CRAIG

Hello, and welcome to Desperately Seeking Wisdom with me, Craig Oliver. This is a podcast for anyone who wants to lead a wiser, more fulfilled life, but is tired of all the snake oil and dubious life hacks that are out there. I talk to some well-known people and some experts about what life has taught them as they share the wisdom they gained, particularly during the tougher times. Our guest today is Reverend Richard Coles. At the heart of our conversation is the deep joy and turmoil brought into his life by his partner David, then the terrible grief of losing him.

RICHARD

Part of the reason why I loved him was because there was a bit of a Mr. Hyde in him sometimes and when he was drunk, he drank - lots of people drink, self-medicate, I think - to palliate the pain that he felt. He could be a bit of a hell-raiser sometimes - he was magnificent when he did that, although sometimes terrifying at the same time. There was a boldness and a bravery about him, that part of me wanted to actually give him a round of applause.

CRAIG

I'm fascinated by Richard's life, how this gently-spoken man found stardom in the 1980s band The Communards, before reconnecting with religion, and becoming a vicar, much-loved presenter and writer.

It's good to see you, Richard. So how are you? And where are you?

RICHARD

I'm in East Sussex, I'm in the little edge of the South Downs, the sea is not very far away, and the soaring Downs are on the other side, it's very nice place to be, it's very pretty little village. I'm the only person in the village who doesn't have a BAFTA, as far as I can tell. So that tells you what kind of place it is. And it's where I'm living the rest of my life, that's the plan. I did have a plan, which I shared with my partner, David, and then when he died in 2019, I required a new plan. And that's been quite a job, actually. But I'm probably, I think about where I should be right now.

CRAIG

That's great to hear. And we're going to talk all about that. But I wanted to start with your career in music. And it struck me that anybody who has a passing interest in 1980s pop, knows The Communards, you know, for songs like ‘Don't leave me this way’. How did you become a pop star?

RICHARD

Well, I mean, it's a question that baffles me and I was there... So, I don’t know, it was a counterintuitive fact, for sure. Well, I would never have been had I not been gay, which jolted me out of the life that I was kind of born into, which was one of relative privilege. I went to an English public school, there was a chapel at the heart of that with a very good choir and a great Head of Music. So like lots of people who have careers in music, that was my way in. But then a combination of the collapse of the manufacturing sector, which meant the shoe industry, which my family were involved in, no longer existed, so I couldn't do that. And also, homosexuality required me to move from Kettering, because if you were gay in Kettering in 1976, the chances were that it wasn't going to be great. So I escaped to London - gay runaway - and I bumped into another gay runaway, Jimmy Somerville, who had run away from sectarian working class tenement in Glasgow. And we threw in our lot together with a bunch of other people. And I was just fortunate because Jimmy turned out to be one of the most talented singers and performers of that time, and I hitched my wagon to him, and he hauled me into unlikely pop stardom.

CRAIG

Looking back on the 1980s, it seems to me like, you know, almost like an entirely alien time. When your music came out, I was at a Scottish comprehensive school. And I think being gay there was considered to be profitably the worst thing that can happen to somebody. And I vividly remember people like Boy George and Jimmy Somerville appearing as if from another planet and bravely telling people that they were gay and the world being sort of shocked and bemused by this.

RICHARD

If you look at the index on social attitudes, I'm sure that's the data that you daily consult Craig, it shows you that in 1980, I think 80% of people thought gay relationships were always wrong. By 1990, that had shifted to 20%. So there was a huge shift in attitudes in the 1980s. And I think we played our part in that. I mean, we were just the latest to step into the breach, as it were. Others had gone before us and the world was changing. After the 1960s lots of those, I suppose, values, which would once seemed unchanging and certain no longer seemed so. And, you know, feminism happened on the back of that. And I think we felt we were allied to that. The movement for civil rights in America and the way that used pop music as a sort of battle cry, I think we related to that, too. I now think it goes back a lot into gospel and gospel music as the kind of anthem of the dispossessed, as a way of asserting your dignity and your integrity and your right to be considered as fully human. So I think all that stuff sort of fed into it, and it was a very rich time.

CRAIG

You're right in terms of like, the considerations on it. But I think there was another layer on top of that. I mean, I remember my parents thinking they didn't know anybody who was gay, they didn't believe that it was in their orbit and around them. And it was this strange and distant perversion that was off somewhere else. And then that was challenged by the fact that my brother came out as being gay, and suddenly they were forced to confront, actually, somebody who couldn't be more close to them actually was gay. But it really was an extraordinary challenge to them. And they were deeply shocked and surprised by it.

RICHARD

Yeah, But I think if you look at what, you know, the references people heard, at that time, it was homosexuality was criminal, disgraceful, clandestine. If it appeared at all, it was either with kind of mincing creatures from light entertainment, very funny in their own right, but hardly fully-rounded individuals. And also worse than that was this kind of negative connotation of disgrace and public toilets, and prosecution. And so, unsurprisingly, if that was the version of it that was in your head, to hear that your nearest and dearest were ticking that box must have been - sorry, I'm mixing my metaphors horribly - but must have been a bit startling. Well, I think the real breakthrough was partly through the 1980s that we're seeing in popular culture, images of gay men and lesbians defining themselves. That was a really important thing. I think, for lots of an older generation, and this was much later, civil partnerships changed everything. Because I think for people of my parents’ generation, all of a sudden, they saw people being happy, having a slice of cake and a glass of prosecco. And they thought, oh, yeah, I get this. And I think that really, really changed things.

