What is in Kelvin's Head?

10 Tips on How to Date a Priest

13/02/2015
Valentine’s Day being upon us and my being an expert witness in the matter, I feel it incumbent upon me to share my best wisdom in the small matter of how to date a priest.
1. Firstly, accept that clergy are people, just like everyone else.
  I’ve met people who believed that when they were ordained, God would take away all their romantic emotions and leave them pure and holy in order to get on with saving the world. Trouble is, no-one ever told God that this was what should happen and God isn’t in the sublimation business. Indeed, a more healthy way to look at clerical life is to remember that it is supposed to be at its heart about being very much yourself and very much about living life with passion. That means all kinds of passion. Oh yes, that kind of passion too.
2. Secondly, accept that clergy are people not like anyone else.
  Hath not a priest eyes? Hath not a priest hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a lay person is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
  Well no – if you tickle us we might laugh but we might also worry that someone might tell the bishop that tickling has occurred. (This applies even if the bishop is tickle-positive). If we go out for a Friday night boogie and a beer, we are probably going to enjoy it more if we are somewhere where everyone else in the gin-joint doesn’t normally see us in a dog-collar. Hearing a confession (from a third party) in the middle of a date can be a bit of a passion killer.
3. Try very hard not to fall in love with anyone who claims to be celibate or who is supposed to be celibate.
  Some parts of the church insist on celibacy for clerics. Not all of those clerics manage it. However falling in love with those clergy tends to be bad news for the people falling in love with them. Indeed, this situation generally seems to me to be a lot worse for the lay person in the relationship than the cleric. Here there be dragons.
4. Clergy feel they can ask anything they choose to ask when on a date. Deal with it.
  Oh, this one is very unfair and no mistake. The thing is, most clergy are perfectly at home in the realm of the emotions. We are used to people telling us how they feel and we are used to listening for what people are not telling us. We know the questions to ask. At best this can make us sensitive, at worst intrusive. We are used to operating the midst of the blood and fire of human relationships. There’s not much you can say to us that will shock us. This can lead to intimacy (or worse, apparent intimacy) developing quite quickly. Beware!
5. You can’t compete with a vocation so you might as well collaborate with it.
  Know from the beginning, from the very first inkling, from the first fluttering questioning that one day might lead you to wonder whether you might perhaps, possibly, tentatively pick up the phone to ask the person for a date that if you ever issue an ultimatum demanding a choice between you and the vocation then you will lose. Either the cleric will stick with the vocation and dump you or you will end up forever tied with someone in mourning for what might have been. You might as well work with a vocation as fight it. You don’t have any choice anyway.
6. It is almost impossible to have an good relationship if you don’t meet as equals.
  There have been relationships which have developed and worked between clergy and members of their flocks but oh, there are real issues here. It is almost impossible to have a successful relationship where you don’t meet as equals. Clergy dating members of their own congregations are in a position of influence over them. Some denominations are so cautious about this as to have rules and guidelines about it. None of these guidelines are there to encourage you. If you are in a congregation and find yourself falling for the priest, it might work better if you are able to join another congregation whilst you are a-courting. Geography and all kinds of personal issues may make this impossible but the the reality that this might be a good idea is a fact not a fancy.
7. If you find a member of the clergy attractive in their dog-collar, don’t be surprised if the same clergy-person is not interested in you.
  This one is really quite important. If you are turned on by the idea of dating a priest then stop, step aside, have a think. If you are all excited by dating someone in holy orders then don’t waste your time with this any further for it is doomed from day one. He or she isn’t going to be interested in you if they even get a whiff of the fact that you are interested in them because of their role rather than their personality. Not for an hour, not for a minute, not for a second. If the very idea of dating a priest yanks your chain then you don’t need a priest you need a therapist. (And don’t fall in love with your therapist either).
8. Clergy have a whole load of expectations put upon them about sex. They may not share these expectations.
  The whole world works out its neuroses about sexuality by piling them all onto the clergy. Don’t be surprised if things are complicated. Also, don’t be surprised if the person finds themselves to be frustrated by the expectations of their denomination/congregation. No-one knows the cost of ordination when they say yes to it. No-one. The private lives of people in public life are not private and no-one knows what this will feel like when they are first ordained. This is just the ways things are. The cost is high.
9. It is more likely to work if faith is a common factor.
  The bible has quite strong admonitions against Christians taking up with non-Christians. This is for practical rather than theological reasons though those admonitions were written when people thought the end of the world was just around the corner. Clergy in particular inhabit a religious world and it is only natural that they are more likely to have relationships which work with people who understand that. However, there are no guarantees here. Sometimes relationships work for reasons that no outsider will ever be able to fathom – love will find out a way. If you don’t have faith in common though you are going to need a lot in common besides.
10. Don’t be deceived by their public profile and behaviour, most clergy are very shy and private.
  Hard to believe, isn’t it? They speak with such sophistication and can articulate such complex religious ideas in public with wit and wisdom. However, ask them to be honest about their own feelings and say clearly what they want from life and clergy can go to jelly just like anyone else. (See number 1 above). Remember too that like lots of people in the public gaze, they often keep a bit of themselves very private. The church rewards introverts who behave as extroverts (and vice-versa, actually, but outward-acting introverts are most common). Start dating a priest and there may well be bits of themselves that they know very well how to keep hidden from view.
Tricky, isn’t it?
how to date a priest

7 responses to “Whither the Kirk?”

