Touching Cloth: Confessions and communions of a young priest

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Perfect gift for any CofE enthusiasts in your life. Funny, thoughtful, observations of the human condition in all its infinite variety. The exact origin of the idiom“touching cloth” is unknown. The only thing for certain is that the phrase began being used sometime in the early 2000s to describe someone’s urge to poop. “Touching Cloth” Examples Example Statements L ord, how can man preach thy eternal word?’ asked the 17th-century priest and poet George Herbert. ‘He is a brittle crazy glass.’ The Reverend Fergus Butler-Gallie asks this old and difficult question in a thoroughly modern way. His new book, Touching Cloth, a memoir that describes his first year in ministry following ordination, explores the challenges of the clerical vocation in a manner somewhat different from that of his Jacobean predecessor, but with an equal appreciation for the crazy.

Touching Cloth can be compared to Adam Kay's This Is Going to Hurt and the writings of the Secret Barrister' Observer For all the occasional laddish informality of the prose – “would a saint, as I did later on, jump the barriers to avoid paying 20p for a wazz at Euston?” Butler-Gallie asks while discussing charity and kindness in contemporary life – there is a warmth and wit here that recalls everyone from Wodehouse to that other godly humorist GK Chesterton, although it is hard to imagine Chesterton’s Father Brown receiving what Butler-Gallie describes as “an impromptu and ill-directed enema, courtesy of one of Britain’s dirtier rivers” while holding a merchant navy remembrance service alfresco by the Mersey. An interesting read with some deep insight and some hilarious episodes, but unfortunately interspersed with a lot more material that is informative but not as interesting or as funny as the author thinks. He does give a good description of the typical life of a low-ranking halfway-up-the-candle clergyman, but no real insight or explanation. He never really answers the question he opens with: why did he become a priest? Somehow God spoke to him as a young man, but there is no real description of that; and there are dropped hints of his clerical career coming to a screeching halt later in life as he took a job at a hellish church rife with spiritual abuse under an appalling vicar, but not much actual detail of that either. The phrase “touching cloth” means that you have to poop so badly that it is peeking out and touching the underwear or that you nearly crapped yourself.

Rather than seeking to justify the ways of God to man, Butler-Gallie places himself in the new vein of workplace memoirs based on the traditional professions. Touching Cloth can be compared to Adam Kay’s This Is Going to Hurtand the writings of the Secret Barrister, but while Kay and the anonymous advocate were scathing about, respectively, the medical and legal professions, Butler-Gallie is mostly warm and complimentary about the clergy, even as he retains a wry edge of reserve. He writes, of his ordination, that “as I am contractually obliged to tell you, it leads me to a fuller, more joyous life”, and keeps a sense of humour about the demands of his vocation. When asked by one stranger “Are you a priest?”, while in full clerical garb, Butler-Gallie muses that “I may conceivably have been a very ugly stripper”. When Fergus Butler-Gallie informed his ex-army father that he intended to become a Church of England priest, his father’s response was: “In many ways it’s not so different from the army. The outfit’s stupid and the pay’s crap. Carry on.” Thus encouraged, Butler-Gallie (born in 1991) went ahead. In his short, irreverent and hilarious book Touching Cloth, he gives us an account of his daily life as a young curate in Liverpool. Reading it, I can see he’s not nearly bland enough to have an easy career progression in today’s increasingly centralised, eccentricity-shunning C of E. So it seems to be proving: since that curacy, he tells us, he’s had two unhappy, short-lived jobs in the south of England.

To link to this term in a wiki such as Wikipedia, insert the following. [http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meaning-definition-of/touch-cloth touch cloth] The very word ‘reverend’ inspires solemnity. To be a priest is to dedicate one’s life to quiet prayer and spiritual contemplation. Isn’t it? I did find his judgments and findings of human kindness very similar to my own which gave me some connection, other than that I struggled to connect to him. Son: Trust me, Dad. If you don’t go faster and find me a toilet, a cop pulling you over is going to the be the least of your problems because I am touching cloth.

Following the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, the idea took hold that Austria had been the first casualty of Hitler’s aggression when in 1938 it was incorporated into the Third Reich.’ Like all idiomatic phrases, there are several other ways to say “touching cloth” that still convey the same meaning. Some of these other ways include: Ugaz’s case is all too familiar in Peru, where powerful groups regularly use the courts to silence journalists by fabricating criminal allegations against them.’ Yet in an affecting epilogue, he levels with the reader. He matter-of-factly describes his disappointment at failing to acquire a permanent living, and angrily calls out a minority of clerics as “manipulative and abusive, disinterested and duplicitous”. He has now left ministry, perhaps for good, and concludes that the church is, in an echo of St Paul’s words, “one body in Christ… not its silver plate or its procedures or its pomp or its promotions, but its people… the strange, awkward, wonderful, holy people”. It is ultimately the book’s humanity and compassion – as well as disbelief at Butler-Gallie’s not being able to find a place in the contemporary Anglican church – that lingers after you finish reading, rather than its farce.