Extracts from my first solo book which I have recently published about the two years I spent driving a private hire car rather than being a clergyman. It began life as a piece of auto-catharsis and turned into a project. If I can sell some I can start recouping my costs!


The Collar and the Cab
Follow this link to buy from publisher, or you can order direct from me. Amazon also have it as well as a number of independent retailers.

 22
Rodley – Time to Take Stock

It was that time of year when Spring finally breaks free of the
shackles of Winter – even if only to succumb periodically at
any point up to the end of May. April was giving notice to
quit, and the air was rich with the scent of nature reasserting
its immortality. Much the same was happening to my mental
health. The psychological injuries I had previously sustained
had given me some idea of the trauma experienced by those
involved in serious road traffic accidents and unprovoked
assaults. My life had never been threatened physically but my
sanity had; even the odd suicidal thought had crossed my mind
on more than one occasion. I had come out of the operating
theatre, done my time in intensive care, and was now officially
off the danger list.
Easter had passed by in a blur. This of course was nothing
unusual for me, but the manner in which it had passed was,
to put it mildly, unfamiliar. I had made a special effort to be
in church on Easter Sunday – something I managed on most
Christian Sabbaths, though rarely before the service started.
But Good Friday had merited its epithet this year only in the
sense that it had been exceptionally profitable, and there was
something about the triumphalism of the familiar hymnody of
Easter Day that seemed strangely hollow.
 The period from Maundy Thursday to Easter Sunday had
hitherto been a maelstrom of frenetic clerical and ecumenical hyperactivity with little or no variation in pattern for the last 20
years or more.
Thursday evening generally witnessed a respectable and
insipid re-enactment of the Last Supper, with small cubes
of bread and individual glasses of sweetened, non-alcoholic
communion wine that assuaged the thirst of the sensitivities
of traditional nonconformity rather than connecting with one
of the most dramatic episodes in the gospels. The real Last
Supper featured large chunks of roast lamb and an almost
limitless supply of decent red plonk, and took place against
the backdrop of looming disaster and certain, agonising death
following the spineless betrayal of a friend. Too much of that
kind of atmosphere would have been considered inappropriate,
and very likely put the good churchgoing folk off their late night
cheese and biscuits.
Good Friday had always provided the opportunity to do
something with other local churches, the argument being that
if we could not work together on the occasion on which we
remembered the death of the Saviour of us all, how could we
even pretend to claim a common heritage and purpose? For at
least one day of the year we laid aside petty resentments over
recalcitrant former members who were now part of another
local flock, allowed theological disputes over the correct
quantity of water to use in initiation rites to lie dormant, and
almost reached the idyllic state of wanting all churches to do
well. Typically this exercise in ecumenical camaraderie took the
physical form of a march down the local high street. We would
pass bemused onlookers exhibiting modest levels of admiration
at our courage and perhaps just the tiniest trace of guilt that
they were out shopping on such a sacred day; over the years the
guilt seemed to diminish and the bemusement to morph into
incomprehension about the whole exercise. We would walk
more timidly perhaps past diverse hostelries hosting the sort of
people I had always convinced myself were not having nearly as good a time as they appeared to be, and was certain that they
knew nothing of the deep joy of the faithful such as I.
Everything culminated, of course, in the triumphant
assertion of each Easter Sunday that “Christ is Risen, He is
Risen Indeed” never again to die, the gift of God to assuage
sinful mankind’s guilt and provide a guarantee of eternal life to
all who believe. Perhaps it was familiarity rather than a loss of
faith, but it seemed to me that the power of that simple message
to change lives, indeed to alter the course of human history, was
largely lost in the background. Thoughts of Sunday lunch and
the anticipation of plans for the Bank Holiday assumed centre
stage after the second verse of “Thine be the Glory”, or five
minutes into a sermon reinforcing the same eternal conviction
with varying degrees of certitude. 

I had to face the harrowing truth that along with the dismantling of my selfconfidence
and professional reputation my carefully constructed
spiritual hermitage had also fallen around my ears, and now lay
like so much rubble at my feet. I stood leaden-footed, exposed
to elements that had previously battered unavailingly on the
walls of my carefully constructed house of faith. Leaden-footed
I might have been, but it would be erroneous to mistake lack of
movement for any kind of stability. I realised just how efficiently
I had worked to keep the arguments against my faith at bay
using a combination of pseudo-spiritual semantics and recalling
memories of the few occasions when the presence of God had
seemed so palpable as to dismiss doubt as so much chaff to be
blown away by the wind of a single line of a familiar chorus.
The quest to delve into my soul to look for the remains
of a belief system amidst the rubble was neither an academic
exercise nor a leisure pursuit. More than six months had
now passed since I had relinquished a pulpit in favour of the
driver’s seat of a private hire car. Whether out of a sense of
puritanical masochism or because I had still failed to learn my
lesson I was meeting leaders of different churches to look at the
possibility of returning to ministry by the autumn – a process
called “settlement” in my denomination – that usually takes at
least three months. There are doubtless clergy who have lost
their faith in a God who has become anything other than a
metaphysical image and who are still able to trot out Christian
dogma quite happily with fingers crossed behind their backs; I
have never been one of them, believing that St. Paul was stating
the bloody obvious when he commented “If for this life only we
have believed in Christ we are of all people most to be pitied.”
It was time to ask hard questions about how much of the faith I
had spent almost all my adult life propagating I still believed.