Pausing Place

25/08/2010

I missed last night’s programme, but I thought your comments were interesting.

In a sense, perhaps it’s unsurprising if the SEC is inwardly more positive about itself than the CofS. My take is that in the recent past, at least, the SEC started from a lower common denominator, not being the “local” church in the same way as the Kirk, and so it doesn’t have to contend with others saying of it “look how the mighty have fallen” in quite the same way.

As to the health of the Kirk (and the SEC for that matter), I think we need to reflect on our self-perception and to consider carefully the points and places in which a dying church (congregation or denomination) should be allowed to die gracefully, and the ways in which we might see new life emerge from the rubble.

As a young(ish!), relatively new Christian I have seen examples of (both urban and rural) SEC and Kirk congregations where there are few signs of new growth, little to draw in younger (under 50 year olds, to pick a random-ish number) new folk, and much to sustain negative preconceptions of church as boring, irrelevant and so forth.

We as a faith community need to get much better at stepping up to the mark in our creativity and engagement with our society. The sad truth is that most young adults do not know and have not heard about Jesus Christ, and unless we engage with them in ways culturally relevant to them, and which do not presuppose previous knowledge (too often taken for granted) they never will.

It troubles me, but I do think it’s true to say that in the SEC and in the Kirk we have a church sustained by the traditions and cultural reference points taught to a previous generation. Culture has shifted radically, with the result that the same will not be able to be said in 20 years time.

Our challenge is clear. Whether the Kirk and the SEC can step up to the mark to address what it means to live out the Great Commission in the 21st century is less so.

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Cal

25/08/2010

I didn’t really understand who this programme was aimed at, or even what its aim was.

Yes, numbers have fallen, but perhaps the small number of people who remain are there because they actually want to be, not because it’s the done thing on a Sunday morning.

And personally, I rather like the idea of a church “sustained by traditions”. Clearly the church has to be relevant to modern society, but in abandoning the traditions of worship then you lose the centre of why the church exists in the first place.

There was something very Presbyterian about the programme with its “we’re doomed” mentality. I find the SEC generally more positive in outlook.

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John

25/08/2010

The only book the presenter seemed to have used in his research was ‘The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800-2000’ By Callum G Brown – indeed Callum Brown was one of the speakers. The thesis of this well argued sociological study is that “quite suddenly in 1963 something very profound ruptured the character of the nation and its people sending organised Christianity on a downward spiral to the margins of social significanceâ€. That something he identifies as new media, new gender roles and a moral revolution which has dramatically ended peopleâ€™s conception that they lived Christian lives.â€ It could be said to have happened as â€œsex beganâ€ between the end of the Chatterly ban and the Beatles first LP as the poet Philip Larkin so famously put it.”
To balance this statistical decline the programme flagged up some of the “church without walls ” iniatives in a lame sort of way. All in all a most unsatisfactory programme that only told half the story.

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Kenny

25/08/2010

Good crit Kelvin. My reflection at the end of the programme was, “Lord, we visited this stuff over 30 years ago, and have come out of it stronger and better Church in the SEC.” Hopefully, we stopped longing for ‘the good old days’ a long time ago!

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MartinRitchie

26/08/2010

I thinking “Pausing Place” makes a good point about needing to creatively engage with society. From my own experience of working with a CofS congregation, this creative engagement is a weak spot for many.

As a counterpoint to the programme, interesting to note in the latest “Life and Work” a very positive article about a growing CofS congregation in Stornoway – and I mean really growing! So not all doom and gloom, and I’m sure there are many more examples of bright spots, just as there are in the SEC!

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Graham Vahey

28/08/2010

If the C of S disappeared completely we would be at a loss. During the dark and bleak years of Thatcher’s reign she refused to visit Scotland for 5 years. When she did she expressed shock that we had Royal Regalia and ordered it to be removed immediately for safe-keeping to England. Her ‘Sermon on the Mound’ is now historical for its condescension to the Scots. She was none too pleased to be handed two reports on poverty in Scotland by the powerful Church and Nation Committee. Indeed, it was to this Committee that the population turned to for a moral lead during Thatcherism. When James VI (‘Jamie the Saxt’) became James I in England, the population turned to senior Scottish earls for a moral lead. Unfortunately, the Piskie Church does not give a moral lead in Scotland, apart from the work of the Scottish Constitutional Convention in the recent past. The RC Church does pronounce on moral issues. Could it not be conceivable that all the major Churches could unite in a Committee to pronounce for Scotland on moral issues as the Church & Nation Committee once did?

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Aldous N. Gaiters

01/09/2010

Speaking as a Nonjuror myself I am sure the SEC has a right to a moral voice in Scotland. Taking the US daughter church of the SEC as a model you could see where the fissures would appear. There is room for a modern liberal Christian voice, but even I an old Liberal myself, would have to fear that such a voice might appeal to only a select few.

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