8
Dazzling Darkness
misreading. However, let me testify: I know Rachel – and, really, I’ve seldom met anyone who, so far as I can tell, is less motivated by self-pity than she is. It seems to me that what she represents is a whole other species of religious faith. Namely, something like an option for all-transformative ultimate acceptance. So far as I understand it, her faith seems to be a sheer celebration of life, come what may. I guess it takes some courage to make public a story like the one that follows, risking the world’s crass prurience and confronting it. Indeed, Rachel’s faith is quite clearly bound up with the reckless moral courage of a natural dissident. Yet, this is dissent unspoilt by bitterness. Rather, it’s nothing other than a principled recognition of the very clearest-eyed honesty – precisely, as a sacred ideal. Her telling of her story is theologically interesting, above all because of the vivid way it illustrates that species of faith. In short, here’s someone who appears to embody all the ‘Dionysian’ virtues so entertainingly, and so thought-provokingly, celebrated by Friedrich Nietzsche and his many followers to this day. Only minus the typical Nietzschean vice of intellectual conceit, the one truly God-less element in their doctrine. She’s quite free of that – as is evidenced by her also being such a good priest. For my part, I’ve actually only ever known Rachel as a very capable, sane and level-headed Anglican parish priest, much loved (I sense) by her parishioners, both at St Matthew’s Stretford and St Nicholas Burnage. Prejudice whispers to me that one wouldn’t expect a person with a back-story like hers to be as effortlessly at ease with people, in general, as she is. But it helps that she has so much laughter within her. Here, indeed, is a priest who quite plainly can see the funny side of the divine comedy, in its defiant, final aspiration to encompass all tragedy. And this is a woman who can write, too. She’s our Cathedral poet. A little while ago, for instance, we published the following poem of hers in our Manchester Cathedral News:
