MAS: Do you miss that?

RW: Yes, I do. It’s very good to go down to Canterbury, usually once a
fortnight for a few days and just go to the parishes and try and make
contact.

MAS: Is the job harder than you thought it would be?

RW: Yes. I think anybody in ministry will experience a kind of upward
gradation in terms of attention from other people, expectation and
projection. It happens to anybody as soon as they’re ordained, it happens
a bit more when you become a bishop and obviously a bit more again when
you become an archbishop. That kind of intensification – what I sometimes
used to call with my clergy in Wales, “living other people’s dreams” –
that becomes a factor.

MAS: Do you feel you can’t live up to other people’s dreams?

RW: I think you’re very stupid if you try. You have to recognise that it
happens and you have to try and live with it and you have to try not to
let that determine everything you do or think or say. There is inevitably
a measure of struggle involved in that.

MAS: Do you find you encounter a lot of disappointment then?

RW: I think that comes with the territory. And again, even when I was
Archbishop of Wales and working with new bishops, I used to say, not
realising quite how true it was, “One of the things you will do as a
bishop is disappoint people.” And, you know, you get used to it, because
you also exceed expectations when it has nothing to do with what you do.

MAS: In what areas do you think you’ve disappointed people, and where have
you exceeded expectations?

RW: I don’t know about exceeding, but I think there’s bound to be an
expectation that new archbishops make a difference rapidly. And because
you’re not the elected leader of a new government with a manifesto to
implement and a structure designed to do that for you, the rate of change
is bound to be slow. And I’ve said from the start that my job isn’t to be
a kind of government leader, to impose a line. And that’s one of the
challenges: what does leadership mean in the context of the Church? It
involves a great deal of listening, trying to make sense of people to each
other, and out of that trying to find what’s possible, in your own prayer
and discernment, as to how to nudge things foRW:ard. So it can be a slow
process, it can be a frustrating process but I think that’s partly the way
Christian leadership anyway is set up and very much the way in which
Anglicans have tended to do the job [laughs].

MAS: When you talk about change, you say it has to be slow, but in what
direction do you see yourself changing the Church?

RW: I think the main thing in terms of specific structures, programmes and
hopes that’s emerged in the last year or two has to do with what’s summed
up in Bishop Graham Cray’s report on the “mission-shaped Church”. How do
we find the kind of structural flexibility that doesn’t undo what’s good
in how we do things at the moment, which responds effectively and fairly
promptly to new expressions of Church life that are around, tries to keep
proper channels of communication of what’s new and to give permission? And
actually I think although that’s happening slowly, the ownership of that
kind of vision of how the Church might move has happened surprisingly
fast. Implementing it is another matter, but I think the idea that we move
away from a purely monolithic Church of England where only the parish
system is taken seriously – there’s a lot of head of steam behind that. So
that’s one obvious change. It’s got to be a Church which can travel fairly
lightly in terms of its structures and respond quite flexibly to where its
new needs arise. I think it’s happening.

MAS: How would you like to be judged at the end of your tenure?

RW: Mercifully! [laughs]

MAS: What would be your measures of success?

RW: Two things, and they’re both quite ambitious. And yes, I’m setting
myself up for judgment here. They are, I suppose, a Church that is looking
more flexible, which is able not simply to regard its numerical strength
in terms of who’s in a pew on Sunday morning, but to think of all the
networks of Christian activity that are springing up. I’d like to be
judged on how far I’ve enabled that to happen.

Secondly – this is much more ambitious – I’d like to be judged on whether
I’ve managed to persuade anybody out there that the Christian religion is
worth taking seriously intellectually and imaginatively and spiritually,
pushing it back a little bit towards the cultural mainstream. Or maybe
even drawing the cultural mainstream back towards Christianity. What it
means in practice isn’t, of course, instantly straightfoRW:ard. But when I
spoke when I was appointed about the need to capture the imagination of
the culture, that’s still a phrase which comes back to haunt me, and it’s
thrown back at me from time to time!

