Where angels dare
The Dean of Auckland, preparing for a move to head office, says she’s a cup-runneth-over sort of woman.
The Dean of Auckland, preparing for a move to head office, says she’s a cup-run-net-hover sort of woman.
If it weren’t for the bunches of sweetsmelling spring flowers, you might charitably describe the office of the Dean of Auckland, the Very Reverend Jo Kelly-Moore, as austere. It could be the office of a middle manager in a dusty business that sells something dull, like paper clips, say, instead of faith.
You might, should you glimpse the Dean at a distance, describe her as austere, too. She has very black hair cut in a severe bob, and headmistressy black-framed specs. The day we meet, she’s wearing her clerical garb, which is as black as her hair, a simple cross and the expected white clerical collar. She should look rather stern but has twinkling black patent leather wedge heels and a twinkly smile to match. She’s anything but dull and could almost, as I’ll find out, sell angels to an atheist.
Her house is just down the road from Holy Trinity Cathedral, where she’s the boss. She says it’s “like a florist’s at the moment”, full of flowers and cards and cupcakes and warm wishes. She has just been appointed the Archdeacon of Canterbury Cathedral in Kent, the spiritual home of the Anglican church, and one of the loveliest and most loved cathedrals in the world.
It was founded in 597. Thomas Becket, that turbulent priest, that thorn in the side of his king, Henry II, was murdered there in 1170. “I’ve seen the spot,” Kelly-Moore says. So, wow!
“Exactly,” she says, twinkling. She’s very excited, and that she’s to be the Archdeacon of Canterbury is, she says, “beyond my imaginings”.
“It is an extraordinary privilege. This is like going to the Vatican, if you’re a Catholic. This is head-office stuff.”
I suggest that her new cathedral is rather prettier than her present one, to which she takes mild umbrage. “Oh! I quite like ours. Actually, I’ve walked into our cathedral with two Archbishops of Canterbury, Rowan Williams and Justin Welby,
and both said: ‘Wow! This is an amazing place.’” They might have just been being polite. “Oh, I don’t think so, actually. I think we’re blessed here. Our stained glass … People come from all over the world to see this place.”
Kelly-Moore has conducted the funerals of famous people here: Sir Paul Holmes, Martin Crowe, Sir Wilson Whineray. Holy Trinity Cathedral is where the funerals of celebrities are held.
I wondered what a priest who’s often in the reflected glare of that sort of spotlight has to have. Ambition is not a word the church is fond of, but ambition must come into getting the “head-office stuff”, surely? “I think it’s about your gifts and talents.” And also, probably, charisma. “Charisma is a bit of passion.” Does she have charisma, then? “I think I’ve got energy. Charisma in my work is being able to stand up in front of a grieving com- munity and have them trust you, that you can lead them through this ritual of farewell and feel safe to cry and to laugh and go through this journey.”
But she’s more than a safe pair of guiding hands. She says she thinks she’s “allowed to be chuffed” about her new big job. It would be rude to God not to be, because she and her husband, Paul, and their two sons ask God for guidance in all that they do.
She says there’s no right and wrong with her god. “There are two rights: God’s with you whichever way you turn. But in this situation, I think we discovered between us that God was suggesting a direction and then …”
He, or She, is a very nice God. The Anglicans do not do fire and brimstone or lightning bolts from above. They do chats. They don’t do gender because, she says, “I think God is way beyond any definition of gender”.
Heaven and Hell are “God’s business”, but she does, actually, believe in Heaven and that she will go to there, which she thinks will look more like this world than we expect. Where’s the fun in that? “Well, I think life’s quite fun, don’t you?”
Her idea of Heaven is a place (if it is a place) where everyone has enough to eat and a place to live and where the skaters who defy the signs outside the cathedral prohibiting skateboarding will be going “in the right direction so as not to knock over the old lady in Heaven”.
I wonder whether bad buggers get to go to Heaven and she gives me what is for her a headmistressy look, over her headmistressy specs and says: “Ah, well, who knows? That’s their choice.” What about the atheists: Heaven or Hell?
“You can tell me when you get there!” By ringing her up? “I’ll give you my number.”
I think she might secretly hope that atheists do go to Heaven because she has lots of lovely atheist friends and she loves them “to bits” and loves having “lively” conversations with them about the God-versus-no-God question. “It makes my life rich and full.”
She doesn’t try to convert them, but why not? Shouldn’t she at least give it a go, since she thinks it’s lovely to believe in God? “Oh, I think ‘lovely’ is a pretty wussy word. Ha, ha.” A better word then? “I think it’s the best way of life for the world, because it offers us a way of living that – regardless of the academic knots we can tie ourselves in about the virgin birth and resurrection from the dead – if everybody did one more good thing in the world every day, boy, the world would be a better place.”
I say that many atheists subscribe to that way of living and she says she wouldn’t disagree. “However, I would say, ‘Where do we find the source of that love and where have we seen it best modelled?’ I find it in the scriptures and in the person of Christ.” So I suppose we have agreed to agree in some weird sort of way that I’m still pondering.
