THOUGHT to be the oldest ordinand this Petertide, Elinor Delaney was ordained deacon in St Paul’s Cathedral on 29 June and might be 80 by the point she is priested.
“I’m living proof that when you understand what you would like, yow will discover a way through,” she says cheerfully. It is the “generosity of spirit” within the people she has encountered on the way in which that convinces her that the Church is the community to which she known as.
A fluent Welsh speaker, Mrs Delaney was born in Barry, and learnt the religion at Llandaff Parish Church. “Welsh is a lovely language. I don’t think people in England realise how much it’s used. I believe they think it’s only a quaint sideline,” she says. “But when you live within the Welsh-language community in those places, that’s all you heard.”
Her father was a Methodist, a son of the manse, confirmed as an Anglican throughout the war, and went on to worship at All Saints’, Margaret Street, in central London. Her mother was confirmed within the early Fifties, when her own father, who was a Baptist, died.
Mrs Delaney attended Howells School, a Drapers foundation, in Cardiff, which she recalls as “probably the most draconian environment. . . You needed to wear your gloves to go outside, and alter clothes on the drop of a hat.”
She went straight into nursing school after “dabbling with a spiritual vocation. The very sensible mother superior told me to go off and get qualified first.” She took two profession breaks to have her 4 children, but, when her first husband died in 1991, she needed to look to “constructing a correct profession, not only working odd hours”. She became one among five acute-pain nurses on the Royal Free.
At 50, she “had a brainstorm, thought, ‘I’ve got to do something different.’” She spent the subsequent ten years as a faculty nurse to the choristers of St Paul’s Cathedral, which she described as “the job from heaven. It’s nursing; it’s being mum to 40 boys; it’s having fun with church music. . . What may very well be higher?”
Statutory retirement was 60, but she became practice nurse to the varsity doctor for the subsequent few years before retiring again.
Along the way in which, she has been a weather presenter on Welsh television, a sideline born out of some freelance reporting on early-morning Radio Cymru. When the Met Office were on the lookout for people to present the Welsh-language broadcast, she took the plunge, learning from Bill Giles the way to compile slides from the charts coming through from Bracknell, to be checked by the qualified meteorologists.
“It was a steep learning curve,” she admits.
Mrs Delaney had felt a pull towards to ministry within the late Eighties, and applied to be a deaconess, but “between ACCM and college, when the goalposts modified”, she had a latest alternative to make — distinctive diaconate or priesthood? She opted for the latter and got so far as securing some funding, but encouragement for girls in her diocese was lacking, and, with reluctance, she pulled out.
“I’m not someone who sits around, wringing my hands,” she says. “It was the time when my husband died, and so the entire thing was parked, and there was no way, with 4 teenage children, that I could return to it. But, when one door closes, the Lord will all the time open one other.”
The open door has been at St Jude on the Hill, in Hampstead Garden Suburb, north-west London, which has been her home church since 1977, and where she has twice been churchwarden. When the church went into an 18-month interregnum, she took a major position and “really needed to run with it until the tip”, she says. “The Bishop and Emily [the Revd Emily Kolltveit, the Priest-in-Charge] decided I should be ordained: that it was something that ought to occur.”
She told them she couldn’t go to varsity for 3 years; so there was no way she could do it. “But I used to be really helpful and accepted for the St Mellitus Caleb stream,” she marvels. “I’ve had probably the most wonderful time, studying with young people, and if all goes in accordance with plan, I’ll be priested next yr.
“I used to be told after I first began, ‘You go to theological college to find how much you don’t know,’ and there was an awful lot. But it’s been so insightful and helpful, and there’s been such acceptance and generosity. You’re never on your individual, which is great.”
She continues: “Basically, I’m doing what I’ve all the time done. I’m officially the pastoral lead now, and what’s so lovely about that’s that I’m not secretary to the PCC, I’m not the electoral-roll officer. . . Administration has been taken off me, which is so liberating! The congregation have been so supportive of all the things that I even have been doing within the church. They’ve been magnificent all through and so generous of their appreciation.”
Her elder granddaughter was one among her supporting companions at her ordination, and “even my oldest, who is completely against institutional church, said: “Mum, go for it: you’ve all the time desired to do it.”
Ms Kolltveit says: “Eli brings incredible wisdom, dedication, spirituality, and patience to her ministry, but in addition a Peter Pan-like energy. She really engages in Jesus’s call to be like children, to stay inspired by the wonder and awe of the world, and to search out newness and mystery within the human journey.
“And she never wastes a day; she’s all the time got something to do and she or he puts God’s people first with a deep love and kindness for everybody. She’s also sensible to minister alongside and now we have a extremely good laugh together. I’m really looking forward to this next season and I do know we are going to proceed to learn from one another throughout her curacy.”
Read more in our Petertide features and full ordination lists with photos
