Contents
 back to Lambeth Conference |
 previous story
|
next story 
|
Reason all the wives are here
To appreciate the Lambeth Spouses’ Conference, says Caroline Chartres, you have to understand bishops’ wives
 Rare priest: Jaleela, the wife of Bishop Andudu Adam Elnail of Kadugli diocese in Sudan — unusual in that she is ordained CHRIS WRIGHT |
|
THIS week, not only 657 bishops but 543 bishops’ spouses descended on Canterbury. Voltaire memorably observed that the English bishops were “forced to content themselves with one wife only, and that generally their own”. Certainly the Conference organisers are not expecting more than one spouse per bishop. But why should there be a Spouses’ Conference at all? Isn’t it an anomaly, when more and more bishops’ wives are independently employed, and many are juggling jobs and families, to invite them to drop everything, use up their annual-leave allowance, and decamp to Canterbury for three weeks at the start of the school holidays? That question, of course, assumes a peculiarly Western perspective. One of the effects of the Lambeth Conference is to highlight the contrast between Africa in particular (not least because of its numerical dominance) and the West. One of the things that the conference can achieve is to make us aware of the narrowness of our own viewpoint. At risk of generalisation, most bishops’ wives from the developing world still regard being a bishop’s wife as their primary occupation; Western bishops’ wives are much more likely to be juggling their responsibilities as an episcopal relict alongside other employment. Most of the latter might recognise that we have a ministry of sorts, but would see it as distinct from our husband’s. It is salutary and often humbling for us to see how our overseas sisters approach the task, and their widely differing circumstances and experience. In parts of West Africa, for instance, bishops and their families enjoy a status and a level of domestic support unknown in this country since before the First World War. We certainly would not expect to have full-time cooks or laundresses, and are much more likely to do our own catering — but nor do we have to go in search of food and water to ensure our families’ survival, as our Sudanese sisters do (the male members of the family not daring to venture out for fear of being abducted), or to live on pence and God’s providence, like our sisters in Myanmar (Burma). Thirty years ago, the (mostly African) bishops’ wives who accompanied their husbands to the Lambeth Conference were accommodated with host families in Kent. Hospitable as the families were, it was easy for the wives (many of whom had not been abroad before, for whom English was not their first language, and who were used to being with their husbands) to feel lonely and isolated. Twenty years ago, therefore, the overseas wives were accommodated together in a school in Canterbury, some little way from where the main conference takes place at the University of Kent. Some of the English bishops’ wives joined them there to help host the programme (which was, by all accounts, brilliantly organised by the Mothers’ Union). Addresses by well-informed speakers in the mornings (HIV/AIDS was shooting up the international agenda) were followed by outings and creative activities in the afternoons. Building on this, in 1998, Eileen Carey masterminded the first full-scale Spouses’ Conference, which ran alongside the Bishops’ Conference, and included, for the first time, some bishops’ husbands. Bishops and spouses shared the university campus and the students’ accommodation. This was both a plus: of course, it is more agreeable to sleep with your husband; and a minus: it undermined the collegiality of the bishops, which is one of the points of the Conference. This year, the fact that all the accommodation has been upgraded to single en suite bedrooms provides a fresh set of challenges, and vests supreme power in the hands of the person with responsibility for the room rota. For the 2008 conference, Jane Williams convened an international planning group to devise a spouses’ programme, which runs alongside the bishops’, and a local implementation group to put it into effect. As well as the shared worship at the beginning and end of every day, bishops and spouses come together for a day exploring abuse, for example, or for the visit to London (which includes lunch at Lambeth Palace, and a garden party given by the Queen). Every spouse is allocated to one of the small “indaba” groups, which will meet daily for Bible study and prayer. Appropriately, given that identity (vicarious or individual) is at the heart of the Spouses’ Conference, these groups will be studying the “I am” statements in John’s Gospel. For some overseas bishops’ wives, this may be the only opportunity they will ever have to travel outside their own country. Ten years ago, the wife of a bishop from Papua New Guinea described the Lambeth Conference as their honeymoon: after 12 years of marriage, it was the only time they had been away together for any length of time. In this country, most of us are able to choose to what extent we follow in our husbands’ wake. In parts of the Anglican Communion, a combination of distance (vast) and resources (meagre) means that bishops’ spouses will never meet each other.Here, pressures on the diary may mean that the likelier problem is that the bishop’s wife never meets her husband. (Ten years ago, the writer Susan Howatch drew a roar of recognition when she described the typical cleric who “is always out being wonderful somewhere else”.) |
 Relaxing: Matrina (above, left), the wife of Bishop Funginkosi Mbhele, of North West Natal, and Zanele, the wife of Bishop Nkosinathi Ndandwe of South Natal, Southern Africa RACHEL FARMER |
| Cultural differences manifest themselves in sometimes unexpected ways. Inevitably, some of the talks and workshops have limited capacity: being British, we assume that asking people to sign up on a numbered list is the fair and obvious way of allocating places. At the last Lambeth Conference, ruthless spouses who found their chosen workshops fully booked simply crossed out names already on the list, and substituted their own. Coach trips are difficult to run when posses of enthusiastic takers arrive at a time that bears little resemblance to that advertised. English bishops’ wives often seem to find Being much more difficult than Doing; so the easiest way to organise them is to recruit them as organisers. They seem much happier when given a task and a clipboard. So the challenge of putting together the Spouses’ Conference, for a group made up of such organisers, is considerable. As John Updike observed: “In a congress of masseurs, no one turns his back.” THE expressed aim of this year’s programme is “to make the most of what will, for most of us, be a once-in-a-lifetime chance to equip ourselves, in the company of others who really know what we need”. Wisely, it also allows for the fact that the best conversations take place when people are simply alongside one another, engaged in shared activity. I have never forgotten hearing of the African archbishop who had halved the incidence of fatal diarrhoea in his diocese by the simple expedient of starting every sermon with a reminder to his audience to wash their hands; nor the blood-freezing testimony from the Rwandan whose phone conversation with a friend had been cut short by the arrival in the friend’s house of killers from a rival tribe. The friend’s family declaimed Bible passages as they were hacked down. I was profoundly moved by the stories from Myanmar and Sudan. The Lambeth Conference transformed global news reports into individual faces and stories. Strangers became fellow travellers; other countries and other Churches were suddenly peopled with those with whom we had broken bread. Above all, I remember warmly the collaboration of the spouses in a musical production based on The Happy Prince, written and produced by Veronica Bennetts, the wife of the then Bishop of Coventry. It was performed to a standing ovation. One of the creative activities at this year’s conference involves making and decorating leaves for a vine: an echo, perhaps, of the Hasidic Jews’ story of the Sorrows Tree, on which everyone pins their own worries, before circling the branches, looking for someone else’s burdens to take on. Eventually, of course, everyone takes back their own sufferings, recognising them as infinitely more bearable than other people’s. If the Spouses’ Conference only frees us from the heretical conviction that our way is the only way, and gives us a new awareness of other people’s sufferings and our own blessings, it will have been worth while. Caroline Chartres is married to the Bishop of London. |
