Coles - Fathomless Riches: Or How I Went From Pop to Pulpit

One of the most immensely readable and redeemable memoirs of the year. His book is an engaging account of eccentricity, curiosity and a profound spiritual journey. I give it a screamingly camp, happy-clappy thumbs up Sunday Times, Books of the Year

Full of wit and humour about finding god, and Jimmy Somerville Independent on Sunday, Books of the Year

Sex, drugs, death, religion, more sex, many more deaths it has got it all. Like a sparkling old style chasuble worn by a Spanish priest, it is difficult to ignore Guardian

He writes with charm and erudition and his take on 1980s Britain is fascinating Sunday Express

Beautifully written, disarmingly frank and utterly charming Mail on Sunday

Richards devastating honesty makes his journey from gay pop-star to celibate parish priest comprehensible even to atheists Linda Grant

It is a tale of redemption and of a sinner come to transformation... The Church of England is all the better for having such a priest within its ranks Literary Review

Richard Coles has achieved a rare thing in writing an astonishingly honest autobiography, which, alongside the sex and drugs, presents Christian faith in a way that will surely be invitingly intriguing to an audience well beyond the church... immensely enjoyable Church Times

For David

Genesis 2:18

Contents

I would like to thank Alan Samson, my publisher, and everyone at Orion; Robert Caskie, my agent, and everyone at Peters Fraser & Dunlop.

Special thanks to my editor, Gillian Stern, who discerned from my tweets a story of more than 140 characters waiting to be told and then rescued it from my 160,000-word sprawl.

Thanks also to my parishioners: long-suffering, forgiving and kind.

In a plain little room out of the sun, religious zealots in robes and beards meet to study the teachings of the founder of their sect. In the hum of their discourse and the rhythm of their prayer summaries of his teachings emerge, are worked up, recorded and broadcast to the communities he founded, fractious and disobedient, in the cities and towns of that hot and volatile region.

The teacher we know as St Paul. He lived in the first century in Palestine, and those summaries we know as his epistles, or letters, to the communities he founded. Paul was born a Jew and became a brilliant scholar, so devout and so rigorous he was charged with putting down a weird little sect that had sprung up around an itinerant rabbi from the north, Jesus of Nazareth, whose teaching was so scandalous, so threatening, that he had been handed over to the Romans and executed.

And then something extraordinary happened. Paul, who had never seen Jesus or heard him teach, encountered him in a way that was so dazzling he was at first blinded by it. When he recovered his vision he saw something never seen before: the God who created the universe fully realised in a man, the expectation of the Jewish people not only fulfilled but surpassed, and the offer of salvation for all.

Paul exhausted his exceptional intelligence and gave his life to set out why this is so, and to pass on the good news or gospel to everyone else.

Of this gospel I was made a minister according to the gift of Gods grace, which was given to me by the working of his power. To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given,to preach to the Gentiles the fathomless riches of Christ...

Pauls followers sent this document out as a round robin to the churches that waxed and waned in the cities of the eastern Mediterranean, among them Ephesus. In time the document became known as St Pauls Epistle to the Ephesians, and in that form made the final edit of the New Testament. And so for many centuries it has captivated and mystified and transformed its readers, among them me, who came into this inheritance like a neer-do-well in a Victorian novel suddenly and undeservingly enriched by an unimaginable and unforeseen largesse.

I am a sinner. My best efforts to return Christs generosity are inadequate, and even devalue the currency theyre paid in. This matters, because my lack of generosity and meanness of spirit and self-absorption contribute, in their own small way, to building a hell in heavens despite. But in spite of my inadequacies, and the inadequacies of all who struggle to live in the gap between Jesus love and our best efforts, God continually restores to us that inheritance, no matter how thoroughly we fail to be what God would have us be, no matter how insistently we fritter ourselves away on the diversions that the world in all its splendour and awfulness can offer. I have frittered much in splendour and awfulness, and I have tried to be as candid as I can about that, in order that if disgraced myself I do not disgrace Pauls calling: to preach to the Gentiles the fathomless riches of Christ.

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I know a priest who, after he had shut up shop on Christmas Day, would get into his pyjamas and take a bottle of vodka alone to bed, watch The Sound of Music and cry. An irony that a festival so commonly thought to be the one time of year when vicars come into their own should for him be a time of particular tristesse. Since the enchantment of childhood dimmed I, too, have had at least ambivalent feelings about the festive season.

One year, between falling out of pop music and getting ordained myself, Christmas for me began with a migraine, which lasted the whole day. I was with my brothers and my parents and after lunch and the Queen I went upstairs for a lie-down and tried to play Sonic the Hedgehog, the only computer game I have ever possessed. After a couple of goes, I decided I didnt need any more garishness and unreality than the day had already provided, so after a sleep I went downstairs and rejoined my family, dozing, reading, waiting for tea and Christmas cake. My mother, at least, was alert and suddenly into the silence she spoke: Darling, she looked at me, I was driving to Northampton the other day and a record came on the radio which I thought I recognised and I was right, it was the CommuNARDS (she always pronounces the name of my band with an odd emphasis on the last syllable). And, do you know, l thought it sounded really marvellous, so marvellous I was dancing around as I drove along. If anyone had seen me they would have thought I was crackers. Dont leave me this waaaay. It was really, really great. I felt myself puff with pride. I dont care what anyone says, she added.

Later on, like many gay men after a family Christmas, I decided toseek the comfort of strangers, only where could I find a comforting stranger on a freezing cold Christmas night in the middle of Northamptonshire? I pulled into a lay-by, hidden by woodland, expecting it, on this most holy night, to be deserted, but it wasnt. A car was parked in the darkness, the engine turning over but with no lights on. I parked in front of it, a few yards ahead, and noticed in my rear-view mirror something stir within. The headlights flashed. A signal. I switched on my interior light and switched it off again. After a moment the cars headlights came on and stayed on. A figure got out and came and stood in front, illuminated by the headlamps. It was a man, doing a dance, and he was completely naked apart from a bow of tinsel, which he had tied round his balls. Merry Christmas, I thought: Happy Feast of the Nativity.