MAS: How do you capture the imagination of the culture?

RW: I guess that trying to take the debate out of the Church context, you
know those television programmes I did last autumn where I suppose I
attempted to say, “Let’s go and engage people thinking hard about
practical problems in our society and its future and seek to address them
in conversation from a Christian perspective.” I very much enjoyed the
engagement with Philip Pullman earlier this year. That seemed to connect
with at least some people’s interests and concerns. So I do want to keep
up that kind of engagement with the cultural and intellectual life, as
opportunity presents.

MAS: It seems such a shame that it’s got to the point now where it’s
almost embarrassing to admit that you believe in God. I met someone the
other night who was absolutely aghast when I said I did. She couldn’t
believe it.

RW: Yes: “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a religion like this?”!
[laughs] Yes, there’s a lot of that, and I think reading some of the
opinion-forming literature – the weeklies, the broadsheets – I don’t at
all subscribe to the idea that there’s some kind of secularist conspiracy
out there, but there is just that assumption that this really is not worth
thinking about and it surfaces only as a set of problems, the religious
Right, say.

One of the things that interests me a lot is how we get to talk about the
lives of religious people in a way that doesn’t instantly reduce them to
cliché and stereotype. I’ve just been dipping into the journals of Etty
Hillesum, the Dutch Jewish writer who died in the concentration camps and
thinking as I read that here is a profoundly religious person whose life,
whose way of speaking and writing about herself, whose personal
circumstances and intellectual horizons are not at all what most people
here would think of as religious, in the sense that she’s somebody who’s
engaged on the cutting edge of intellectual and cultural debate in Holland
in her time, her private life is that of a Jewish intellectual mid-century
in Europe, it’s not conventionally Christian and moral. But, as the
journals go on, as they move towards her deportation from Holland to the
death camps, you see how slowly, a very vigorous seed of religious
understanding and aspiration and practice is growing, growing all the time
and blossoms as she goes towards her death. Now, a life like that, it
seems to me, says, “This is what religious faith might be.” Don’t assume
it’s either just a conventional worshipping pattern or a rather repressive
and monochrome set of practices. Look at how it’s lived. Look at how it’s
lived. And actually the 20th century gives us a huge range of examples of
religious lives lived in critical, dramatic situations, testing
situations.

MAS: I think a lot of people don’t start to think about religion until
they’re tested.

RW: No, that’s right. And I’ve mentioned before my own huge debt to
Gillian Rose’s writings, the remarkable philosopher and social thinker,
and what Gillian wrote in her last years, when she was dying of cancer,
some of it now published in a book called Paradiso, again it’s an
illustration of a religious life of the kind you wouldn’t perhaps expect,
someone whose mind is working furiously all the time, whose imagination is
anarchic and complex, and who increasingly is drawing things together into
a fundamentally very simple commitment to God. I think to understand what
it’s all about, to understand the scope, the scale of religion, we simply
need stories like that.

MAS: How do you tell them?

RW: How do you get them out there? Yes, that’s the challenge. It’s the
sort of thing I’d like to try and write about but writing isn’t always the
best medium. I haven’t got a quick answer to that. I just want people to
be aware that they’re there.

MAS: What do you dislike about the job, apart from the attention, which I
imagine you must be getting used to?

RW: Yes. I miss the sheer regularity of pastoral contact and it’s
inevitable some of that goes in this job. I suppose, thinking of public
attention, I was thinking about this, actually, before you came. When you
are talking to someone who’s hard of hearing, you have to pitch your voice
in a certain way and keep it at that pitch. And as you can imagine, I
sometimes find this very difficult. It’s one of the things my mother used
to shout at me about in her last years. And as you pitch your voice like
that, and try and keep it audible, you become more self-conscious about
what you’re saying and perhaps more stumbling, more hesitant. It’s just
harder. The rhythms of ordinary speech go as you try to get that across.
And that struck me as one of the best analogies for trying to speak in a
position like this. Everybody’s listening – not everybody, goodness, I
delude myself! – but a lot of people are listening quite hard for nuances.
But of course when you’re speaking in the public register and nuance is
difficult to get, you get self-conscious and it’s as if you’re always
speaking to that imagined, undifferentiated audience, or at least that’s
the temptation. And I’m still struggling with that.

