In thinking about human goodness, I have found something said by the philosopher William James helpful. He divided religious geniuses into once-born and twice-born types. The once-born were people of uncomplicated goodness who were uninterested in themselves and were therefore easily taken for granted. They may find themselves in situations of conflict and moral complexity, but their calm integrity is impervious to the pressures and temptations that can wreck the lives of more conflicted characters. Their spiritual lives flow like quiet rivers to the sea. The lives of the twice-born are more tumultuous, which is why they are usually more interesting. Their personalities are often a problem to them, and their lives are often marked by crisis and conflict. Unlike the untroubled constancy of the once-born, the twice-born have to rush over waterfalls and crash among rocks before making it to the sea.
James’s typology is too stark to capture the variety of human types, even in religion, but his once-born description did fit Lilias. Unlike many people who dedicate themselves to the service of others, there was no sense of strain in her, no aura of grim attendance to duty. Radical behaviourists say there is no such thing as pure altruism; there is always a payback; an answer to some kind of need is always being met. This dismissal of disinterested altruism – which has been called ‘the hermeneutics of condescension’ – is usually a variant of envy, but sometimes it fits the bill. The clue to the payback-altruist is self-consciousness: ‘I am labouring heroically to make the world a better place and you are enjoying yourself – shame on you.’ This is the result of tension in the committed because there is no effortless flow of goodness in them. Their commitment comes from conscience not compassion, the head not the heart, which is why it can come over as cold and unattractive. True and unaffected goodness is more intestinal than cerebral in origin, which is something the Bible understands. In the Parable of the Good Samaritan, an explosive Greek verb lies at the heart of the story. We are told that after the Priest and the Levite pass by the man fallen among thieves, the Samaritan goes to his aid because he is moved with compassion. Behind the verb used here, esplanknise, there lies a noun meaning entrails or bowels. At the sight of the naked man bleeding at the roadside, the Samaritan’s guts were wrenched with such empathy that it obliterated all self-protective caution and calculation. History has many examples of such passionate behaviour, much of it contrary to the survival instinct that is supposed to control all our actions.
We are close here to the difference between intuitive and intentional goodness. Unlike someone like Lilias, who was intuitively good, the intentionally good have to work hard at it. And it can show. They may perfect the acts of love but they never learn the dance because they never lose themselves. The intuitively good are unaware of themselves in these costly transactions, the intentionally good always are, which is why they are destined always to be Salieri and never Mozart. Though there is something admirable in the determination of the intentional person to act well, they can be difficult to be around, especially if you yourself are harbouring doubts about your own capacity for unself-conscious goodness. There was none of that sense of strain in Lilias, no guilt-inducing emanations, no detectable twists or corkscrews in her psyche, no heaviness of purpose or duty. She was unself-consciously, joyously herself. I knew I was a phoney, a priest actor trying out a different part. Phonies are envious of the genuine and either keep their distance or are powerfully attracted to them. Lilias fascinated me because it was obvious she was the genuine article. What was that phrase from the Letter to James that had always puzzled me? ‘No shadow cast by turning.’42 My turnings cast shadows, not least in my own mind. I could detect no shadow in Lilias.
Geoff’s goodness was different, more agonistic, which is why I found him both more interesting and more threatening. I was certain he struggled with his commitment to be available to those who needed him, but he never seemed to be defeated by the struggle. And he was no stranger to theological crisis, either. In fact, he seemed to me to be close to Schweitzer both in his actions and in the theological conflict that precipitated them. He no longer wanted to talk about God or religion; he wanted to act. His life became active goodness. There was effort in that goodness, but it never seemed to fade or need time out, as mine did. A sadly precise little memory captures the difference between us.
