Yesterday I went to London to submit my suggested revisions to the draft Women Bishops legislation to the Revision Committee. I've just been looking at George Herbert's use of courtly motifs in his poetry, and how he used his experience at the court of James I to reflect on the idea of God as a monarch. The parallels were hard to resist.
First of all, we (there were 7 of us in total, making submissions on clauses 1, 2 and 3 of the draft Measure) were directed to an empty waiting room as we arrived. There we waited. There was no indication of what we should do, when things might happen. Soon, members of the Revision Committee began to come out of their room for lunch, but most refused to speak to us or even make eye contact with us. One or two stopped to say hello, but wouldn't answer our questions about when we might be called to speak - 'we can't say' or 'we're not allowed to tell you anything' was as much information as we got.
Eventually Stephen Slack, the legal advisor, came to see us. He at least had the good manners to apologise to us for the procedure, and to try to tell us what was happening, though the best he could do was to say that he was going to 'suggest' to the committee that they really should hear us that day (we'd been meant to come down two weeks ago but that had been cancelled at 5pm the day before), and that 'might' be after 3pm.
And so we continued to wait. It was like being a supplicant at a Byzantine court, or at Versailles, or at pretty much any court in between. The entire process seemed designed to make it clear to us that we were of negligible importance compared to the members of the committee, that our time was of no value compared to theirs, and that they would really have preferred that we had not come at all.
At one point I got up and wrote on the flipchart that stood in one corner of the room, the message that should have been there for us when we arrived (if nobody could be bothered to deliver it in person). I wrote: 'Welcome to all those making submissions today. We value your time, and apologise to your wait'. Cheesy, but it would have been better than nothing. The interesting thing was how those who had not been in the room when I wrote it cheered up when they returned and saw it, until I had to disillusion them by explaining that it was not, in fact, genuine. But it should have been.
After several hours, we were called into the room where the Revision Committee were meeting. We squeezed onto a row of chairs against the wall in the far corner of the room. It would have been hard for chairs to have been better placed to eloquently convey the message that we were being marginalised. One by one we made our submissions, and were heard in silence. Then the 'discussion' began - but the entire discussion was conducted in a sort of code, in order that we supplicants might not understand what was going on. It became clear that the committee were working on a new draft of the legislation, different to the one we had made submissions on, and so were minded to dismiss our submissions as no longer relevant. Why they decided to draft new legislation before hearing our submissions is anyone's guess. A vote was taken on one of our proposals - it wasn't clear why that particular proposal was singled out for a vote - and it went the way we wanted (to remove Clause 2). However, I was left wondering what on earth had happened and why - the tension in the room was tangible, it was clear that there were several different agendas being pursued simultaneously and I was not at all sure that they had voted against Clause 2 because they agreed with our reasons (to not have discriminatory provisions in the measure itself, but in the Code of Practice). After all, from what we gleaned, the 'new' measure they were working on had even more clauses than the original.
Then, just to add to our confusion, the Church 'civil servants' effectively had a tantrum at the 'wrong' decision having been taken! I was left with the impression that someone behind the scenes was herding the Revision Commitee very firmly in a particular direction, and that the individual members of the committee had very little chance to make their views heard and to explore alternatives to the track they were being steered along. What I didn't know was who was pulling the strings. There seems to be some shadowy power behind the throne at this courtroom, deciding how things should go in his or her (but I guess his) own wisdom - a Warwick the Kingmaker or an Archbishop Laud.
I didn't expect to become entangled in this sort of courtly politics when I was ordained, but I suppose I should have known better. More and more I think that being a historian before being a priest is a great help in understanding what goes on in the church.