I ask a theological question: how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? She laughs like anything. Is that a theological question or just a nice piece of whimsy? “Ha, ha. Oh, look, I think millions upon millions. That’s the wonderful mystery of life in the universe.” She believes in angels. “Absolutely.” What are they? “Oh, I think the presence of God made known. I think it’s the mystery of Heaven and I think we understand the eternal in myriad different ways. I hope there are angels.”
You can’t hope things are true just because they’re a nice idea. “Well, you can. I hope it’ll be fine tomorrow for the picnic. That’s a nice idea.” What if it’s raining? “We’ll have the picnic inside!”
She believes in angels, then. She believes in the Resurrection, of course; she “wouldn’t hang my hat” on virgin birth, but she’s “prepared to believe in a virgin birth [that] wasn’t quite as Christian tradition might have held it out”.
She believes gay people should be allowed to be Anglican priests. If anyone could win over the portion of the Anglican church that’s opposed to the idea, I imagine it would be her.
You can see why she’s such a successful priest – if that’s the right way to put it. She almost managed to make me think that angels, just possibly, can dance on the head of a pin. Why not?
She believes in angels as “the presence of God made known. I think it’s the mystery of Heaven.”
Ihope she gets a grander office in Canterbury, but I imagine she’d be as happy as a lark in a box room under the stairs. And you could put her in a box room under the stairs and you would still, should you wander in to see her, think of spring flowers and cupcakes and warm wishes. She might be the happiest person I’ve ever met (and I have met a lot of clergy) and quite possibly the good-est. She exudes joy.
It’s hard not to make her sound like a Pollyanna, a Little Miss Sunshine, a cupcake with sprinkles on top. She’s not a bit saccharine, or stuffy, but she wouldn’t mind being described as a do-gooder and a goody-goody. She says, “Look, if that’s on my headstone, I’d be a happy woman.”
We did sin. Or I tried to. She has never smoked a cigarette or got drunk. “No I have not.” Would getting drunk be a sin? “If I got into my car and killed someone on the way home, it might be. I believe we have to respect our bodies.” So if she got fat, would that be a sin? “Ah, I don’t think so. But I might want to think about healthy living and that’s about respecting ourselves.”
She does dye her hair, which might be vanity, which might be a very small sort of sin. “Oh, probably a bit.” Or it might, she says, be because she started going grey at the age of 15, and when, at 27, people began asking if her then young children had left home, she thought: “Actually, this is awful. It’s dignified for my male friends to have grey hair, it isn’t for women.”
Her idea of a sinning is to speak rudely to somebody, or a sin of omission: “That time I could have responded to somebody more generously than I did.”
She seems to have been born good. The most rebellious thing she has done was to become a priest, which is pretty funny. She grew up in Lower Hutt, the only child of “blue-collar” parents, who bought their state house. Her father was a government chauffeur; her mother mostly a stay-athome mum, who later worked for the then Post Office in office administration and “making sure cups of tea and coffee were available for guests”.
They were Church of England but not churchgoers, although her mum would take her to Sunday school. Kelly-Moore took to the church like a duck to water and found it encompassing and welcoming. She became very involved in church life, and it stuck.
She went to Victoria University, got her degree in law and French and became a commercial litigation lawyer here, for Bell Gully, and later in England. She met her English social worker husband at a Christmas church service in Wellington. They married in London and have two boys, now aged 13 and 15. He’s the primary caregiver and is also a funeral celebrant and does part-time pastoral care work at the cathedral.
She couldn’t have married a man who wasn’t a Christian. “No. Because it’s who I am. It’s so integral to everyday decisionmaking, to our philosophy as a family.
You know, it’s quite a lifestyle choice.”
She’d thought no further about studying theology beyond considering that she might one day like to explore her faith academically. She was pondering, though, whether the law was the career she wanted to spend her life in and decided it wasn’t.
She went back to university to do a theology degree and people began saying, “Have you ever thought about ordination?” So she did think about it, and spoke to the then bishop at the cathedral and that was that, really. “It just felt profoundly right.”
She says she was born a happy person, an optimist. “Yeah. I am an optimist and the cup for me – you know,
I’m blessed that it’s overflowing.” She doesn’t even mind if, at the end, there is no God. “It’s been a great life. I don’t happen to believe that, but in the end, it’s a great life and I wouldn’t choose it any other way.”
Her father died too young, of “a horrible cancer”. Where is God in suffering? “As close as my breath.” She has never struggled with her faith, another way in which she’s blessed, she says.
She gets a really cool new house with her new job. Actually, it’s a really cool, really old, new house. “Google it,” she says. It’s the Archdeacon’s House, in the precinct of the Canterbury Cathedral, built circa 1400. Wow again. She says,
“If you’d said to me, when I was a young lawyer, ‘One day you’ll be the Archdeacon of Canterbury’, I’d have roared with laughter.”
She does have a lively sense of humour. As she sees this atheist off the cathedral premises, the new Archdeacon of Canterbury says: “God bless.” Proof, if any more were needed, of Kelly-Moore’s eternal optimism.