CRAIG

It’s reminding me of something like my old boss, David Cameron, the conservative, he's not necessarily always, the conservative party's not necessarily seen as the sort of at the forefront of gay rights for all sorts of very good reasons. But I remember him, saying that he supported gay marriage because he was a conservative, and he believed that people should be allowed to have a strong lasting union. And that that was a value that was the deepest conservative one. I was interested in that and given your church background and that kind of thing.

RICHARD

Yeah, I remember around that time going to No. 10., and David Cameron was there, it was a reception for the LGBT - I think that was that string of initials in those days - community. And I remember kind of turning on my kind of token detectors to see if what he was saying sounded true. And I genuinely think it did. And I don't know David Cameron, but I imagine that he probably was on a bit of a journey with that, like, well, like lots of other people. But I think it was very interesting that we support gay marriage, as it later became, not because we wish to destabilise these sort of institutions which hold societies together, but because we wish to reinforce them.

CRAIG

Yeah, no, I remember the conversations, I remember, we were at dinner, and he was with his closest aides, and he was asking the people around the table what they thought about gay marriage, and I, someone was saying, ‘Look, you know, this is just not going to go down well, with our supporters, why pick this fight?’ And I felt very strongly that it was the right thing to do. And also, you know, how can it be that you treat certain section of the population in a way where you know that they have all sorts of rights or obligations, but the one thing you don't give them is marriage. And it was interesting that at the end of the conversation, he said no, I know a lot of people who either are gay and/or have that in their family, and they are absolutely 100% convinced. So it must be the right thing to do.

RICHARD

Yeah, it was very interesting as well, it was an initiative that really began in Blair's administration, I think, was one of those things that had a sort of cross-party sense to it, because I think everyone was just acknowledging, what was really interesting was that you get knowing people meeting people, working with people, discovering people in your family, in your social network, in your workplace, who're just happily getting on with it. And all of a sudden, to put up a resistance to equal treatment seemed absurd. It's a tricky one for me though as a tribal Labourite Craig, all of a sudden finding the initiatives being done by conservatives who keep beating blues, beating reds into kind of diversity issues was very interesting.

CRAIG

And I think it's interesting that often, it's the party that is associated as being most anti-something that can be the ones that ultimately make the link. But I want it sort of explored, that time in the 1980s a bit more, because I listened to The Communards albums again, in preparation for this and really enjoyed them. The song that really stuck out for me was ‘For a Friend’, which never actually says, but it seems to me to be explicitly about a mourning of somebody who's died of AIDS. And it's haunting and it's very moving. Tell me about that song.

RICHARD

Well, we were big buddies with a guy called Mark Ashton, who was a very remarkable activist in the early 80s. He was actually General Secretary of the Young Communist League. So he came from a kind of creaky, ancient, dinosaur-left sort of background. That sounds a bit pejorative, but you know what I mean. Grew up in Northern Ireland in a very sectarian and divided world. And he was just blazing with ideas and challenge and boldness. And he was the least puritanical appear- he was an activist who was actually really, really good fun. And he inspired lots of people to do lots of wonderful things. And then he, in 1987, died of AIDS. He was the first of our circle to die of AIDS. He was 26. And he was an extraordinarily gifted, wonderful person, we loved him. And that song was written in response to that. I mean, I think we were just devastated by it. It was that and -

CRAIG

And one of the lyrics is ‘we'd march for love and pride, together arm in arm’. And it struck me that anybody who lives in London, when you see the Pride March now it feels to be part of the mainstream -

RICHARD

Oh yeah, it wasn’t it then.

CRAIG

-but then, it seemed actually very dangerous to be part of.

RICHARD

It was, it was counterculture. And it was highly politicised, but… and of its time, I guess. And I mean, those days, it was a very hostile world sometimes, and we did get attacked sometimes. And the policing of what we got up to was sometimes very difficult and challenging. But we would, we were tight. And we were very tough. And we were out - I think, I mean, for me, I'm naturally a quite timid and conservative small person, that's my - by nature, I'm that and I was obliged by having to confront the reality of my own sexuality, to find a kind of fight and challenge that would not normally be mine.

CRAIG

You find yourself in rough situations?

RICHARD

Yeah, attacked a couple of times, there was one notorious time when some National Front skinheads came and attacked us all in a pub in Islington. Once in Dijon, when we were on tour, we were attacked by Front National. You know, skinheads. But worse than that, actually was a kind of hostile world. So just when were beginning to kind of push back at the boundaries of inclusion and so on, HIV came along, and it kind of gave ammunition to the enemy who all of a sudden started talking about this being a judgement of either nature or God, on this kind of renegade minority. And people were terrified of AIDS, and to have that kind of folded into the way people perceived you was really difficult. Again, big surprise, the first politician who really got it was Norman Fowler, the Tory health secretary. And so we found ourselves again, having to think oh, well, he's supposed to be the enemy. But he actually seems to be the first person who's got it and indeed, has continued to be a great supporter.

CRAIG

This is a podcast that's all about what people learned often from traumatic experiences and the wisdom they gained. So from that experience of dealing with AIDS, when it was deadly, and the fight for gay recognition. What did you think you learned about people and the way things are?

