I’ve been very quiet here and elsewhere in recent months. It’s down to the combination of getting a diagnosis and treatment for the extreme hip pain that had led to me having to attend the July Synod at York online, then the long voting period for the General Synod elections, plus the necessary reading and meeting for the Oxford Crown Nominations Commission (CNC: the group that finds the next bishop) and then my husband’s heart attack and cardiac arrest in mid-September. To update anyone interested in any of those, I am now free from pain and in the care of a superb physio, I was re-elected to Synod and my husband is making an excellent recovery despite also having had hospital-acquired pneumonia. CNC work continues, but under an oath of confidentiality, so that’s your lot, there.

And the main message I have for you, reader, is a dual one: if your instinct is that something is badly wrong, trust that and dial 999 immediately rather than having a little think about it, because that saves lives; and tightly hug the ones you love, because they may not be with you tomorrow. You could try to draw all sorts of lessons for the Church of England from that, but I will leave that work to you.

One thing I learned very forcefully during the time my husband was in hospital was the power of community. I don’t drive, but neighbours and friends from our town were there to take me to the hospital and bring me back. They fed me and were sensitive to whether I wanted to curl up in a corner with a tray, or eat with others. They brought flowers and little gifts. One friend even helped me clear up the considerable chaos in the room where it all happened; when it’s life or death, paramedics leave sharp and otherwise nasty stuff everywhere, and quite right too, because every second counts. Weirdly, when I spoke to more distant friends and family, they assumed this was support from the church community but, while some of these lovely people are associated with churches, most aren’t. We delude ourselves if we think that the churches have a monopoly on supporting people. As for the ambulance service, everyone involved was brilliant, and one of the first things my husband did when he felt up to it was to write and thank them.

So, community; and deep gratitude. And there’s something more, which it took me longer to process. There is a term used in the sudden cardiac arrest community (and yes, I have found and joined this special community) which I have found very helpful: co-survivor. What I witnessed I can’t un-see. When my husband was not conscious, I was. When the ambulance stopped so he could be brought back to life, I knew what was going on. Some people give CPR to a stranger, others to a friend or family member. It’s impossible to rank these different experiences. All of them are traumatic and they catch up with you at unexpected moments; flashes of what we saw, which can only slowly be overridden by more positive images. In church last Sunday, we sang the hymn ‘I cannot tell, why he whom angels worship’ and the words which jumped out at me were ‘calms our lurking fear’. When you have witnessed anything like a heart attack or cardiac arrest, the lurking fear that it will happen again remains with you, and it takes many weeks for it to settle down; to get over the hyperanxiety which leads to a stress response on just hearing a cough or seeing a change of facial expression.

What’s any of this got to do with General Synod, other than the basic reminder that some things really are life or death, and being elected or not doesn’t make it into that category?

I’m involved in talking to various new members of Synod, and also to those who served in the previous quinquennium, and it occurred to me that the latter are my co-survivors. We’ve been through the same experiences, in particular some particularly hideous ‘small group work’ when we have been put in the same room as people who had previously made speeches that called us false teachers and sinners, and we’ve been expected to smile nicely and work together. Some of us can brush this off: others find this harder and are more easily triggered. Those of us on the 2021-2026 Synod have become used to the scenario in which any debate, on any subject, somehow morphs into a debate on same-sex relationships. It’s hard to go into a new quinquennium without remembering the old one.

So if you are reading this hoping for an in-depth analysis of the composition of the new Synod, sorry, but that’s not at the forefront of my mind right now. Somehow, we need to move on from the past five years and from the dynamics of that quinquennium. I am more interested in how we can work together, not just on the many important topics that will come before us from the world and from nation and from our internal concerns about money, vocations, mission and ministry, but also when we come up against the debates we had so many times in the previous five years. If you want some detail, apparently 52% of this Synod consists of new members: so 48% of us are co-survivors of the old one. The vast majority of candidates were signed up for the election with Together for the Church of England or with the Alliance, and those overlap with people who stood on a Save the Parish platform. But that doesn’t mean that members agree with everything in the manifesto, or statement of belief, of their ‘party’. Nor is Synod designed as a two-party process.

If we are going to survive the next five years, all of us need to find a sense of community; of what we share, of what we are grateful for, and of our place in our own communities and in our nation.