Fergus Butler-Gallie Touching Cloth

‘’Ow about a lifetime of being asked whether budgies go to Heaven by strangers on buses?’ This is not the most attractive challenge of priestly ministry but it is part of a witty, readable capturing of it by a young priest whose ministry is sadly now on hold. As the young doctor Adam Kay’s ‘This Is Going to Hurt’ shocked us by his expose of the National Health Service Fergus Butler-Gallie gives a less shocking than ambiguous picture of the Church of England as he stands back from the institution. Butler-Gallie is an accomplished writer and speaker, author of the bestselling Times and Mail on Sunday Book of the Year ‘A Field Guide to the English Clergy’ and the Spectator Book of the Year ‘Priests de la Resistance!’. Fr Fergus has ministered in Liverpool and Central London.

His image of the Church has pastoral warmth building from the story of St Laurence who, asked at pain of death to present the treasures of the Church, brought forth not silver but the poor. ‘My ministry – for it is that and definitely not a ‘career’ –  brought me into contact with the true treasures of the Church. Not its silver plate or its procedures or its pomp or its promotions but its people. The privilege of knowing and loving them: the strange, awkward, wonderful, holy people, who, despite all the Church throws at them, still come to it in search of love. They’re the ones who run the practical expressions of love on the ground – the Sunday clubs and schools, the food banks and outreach programmes. And they’re the ones who, even more importantly, point us, point me, in the direction of a love that is even greater. And, above all else, they have brought me joy’. A paragraph like that makes the reader feel the author may be back soon exercising his priesthood. 

In this readable, humorous book there are  hilarious passages like that on dealing with a church alarm stubbornly blaring until they ‘poked the pin that dangled from the offending object’s side into a hitherto unseen hole and, lo, blissful silence reigned. We breathed heavy sighs… it came as no surprise to learn, in retrospect, that the alarm had the same mechanism as a hand grenade’. The author’s military pedigree comes into play throughout his book starting with when he told his father he wanted to be ordained: ‘he merely gazed at me with a well-worn hereditary hangdog look and remarked: ‘In many ways it’s not so different from the army. The outfit’s stupid and the pay’s crap’’. Fr Fergus relates with humility his own failures but like Adam Kay hits out at the ‘outfit’: ‘controlling, manipulative behaviour. I’d be humiliated at meetings, ignored in public, endlessly gossiped about… I was shocked to be refused communion that Christmas, and it remains one of the most painful incidents of my life. Priests are meant to work in the wilderness, but when there’s no way out, no redemptive arc, just more and more damaging behaviour, it becomes too much. And it becomes necessary to walk away. This, in the end, is what I did, into another, different wilderness’. 

‘Touching Cloth’ takes us on Fergus’s roller coaster of joy and sadness. The title builds from his choice of all round detachable clerical collar which can be expanded by a new purchase when it gets tight.  As a priest I identify with the ‘tight’ times he describes as well as the author’s joyous scenarios. There are well narrated sections on the ministry of prayer for individuals and more rare stories of lay empowerment - the book has a strongly clerical focus - as in the story of an asylum seeker from Iraq. ‘He had wandered into church feeling very low, as low as a person might ever feel. We prayed with him, we put him in contact with accommodation, appropriate medical care and food, yet something was still missing: he wanted a task, a purpose, something practical… As it happened the senior flower lady had put in a request for more hands on deck to help with the harvest displays … he was game and came along… I came to learn that much of ministry was sowing a seed, then walking away to allow something holy and good to spring forth. Harvest conspired with grace to teach me a valuable lesson about what really feeds people, and deep respect for the silent magic of the flower room’. The author’s collaboration with the flower arrangers is one of many preferences going against the clerical grain in his humorous book which, with all its sadness, has power to shake ministerial apathy. 

Canon John Twisleton 25 April 2023

Fergus Butler-Gallie Touching Cloth Confessions and communions of a young priest

Bantam Press 2023 £16.99 ISBN 9781787635753 208p