We were all members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and Geoff was the Glasgow Chairman. As well as local demonstrations, including some imaginative dramatisations of the effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki crafted by Geoff for performance in Glasgow’s George Square, we decided one year to join the annual Aldermaston March in London. I saw it as an opportunity to go to the movies after the march in one of the great London picture palaces, and headed south on my own. Geoff saw it as an opportunity to give some of his teenagers a jaunt to England, so he drove a gang of them down in his old Bedford van. When we met, as planned, after the march he asked if I would come back north with them in the van that night to share the driving. He was knackered. Goodbye to my plans for a night in London. Sure, I said. He got us out of London. I took over while he dozed. I couldn’t manage his vehicle, which was an eccentric monster to drive. After one hair-raising swerve out of danger that had the guys in the back cheering, Geoff woke up and took over. No complaint. He drove with determination for eight hours while I sat beside him fretting at losing a night at the movies while contributing nothing to the journey home. It said it all.
7
BROADWAY
When I was ten I tried to start a correspondence with a pen pal. I got his name from an American comic paper bought from Kinniburgh’s in Bank Street. His address was in Arizona, and that was enough for me. Arizona was a very un-Scottish word – we didn’t have zeds in the middle of names – but I felt I knew it as well as I knew the Loch and the Ben. It featured in the novels of Zane Grey – and wasn’t Zane itself a great name? A zed in it too. The library in Alexandria had his novels, most of which I had devoured, and many of them had been turned into movies, movies I had seen, movies set in the mythic South-West, land of sagebrush and tumbleweed and lonely drifting heroes. Wyoming. Utah. Those names also conjured up the myth of the American West, but none more so than Arizona, a word that rolled more easily off the Scottish tongue – though Colorado was pretty good, too, with that great rrrr in the middle. But it wasn’t just Zane Grey. The Vale library had an enormous collection of Westerns, most of which I read: Louis L’Amour, Max Brand . . . But for me Luke Short was the chief. He had even more movies to his credit than Zane Grey, and I found more of an edge to his writing than the stately Zane’s. Luke Short’s Ramrod was made into a good film, starring Joel McRea and Veronica Lake, but it was Blood on the Moon with the lazy-eyed Robert Mitchum that grabbed me. I lived that classic theme in my imagination. Far away from Alexandria I drift along the American frontier on my faithful horse, the only friend I have. One day I ride into a community held in the grip of fear by a rancher whose cowboys shoot up the town and terrorise its citizens. His only opposition is a small farmer and his beautiful but determined daughter. I sort out the bad guys and win the heart of the farmer’s daughter. But what followed varied. Sometimes I settled down with her and hung up my gun, but sometimes I had to bid her a reluctant farewell, for I was not as other men were and had to move on to other challenges. Before the credits came up at the end of my private movie, she stood behind the white picket fence and waved me onto another lonely adventure. I roamed the hills of the Vale in my body, but in my imagination I was in America far across the sea, in the words of my mother’s Hogmanay lament. America seemed far away and very close, thousands of miles across the sea, yet just round the corner at the Strand in Bank Street or up the road at the library in Gilmour Street.
So I was excited by the prospect of having an American pen pal, especially one who lived in Arizona. I wrote to him during one of the long double summertime evenings of the war when it never got dark, sitting on the doorstep of 31 Random Street, composing onto a page of my school jotter. I wasn’t s
ure how to end the letter till a mild deception occurred to me. There were a number of ways to calibrate social distinctions in the Vale, the most obvious of which was whether your lavatory was inside your house or outside like ours. Another distinction was having hot water. We didn’t. But for children the real difference was having stairs in your house. The big establishments up the hill had upstairs and downstairs inside, while the houses below Main Street were all on one level, whether tenements, cottages, or two-storey terraces with outside stairs. To have stairs inside distinguished you from the lives of people who had to live their days on one level. I decided to impress the boy from Arizona with a piece of sophistry. There were two steps outside our door, and I was sitting on the wider bottom one to write. I decided to end my letter to Arizona with a pretentious flourish: ‘Now I must finish this and go upstairs to bed. Goodnight.’