RICHARD

Well, I think I learned what resilient communities are like, I mean, sometimes people think that there's a great discontinuity between what I was doing as a parish priest and what I was doing in London 1980s. But actually, the continuity was all about trying to find resilient communities, I think. I've formed friendships that have endured all my life. And I think I learned… there’s a sort of humility - to claim humility is obviously an awkward thing to do - but there's a sort of humility, I think that comes with confronting the fact of mortality. I think so much when I was in my 20s, I was concerned with the sort of buzz and static of everything that was happening around me. I think confrontation with mortality through HIV and AIDS made me begin to understand that there are profoundly shaping currents in all our lives, and the confrontation of mortality is one of them – it's very odd, because we were very young to be doing that. And sometimes when I've read the accounts of people who were called up to serve in the First or Second World Wars, and often talking to people who served in the Second World War, same sort of thing to be confronted in your 20s with the fact of mortality changes people.

CRAIG

And that thing, so that, say, confronted by mortality, but then also the fight to be recognised. And knowing that, as you do that, you're going to offend people, they're going to be obnoxious or even violent. That must have been an extraordinarily frightening thing sometimes

RICHARD

The more frightening thing would have been not to have fought it, I think. What really scared me was the sort of having an unlivable life and that I would be consigned to a sort of…

CRAIG

Pushed to the corners?

RICHARD

Yeah, I would have a life without any joy or fulfilment or truthfulness. That seemed to me to be the more frightening thing and it was worth the fight. Also, in those days, I quite liked fighting actually, I discovered a sort of, the fight within me. Not so keen on it now. And the other thing was the solidarity.

CRAIG

Why not now?

RICHARD

Because fighting takes stuff from you - because you need to put on armour everyday and tool up and go into the field. And now I'm older, I'm more interested in parts of me that are vulnerable, parts of me that are unsure, uncertain, the grayness - grayness, not a word -, but the indistinctness of life in my 60s, I don't want to do that anymore.

CRAIG

We'll explore that a bit more but I'm curious about how and why you became a Christian and, and then a reverend? Was it always there?

RICHARD

That's a good question. So I was a chorister when I was a kid, Craig, so I grew up, from the age of seven, I was singing that stuff, and being formed, unwittingly, by the drip-drip of Anglicanism, through music really, and through text, although I was consciously completely certain that the whole thing was a fairy tale and a myth. So I loved being in chapel, I loved the - I like the people that, I like the whole thing about it. But I thought it was nonsense and nobody in his right mind could possibly cleave to its specious doctrines. But it formed me. And then I was a very, very uncompromising atheist, until I wasn't, in my late 20s. But I think anyone who reacts that powerfully to something there's clearly identification in that - I'm sorry, I've talked to Richard Dawkins about this quite a lot, he and I both went to English public schools in the same part of the world, and both sat rigidly upright during prayers to express refusal to cower to the doctrine. But I think that there is identification in that, why does it matter so much? Because it does somehow make some claim on you, some hold on you. And then when I got to my late 20s, and particularly coming out of the turbulence of not just AIDS and HIV, which was darkness, but also the kind of brilliance of success, and vindication - that also has its turbulence too - I just found that I was kind of full of questions. And the places I would normally go to seek answers to those questions, were unable… did not avail. I needed to go somewhere else. And that was what took me to a church door, very reluctantly. But the minute I crossed over and went in, I knew I was a participant, not a spectator. And it was, it was that decisive. In retrospect, I've been coming on for a long time, but it felt at the moment like a total epiphany.

CRAIG

This summer, trying to bring together the two early parts of our conversation, the Archbishop of Canterbury affirmed a 1998 declaration, saying homosexuality is a sin. And I wonder how, as an openly gay man, you feel about being closely associated with an institution that still is prepared to say that gay sex is sinful? Is it – how do you square that contradiction?

RICHARD

Well, I'm not interested in the church, which obliges me in coinciding with all my convictions and beliefs, everything. So that's one thing, the fact that it diverges so sharply with me over something so key is a real challenge, actually. The important thing is, I have absolutely no doubt that God is fine with it. So I've never had a problem with that. That's always seemed to me to be unarguable. The church's difficulty with it is entirely comprehensible. When you think about, you know, 2000 years’ inheritance of tradition, which is absolutely inimical to the kind of equality I'm talking about, although contains within it, a clarion call to achieve that very equality. So that's interesting. It's dispiriting when you feel, you know, often progress, as you will know, in a pragmatic world. It's interesting, isn't it, because the church signed up to the glory of a transcendent, majestic and gracious God, in its daily workings is about horse-trading, is political, of course it is. So you know that in a world of horse-trading and pragmatism, sometimes you will take two steps forward and three steps back, I kind of know that.

CRAIG

I'm not a Christian, but I genuinely, you know, respect people who are and I like to hear why and what they're doing. And I've read the Bible, and I particularly look to the Gospels. And it seems to me, maybe I'm being a bit arrogant, when I read about Jesus, I suspect if he'd been around today, he would have been pretty critical of the institution and pretty in favour of the people who were being told that ‘you're sinful’ here. Isn't that right? Isn't there a danger that actually what happens is you protect the institution rather than what the main proponent of it ie, Jesus was trying to say?

RICHARD

I mean, it's very difficult for us to be confident about what Jesus really thought because we just reflect ourselves obviously, and he's not like us because the Divine is inexpressibly and ineffably different from us. The thing about institute – I mean sometimes think it’s like stained glass. I love stained glass, and to see it light up and glitter and sparkle and paint its colours and shapes, is wonderful, but it's only there because there's a frame that's holding it up. And you know, the church needs to be here for tomorrow. And in order to be here for tomorrow, it needs to do the things that institutions do to ensure their survival. And sometimes that is absolutely at odds with what you think it's core pur – a bishop once said to me, ‘all institutions are demonic’. And I kind of know what he means. But without those institutions, what do you get: you get a wisp, a will-o'-the-wisp, you get a race, you get something like that. And where do we feed the sheep of tomorrow?

