Leaving Alexandria

by Richard Holloway

  When I got back to the Kennedys that evening I let myself into their apartment in Knox Hall on 122nd Street and walked the length of their ninety-foot hallway to the guest room to dump my stuff. If I shoved my head out of the guest room window and craned to the right I could see where the Subway emerged from underground and became the Elevated, running from Harlem, a few streets north, all the way up to the Bronx. My last night in America. I lingered at the window. I noticed how cold it was becoming. Dr Kennedy knocked on the door. Tea? A sandwich? Something more substantial? I followed him down the hall to the kitchen, a large cheerful room, well equipped in the American way, with a fridge the size of a small truck. Seated at the table were Mrs Kennedy and the younger of their two daughters, Jean. She told me, much later, that when she heard me enter the apartment she got up to leave, not wanting to be seen in the curlers she was wearing. Her mother told her not to bother. He’s the dedicated type. He won’t notice. She was wrong. I had noticed.

  After the brilliance of New York in the Fall, Glasgow was dreich and colourless on my return. Rain was sheeting down. The close at number 10 was grimmer than I remembered. Back in my room I fingered my souvenirs, hung a print of Brooklyn Bridge on the wall, and wrote some thank-you letters, including one to Jean Kennedy, who had volunteered to parcel up the books I had collected and couldn’t fit into my suitcase. At last I had an American pen pal. By Christmas we had decided that she would come to Gorbals the summer of 1962, when she had finished her Master’s degree at Columbia, to do voluntary work with us for a couple of months.

  When that summer arrived, I decided to spend my vacation motorcycling to Greece. Back in Britain three weeks later on a busted machine with only one brake working and with Jean shortly to arrive, I took the Great North Road to Scotland. Near Newark I caught sight of that remembered silhouette, and soon found myself crossing the old bridge over the Trent and turning through the gate into Kelham. It was the first week of the summer vacation, so there were no students around and not many professed, so the House was quiet. Their welcome was not effusive – I had boshed six years ago – but they offered me a bed for the night. I was just in time for Evensong, said not sung because there weren’t enough in residence to carry the music. Though softened by the summer light that drifted in through the open door, the Great Chapel was as overwhelming as ever. I remembered how we had looked at strangers when they visited us and wondered about their lives, poor lives not led here where life was at its richest and most meaningful. Scruffy in my flannels and anorak, mine was a poor life now, no longer lived here in the intensity of the sacred mission. I looked up at the dome and felt small. Not the humble smallness we were encouraged to practise here as a spiritual exercise. This was the smallness of my failure. I was a disappointment. Demas hath forsaken me, having loved this present world. I was now the stranger, the one looked at and wondered about. Yet the place still tugged at my unquiet heart. After supper I had half an hour with a contemporary who was now the Cottage Master. We sat in his big bright room under the east end of the Cottage dorm smoking our pipes while he told me of the changes they were making. Better teaching. A-levels now. The same ethos, of course. That could not change. The spirit of the Society. ‘We sacrifice young men on that altar!’ And how was I? Glasgow was it? Now, could I please excuse him? Things to finish before Compline. Lovely to have caught up.

  I wandered down Apostles’ Walk, not daring to enter the graveyard – nothing counts but lifetimes – and turned into Forty Acre. I stared at the river. My sorrow was to feel drawn to a life I was incapable of sustaining. I was beginning to wonder if the trouble might not be deeper than that. I had not been able to become what I thought I had been called to be. Now I suspected I would not be much good at the other options on offer either. They all required the submission of the individual mind to the mind of the community for the achievement of a common purpose. I could see the point in this. HK had talked about how the independent intelligence could be led, under disciplined direction, to concentrate upon the attainment of a common aim.44 Working harmoniously together, the most disparate group of people could get things done. That was the secret of Kelham’s success. It was the secret of any organisation’s success. The trouble was, the timber of my particular humanity did not seem to lend itself to the shape-shifting required. Back in Glasgow I had already had a collision with my Bishop on the subject.

  It wearies me to recall the issue, particularly since things have moved on since then. It has to do with the way churches rate themselves with respect to others. Top of the pinnacle is the Roman Catholic Church. Its self-understanding is that it is the only true church on earth and all others are defective in varying degree, some of them so utterly as not to be churches at all. The main focus for this discrimination is access to the Eucharist, the central sacrament of Christianity. The lower down the chain of ecclesiastical being you are placed, according to the high Catholic position, the less Eucharistic integrity you have. To Roman Catholics, no Protestant churches, including Anglicans, have full Eucharistic authenticity. This means we cannot participate in their communions and they will not participate in ours. According to the Anglican tariff, Catholics have a valid Eucharist and so have we, even though they do not recognise it. But at the time of which I speak Catholics were not the only closed Eucharistic game in town. Episcopalians were at it too. The Scottish Episcopal Church did not recognise the Presbyterian Eucharist, and that included the rite celebrated by the Gorbals Group every Thursday evening. This meant we were neither allowed to share our Eucharist with the Group nor participate in theirs. Lilias and I knew the rule and observed it – to begin with. If we went to the Group on Thursday evenings, we did not take communion with them. It was like going to a dinner party and joining in the conversation but refusing to touch the food provided. Religions are full of these separation strategies. Though the expressed rationale behind them varies enormously, fear is a strong factor: fear of ritual or racial pollution; fear of the anger of the jealous god; and the ancient clerical fear of letting their constituents be seduced by rival claimants.

