Archbishop Benson’s Humming Top and Other Reflections
ADRIAN LEAK
(THE BOOK GUILD, 174 PP, £13.99)
Tablet Bookshop price £12.59 • Tel 020 7799 4064

When Adrian Leak retired from full-time ministry in 2013, he wrote his 77th and last letter to his parish magazine. His wife Josephine also wrote a letter of thanks and farewell, in which she apologised for not always having been “the sort of proactive and visible Rector’s Wife” they may have hoped for. Those capital letters say quite a lot. If one can draw any simple lesson from this enchanting little book, it is that the Church should reconsider the energetic busyness it has come to expect of such clerics and their families, and return to what really matters: prayer and contemplation.

The title essay sets the tone. On his appointment as Bishop of London in 1856, Archibald Campbell Tait was offered useful advice by Benjamin Jowett, the famous Master of Balliol. It was that he should do as little as possible. He ignored it, as did his successors, with increasing vigour until, some decades later, the eponymous Archbishop Benson described his own life as a humming top of “perpetual motion, very dizzy, hollow within, keeping up a continual buzz”.