CRAIG

I can see that. And I think that's an interesting point like that, it's sort of a, you know, a balance of good and bad, isn't it, and the balance is, you're saying sort of that the balance of good is more important. But I kind of think like some of the things the institution is defending are actually quite literally intolerant and intolerable. And so maybe the institution should just be a little bit smaller.

RICHARD

Well I think that might just happen, actually. I think what's happening in the stained glass is not really containable by the frame as it exists at the moment. So maybe we need to get a new window or something, I don't know. I mean, it's always been like that, Christianity has given justification to slavers, Christianity has given justification for people waging aggressive wars. There are - today - bishops of the church blessing weapons that Putin is sending to Ukraine. So it is always disappointing. It is always crushingly disappointing.

CRAIG

But I don't want it to go down the rabbit hole. But I'll have one more thing because I just think it's an interesting area. I don't believe for a second that Justin Welby thinks that gay sex is sinful, but he feels he has to uphold this thing. And to me that feels deeply uncomfortable.

RICHARD

Yeah, I mean, I think that - the other thing I would say is that when you take a close look at what actually happened at the conference, there was an attempt to re-state the eternal verity that homosexuality is always sinful - it didn't succeed, and at the end of it, what the bishops came away with was something actually quite positive, and which would feed your optimism, which is that no one's going to get sanctioned if a church, a province within the Anglican Communion, as provinces already do, takes an inclusive line. And so in actually there were, it was sort of progress, although it was such a modest kind, that it was sometimes lost in the outrage and lots of – I mean, the outrage that you or I might feel of somebody refusing to grant equal dignity to gay people, in most of the Anglican Communion, the outrage would be the other way round. I've worked in Uganda for a while in the belly of the beast, you might say, and the idea that somehow gay relationships could be afforded any dignity, let alone equal dignity was just an unthinkable thought for lots of Ugandans, apart from the gay ones who are bravely living their lives.

CRAIG

In your book, the Madness of Grief, which is very moving, and a great book, I recommend anybody who's listening to this should go and read it. You talk about the church not recognising the holiness of your relationship. And you also talk about your partner, David, having a hard time escaping the belief that he was bad, despite being a Christian. Do you want to talk a bit about that?

RICHARD

Yeah, I mean, when I say the church was hostile, I mean, the institutional church. Actually, the individuals who comprise the church are always going to welcoming and affirming and even if challenged, would often be up for discussion around that stuff in ways that was often surprising and rich and rewarding. David grew up in a religious sect, which required his dismissal when he was truthful about his sexuality. And so when he was young, in his teens, he found himself excluded. And I think a very powerful message of his unfitness for Heaven came with that. I mean, he found a new life for himself. But I think it's quite common, I think with people who grow up in powerfully uncompromising religious worlds that you absorb a lot of that stuff and internalise all that stuff. And I think there was always, David on a bad day, there was a part of him that was never quite in the light about that stuff, which was very difficult.

CRAIG

Yeah. And you draw a very direct line between that shame and his alcoholism. I don't want to just define him as an alcoholic because he was clearly a very special person. Do you want to talk a bit about him and your relationship to him and tell us about that?

RICHARD

Yeah, I mean, he was a wonderful person, complex person. We met, I had no intention of forming a relationship with anybody. And if I had, he would not have been on my tick-list at all.

CRAIG

Because?

RICHARD

Well, he's just not what I thought I was looking for. My shopping list of what I would require in a partner, he met very few of them, actually, but none of that mattered when we met, we just instantly sort of came together. And part of the reason why I loved him was because he did have this… there was a bit of a Mr. Hyde in him sometimes and when he was drunk, he drank - lots of people drink, self-medicate, I think - partly, it was to palliate the pain that he felt sometimes as a consequence of feeling that he was bad, I think, and other things, too. There was also I think, a part of him that just, he could be a bit of a Hellraiser sometimes. And he was magnificent when he did that, although sometimes terrifying at the same time. And I think about it now, I think he would, he lived parts of my life that I didn't live. There was a boldness and a bravery about him that wasn't mine. And he would do it. Sometimes it was awful. I mean, he could misbehave so badly. But part of me wanted to actually give him a round of applause as well.

CRAIG

What was the misbehaviour?

RICHARD

I remember once, we were at a dinner, and it was the chairman of the county council. And the great and the good, it came – it was a small dinner, it wasn't a work thing, it was a sort of – anyway. I was chatting to the chairman of the county council, we were talking about Tory Heartlands here. And David came and he was drunk. And I was kind of having to kick him under the table. He was just managing to behave himself. But there was a bit where somebody said, ‘oh, who's the Bishop of Peterborough now’? And I said, ‘oh, Donald Allister’. And they said, ‘oh, yes, I thought it was Ian Cundy’ - who was the last Bishop of Peterborough. And David said, ‘Ian Cundy? Oh, yes, the ‘t’ is silent’. And there was a gap while people absorbed what he had said. And I had to take him home.

CRAIG

Did you find that excruciating, or what?