  As far as our situation in Gorbals went, after not very long it just seemed silly to maintain the separation, so we started receiving communion along with everyone else. More significantly, I started to take my turn celebrating the Eucharist at Group meetings, using their form of service. This compounded my offence, since all ordained and licensed clergy in the Scottish Episcopal Church had to take an oath to use the prescribed rites and none other. After a few months of this Eucharistic outlawry, I felt I ought to inform my Bishop what we were up to. I liked Francis Moncreiff, and I think he liked me. He was a tall, lugubrious, witty man who bore a striking physical resemblance to Lee Van Cleef, the Spaghetti Western actor. He had an endearing impatience with lengthy services, towards the end of which, seated imposingly on his throne in the sanctuary, he could be heard muttering in a loud stage whisper, ‘Noooo, not another hymn!’ But he was a traditionalist and followed the rules. He told me that what I was doing was wrong, but it was not a sin, a distinction that puzzled me. He then informed me that, while I was guilty of contumacious conduct, he would take no further action. ‘And would I like another sherry?’ I inferred from this discussion that he, too, thought it was a silly rule, but rules were rules and had to be observed. I continued to break the rule, but I reflected on the situation. I had not really taken this step in any spirit of rebellion, or with much thought at all. It had not created a crisis of conscience for me. It just seemed to be a daft rule, so I ignored it.

  I was also ignoring the rule about not marrying the divorced in Church, another matter on which the Bishop hewed to the official line. I did not think of the divorced people who came to me as items in an abstract category called The Divorced, but as individuals with unique stories and therefore exceptions to general rules. Not that I agreed with the rule. It was the same when I performed my first gay marriage ten years later at Old St Paul’s in Edinburgh. It was obvious that I could not refuse the sincere reque
st of Peter and Richard to hear them promise to live together till death. I heard their vows in the Lady Chapel one evening after Evensong, using the form of the Prayer Book wedding service: and it took death to separate them, thirty-seven years later. What I did not reflect on at the time was that this untroubled capacity for ignoring rules that struck me as inhumane or silly defined me as an anarchist. I am not using the word in the organised, programmatic sense normally associated with the term. I no more believe in anarchism than I believe in any other kind of ism. I am using it in a temperamental sense, which was probably why I did not think too much about what I was doing at the time. Anarchic, in the sense in which I am using the word, means that one treats rules and regulations as having only a relative or provisional status, not as being immutable. Sitting in a car at a red light on a pedestrian crossing on a Sunday morning with not a soul in sight is daft, as are most regulations applied without reference to the context. Yet the minatory power of that red light paralyses us into stupidity and acquiescence. This is one of the fault-lines in debates about human value, and it puts the role of institutions and the good of the individuals in unnecessary contention. We need institutions, but they are always instrumental goods, good for something else. That something else is human flourishing, which is an intrinsic good, good in itself. Religions are a famous battleground in this debate, because they imagine their rules and regulations are not just another variant of human arbitrariness, but have immutable transcendental authority behind them, a delusion Jesus challenged. He skewered the issue with a single saying: ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.’45 The saying can be universalised: The State was made for man, not man for the State. The Law was made for man, not man for the Law. Traffic lights were made for man, not man for traffic lights. Religion was made for man, not man for religion. Jesus’s saying fixes the status of all institutional rules as useful but never absolute.

  The trouble with this kind of situational daring is that it undermines the human love of order and continuity. Most people prefer the familiar scales of stability to the jazz of creative morality. However, if everyone followed that preference no moral or social evolution would ever occur and history would be a constant replay of the past. Change comes through two forces that challenge the status quo. All systems have victims who sooner or later challenge the institutions that oppress or discriminate against them. The other agent of change is the defective person who is born without the institutional-loyalty gene. Though I was slow to realise it, I belonged to this group. I am not suggesting that disloyalty is a virtue, only that it is a fact and an occasionally useful one. Nietzsche was intrigued by the beneficial effect the disloyal have on the communities they sat so lightly to.

  It is the individuals who have fewer ties and are much more uncertain and morally weaker upon whom spiritual progress depends in such communities; they are the men who make new and manifold experiments. Innumerable men of this sort perish because of their weakness without any very visible effect; but in general . . . they loosen up and from time to time inflict a wound on the stable element of a community. Precisely in this wounded and weakened spot the whole structure is inoculated, as it were, with something new.46

  I was far from putting all this together that August afternoon on the banks of the Trent, but I was aware of an inner unease, a dissonance between me and the Church I served. I, an unstable and uncertain man, had been steered into leadership in an institution that laid claim to transcendental levels of stability and certainty. Maybe that was one of the attractions, but it would not have needed a clairvoyant to predict that there would be trouble ahead. I did not know it as I stood gazing into the river that it would be the last time I would witness the old order at Kelham. The circumstances that would lead to its dissolution were even then assembling themselves. Early next morning I got back on my one-brake motorbike, steered it over Kelham bridge and headed north to Glasgow.