The fact that he never replied did nothing to quench my interest in America. I was intrigued by the knowledge that I had an unknown grandfather somewhere over there. Even at Kelham the interest in America had not waned. It was Thomas Merton, the American monk, who had stimulated my interest in the Cistercians. Apart from the romance of American monasticism, there were always the movies, as close now as they had been in my Random Street days, with the New Bedford and the Coliseum just round the corner in Eglinton Street to keep the habit going. So it is not surprising that at the beginning of my second year in Gorbals I was excited by an advertisement announcing four travelling scholarships to the USA under the auspices of the English Speaking Union. I saw the ad in the Glasgow Herald, calling for applications from young Scots likely to benefit from a month in the USA exploring areas of work similar to their own. Though he left me to my own devices, I was still technically a curate under Canon Bullough at Saint Ninian’s in Pollokshields. As tolerant as ever, he encouraged me to have a go. I got my application in early, was called to interview and weeks later heard I’d been successful. I was going to America!
Four of us, two men from Glasgow and two women from Edinburgh, set off from Prestwick at the end of September 1961. The cheapest way to fly to America in those days was also the slowest: thirteen hours by Icelandic Air in prop planes, with several hours spent on the ground in the airport in Reykjavik. None of us minded. It was the first time I’d been off the ground, so the journey was as exciting as the destination. We were aiming for Philadelphia, where most of our time would be spent, with side visits to Baltimore and Washington. But it was the prospect of four days in New York City at the end of the trip that caught my interest. They billeted us with wealthy families in Philadelphia’s Mainline, most of whom were conservative Republicans, but one host was a founder member of Americans for Democratic Action, a liberal pressure group in the Democratic Party. I liked the whole family, but it was the daughter who provoked me into a fit of Hopkinsian verse. ‘Meredith wore her hair in a wind flung far flown flash of flame’, and more of the same. She was unmoved by the effusion. I was secretly relieved. It was America I was falling for, not her. I was taken to my first drive-in movie by another young woman, a prominent lawyer’s daughter. The sight of the closed steamed-up windows of the other cars at the drive-in was promising, but Brooke reminded me that our outing was a cultural exchange not a date. We parked beside one of the hearing posts, placed the speaker on the middle of the dashboard, put the tub of popcorn on the seat between us, and watched the movie, sucking on our root beers – with the windows open to the balmy night.
But it was Manhattan I’d really come to see, and when we got there at the end of October it did not disappoint. When we arrived at the mid-town office of the ESU I was told they’d billeted me with Dr Kennedy, ‘a lovely man’, at Union Theological Seminary, a place whose reputation I knew something about. Union was a well-known postgraduate destination for Scottish Divinity students, for whom a number of attractive scholarships were on offer. It was while they had been at Union that Geoff and Walter had been inspired to start the Gorbals Group. UTS was up on Broadway between West 120th and West 122nd Street, not far from the Columbia University Subway stop. Designed in the English Gothic style, it was a handsome brick and limestone campus that covered several blocks, with a large elegant quadrangular garden in the middle. The Kennedys lived in a large apartment in the complex, at 606 West 122nd Street, and they were solicitous hosts. Dr Kennedy was Secretary of the Seminary. After a distinguished ministry in various Presbyterian congregations, ending at Englewood in New Jersey, just across the Hudson from upper Manhattan, he had been invited by his old seminary to come back as its chief administrator. Proud of his ancestry, he took a particular interest in Scottish students who came to Union on fellowships from Scottish universities. I was the wrong denomination but the right nationality. He and his wife Ann welcomed me warmly to my final fling in America.
In Philadelphia we’d mixed sightseeing and pleasure with research into our chosen areas of interest, and we were expected to write a report after our return. In New York we were free to do what we liked. I’d been looking at this city for years in darkened cinemas. I could do the accent and the walk. What I wanted to do with my three days was explore as much of the city as I could on foot. I walked the length of Broadway the first day and Fifth Avenue the second. But it was on the third day it hit me. I was walking across town from Greenwich Village to the East Side. I crossed the Bowery, picking my way over drunks who might have been positioned by a set designer, and turned into a little street that ran between the Bowery and Tompkins Square. The sense of time and place shifted. A shop sign announced itself as the Ukrainian Bazaar. In the window there were carved hens sitting on painted eggs. There were rows of holy pictures and old photographs of girls in peasant costumes. It had the look of a small-town museum, a small town in Ukraine. At the end of the street, Tompkins Square was a shot of contemporary America, with its concrete benches and kids playing baseball. And sitting in the middle of the square were scores of old Ukrainians, women in black dresses with scarves round their heads, and old men in black suits leaning on sticks. No one spoke. They sat there, out of place and out of time, in silence, waiting. Maybe they had grandchildren in Queens who went to the ball games and thrashed along in the American mainstream, but they themselves did not belong here. Exiled was the word, a word that always hurts me.