MAS: What about the firefighting that you’ve had to do over the past year?

RW: Well, that is really, again, just part of the turf, and I couldn’t say
that I found that a part of the job that I disliked as if that were
something that could be excluded. Managing crises, managing conflict just
is always part of the ministerial job, the bishop’s job.

MAS: Is that something you find comes easily to you?

RW: Not very. I suppose very few people find it comes that easily. Some
people are quite good at it, and the future will judge whether I’m one of
them. I don’t know. But, yes, I wouldn’t want to identify that as a bigger
problem than a lot of things. It’s just one of those factors, and being in
the job at this particular moment, well, it’s just one of the things I’ve
just got to do. Somebody’s got to do it (laughs).

MAS: How do you feel that the arguments of the past year or two make the
Church look to wider society?

RW: I think one of the things that does emerge from current conflicts is
the perception, which I guess you’re referring to, that the Church is
quite intensely interested in sexual ethics more than many other things. I
don’t think that’s a true perception, but I think it’s one of those
factors. This happens to be where the conflicts arise, so naturally a lot
of what’s seen has to do with that. If we’d been talking 150 years ago,
conflicts would have been over Cardinal Newman becoming a Roman Catholic
and that kind of thing. And at that point, the world at large might have
thought, “The Church seems extraordinarily preoccupied with matters of
ritual and authority.” These things shift from age to age.

MAS: It’s not just that you seem to be preoccupied with something that
ought to be marginal to the Church’s mission. I think that’s one thing
that people outside the Church feel. But the second thing is: just why do
they care so much about an issue that the rest of us have happily
resolved? Why do they find it so hard to resolve? It seems very
old-fashioned and dated.

RW: Two things. One is, of course, whether something is old-fashioned or
not doesn’t resolve the question of whether it’s true or not. It’s always
very tempting, I think, to go there, keeping up with what’s… I spoke
earlier about joining the cultural mainstream and I can see the temptation
there of simply thinking, “Well, there’s a cultural mainstream which flows
neatly in one direction. You just align with it.” And that really won’t
do.

The second thing is really to do with just that gulf between being a
religious believer and being a 21st-century person, which many experience,
where a lot of religious believers simply start from a set of criteria,
points of reference, assumptions that others don’t share. So it comes out
particularly where sexuality is concerned. It could come out in other
areas. There could be brick walls of understanding which suddenly emerge.
Something that one theologian said, 50 years ago, that the Christian is
always a bad political ally, because you don’t know quite when you’re
going to run into some point of reference, some standard which doesn’t
just come from the general cultural consensus.

MAS: You’re presupposing in all this that all Christians find
homosexuality a brick wall, and a lot of them don’t.

RW: No, I know a lot of Christians don’t. But I’m saying that what emerges
in this is the fact that Christians, whatever their view on this subject,
will all of them somewhere find some point of brick-walling, and it may be
that the culture will understand it as little in some other areas as they
do in this one.

MAS: But does it worry that those people who might be tempted to join the
Church, to lead a more religious life, are deterred because they think,
“How can I join an organisation which has these views, which I don’t
share, which I find bigoted?”

RW: The difficulty there, I think, is anything which suggests that, in
order to enter this frame of reference, a life of faith, first of all you
have to subscribe to the full list. And whether it’s attitudes to
homosexuality or whether it’s particular doctrinal questions, if you’re
presented first with the list to take, it would be deeply off-putting. And
what we’re not always very good at as Christians is just sort of being
there and getting on with it and leaving the door open and saying, as
invitingly as we can, “Well, look, this is here. You’re welcome to
discover why we do this and what we mean by this,” as opposed to meeting
people at the door and saying, “Well, let’s see your documents!”

