Country life
Nobody's perfect
Leanda de Lisle
Ionly believe in God every other day and my holy days don't always fall on a Sunday. If I go to Mass it's with the same kind of `I'm-making-a-real-effort-today' feeling that I have when I'm preparing a Yorkshire pudding for lunch.
However, the strangest thought occurred to me during our early morning happy clappy service this weekend: I realised I was happy to be there. Don't worry, I didn't see the light or anything like that. God forbid, if one can put it that way. No, it was just that it all seemed so cosy and familiar: my youngest son complaining about being bored, the church band twang- ing away on their guitars, the anorak brigade crossing the church to shake our hands, the promise of coffee, home-made cakes and a chat with that nice old lady whose name I can never remember. Really, I think we have the best little church in Christendom. But what, I wonder, would my friend Cristina Odone make of it?
Cristina's first reaction would surely be similar to my own, 'Oh, yuk, clapping, and I can't believe this service is as long as High Mass at the Brompton Oratory.' But I sus- pect she'd fall for it in the end too. She's as warm as toast and the full pews in our church are like nothing so much as toast- racks for people as generous in nature as she is. You can smell it.
I realise those of you who have read reviews of her latest novel, A Perfect Wife, must think me mad. She's written a diatribe against what is described as the 'happy clappy' movement. But it's not wishy-washy modem hymns that offend her. 'I want to alert Britain to the danger of Christian fun- damentalism,' she told the Times. Well, her description in The Spectator of parishioners from Holy Trinity Brompton publicly con- fessing to having had oral sex is certainly a warning of sorts. Many people feel, howev- er, that the Church of England, to which Holy Trinity Brompton belongs, suffers not from too much fundamentalism but too lit- tle.
No vicar at HTB could fail to notice how popular the Brompton Oratory is. Perhaps they are trying to learn from good, old- fashioned Catholic fundamentalism. I grant you Catholics don't stand up in church and confess to having oral sex, but some of them may do so on their knees in a confes- sional. I don't actually remember oral sex being mentioned in my penny catechism, but there is all that stuff about wasting seed. No, I suspect that what Cristina objects to, indeed fears, are nice healthy women being turned into the Stepford brides of Christ. You see, it's one thing try- ing to live by a moral code and praying for God to make you good, but not yet. It's quite another actually living by that code and scaring people by advertising it.
`Perfect' as in A Perfect Wife translates as `creepy' in modem usage. Yet, perversely, there is a vogue for perfection as there is a vogue for public confession. Why would you want to go to see a shrink? To smooth out all the wrinkles that the troubles of life have visited upon you. It's like The Picture of Dorian Gray in reverse. You wander around with a 40-year-old face, but that one hour a week at the analyst restores your hidden self to the unravaged state it enjoyed when you were innocent. It is telling that Cristina believes the reason she and so many other women of our genera- tion aren't married is that they are carrying too much baggage: their parents' divorce, their careers, their high expectations, their neuroses. Perhaps they should just shed the desire for perfection in themselves and oth- ers now rather than at the moment of death.
How easily I can imagine Cristina, sur- rounded by naughty children, singing that dreadful hymn 'Make Me A Channel Of Your Peace' alongside the husband with whom she had a flaming row over break- fast. The scene might not be perfect, but it is so right.
Be gentle with me, its my last time.'
Previous page