Maybe the pain I found in the word had more to do with me than with the old Ukrainians. A fear of finding myself in the wrong place? Not quite. A fear of being cast out of the good place, the place of abiding? Closer. Or maybe it was a prospective sorrow at the thought of dying in the wrong place. Twenty years later, when I was a parish priest in Massachusetts, I was asked to take the funeral of a man who had died in a rooming house in Boston’s Fenway. He had no relatives, no friends, no next of kin. I asked the undertakers what information they had about him, anything that would help me make the rite of consigning him to the flames more personal, a way of noticing that he’d been here, even if it was only as an inflection in my own mind. All they had on him was that he had been born in London sixty-seven years before and hadn’t been in the US long. No one came to the funeral. As I read the service I couldn’t stop thinking of him dying alone in the wrong country. Shakespeare was running through my mind. I am dying in Egypt, dying. I checked the quote afterwards and saw I’d got it wrong. Anthony actually said, ‘I am dying, Egypt, dying.’ I’d supplied the adverb. To me, the sorrow lay not in dying, but in dying in the wrong place; dying in Egypt not Rome, in Boston not London, in the Bowery not the Ukraine.
I was surprised that my walk had left me feeling so melancholy. But I knew it was a deeper thing than the mood provoked by those old Ukrainians waiting for death in Tompkins Square. For all its energy and confidence, there was something unsettled about America and it chimed with my own spiritual state. The frontier was an abiding theme of American culture, a theme I knew from my addiction to Western movies. It was also a theme I was beginning to recognise in my own nature. The romantic’s curse, to be searching for an abiding good place that constan
tly disappears over the horizon. America’s restlessness mirrored my own restlessness – with one significant difference. God was the exception to America’s search for the green valley over the next hill. Americans carried God the way the Israelites carried the Ark of the Covenant, through the wilderness of their wanderings. One of the influential books of the time was a study of how immigrant groups accounted for America’s religious conservatism as well as its ethnic dynamism. In Protestant Catholic Jew, Will Herberg proved that America believed in belief. It was belief that brought them here, belief that sustained them through disappointment in the promised land. It wasn’t what you believed that mattered either, but that you believed. ProtestantCatholicJew! And some aspects of this belief in belief seemed worlds away from the downside-up theology of Jesus. There was a lot of agitation in American newspapers about nuclear fallout shelters at the time, and I was disconcerted to see that a not uncommon topic for sermons was whether prudent builders of shelters had the moral right to shoot their imprudent neighbours trying to enter their shelter when the bombs were falling. Britain was different. It wasn’t so sure about anything. Even Kelham hadn’t been so sure. Indeed, it was the sense of gambling one’s whole life on what was far from a sure bet that had been part of the appeal of Kelham theology.
I wasn’t sure either. I was beginning to wonder if God was not the ultimate object of desire of the romantic imagination? It was God’s elusiveness that seemed to be part of his appeal. The idea that there existed an immutable Good that drew the heart and made it unsatisfied till it rested in it was one of the themes of Christian theology, and the romantic Augustine of Hippo was its poet. He began his Confessions with an address to the God who haunted the human imagination and made our hearts restless till they rested in him. Inquietum. Restless. Inconstant. I knew I had an unquiet heart. Thomas Merton had had an unquiet heart till he found rest at Gethsemani. While I was a boy at Kelham I’d read the book he’d written about his journey and had longed for that kind of abiding for myself. I did not know as I walked the streets of Manhattan how unquiet Merton’s own heart had become away down there in his abbey in Kentucky. All I knew was that my own heart was unquiet and always searching for what R.S. Thomas called ‘the glimpsed good place permanent’43 – and never finding it. And America, eager, questing, unsatisfied America made me more conscious of it than ever.
Leaving Alexandria Page 12