From dawn till dusk, the diocese of London fills Richard Chartres' exhausting schedule.
Anna Tims guardian.co.uk,
The bishop of London is describing the weight of the episcopal burden. A bishop's destiny, he says, is to be tossed about by storms while struggling to resolve the tension between leading and serving his people. The words, boomed sonorously at half a dozen worshippers gathered for the 8am Eucharist, are those of a fifth-century prelate, dismayed by the encumbrance of promotion.
It's hard to imagine Richard Chartres, the formidable cleric who delivered the sermon at this year's royal wedding, struggling with similar self-doubt. Confident leadership exudes from every fold of his purple cassock and this, coupled with exuberant facial hair, gives him the air of an Orthodox patriarch rather than the inoffensive Church of England stereotype.
Does he struggle with the conflict of being a bishop for the people and a Christian with them? "No," he says unhesitatingly. "It's essential to keep yourself in proportion by making the division between the role and the person. Most bishops are failed Rada students and you do have to perform in public, but because I have a strong sense of what the role demands I can assimilate it into who I am without it changing me."
We are squeezed in the back seat of a hybrid car being steered through the city by the bishop's personal chauffeur. His environmental zeal has led him to buy an Oyster card, but tight schedules and cumbersome accessories – mitre, alb and cope sit on his list of instructions for the day and his wooden staff is wedged in the boot – mean that the London Underground is often unfeasible. The hybrid engine is a compromise.
It's not yet 10am and the 64-year-old bishop has already presided over Holy Communion at St Paul's, hosted an overnight visit from the new bishop of Durham and held a breakfast meeting to discuss diocesan links with Nigeria. He is now on his way to address the pupils of a Church of England secondary school in a deprived part of north London, then it's a dash to King's College London to appraise the dean in a meeting with the principal, then back home to counsel a US priest distressed by tensions within the Anglican communion. The previous evening he was up late addressing the General Synod, the legislative body of the Church of England.
"You can't survive unless you believe in early hours," he says. "As soon as the morning office starts at 7.30am you are available to people." He never attends the morning office in the cathedral, however, because the new order of service is used and Chartres, an implacable traditionalist, prefers the Book of Common Prayer. Instead, he rises at 6am and says morning prayer by himself in a back room in the deanery before it fills up with the staff who occupy most of the building.
The grandeur of the episcopal office is largely illusory. The modest car is parked outside a 400-year-old mansion which sits between an Italian restaurant and a youth hostel down a narrow, dank lane. The ground floor is given over to administration and the first floor functions as an embassy where visitors are received and conferences held. The bishop, his wife and his four grown children are confined to a sunless attic flat which, he says, is so overcrowded with flesh and possessions that he would risk "major wrath" if he invited anyone in.
"A garden is one of the things I most miss," he says. "I take solace in my tubs of geraniums which flourish on total neglect – a definite sign of the spirit at work."
Beyond the mouth of the lane looms the white enormity of St Paul's, where he presides over the morning communion service a couple of times a week. "Once bishops only set foot in the cathedral on state occasions, but I try to go in regularly and am made very welcome, for I resist the temptation to micro-manage," he says.
The day-to-day life of the cathedral is the responsibility of the dean and chapter, while the bishop's role is to offer pastoral care to several hundred clergy in the diocese and oversee the diocesan budget and the church's portfolio of often ancient, often crumbling assets. "The church is responsible for 45% of the Grade I-listed buildings in the country, yet receives only 6% of the maintenance costs from any public source," he says. "As chair of the church's buildings division a big part of my job is spent worrying roofs will fall in."
He is directly involved in more than 200 bodies, including 80 trusts and charities of which he is patron, and he has an automatic seat on the privy council and House of Lords where he speaks on behalf of the church on environmental and ecclesiastical issues. There is, he says, no such thing as a typical day. The only constant is the pressure of a schedule that can extend from dawn to well beyond nightfall.
He once declared he was overworked, overtired and sponsored by Nurofen, but, he says, the daily grind has not yet sapped his zeal for ministry: "I don't find myself having to flog myself through the day because something always happens that's intensely moving. If I'm feeling weary one morning, an encounter with a Tiggerish curate will cheer me up."
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