RICHARD

I sort of admired the kind of punk-rock thing in him. But it was also excruciating, because I was the vicar and I was chaplain and I had to behave myself and rather… he sort of rescued me a bit from that, Craig, because, you know, it's very easy to lose yourself in what you've considered to be a flattering reflection, you know, and I quite liked all the sorts of getting involved with the county and all that stuff. I liked all that. I've always liked me being in a role. And David was sometimes just not letting me get away with it. And he did save me from the worst parts of myself very often. I couldn't save him from the worst part of himself, which was the self-destructiveness though. And in the end, the self-destructiveness became... got the upper hand, and he drank himself to death. I couldn't stop him.

CRAIG

So let's talk through the memoir, because you start on the moment where an ambulance comes, takes him to hospital, it's very clear that it's very, very serious and he is in a life threatening situation. But you write it very well, I think in that sense that there's almost a sense of denial going on that this couldn't possibly be happening. It couldn't be real. And I think one of the big themes of the book - it feels to me - is how we never really confront the fact that people die and that we will die. And so when it comes, we're just not prepared.

RICHARD

Yeah, saw that Damien Hirst piece isn't it, about the impossibility of death in the mind of the living. I mean, ironic –- because I've seen it happen before. And in my job as a vicar, I was around bereavement an awful lot. So I kind of, it wasn't as if it came as a total surprise. I just couldn't believe that David was going to die, although I knew he was, because alcoholics don't make old bones, as a rule, and I could see the deterioration in his health, but we'd been there before. So I thought, and this is perhaps a comforting thought to get me through the day, that it would be a repeat of what we’d been through before he would go into hospital, he would have a blood transfusion, they would stabilise him and he'd come home again, but it just, he was too badly damaged.

CRAIG

And there's one stage where you write, ‘his death was unthinkable, even though it was happening right in front of us’. So there's on some level, you seem to be clear, this is ending one way, but as you say that unthinkability, do you feel we should spend more time preparing people to confront that fact or do you think it is just a thought that people can't cope with?

RICHARD

It's an irony isn't it, is that in a sort of secular age and in the world in which most of my friends live, I think everyone rather prides themselves on their kind of bravery and standing without the comforts of religion to face the tough realities of life, but actually, I think we're pretty bad at this, we talk about you know, wherever euphemisms proliferate - pass away, for example - you can get on the news now, people say somebody ‘passed away’.

CRAIG

I've noticed that that we can't actually say they died anymore - they ‘passed’.

RICHARD

Yeah, it sounds too blunt somehow. And I think the Victorians, you know, irony will mock them for their elaborate mourning, I found a black satin-covered mourning ear trumpet on eBay when David died, which seemed to be an essential accessory. And we kind of mock it because it seems overwrought or sentimental, but they were better at it than we were because it was a reality for them. You know, my grandmother was the youngest of 13, two of her siblings, she, you know, went to their funerals when she was still a child. So they were used to that. And it does seem an irony, the one thing that we are all going to face, we seem to not really be very well prepared for, and also, we've medicalized it, and we've taken it beyond the horizon of our everyday experience.

CRAIG

And I think there's an interesting phrase, you talk about yearning for a fair fight with death. And of course, there's no such thing as a fair fight with death, but yet we are egos and exactly that point, there is some sense in which we think we can battle it and fight it and stave it off. When in reality it comes when it comes, and it's almost we can't accept it.

RICHARD

Yeah, I just remember that story about, there was someone on death row, who had learning difficulties and shouldn't have been executed, but was executed. And he had his last meal, and he didn't finish it. And they said, ‘well, do you want to finish your ice cream’? And he said, ‘oh, no, I'll come back and get it later’. Because he hadn't understood what was about to happen to him. And I sometimes think that's all of us actually, we can't, because it is the [unintelligible] from which no travel –- you know, it's, it's a deep mystery that we head into. If you're a Christian, there's rich and deep reflection on that, and… but there's, I think, sometimes think Christianity gives you a Get Out of Jail Free card, but it doesn't at all, it doesn't deny the reality of death. If you look at a cross, there's nothing in there, which spares you the reality of death. It's just this belief, that beyond the horizon of that, extraordinary transformation awaits.

CRAIG

Yeah. There's a sense in which though, it does provide the comfort of saying that you're going to be conscious in an afterlife, and you'll be yourself - your best self. Okay, you're shaking your head here. So tell me why that's wrong with my assumption about Christianity.

RICHARD

I think it's a fair assumption to make, but it's just not my experience at all. I've never found Christianity to be consoling actually, I find it challenging, more than anything. Consolation, perhaps, too - I think I've been… yeah, must be. But I think it's a mistake to think that what Christianity has to say about death will – it's amazing how often I've been at deathbeds of people, lifelong people who have not gone gently into that good night.

CRAIG

That's true. But it does offer you the prospect of eternity though, which a lot of people like to, you have, say you have conversations with Richard Dawkins, and he would just say, that's just utterly ridiculous, why do you persist with this fairytale?

RICHARD

Well, first thing to say to that is, are you sure that the prospect of eternity is one that you would wish to entertain? And the other thing is, it doesn't get you off anything? I mean, it's interesting, so I think about, people say to me - I think because I'm a Christian - ‘do you imagine David sort of being alive somewhere’? And I say, yes, I do. And they say what, in heaven? And I say, well, no, the Co-op, actually, I imagine him living the life that he lived on Earth, somewhere, could, because the fact of his death even now is sort of unimaginable.

CRAIG

See the traditional view of eternity, I think, you know, when you look at all that sort of Renaissance paintings is sort of like angels sitting on clouds and sort of worshipping God for eternity. But you do actually speak about eternity in the Madness of Grief. And you say that you see it as a kind of geometry, and the line you use is ‘you imagine light, and line, and π r²? What did you mean by that?

