Making the brotherhood real

Loneliness can be a problem for priests - as it can be for anybody. Once, when I had been at seminary a couple of years, my rector, Mgr Jack Kennedy, asked me during my annual formal interview how I was. "I'm lonely" I said, immediately feeling rather surprised that I should have said this (as before our conversation I hadn't really acknowledged this to myself) and also rather embarrassed that I should have shared something so personal. Mgr Kennedy was well able for the disclosure. "Ah, well you have to choose," he said, in a very straightforward fashion. "If you say 'I'm lonely' and reflect on how lonely you are, you'll become far lonelier, whereas if you say 'I'm lonely' and then go and do something, like study for an exam, play football or ask a friend for a coffee, your sense of being lonely will disappear." I've taken his advice ever since and it works.

I mention this because sometimes people think that priests are to be pitied in their singleness. There are odd occasions, it's true, when the solitude I experience when I close the door to my flat at Leeds Trinity can feel a little heavy. But those times are exceptionally few. Far more frequently, I think, "Oh good, now I can read that book or watch BBC iPlayer undisturbed." The truth is that we are never cut off as priests unless we choose to make ourselves so. Ever since I was ordained seventeen-and-a-half years ago, I have been a member of a Ministry to Priests Group in the diocese. We meet about nine Mondays every year; there are about 12 priests in the group. After a sandwich lunch, we go on a seven-mile-or-so walk in the Yorkshire Dales, rendezvous back at a pub for tea and biscuits, a bath and a rest, Evening Prayer, dinner and then a stroll around the village where we are staying - Clapham in recent years. We disperse the following day after Morning Prayer and breakfast and the diocese pays the bill. I enjoy these days enormously and cancel just about everything so that I can participate in them. They help me to stay steady, to appreciate my reality: I am part of a brotherhood, and that is a marvellous thing. The picture shows three of our group on Malham Moor a few days ago (l to r: me, Mgr Michael McQuinn, Fr Kevin Firth).