MAS: You’re slightly implying that these people would be welcomed and
wouldn’t have to sign everything right away but that they would
eventually.

RW: What happens to people when they come in is very unpredictable, I
think, and if you say, “Right. You’re welcome to discover, to understand,”
there will be decisions to be made at some point. I don’t know whether we
can predict when others should be made. Take something like a doctrinal
matter, like the divinity of Christ. I don’t think in the long run you can
cope as a Christian without believing what the Creed believes. I don’t
think the sacraments or anything else make sense. Meet someone at the door
and say, “Here’s the Nicaean creed, yes or no,” and you’ve got a big
problem. Invite somebody to share, to explore to see if they can get the
logic of it, the thrust of it and the point may come when they say, “I’m
not sure about the worlds I started with, but I see how you get there” and
go a stage further. It becomes a process of induction, I guess.

MAS: A lot of people outside the Church feel, “Well, I’m not sure I want
to have anything to do with an organisation that’s even arguing about
this,” but beyond that, even if they’re prepared to accept that you’re
arguing, they feel puzzled that you can’t just come to a “live and let
live” solution, whereby no-one in England is going to say to the Nigerians
or the West Indians or Archbishop Jensen, “You have to accept gay
priests,” but equally, they shouldn’t be in a position to say to us,
“You’re not allowed to.” Is it not possible to devise a sort of loose
Communion? Why do they get so het up about what other parts of the
Communion do?

RW: Because a Communion isn’t just a kind of loose international
federation. There’s a very strong sense, I think, in the Communion that
what is done here affects what is done somewhere else. And the feeling of
being compromised by someone else’s decision is a hugely important factor
in the reaction of, let’s say, the Church in Africa. If you do this, we’re
part of the same Church family, so we are held responsible for what you
have decided.

MAS: Held responsible by whom?

RW: By their own neighbours, by other Christians in their context, by
non-Christians in their context.

MAS: In what sense? My local vicar isn’t held responsible for the attitude
of Nigerian bishops towards gay people. It doesn’t seem to work that way
round.

RW: [laughs] I don’t know, actually. Sometimes I think he may be! I’m just
trying to elucidate the fact that this is what is felt and sometimes it’s
felt too as another instance of colonialism. People make decisions in
which we have not been involved, yet we have to deal with the
consequences.

MAS: But we’re not making decisions about how they run their Church.

RW: But we are making decisions which determine how they’re perceived,
what they have to react to, what is said about them, and what can, in a
context like Nigeria, be yet another complication in the relations between
Christians and Muslims.

MAS: Does that mean then that the convoy, the Communion, is always going
to have to move at the pace of the slowest member?

RW: It’s never just done that. For the Communion as a whole, where it
wants to move on this issue is still formally an open question, I think.
You can’t assume it will go one way. Let’s say the ordination of women.
Actions in certain provinces brought others along. For whatever reason,
though, that wasn’t seen, by many people, as a matter affecting the
authority of the Bible in quite the way this is. Nor did it have quite the
same cultural intensity that this seems to have.

MAS: It did for some people.

RW: I mean outside Europe. I didn’t sense that in Africa, for example,
although there were very different policies on women’s ordination, it had
quite that intensity. I know it’s been a hugely difficult cultural
question in some contexts, but for some reason it doesn’t seem to have the
effect on people of compromising the integrity of Christian witness in the
same way that this is perceived to have.

MAS: And does that mean, then, that you don’t think it will end up being
feasible to have the same sort of arrangements in terms of oversight that
you’ve had for women priests?

RW: I don’t know at the moment. I really don’t know. The American Church
is trying to find its way on this at the moment. We’ll learn something
from that.

MAS: You’re not going to expel it then?

RW: In the middle of the Commission’s work, I really don’t want to make
any prediction.

MAS: What about the idea of a sort of Lutheran federation?

