Learning to be a Bishop

Meeting him again on the first day of our meeting I didn't at first recognise Bishop George Matthew - or to be more precise Bishop Geervarghese Mor Coorilis. He had not yet been ordained bishop when I last met him at the CWME meeting in Athens, amazing how wearing a different "uniform" changes how we respond to people. I couldn't at first see beyond the outer picture and so assumed this was not someone I knew - I should add that I am very bad both at remembering faces and remembering names so that doesn't help!

Bishop George comes from the Syrian Orthodox Church in Kerala, he admitted to all of us that he is still "learning to be a Bishop". Later he admitted to me that it's difficult to live up to people's expectations of him - should he drive a car or be driven by a chauffeur; what will people think if he goes out and drinks tea in the local café? Listening to him I was very humbled. We Protestants speak of vocation and yet for many of us in the west at least this kind of giving up of personal freedom in order to serve the church and the gospel is not part of our schema in the same way. In interviewing candidates for ministry in my church we would even insist on some kind of balance between public ministry and private, personal life.

In some ways Bishop George and other bishops in his church are I suppose some kind of living icon amongst the people, an icon both of the church and of the presence of Christ.

Bishop George led us in a very moving morning meditation on the second day of the meeting here, charting from his own experience the changing attitude within his church to the conversion of Dalits and to supporting the rights of Dalits - I've already packed my notes away so I won't say too much more about that for the time being. I do however very much hope that we continue to welcome him to the table of our ecumenical meetings. His calm and gentle support and encouragement to the cause of Dalits within his church and beyond it, his vocation to being both amongst his people and and an advocate within the world church, make him a very incisive voice from the South. It was a privilege to listen to him.

P.S. Travelling back on the train I saw this article in the Guardian about how a Dalit family exists on the flipside of the Indian economic miracle.