Looking down

There's a job vacancy at Lambeth Palace as the Funny Hat Wearer In Chief of Agnostics Anonymous has announced that after ten years of people being bitchy about his vestments behind his back, he is stepping down, no doubt to write a series of essays that essentially boil down to; 'I was right, sod the lot of you'. Applicants for this post are a short list of bishops from around the country but, like fishermen, surely the appointment panel (chaired by who, God?) should cast their nets wider. This appears to be a job where the most important role is telling people how to live their lives and commenting on the more pernicious aspects of Government policy, so surely the most ideal candidates are stand-up comedians and bloody bloody tabloid columnists.

These are two professions never short of an opinion, usually uninformed and always unaccountable, ideal credentials for leading a religious organisation, as nobody knows whether your pronouncements about the afterlife are right until it's too late.

The issue exercising the church and the tabloids at the moment is gay marriage. It's amazing that anyone would think that somebody should be deprived of the pleasure of marriage just because they happen to be a ulist. Certainly, it can't be an exclusively heterosexual skill set to continue living with somebody while compiling a never ending list of petty resentments.

It starts with a list, evolves into a book, then at some point becomes the big book of petty resentments. I know couples who can make a whole tragic mime from taking down the Big Book of Petty Resentments from the shelf, opening it up as one would a substantial tome and making an entry. I even know one couple who, when Mrs Big Book calmly announced that their Big Book of Petty Resentments had grown so substantial that they had moved it to a Kindle edition, Mr Big Book responded that he had had to outsource his resentment management to a call centre in Bangalore.

Looking down on the city, with a God's eye view, one thing becomes clear, problems on a human scale like just who can get married to whom fade into insignificance. If two chaps want to get married, then who is going to object. Certainly no married chap, who thinks two things, the first being that he doesn't see what all the fuss is about and the second being that if he has to spend Sunday mornings pretending to care about wallpaper patterns and wandering round garden centres, he doesn't seed why anyone else should get away with it just because they are confirmed batchalors, fans of musical theatre and recipients of the occasional cock.

It's important to get perspective on this, and also to see what others are saying. If your views on gay marriage align with those of people who also have robust views about women priests, women voting, women working at all and, indeed, women leaving the house, then you probably need to either realign your views in a hurry or sod off to Afghanistan to live in a cave with lots of other gritty misogynists who quickly find out that without the civilising presence of women, you develop questionable hygiene, your socks rot and you end up having the sort of relationship with one of the other fellows that, ironically, results in your wanting him to make an honest man of you.

There's no doubt that being an Archbishop should have its perks, chief among these being that everybody listens to you. The problem is that being the Archbishop of Canterbury means that everybody listened to you only long enough to work out what it is you are saying so that they can start arguing with you. Ending every day by slamming the office door shut, uncorking the alter wine and muttering 'I bet the Pope doesn't have to put up with this shit' is not conducive to developing the spirit of forgiveness.

Wearing a big hat and living in a palace though, those are some perks, possibly even more fun that telling people how to think and daydreaming about punching Richard Dawkins, really hard. First to do that - gets the job.