foundational images of Christian ministry, inspired of course by the image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd. The relationship, however, between the ordained and Christ in the ministry of the Church has led some to explore a comparison between the priest and the sheepdog. Sue Walrond-Skinner, for example, has some evocative things to say from her ‘years of watching and working with border collies’:
The sheepdog possesses two all-consuming attractions: the sheep and her master. Her eye stays focused always on the sheep; her ear listens ceaselessly to the shepherd’s call. Her attractions to both are profound . . . yet neither attraction can be worked out for her without the contrary pull of the other. She is held into a triangular relationship with the shepherd and sheep; her wild, compulsive instincts are only kept in check by her unswerving attention to her master.
Sheepdogs lie about a lot. They are capable of putting every fibre of their being to work when required to do so, but they are instantly at ease, able to leave the sheep to get on with their lives, feeding, communicating, just ‘being’ together. The sheepdog does not interfere with or interrupt the life and work of the flock. The sheep are always the focus, the dog is merely an instrument which exists for their welfare and a tool that is usable by the shepherd