Chris Boyle

So the Church of England has drawn the "Living in Love and Faith" process to a close, in a way that puts any pursuit of my priestly vocation out of reach for the foreseeable future. A new working group is being set up to continue looking at the question of priests in same-sex marriages, which is supposed to report back to Synod in 2028. Based on past experience, that probably means 2029 or 2030, at which point there will no doubt be a new round of painful arguments, and then I guess we'll see. But for now, that door is closed.

I think I am currently feeling less upset about this than I thought I'd be, although it might just be alexithymia fogging things up. It didn't really come as a surprise, so to some extent letting go of the uncertainty is something of a relief.

It also removes the potential complication that comes with having reinvigorated my academic vocation, coming back to the field with my mental health intact, my ADHD treated, and the general increased wisdom that comes with age. Of course academia and the priesthood is hardly a combination that hasn't been tried before, but I had been worrying slightly about what happens if I have to make a choice about which to pursue first, and now that that choice has been taken off the table I can just concentrate on my studies, and should at least be well into a PhD before the question of formal priestly discernment becomes pertinent again.

First day of lectures today. I was supposed to be starting with History of Church and Theology: Contemporary Period at 9.00, but got an email sent at 7:46 saying that it was cancelled (along with tomorrow's and both of next week's), because the professor is in India. I can't help but feel that maybe he might have known that would be happening more than 75 minutes before the lecture, by which point I'd already left the flat, but it gave me a couple of extra hours in the library, so I'm not really complaining.

Following that was Coptic II, with my favourite prof. The first half was talking about the practicalities of what the semester was going to look like, including asking for thoughts on what texts we'd like to read. There were a whole two students, so unless it turns out to be too difficult for relative beginners, then we should get to look at "The Investiture of the Archangel Michael", an apocryphal text which covers some of the same ground as Paradise Lost, which was one of my requests.

In the afternoon we had Christian Social and Political Ethics, which was reasonably interesting, although I'm actually hoping that I'm going to be allowed to swap that module for a Hebrew/Midrash one that I'm a lot more excited about. I'm not sure when I'll find out though, so until I do I'll be going to lectures for both. Afterwards I was doing some reading related to that first lecture, which talks about the necessity of social and relational ties for human beings and humanity to flourish. From time to time it used the phrase "mutual flourishing" and I kept having to remind myself that this was a book chapter written in a Roman Catholic milieu, and therefore it had nothing to do with the very specific way that phrase is used in Anglican ecclesial politics...