RICHARD

I mean, the thing is, the Christian view of eternity is actually very complex. I think one of the things, Craig, is that lots of people think they know what Christianity is, but actually they stopped thinking about it when it ceased to be compulsory, and that was possibly leaving primary school or even secondary school. So we have a sort of almost a caricature understanding of what Christianity is, and so beardy gods, angels on clouds and that kind of thing, that's pictorial representation of aspects of doctrine, it's not the whole thing. And people use the resources they have to try to depict it. I like – so the geometry thing really comes from Botticelli’s illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy, which he made in Florence in 15th century, I guess, and it’s really interesting as you go through Inferno, and is peopled with these fascinating characters, vividly drawn, and by the time you get to Paradise it’s as if all his kind of skill has deserted and all he’s left with this, you obviously get these kinds of circles, or these arcs, and these figures floating into this kind of abstraction, almost. This is the interesting thing, is individuation, we are who we are, but we are reconfigured for eternity. How that works, I don't know.

CRAIG

Interesting. There's also, let's switch from eternity back to being back on Earth. And obviously, the reality is that you're left behind and grieving. And a very strong phrase from the book that struck me was ‘grief does what it wants’. And that seems to me to be quite a repudiation of attempts to put a pattern on grief. You know, we've all heard that there's denial and anger and bargaining and then acceptance. You don't see it that way. It's not a linear journey. It's all over the place.

RICHARD

I mean, I think all that stuff happens, but it's not a process. You go, I think people like this idea of going through a process, because it suggests that you kind of get better. And people often say that, you know, ‘how are you? Are you getting over it?’. You don't get over it. It's like losing a limb. You know, you just get used to living your life in a new way. But everybody wants you to sort of get over it because it makes them feel better. Here's, a really interesting thing is a lot of the heavy lifting, the heaviest lifting you do in bereavement is because you think you need to spare other people embarrassment or awkwardness and I've stopped doing that now. So if people ask me how I am and I'm having a bad day, I'll tell them.

CRAIG

And you think it's important that they hear the true answer?

RICHARD

I think it's best to be truthful if you can.

CRAIG

And there's obviously the loss of the person that you love in death. But it seemed to me that you were also describing how it cut away other great swathes of your life to the extent you're left questioning who you are to an extent and I noticed that when we started this interview, you were talking about having a different life now and that life coming together and formulating. And there's a very many moving examples of loss that goes beyond David. So for example, you had five dogs, and you couldn't cope with them. So you have to get, not get rid of them, but give them to another caring home. And I guess what I'm saying here is that, that you talk about almost having to become another person with another life.

RICHARD

It's so obvious, but it hadn't occurred to me really until it happened, which is that when somebody dies, you don't just lose them, but you lose your future. So David and I had quite developed plans about what we were going to do and how we’re gonna - we've actually found a house and everything. And then that just disappeared with him. And I remember, I felt myself [unintelligible] Philip Larkin poem about just looking at a sort of undifferentiated horizon in front of me and thinking, ‘what do I do now’, and eventually began to put some things together. You know, the other thing as a priest, I'm, I suppose I think of myself in some ways, as someone who is called to be a saviour. And when you can't save people, that's quite challenging, really. But you can't save people, actually.

CRAIG

I'm interested in the ‘can’t save people’, so let's take that in a moment. But firstly, the future thing. It seems to me that a lot of the stuff I've been reading about trying to live a good life and trying to live a life, often people say, you know, just take the present and not make assumptions about the future. And so we build, we've got a past, often one that we created many ways, but we've also got a future that we definitely create. And then when reality comes along and takes a massive swipe. And when you think about it, nobody ever told you that you had a right to that future. And actually, if you look at the way the world is, it's never set up like that, there's people all the time having their future swiped away from them. I just, it’s worth reflecting on that. We need it and I think we need to tell ourselves stories. Don't we, we need a story that is going to help us through and when that story gets knocked off track, then we struggle.

RICHARD

And you see that with individuals, and you also see it with organisations, I think you also see it with nations perhaps, is that we must, we have a narrative which projects a version of ourselves that we are comfortable with, beyond the reality of the present moment. We indeed can't live in a world in which the future is entirely and always indistinct, because you'd never get out of bed I guess, or you would never know what you were doing. And when that is disrupted powerfully - and again, that can happen to nations as well as to individuals - then all of a sudden, you have to work hard, I think, to – I sometimes say to people, people who have just been bereaved, and they ask me what it was like for me, and I say, well, if you can, if you can just get out of bed, that's not, that might be quite an achievement, if you can just stand up and face forward, that might be quite an achievement and don't think you have to be heroic about this. You see, that's the thing with priests, Craig, is that we do have, there, we're kind of haunted by the sense of ourselves, if we're not careful, of being heroic, that doesn't help at all.

CRAIG

One of the interviews that I did was with Georgia Alagiah, who's very sadly had to stop being a presenter of the news again, because of his bowel cancer. And he talked about the moment when he was diagnosed with having terminal bowel cancer. And he said that the hardest thing for him was feeling that he'd been robbed of his future with his wife. And then he came to terms with the fact and just being grateful for the fact that he'd had any time with her at all. And that that was an amazing thing. And that was the wisdom that he managed to take out of it.

RICHARD

I think if you can kind of locate yourself in the gratitude for what has been, rather than regret for what won't be, it's probably a psychologically healthy place to be, maybe a spiritually healthy place to be too.

