Didn’t You Use to Be Michael Coren?

“Excuse me, may I ask you a question?” says a middle-aged man sitting at the next table in the pub. “Don’t want to be rude, but you’re wearing a clerical collar. Didn’t you use to be Michael Coren?” Good question, because sometimes I’m not entirely sure. 

The days of hosting television and radio shows ended more than a decade ago. I still write columns and books, but they generally concern Christianity and discuss where the Gospel essence of forgiveness and love meets the body politic. My main work, my vocation, is, of course, as an Anglican priest. I was ordained almost seven years ago, and on that terrifying but completing day took an oath “to serve all people, particularly the poor, the weak, the sick, and the lonely.” 

I’ve tried to document some of this in a recent book, Diary of a Lowborn Cleric, an attempt to open a window through which people might see and understand what we do, however long we’ve been on this journey. Frankly, we could do with some favourable exposure. 

I was raised to speak my mind and welcome others doing the same. That matters when you’re a priest because the days of assumed deference are generally long gone. Not always, though. On one trip to England, I noticed that groups of young, fairly rowdy men were friendly, even affectionate, when they saw the collar. 

“Oy, father, you alright, buy you a drink mate.” I tried to do my benign appreciation look, but it probably just looked like I had gas. I asked a priest friend what this was all about. “Oh”, he said, “that’s common. You’d be amazed at how many of them have been in prison or the army. The only person they see with compassion is the chaplain. They never lose that respect.” 

Then there’s the surreal. Priests spend a lot of time in hospitals, and on one visit, someone shouted that I’d stolen his sausages. I said I hadn’t, but would be happy to find him some food. He became increasingly convinced and then stood up to reveal that he’d removed his pyjamas. A nurse calmed him and then reassured me. “Was it the sausages?” I said it was. “Don’t worry. Last week, he accused a rabbi of walking off with his cheese.” 

And the sublime – presiding at the altar and sharing the eucharist. It’s a gloriously unique blessing and something no priest should ever find habitual or routine. I was physically shaking the first time I took a service, and while that sharpness of emotion has evolved, I still feel so inadequate. It’s not about me, of course, and the priest is a conduit. Here and in every other situation, my role is to present Jesus, pull back the curtain, and then get out of the way. 

That’s especially true when dealing with pain, loss, and death. Listen rather than speak, be there rather than be clever, and allow God the space and time. When I started out, I would drive home and sometimes cry in the car. So much grief. The man who apologized to me in his last few moments because he was taking up my time, the children who didn’t arrive at their father’s bedside in time to say goodbye, the teen suicide, the sudden cold isolation of a woman who lost her spouse after so many decades and could only stare in fear and incredulity. 

I don’t know if I do any good, and I’m not sure it’s the right question. As a person, I’m broken, flawed, weak. As someone who has agreed to Christ’s command to follow him, I can symbolize something impeccable. 

Yet how to do this job, how to preach love, hope, and faith when the world looks so grim and sepulchral? Old hatreds considered long exorcised, given new and obscene life, hideous bullies silencing careful diplomats, war and violence made more grotesquely capable by the abuse of science and technology, and in my ministry, a regular experience of poverty, homelessness, and injustice. In other words, the repeated triumph of all that Jesus preached against. 

It’s because and not in spite of this that the church and its people have more relevance and significance than ever. We’re not supposed to go with the flow, even though that’s happened more times than I like to remember. “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting,” said GK Chesterton, “It has been found difficult; and left untried.” He wrote that more than a century ago. 

“Didn’t you use to be Michael Coren?” Still am, but occasionally, through reliance on God and a commitment to the beatitudes, this lowborn cleric might be doing something right.