clergy Easter

On April 12, 2006 / By maggi dawn / Reply

In my current post, I don’t do any Easter services at College. We do Christmas services at Robinson, but the rest of the year our quiet and busy times don’t coincide with the rest of the Church – our "big" and stressful seasons come in summer and autumn. Given that exam season is only a few weeks off, I am not complaining about this – Holy Week/Easter serves as the calm before the storm. There’s a sense of dislocation about it, all the same – both as a Christian, aware that we go quiet when everyone else is  intensely focussed on the central festival of the Church year, and as a member of the clergy, having experienced in two previous posts that the "norm" for the clergy is that this is a madly busy week , so jam packed with services and events and preparations for services that the approach of Easter is more likely to invoke dread than joy.  In addition, Holy Week also marks the beginning of the wedding season, which if you are in charge of a "pretty" church means stress season. In my first post (very pretty indeed) we used to have two or three weddings every Saturday from Easter to the end of the summer.

I’m saying prayers for my many clergy friends today – praying that they will find time to breathe in between things, praying that they will feel something of the joy of Easter when it arrives, and praying that the promise of a few days’ break next week will sustain them through one of the hardest weeks of their year.

(It occurs to me as I write that "member of the clergy" is not altogether satisfying as a phrase – it’s gained currency now that "clergyman" is no longer applicable as a generic term, but "member of" might suggest an exclusivity of its own. "Clergyperson" is awful. Words or phrases like this have to be short and easy to use, not PC-clumsy. But they also need to say what they mean, if at all possible…  Hmmmm. Need to ponder for a better word or phrase. )

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« Le Scaphandre et le Papillon
when God vanishes (ii) »

12 Responses to “clergy Easter”

Comments

  1. John
    On April 12, 2006 at 9:02 am

    Surely, if “clergy” is the adjective (as in “clergyman”) then the noun from which it is derived is “clerge” (to rhyme with “urge”). So, it would be: “as a clerge, having experienced…” :-)
    pax et bonum
    (And, yes, I know the real derivation is the same as “clerk”.)

  2. Chris T.
    On April 12, 2006 at 2:54 pm

    I’ve heard people use “clergy” to refer to a single clergyperson; it may sound a bit ungrammatical at the moment, but I think it’s a decent way of saying what you’re getting at.

  3. ash
    On April 12, 2006 at 5:17 pm

    Clergy and Cleric are both nouns. According to the OED, ‘Clergies’ is also a real word, although, because ‘Clergy’ is also sometimes plural (like sheep) I think ‘clergies’ could only be used int he context of ‘the clergies of both St.Alban’s and Southwark Diocese came together to play volleyball’.

  4. Sally
    On April 12, 2006 at 6:34 pm

    I guess clergybeing is just to wierd, especially as it should so often need to be rendered clergydoing!!!!
    I rather like clrege…but perhaps we need a completely new word…

  5. Richard
    On April 12, 2006 at 8:44 pm

    Why, it sounds as if you need the services of a professional linguist such as my good self!
    ‘Cleric’ is a good alternative, I guess – short, well-established (i.e. not an awkward neologism), prosodically similar to ‘clergyman’.
    In the past, words seem to have just sprung up and plugged a referential gap (sometimes they’re weird, random words – ‘movie’ just means that the picture moves while you watch it!). You can’t just manufacture new words and expect people to use them; people will decide, over the course of the next generation, how they’re going to deal with gender-inclusion, and they don’t need prescriptive rules about what words ’should’ be used.

  6. Ben Myers
    On April 13, 2006 at 3:08 am

    I suppose clericalist or clergicalist or clerger would be out of the question…? But what about a catchy new acronym, POTCH (Person Of The ClotH)? ;-)

  7. maggi
    On April 13, 2006 at 8:12 am

    You’re right that words “emerge”, Richard, but it’s not true that nobody manufactures them – new words often come into usage precisely because someone thinks of a word to plug the gap. WHat you can’t decide in advance is which word will catch on – for that, public opinion decides. Coleridge was one of the most prolific coiners of new words and phrases – his caught on precisely because they were so good!
    Cleric is nice and simple, but I have a strong hunch it won’t catch on, And, Ben, ingenious though it is, I fear Potch may not please public opinion either (if it does, I’m changing my career)… ;)

  8. Richard
    On April 13, 2006 at 8:41 am

    Ah, now I didn’t say nobody manufactures them, did I? :P
    I was thinking of the French attitude to gender-inclusion, really, because in France they’ve had commissions working on the ‘politically-correct’ terminology, who’ve then given prescriptive rules about the terms to be used, and the general populace has then soundly rejected (some of) those terms.
    The ‘manufacturing’ usually comes from within the community in question, not from outside. That’s what I meant.

  9. hopefulamphibian
    On April 13, 2006 at 5:40 pm

    Hmm – I guess that could make the collective noun for a group of clerics a “hotchpotch”? Sounds rather accurate – I vote for Ben’s idea. (But what would the plural be? How about ‘Spotch’ – ‘Several persons…etc’.)

  10. maggi
    On April 13, 2006 at 6:31 pm

    hotchpotch! perfect descriptor for the clergy…
    Mr R., yes, I take your point completely. ANd where better than a BLOG-community… :)

  11. Anna
    On April 15, 2006 at 4:05 am

    And priest is totally out? I hear it used nearly interchangeably with rector in the US.

  12. Lorna
    On April 15, 2006 at 4:30 pm

    clergy does fine I think