I always knew the C4 Faculty was coming. It’s the unwritten chapter in the syllabus for any ordinand who has been divorced: the process where you ask the Archbishops for permission to proceed.
I spent months worrying about it. I worried about the invasion of privacy. I worried about the outcome. But looking back, the thing that actually paralysed me wasn’t the theology or the shame—it was the silence.
I was told simply to “speak to someone about the C4”. There was no deadline. No countdown.
For my dyslexic brain, which thrives on the pressure of a due date, an open-ended instruction is like a void. So, I just sat on it. For months. I let the task grow into a monster in my mind, not because it was hard, but because it was undefined.
When I finally forced myself to start, the monster didn’t disappear; it just changed shape. It became paperwork.
I remember staring at the forms and feeling my brain misfire. I answered questions backwards. I put down the wrong dates. I struggled to sequence the events of my own life on paper. At that moment, I felt a deep, hot flush of judgment. But I realised later that I wasn’t feeling judged for my past marriage; I was feeling judged for my current competence. My DDO hadn’t made the assessor aware I was dyslexic. They were seeing errors and thinking “careless”; I was experiencing a processing barrier and feeling stupid.
The turning point wasn’t a spiritual revelation. It was a practical admission.
Once I finally explained the dyslexia—that I wasn’t being difficult, I was just wired differently—the temperature in the room changed. We stopped fighting the forms and started navigating them. Having the questions explained to me verbally, letting the spoken word guide the written text, changed everything.
The fear began to lift.
And then came the moment I had dreaded most: the interview. My wife and I sat with the person compiling the report. I was braced for the “gotcha” question, something totally left field that would derail everything.
It never came.
Instead, I sat there and listened to my wife talk about me. For half the conversation, I wasn’t the subject of an enquiry; I was the subject of her affection. She spoke about how we met, how we grew, and who she sees when she looks at me. I wasn’t even in the room for all of it, but I didn’t need to be. I caught the gist.
It was oddly cathartic. Much like the psychological assessment, the C4 process forced me to stop hiding the timeline of my life. It required me to lay it all out—the divorce, the calling, the dyslexia, the mess, and the grace.
I went into the process thinking I needed to prove I was “good enough” despite my past. I came out, realising that the process wasn’t about proving anything. It was about being known.
If I could go back and tell my slightly younger, frozen self one thing, it would be this: Tell them how your brain works.
The Church has a process for the legalities, but they can’t help you with the practicalities unless you let them in. The paperwork is just paper; it’s the conversation that actually matters.