CRAIG

You don't shy away, going back to David, in the book about how the drinking lead your relationship into slightly dark places occasionally. And I think anybody who's had any experience of anybody who's had somebody who's addicted to drink, or drugs, knows that what that can be, the personality shifts and the behaviours. Was there a point where you thought, is this actually healthy for me? Or were you just completely convinced that you loved him and it was your, you wanted to be there?

RICHARD

I can remember parking in the drive and sitting in the car, taking everything I got just to get out and go inside, because I thought, what fresh hell awaits me there? And sometimes it would be, when he was at his worst, it would be really bad. And I saw, I don't know, I think I thought, well, I just got to get through the next moment. I knew I wouldn't leave him. I couldn't, wouldn't leave him. I mean, I don't, I’m a bit hesitant to say this because lots of people who live with addicts do leave them and rightly so. If I had kids, for example, and if the safety of the kids was compromised, well, then, of course, it would have been different. But I couldn't bear the thought of David being abandoned by me. I couldn't bear it. And I think the breakthrough came when David, we've got him to see a shrink. And he was having a conversation with a shrink, and he was saying how frightened he was that his drunkenness would cause me to leave. And the shrink burst out laughing, and David said, what's so funny? And the shrink said, ‘if he was going to go, he would have gone by now’. And I think that put away one of his most unmanageable fears.

CRAIG

Obviously, there's a huge amount of love and concern in that. But there's also I suppose, something like, are you willing to tolerate stuff? Do you know? I mean, it’s a, why are you willing to accept that? I think a lot of people ask those questions of themselves when they're confronted by those kind of relationships.

RICHARD

I have a friend who had been in a similar situation, and she did leave her husband, and because they did have kids, and because his behaviour was – left them unsafe. And she was absolutely full of the wisdom of that and was saying to me, why do you take this, you've got to leave, you got to leave. And I kind of knew she was right. But I also knew I wasn't gonna go.

CRAIG

You're also very good, not just on the, you know, extreme aspects of relationships, you’re very good on the sort of day to day, you know, difficulties of living with somebody. So you talk about his smoking. And that driving you wild and him saying that he wasn't going to smoke in the house and going off to the studio and smoking up a storm. But also, you know, he hated that you like spicy food and you secretly having curries and stuff. Tell us about what you learned about that reality of you know, like that just sheer friction of being in a relationship.

RICHARD

I mean, we do – because we were very different people. He was 15 years younger than me. He voted Tory, he like.. the most - the first negotiation we had to have that was tricky was over me watching match of the day because I really like football. And David loathed football. So we had to kind of work out how to manage that. In the end, we had a sort of metric: so he got too Ugly Betty's or a Legally Blonde for every match of the day. So we kind of worked it out that way, as people do in relationships. I grew up in a world where nobody ever argued Craig, my parents never argued, not so much has raised their voices. And David grew up in a big family, working class family in Manchester, where everyone argued all the time. And what I kind of learned from him was that you can have an argument and it's not the end of the world. So we would have really blistering arguments sometimes and then it'd be okay. What do you fancy for tea? And I'd never really had that before, I don't think. So, I learned that disagreement was, fundamental disagreement was, the worst row we ever had was the day Margaret Thatcher died. And a part of me and I'm ashamed of it, but nonetheless, the case, gave a little whoop. And David was really horrified by that. He thought, how can you be so cruel? And how can you be so unfeeling? And how can you be so crass? And I realised that there was a part… He was right. And what I -because Margaret Thatcher become, for me, a sort of legendary figure, the, like the kind of Snow Queen, the Ice Queen, somehow, not real. And the interesting for David was that she was a kind of hero to him, because his parents bought their council house under Right to Buy.

CRAIG

It's so interesting, isn't it? Because she… was the number, it’s clause 28, was it? You know, so she really was like, anti gay rights. But then as you say, other people often from working class background, see her as a complete hero who transformed their lives. And other people see them as destroying their communities. It's a fascinating seeing how people relate to her.

RICHARD

I mean, for me, she was just like, not a real figure. And then I remember that argument made me go read Charles Moore's astonishingly good biography of her.

CRAIG

Much more complex woman than the narratives around her allow.

RICHARD

And also, what a tragic figure in some ways, in terms of her often close relationships. At the weirdest moment was that I did her, I think it was her sister-in-law's funeral. And she was there as a mourner. And all of a sudden, there was this little figure there, looked after by a carer, I think, and it was just impossible to reconcile the kind of Snow Queen with this frail person, not understanding what was going on around her.

CRAIG

Interesting about humanity, isn't it? There's a lot of pain and suffering in that book. And that you, it's sort of part of the fabric of being a human being. And this is a really big question. And I think in some ways, it's really unfair. But you are a reverend, so I'm gonna, I will ask it to you anyway. Why do you think the world is set that way, in such a way that suffering is so much part of the fabric of our existence?

RICHARD

I mean, I can give you the chapter and verse, I could give you the catechetical response to that, but it doesn't really, it's just me… no, it's like doing your highway code without doing reverse parking, you know, what I do say to people sometimes is that in my life, and in others life, I have observed at those moments when you think they would be most wiped out by the sheer cruelty of hazard, and chance and fate, surprisingly, and beautifully, they will find themselves all of a sudden stepping into that transformed world on the other side of it. And I've seen this in other people, I've experienced it myself. And I couldn't deny that.

CRAIG

We've talked a bit about having a different life and things changing on. Tell us a bit about how that's going. I still hear you on the radio, you're publishing books, it seems to me you've got a very full life.

