A Welsh poet to save the Church of England

The Archbishop of Canterbury has indicated that he will resign in the autumn and already, like bookies and punters inspecting the horses as they are led round the paddock, the churchspotters are eying up the runners who could succeed him. Will it be the Bishop of London, who likes the Book of Common Prayer, or the Archbishop of Wales, who was an Oxford professor, or the go-ahead Bishop of Liverpool or the Bishop of Rochester, who has the advantage of being of Pakistani origin?

For many readers of this newspaper, the identity of the next Archbishop of Canterbury is one of the least interesting questions of the day. The names of the "favourites" are unknown to them and to a population, which has not merely given up going to church but has all but lost touch with Christianity, it is scarcely very interesting to know how Bishop So-and-So differs from Bishop Whatshisname over esoteric matters like the consecration of female bishops.

The outgoing Archbishop, Dr George Carey, is, we are reliably told, an amiable fellow, but it is fairly safe to say that most people in Britain have no idea who he is and in a year's time no one will remember him. How different from the days when William Temple succeeded Cosmo Gordon Lang and when the Church was still a focal point for the spiritual life of the nation.

It would be cruel to blame George Carey for the fact that Christianity in the West would seem to be on its last legs. Yet there are some lessons to be drawn from the past decade, in which Carey has been in office.

When Geoffrey Fisher resigned as Archbishop of Canterbury, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan said that having had a Martha in control, the Church was in need of a Mary.

What he meant was that Fisher was an autocrat, a former headmaster of Repton, a bossy, not very clever man. The Church needed a contemplative, an intellectual, a man of the inner life. Macmillan chose Michael Ramsey, arguably the oddest person ever to occupy St Augustine's throne - a melancholic, someone whose brother had taught Wittgenstein the philosophy of mathematics, and who said things on telly such as: "I think there will be atheists in Heaven." His biographer and press secretary described Ramsey, when touring Australia, lying on a bed with his legs in the air, chanting: "I hate the Church of England, I hate the Church of England."

When Radio 4's Thought for the Day makes me think that I am not merely a Doubting Thomas, but that I would support moves for the state persecution of Christianity; when the holy rollers running the Alpha Course confirm in all of us the sense that we definitely don't believe a word they say; when my feeling of sympathy with my Christian roots reaches rock-bottom, I think of Michael Ramsey. I think of his deep intelligence and his holiness. He used to say that he spent half an hour preparing to pray and hoped that in the last minute something like a prayer would happen.

Now, many people said that during his pontificate the Church of England declined in numbers and influence. That is statistically true. But, though it lost numbers, it did not lose face. It seemed like a place where prayer could, in TS Eliot's words, be valid. It seemed like a place which was liberal in the best English sense, inclusive and yet unworldly. Its values were not those of the world. There was, while Ramsey was there, some connection between the unbelieving multitudes, the Christian past, the beautiful old buildings and the actual day-today spiritual life of Christians and non-Christians.

Thinking about Ramsey, and remembering him, always makes me know that for all my sins and all its faults, I could never entirely abandon the Church of England - or, come to that, Christianity. Is such a man waiting in the wings who could once again revitalise the Church in the way that Ramsey did, simply by being a bit of a saint?

We don't need a good administrator. Nor does it matter where the preferred candidate "stands" on boring issues of the day. Nor does it matter, except in the broadest sense, whether he is a "traditionalist" or " progressive". It should be someone who reads and who prays; someone who in his own person demonstrates that the Anglican way of doing both these things - reading and praying - can still have validity in a godless or multicultural Britain.

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Wales, is not merely a professor and a man of prayer. He is also a poet. If you haven't read Remembering Jerusalem (Perpetua Press, Oxford, £5) buy it and see what you think. His description of Tolstoy's death - "all the words came tumbling/backwards out of his dream" - seems quite marvellous. His image of the anorexic Simone Weil wishing, as she died, that her guts could be hollowed - "till I'm a bone the sentenced god can whistle through" is perhaps as good an image as any of our sad, threadbare but still just surviving Church. What a bold choice, if Rowan Williams were selected. But it might be just what we need - and by "we" I mean those millions of us who do not believe in the conventional sense any longer but who regard ourselves as pious fellow-travellers.

We do not want the Church to die. We value what the Church has been in this country since the Elizabethan Settlement - with its Protestant love of learning and intellectual liberty, and its Catholic reverence for sacrament and liturgy.

We do not want Canterbury Cathedral to become a visitor centre or museum. It is up to the Church to choose for itself a leader who reminds us of what we value about this inheritance - to be "a bone the sentenced god can whistle through".

Many Anglicans would be glad that the choice is not left to me - but if it were I'd go for Rowan Williams, poet, theologue and pastor.