RW: It has practical attractions. The question is whether it’s cutting the
Gordian knot. Trying to be in communion, trying to have a very strong
reciprocal relationship, for instance where ministries are received, where
there are instruments of working together, and lots and lots of local
relationships between parishes and so forth, all of that is a big
investment in being together, and it’s a high-risk one. Communion is a
high-risk enterprise, because it runs into exactly the problems we’ve been
talking about. I think it’s worth trying that high-risk enterprise because
it seems to me to go a bit closer to the heart of the New Testament than
just a slightly shoulder-shrugging coexistence. Although I think it’s
worth trying our very best to maintain the Communion in those terms, in
terms of interchangeability, interrelation between local communities, and
all the regular structures that keep it going, it’s worth trying and
trying very hard and I guess again that’s the job on the table.

MAS: Is it more important than anything else?

RW: You mean more important than truth?

MAS: Yes

RW: People sometimes talk a little bit easily about sacrificing unity to
truth or truth to unity. I suppose Christians are supposed to believe that
unity has something to do with truth, that the work of holding together is
itself a converting and transforming thing, a way of recognising a level
at which we’re necessary to each other in the Christian community, and so
it’s not just a matter of getting some kind of workable compromise and
shrugging your shoulders about truth or integrity. It’s trying to find how
we can genuinely be involved with one another and learning from one
another within dependable long-term structures. So to try and work for the
sake of unity is not to say, “Anything for a quiet life” because it isn’t
in the least quiet. In fact, it’s a recipe for what can be quite a
tension-ridden and difficult relation. But I do feel that federation,
loose parallel processes, are less than we’ve got, less than we could have
and, in the very long run, less than what God wants in the Church.

MAS: But it might be better than a complete split?

RW: It might be. We’ll see. But what I’m really trying to set out is what
I think the priority has to be, the desired priority in terms of unity.

MAS: In that case, would you be prepared to sacrifice the effect that this
has had on gay believers and gay priests in the interests of unity?

RW: Whatever solution we come to is going to cost somebody and it has been
said that the interesting moral decisions are not about whether anyone
gets hurt but who gets hurt, which is a very painful thing. Very. And
whatever shape the unity takes, there’s going to be cost. It’s very
difficult to compose that cost.

MAS: Well, you’re going to have to decide who gets hurt.

RW: I’m going to have a very large role in doing it, yes.

MAS: How do you feel about that?

RW: Again, it’s probably an extreme case of what any pastor has to do at
times in the parish or a bishop in the diocese.

MAS: Turning to politics, have you talked to Tony Blair since you gave
that sermon criticising the Government over Iraq?

RW: No

MAS: Were you surprised by the reaction to it?

RW: A little. But, well, see previous remarks about attention. There’s no
such thing as 11 o’clock on Tuesday morning [laughs].

MAS: Do you see yourself as a de facto opposition?

RW: No. Truthfully, not at all. An opposition is defined by what’s coming
at you. I don’t think the Church has any business letting itself being
boxed in to that sort of job. That’s not what the Church is there for.

MAS: But you do see part of your job as to comment critically and
constructively.

RW: Yes, of course. I think the Christian gospel is bound to be putting
questions as to how we organise our society, how we make our political
decisions. We’re aware of the burden that decision-makers have and that
the questions may not have, but nonetheless they’ve got to be put.

MAS: I wondered whether you weren’t quite aware of the burdens the
decision-maker had with regard to Iraq. Just like you’re going to have to
make some messy compromises.

RW: And just as people are undoubtedly going to give me a very hard time
(laughs). No, I respect that. No, it would be impossible to ignore the
burden the decision-maker carries, especially when it’s a matter of life
and death.

MAS: Are there other areas of political life that worry you, apart from
the war?

RW: One very interesting set of encounters a little while ago was around
the whole area of prison policy. The first debate I introduced in the
Lords was on sentencing policy and we were able to have some very good
preliminary discussions here with a number of lawyers and politicians and
people from prisons charities. I think there’s a huge, huge agenda to be
followed up in terms of the way we treat our prisoners, given that we’ve
got a penal system that isn’t actually making us safer or more crime-free
at the moment. It’s extremely interesting in debates like that, and
certainly in the Lords discussion, that this is both a deeply political
and a deeply un-party issue. Political, because it’s about power and how
it is used and where, and about public perception and public opinion, but
not something on which the parties divide at all neatly.

