Let’s press this image of the priest as Watchman a little further. Let us consider what the image says of the position and disposition of the priest. Imagine a city with a Watchman on its walls. In the city below the walls, life goes on: markets are held, goods made, bought, sold; meals prepared and eaten. If is clear that not everyone can be a Watchman. If everyone in the city were to be appointed a sentinel at the same time, then life would come grinding to a halt. If everyone were watching then no one could be buying, selling, teaching, learning, living. It is not possible to live the life of the city, a civilised life, on the city walls. Life goes on in the city below; people live their lives, trusting that there is someone as to go on in the city below, and the citizens have to trust the Watchman to see the approaching army or tornado or whatever. There should only be one Watchman per vantage point.

Similarly, it is not possible to be a Watchman in the market place, in the public library or in the private home¹: The Watchman must stand in the high and liminal places, on the edges of city life, so as to be able to see what is beyond the city, to be able to see what threatens or promises the city.

These are all characteristics of position; what about disposition? Disposition is a matter of attitude and discernment. The Watchman needs to believe there is something worth watching for: a Watchman who believes that no army could possibly attack the city from his watching place actually becomes the weakest point in the city’s defences. The Watchman also needs to be able to judge what it is he sees: is that cloud on the horizon rain or the dust from horsemen, is it a camel train or a raiding party. The Watchman also needs to know what not to notice. Not every sign of life or activity is significant.

When we transfer this (somewhat over-elaborated) metaphor to Church life, we see that the priest as Watchman needs to be able to read the signs of the times. He needs to be able to understand what is significant, what is changing, what is unfolding in the times and culture in which he finds himself, and in which his community lives. He needs to be engaged with, but not overwhelmed by, the sheer volume of events that unfold in our culture, especially with its tendency to value unmediated novelty. As Williams puts it, the best priest-watchmen “in this and other eras are, it seems to me, those who have known how to read the surface and the depths, but have had no great interest in the shallows”².

In other words, if a priest is to be a meaningful witness to the reality of the Church’s past experience of Christ at work, then the priest needs to be a meaningful student of the present in which the Church finds herself. He has to be able to answer the conspectus questions: where are we? What are the big stories of our day? What are the assumptions of our time and culture? Like a mountain guard, the priest today needs to be able to discern the tiny trembles of snow flakes that precipitate the cataclysmic avalanche. What are the signs of change in our time? Where can we discern God’s purpose being enacted?

And this requires cultural literacy.

The priest should be able to read cultural artefacts, because it is in them he can see what people really value. Samuel Butler’s novel Erewhon (1872) gives us a satirical depiction of this. Butler, the son of a parson and grandson of a Bishop, had broken with his family over his conviction of the truth of Darwin’s Origin of the Species. He emigrated to New Zealand, and made his fortune sheep-farming. Returning to England, and disappointed by the hypocrisies of Victorian society, he wrote Erewhon (“nowhere” rearranged, to make the obvious point). In it, the hero wanders into a European-like civilization in the interior of the New Zealand islands. Life is both like and unlike England. The hero gradually realises the central place of the Musical Banks to Erewhonian society. On a visit to one of the grand, impressive buildings which houses a branch of the Musical Banks, he realises that the currency of the Bank is

… supposed to be the system, and… in which all monetary transactions should be carried on; and as far as I could see, all who wished to be considered respectable, kept a larger or smaller balance at these banks… [but]… the amount so kept had no direct commercial value in the outside world; I am sure that the managers and cashiers of the Musical Banks were not paid in their own currency. Mr. Nosnibor used to go to these banks, or rather to the great mother bank of the city, sometimes, but not very often. He was a pillar of one of the other kind of banks, though he appeared to hold some minor office also in the musical ones. The ladies generally went alone; as indeed was the case in most families, except on state occasions.³

The Musical Banks are the cathedrals and churches of Erewhonian society: the desire to be respectable was stronger than the usefulness and meaning of the Banks. The real currency, the real business, happened somewhere else. Here Butler takes Jesus’s injunction in the Sermon on the Mount and asks what would a society look like in which the treasures of earth and the treasures of heaven were much more clearer distinguished. Like Higgs, the priest as Watchman needs to be able to read the inconsistencies and hypocrisies of a society’s cultural values in order to see what is truly important, not just what is said to be or thought to be important.

1. This is not to say that there is no place for any kind of surveying in the public places of the city, but the person who fulfils that role is a policeman and not a Watchman, and a policeman is a rather different role. Similarly, the person who stands on the city walls and watches the city inside is also not a Watchman, but rather a prison guard. These roles might be necessary, but they are not our concern for the moment. [↩]
2. Rowan Williams, ‘The Christian Priest Today’, a talk given at Ripon College, Cuddesdon, 28 May 2004. The talk is available from the Archbishop’s website. All otherwise unattributed references in this chapter are to the text published on that website. The Archbishop’s comment reminds me of the acerbic quip attributed variously to Robert Runcie or Bill Vanstone that “Church of England is a swimming pool in which all the noise comes from the shallow end.” The source of the Runcie attribution seems to be an address given to the AGM of the Romney Marsh Historic Churches Trust, 5 June 1999, available online here. The alternative, Vanstone, origin seems to have its roots in his obituary published in The Daily Telegraph, 15 March 1999, republished in Trevor Beeson (ed.), Priests and prelates : the Daily Telegraph clerical obituaries, (London: Continuum, 2002) pp. 214-216. [↩]
3. Samuel Butler, Erewhon (English Library Series. London: Penguin Classics, [1872/1901] 1970), Chapter 15 ‘The Musical Banks’, p. 137-138. [↩]