RICHARD

Yeah, I do. I'm trying to stay put because the [unintelligible] is to be away all the time. And I'm trying not to do that. So I'm very happy where I am. I live in a village where one of my best friends lives just two doors away, which is why I'm here.

CRAIG

You say at the end of the book that you, is it Lorna, sorry if I've got her name wrong, that you were actually gonna live together, you seem to hint, is that, not quite?

RICHARD

Well we're fortunate enough to be able to live next door to each other rather than together, which is perhaps the optimum way of living with anybody. So we've, yeah, and it's lovely. So we have a great life here and people sort of call. It's a bit like a sort of slightly less fragrant version of E. F. Benson's Tilly. We're in and out of each other's houses all the time. And it's a nice community. We've all known each other for a long time too.

CRAIG

And I'm quite far into your book, Murder Before Evensong, which - it was quite funny as I started reading it, I was like, this appears to be a murder based around whether or not there's a toilet in a church. How did you come up with that?

RICHARD

The story is about a vicar standing up, or a rector standing up and announcing that there's going to be a new toilet and it leads to murder and mayhem. And the genesis of the book began with me standing up in church and say, we're going to have a new toilet. Everybody went mental. Didn't have a murder, fortunately, or not yet, but – and you know, it's not about the toilet. It's not about mince pies after the carol service. It's not about whether you put the heating on or not. It's about the big stuff, because churches are still the places where people bring that, even if it's unconsciously.

CRAIG

I’m not not quite at the end yet, but I thought that was what was interesting about it is, because on one level, you're like, Oh, for goodness sake, of course, you should have a toilet, and then you actually start introducing people's motivations for why they don't want it. And often, it's quite surprising. And actually, it shows that we haven't considered another human being.

RICHARD

Yeah, exactly. And I think there's often – it's a very Church of England thing that the sorts of people who sit on PCCS and are full of ideas are the sort of people who are used to sitting on things and having ideas, middle class people with degrees, and so forth. And then the sort of people who, who don't feel able to participate at that level are often people who don't have that, and so decisions are made, which don't fully understand what they want. And a big lesson for me as a vicar in Finedon was just trying to work out how I could hear what people wanted when they weren't able to volunteer that in the kind of forums that I was used to.

CRAIG

It's an entertaining and, you know, very engaging book, but I suppose, in some ways, it also felt to me like in answer to the question, what a church is for?

RICHARD

Yes, I think one of the things church is for are laboratories in which you realise the equal dignity of all people.

CRAIG

We're getting to the end of the interview, and you've been incredibly generous and thoughtful. The one last question we always ask people is, if there was one piece of wisdom you could pass on, what would it be? What would yours be?

RICHARD

Because life is so full of unpredictable and unimaginable challenges and opportunities, and surprises, that if you can just get through your present moment, whether it is of delight or of despair, it will pass, and something else will come along, and - provided your spared the real horrors of life - but if you could just keep going, see what awaits, see what's coming, I think.

CRAIG

And it's an interesting that that's really a positive and open attitude. I was talking to Anthony Seldon, the other day he was telling me about a book he was reading about entering old age. And he said that basically there's a crossroads where you can choose to be open to life and keep going, or you can become closed and confined and bitter. And obviously, it's better to choose the former rather than the latter.

RICHARD

But it's hard. I lived in Eastbourne, it's a town which is really a town for older people. And it's just very interesting seeing people in whom that's going well, and people in whom that's going not so well. And try to think about, well, how I might live my own ages. So getting into it.

CRAIG

Yeah, Gratitude seems to be something that comes up an awful lot, which is just realising that, actually, hey, we're on this amazing planet, it's an amazing ride, and you get to see and do amazing things. And that when you look at life from that perspective, it becomes a little bit easier.

RICHARD

Yeah, I'm a lucky person. I grew up in a family that was loving, and supportive, and solvent. And I didn't really want for anything essential. One of the big education's in my life in ministry has been ministering to people who grew up in worlds where they do not wake up in the morning thinking ‘the rising arc of my life is going to take me somewhere good today’. They wake up in the morning thinking, will we eat, you know? And how different it is for people who don't have the advantages that I've had, all things being equal, to make choices. I love the call in Deuteronomy, to choose life.

CRAIG

I think our interview’s coming full circle, we're back to the 1980s. And that was a slogan on a t-shirt. We should choose life. So I think that's a very good point to end. Richard, you've been amazingly open, and I'm incredibly appreciative of you taking the time and you've given us a huge amount to think about. So thank you.

RICHARD

Well, thanks for great questions too, Craig, I really enjoyed the conversation.

CRAIG

What a lovely, thoughtful man Richard Coles is, there aren't many people who could have had such a wide and varied life, and been a success of pretty much everything they turned their hand to.

Next week, I'll be talking to Anthony Scaramucci, whose professional and personal life exploded after he was hired and fired by Donald Trump as Director of Communications at the White House.

Anthony Scaramucci

You're on the playing field at the highest level of American politics and global politics, you make a mistake, you're in a free country with a free press, you get excoriated for that - anybody that says it doesn't hurt is lying to you, but I have a thick skin: I got fired, let's move on.

CRAIG

Buckle up for next week's conversation with straight talking New Yorker, the man they call the Mooch.

If you're enjoying the podcast, please like and follow or even write a review for Apple or Spotify. Desperately Seeking Wisdom is produced by Sarah Parker for Creators Inc. Goodbye for now.