MAS: How would you like prisoners to be treated? What is wrong with the
present system?

RW: The current system is tantamount, I think, to borrow a phrase from
Helena Kennedy, to warehousing people. The prison population has almost
doubled in the last ten or 15 years and there are more and more crimes
which carry a prison tariff. What are the alternatives? Well, the
Government has actually been doing some very interesting work with
restorative justice, on how to bring into the system elements of
conciliation, reparation, non-custodial sentences and, perhaps most
importantly of all with the Sentencing Guideline Council which is coming
into being, there’ll be opportunity for more consideration at the point of
sentencing of how you will shape the future of the prisoner committed to
prison rather than the assumption that the judge alone at that point just
makes a decision and comes often to the simplest one. But we’ve got a
dysfunctional prison system, horribly overcrowded, but also a system in
which, say, an educational programme available in one prison will not be
available in another, so a prisoner starts some kind of rehabilitative
process in prison A and is transferred after nine months to prison B,
where nothing happens. So coherence across the country would help. And
overcrowding is part of the reason for this incoherence. You’ve got to
shuttle the people around in order to get new people in.

MAS: Have you found politicians receptive about this?

RW: Yes, very. Very. There’s quite a tide flowing on this, and the Home
Office papers last year on restorative justice and one or two of the
reports that have come out already this year and the debate in the Lords
and various other things I think shows there’s a vision there. Pushing to
get the political will to take it further I suppose needs doing now.

MAS: Are you worried that the politicians are a bit too populist?

RW: Inevitably, with all parties, the point comes where the election looms
on the horizon and governments don’t get elected on prison reform
policies. But it needs some spelling out. The present system simply
doesn’t function, in either prevention or rehabilitation, very
effectively. Yet there’s the rather easy assumption that prisoners have a
very soft time of it these days, the need for a strong deterrent policy
and so forth, actually what we want is for people not to reoffend. So
there’s the challenge: how do we have a system which genuinely deals with
reoffending, especially among younger prisoners?

MAS: What other social trends alarm you? I don’t know – it might be
rampant consumerism, say.

RW: Well, rampant consumerism is nice easy one, isn’t it? [laughs] The
sort of thing that archbishops go on about, and so would I, given half a
chance. But, I suppose one of the trends that does give me some concern,
something I pick up from lots of different quarters. In the 80s we
probably woke up to the fact that quite a lot of professions and
institutional systems had never really thought about accountability. And
so the question was suddenly about audit and assessment. And that went
hand in hand with concerns about records, paper trails, the tracking down,
processes, all for very worthy reasons. I hear now from people in the
professions, people in the voluntary sector, that the burden of audit and
assessment and process in this respect can be crippling, and for small
voluntary organisations, can virtually put them out of business. It’s a
trend with a perfectly intelligible origin that comes from a deep and
understandable impatience. There was this bland assumption that it will
all be all right if good chaps run things. I think we may be due for a
swing of the pendulum on this.

MAS: That’s an organisational worry. What about people’s personal lives?

RW: It’s another social trend that impacts on people personally. What some
people call a portfolio approach to identity. You build up short-term jobs
and achievements, you don’t look for the job for life any longer and most
people of a rather younger generation assume that’s how life is likely to
be. And that’s a social trend that has to do with all kinds of things like
the break-up of classical patterns of employment and industry and the rise
of service and communications industries and all the requirements that
they have. And one of the results of it, I think, is a sort of fuzziness
about personal identity, personal integrity that can arise from that. It’s
often said – I think with some truth – that the short-term job and the
short-term relationship go together. The short-term job and the short span
of attention go together. How do you actually build, long term, a life
that has three dimensions, which has interiority and resonance? You don’t
do it just by bolting on little bits of spirituality to the edges. You
have to think about the taking of time, how we understand time, the time
we’re given, the time of our lives.