  Jean Kennedy arrived a week later, and we put her to work. Our holiday scheme was in operation, so she joined me in trips to the country in Lilias’s van Jemima, ferrying children to the families who had offered them a break. We fell in love during those journeys, and Jean decided to delay her return to New York from September to December. Should we marry? She, knowing what she wanted from life, thought we should. I was less sure. I wanted to marry her, but I did not want to be married to anyone. It wasn’t just the usual commitment-phobic male thing, though there was that. It was the God thing, the disappointed God thing. As long as I stayed single, there was still a chance I’d make it through to the absolute life – one day. Make me chaste, but not yet. Marriage was the gate from which there would be no return. It would commit me to the world of the body, the world of compromise and accommodation. Why she stood it, I don’t know. Even when we were out together I would not hold her hand in public, especially if I was wearing a clerical collar. And when we became engaged I was reluctant to admit it. In spite of my behaviour, Jean stuck to her pledge to marry me, and when I drove her to Prestwick in a borrowed car to see her onto the plane for New York, she planned to return the following March for the wedding.

  When she came back to Prestwick on a wild March day the following year, I could tell immediately she was troubled. She was twenty-three. Only a few hours ago she had left her family and her homeland to live in a strange country with a man she loved, but who scared her not a little. We did not say much as I drove her into Glasgow. She was to stay with friends till our wedding in April, but I wanted to show her the flat that would be ours when we married. My curacy at St Ninian’s would end that summer, and the Bishop was putting me in charge of Maggie Mungo’s, the little church in Rutherglen Road that served the Gorbals. The diocese had bought and renovated the flat in number 10 above Lilias to accommodate us, and I wanted Jeannie to see it. Gorbals looked dismal as we drew near, and the close at number 10 was running with damp and as intimidating as hell when we arrived. Jean was upset by this time. She told me she did not think she could go through with it, and she wanted to phone her parents. They were wise in their counsel. There would be no problem about cancelling the wedding. The important thing was for her to be sure what she wanted to do. Take your time. Let us know. Meanwhile, we’ll put everything on hold. I too was relieved. Jeannie says my words were, ‘I couldn’t care less.’ That sounds too tactless even for me. But the pressure was off. Meanwhile, I reminded her, I had to furnish this flat. Married or not, I would soon be living in it. Would she help me scramble stuff together?

  Next day we started trawling second-hand show rooms for furniture and cheap watercolours, one of which is hanging above this desk as I write. It was fun. We fell in love again. Jean told her parents we wanted the wedding to go ahead, and on a cold April day in 1963 it did. Geoff was my best man, Margaret, Jean’s sister, her matron of honour. Jean’s father, since he was a Presbyterian Minister and not of the Episcopal elect, was refused permission by the Bishop to take any part in the service other than as father of the bride. While we were exchanging our vows, Joe Bullough, my elderly and forgetful rector, prompted Jean to take me as her wife, to which she responded with a slight emphasis on the word husband. The Bishop celebrated the Nuptial Eucharist. When photographs were taken at the church door afterwards he insisted that he had to stand between us in any shot in which his presence was required. So there we are, the two of us, smiling on the steps at St Ninian’s, and between us, wearing a mitre and a fierce expression, stands Lee Van Cleef. Ya got a problem with that?

  8

  THE ABSENCE

  It was only a white lie, but it was a lie all the same and I’ve often wondered where it came from. I was spending a night intel in the French Alps on my motorcycle ride to Greece. In the hostel kitchen, where I was frying up something to eat, I ran into a couple of English girls and we struck up a conversation. They asked me what I did and, without hesitation, I told them I was a social worker. It was ninety per cent true, of course, but it was the other ten per cent that made it a lie. Why did I tel
l it? I was ambivalent not so much about being a priest as about being identified as one, because it made me prey to their expectations about what the role involved. I had discovered that the clerical collar was read by others in ways that did not correspond to my own self-understanding, and I grew weary of trying to explain how they had it wrong. Wearing a dog collar on public transport was an invitation for other passengers to project onto me their own take on my role in ways I wanted to resist. Sometimes it was just annoying, such as the occasion when I travelled on the night train to London and was serenaded by a Glaswegian on the seat opposite who sang hymns at me till he fell into a drunken stupor as the train drew out of Carlisle. Sometimes it was irritating, as when aggressive atheists challenged me to prove the existence of God for them before we got to the next stop. Surely an hour would take care of it? More taxing were the religiously troubled who wanted me to answer their doubts, usually about the latest tragedy to have hit the papers. On one occasion a Muslim taxi driver, after catechising me on my views, told me I was bound for Hell. The most depressing incident, because in many ways the most typical, was when I was visiting parishioners who had a woman and her young son staying with them. Intrigued by my dog collar, the boy asked his mother what I was. He’s a churchman. What’s a churchman? It means you have to watch your Ps and Qs. My heart sank in the familiar way.