So, if I do have an anxiety, in general cultural terms, it’s how the
portfolio culture impacts on people’s sense of who they are and what they
are. And that’s not saying we need to go back to going down the mines at
16 and staying there until 65. People were rightly glad to get away from
the oppressiveness of that. But I just think we need to recognise that
that’s a problem. Look hard at what it is, particularly in our education
systems and in lifelong education that works with interiority, the inner
chamber where things have time to echo.

MAS: Have you made an effort in the past few weeks to communicate more
clearly? I read your sermon on the tenth anniversary of the ordination of
women, which was a model of clarity, and I just wondered …

RW: Why I can’t write like that all the time? [laughs] It’s not that I’ve
been trying in the last few weeks. I’ve been trying for the last 20 years
or so to write more clearly and it doesn’t seem to get any easier. At
least two things I could plead in mitigation or at least in explanation.
One is the pressure of composition. If you’re writing fast, it’s hard to
write clearly.

MAS: Try being a journalist on a daily newspaper!

RW: No, thank you. But, yes, it may sound terribly plaintive, but some
things just are difficult. And I really have to struggle on some levels to
say just what I want to say, and yes, I know, I know, I know it’s very
clotted and when it is, it’s partly having to try and formulate something
quickly and partly that sometimes the subject matter isn’t wrestled to the
ground very easily. And I think I go back to what I was saying about
talking to someone who’s hard of hearing. If everything you say goes into
more or less the same process of getting out into the public eye or public
ear, then the kind of distinction there might be between preaching to one
congregation or another, between doing a university sermon or a parochial
one, giving a lecture and a rally, all of that tends to flatten out a bit,
and I’m not coping with that very easily. As opposed to being more used to
finding the register that’s appropriate to a congregation for a university
or preaching to a congregation in Margate on an ordinary Sunday morning.

MAS: Can I ask you what I always like asking people: what are your
favourite books, poems, films, TV programmes? I know your favourite
composer is Bach.

RW: Yes, I love the St Matthew Passion and the cello suites and his double
oboe and violin concerto. I suppose some of the books I go back to with
most sheer appreciation and involvement would still be Dostoevsky.

MAS: Why?

RW: Interiority: there’s a big echo chamber there. And he’s a hugely
involving writer. Not easy, but he pulls you through. So The Idiot, where
the first 250-odd pages all take place within six hours, and you look up
at the end of it and think “Good grief!” All of that space in the book and
it’s just a very short space of time and you haven’t noticed.

Poetry: W.H. Auden still means a great deal. I don’t think there’s one
particular poem, but his Collected Works I still pull down to browse.
Among more recent people, it’s still Geoffrey Hill who I most deeply
admire. His recent The Orchards of Syon.

Films? Am I allowed to say The Railway Children? Only joking, though I do
like it. It’s Russian again, I’m afraid. Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, about
a medieval icon painter in Russia, at one end of the spectrum. For sheer
enjoyment, it would probably be a toss-up between Casablanca and Some Like
It Hot.

I watch very little television now, very little. And I don’t think there’s
anything on television now that I’d make a specific effort to be in for.

MAS: Would you say you were happy?

RW: [long pause] Hmmm… Fundamentally content. Happy in the sense of going
round feeling beamingly optimistic about things most days, no. Life isn’t
like that. Accepting gratefully where I am, yes.

MAS: One last question. What are you going to do when your first priest
signs a civil partnership with his gay partner?

RW: Oh … Pass! [laughs] Hmm…

MAS: Because it’s bound to happen, isn’t it?

RW: Bound to happen. I think this is why some people in the Church
discussions were quite concerned that civil partnerships shouldn’t be
defined just in a sexual way. There are other ways in which justice can be
done rather than everything predicated on a marital model.

MAS: Or indeed if people take you to Europe and challenge the Church’s
exemption from the Equal Treatment Directive? Are you planning for these
eventualities?

RW: We are discussing them.

MAS: Thank you very much.