Leaving Alexandria

by Richard Holloway

  A presence at once given and denied are words that could be applied to the Warriors’ Chapel in Old Saint Paul’s.2 That is why this church speaks to unbelievers with as much power as it does to believers. Indeed, the unbelieving part of me suspects it speaks more eloquently of doubt than of faith, because of the store of sorrow and longing it distils. The hope of religion can be neither proved nor extinguished in this life, and we cannot know whether there is another life in which the matter will be finally resolved. This is why there is so much noise on both sides of the debate about religion, noise being the thickest overcoat available to cover us against the chill of uncertainty. Old Saint Paul’s allows itself to be both a stage for the ritual proclamation of belief and, usually when it is empty, a place where we can bring our questions, neither expecting nor wanting them to be answered. Living with the unanswerable question is the key to our humanity. Living with the sense of a presence at once given and denied is the genius of a place like Old Saint Paul’s. It is not that the presence is sometimes experienced and sometimes withdrawn: it is both at the same time, like a piece of music that consoles and make us grieve in equal measure. Laurie was a man of faith, but he also had to be a man of doubt to build those stairs and that chapel. Faith supreme and unconquerable would not grieve at all that dying, because it would know that death was the gateway to more abundant life. Who could grieve over those whose dwelling was now in the heavenly Jerusalem, where all tears had been wiped away and sighing and sorrow were no more? Laurie hoped for that, but could not know it, might even have doubted it, which is why he had their names all written down. That is the passion that keeps the doubting priest in the place of giving and denying, if only for the sake of those to whom he has been given to stand beside.

  10

  COMING THROUGH

  Old Saint Paul’s was a potent but dangerous place for someone like me to come to, haunted as I was by the ghost of my failure to give myself away utterly to God. I was the first married priest to have been appointed Rector of Old Saint Paul’s, and there were people, myself included, who wondered if they had not been given spoiled goods. Monogamy was hard enough, so it was absurd to mourn my failure to be celibate, but the romance of the given-away life tugged at me still. This was a parish where priests were called Father and were expected to be available at all hours of the day and night. There were early masses every morning, as well as Matins and Evensong said in church every day. And there was a complex routine of elaborate services to preside at on high and holy days, with beady-eyed acolytes around to remark on my rusty ceremonial skills. The church belonged to the Anglo-Catholic tradition, the stream in the Anglican Church that had reclaimed many of the practices and beliefs of the Pre-Reformation Church. Though many of the reclaimed practices were later inventions of Roman Catholicism, including the practice of addressing priests as Father, there was a lot to be said for restoring the colour and beauty that had been lost at the Reformation. Old Saint Paul’s gave back to me what I had most loved about Kelham, which was the sense of living completely within the Church’s Year, with its rhythm of feast and fast, light and shade, joy and sorrow. So my new position thrilled me, especially the sooty old church along the street which I enjoyed opening every morning for early mass. I liked going up Laurie’s stairs into its brooding silence, and always sat at the back for a bit to let it gather round me.

  I responded to my new role in two predictable but unhelpful ways. A married man with three children – Mark was born the year after our arrival at Old Saint Paul’s – and a house full of often needy people, I determined to show the parish that I could be as dedicated and on-call as any celibate. This is a not-unfamiliar tension in the life of the priest who feels that the needy of the world have a more immediate call on him than his own family. I was in church when the children were getting ready for school and out visiting when they were being made ready for bed. And when the doorbell or the telephone went, no matter what was happening with the family, the caller took precedence. I could not bring myself to leave the person at the door or on the phone to their own lives and get back to mine, because I felt I had to be the man for them, the man for others, the totally available man, available to everyone except his own family. This became a particular problem during the evening meal. The rectory was a port-of-call for lonely or homeless people who usually came to the door when we were eating. I would bring the caller into my study and hear his story – always his – and either offer him a meal or a voucher for a bed down the road at the Salvation Army Hostel in the Cowgate. I was rarely able to bring the encounter to an end soon enough to get back to the family round the table in the big kitchen at the back of Lauder House, because my duty was to the man in front of me, angry at the turn his life had taken, not to my own children wondering where their father had got to.

  The second response to my new situation was a reversion to monastic authoritarianism. I usually had two curates whom I ran like an elite military unit. At one point I took this as far as supplying a uniform for the three of us and an identical form of transport. I got a job lot of blue donkey jackets and heavy serge firemen’s trousers, ideal for hard-working clergy battling cold winds and the Edinburgh haar. Martin Shaw, one of my curates, told me that his father, a Glasgow businessman, had access to a load of police bikes and wondered if I’d be interested in getting three for the team. I was. They were old-fashioned, single-gear, sit-up-and-beg bicycles, heavy, robust, and hell to pedal up Edinburgh’s hilly streets – but pedal them we did, in our donkey jackets and firemen’s trousers and Doc Marten boots. When we were not taking services or visiting the sick or presiding at youth clubs or taking classes, we were out on those bikes in all weathers visiting parishioners. It was not as grim as it sounds, though there was too much intensity of purpose in me and not enough sense that there was more to life than work. To recompense them for the rigours of the high seasons, I always took my curates to the current hot movie on Boxing Day and Easter Monday, as long as they were prepared to cope with the Burmese cheroots I smoked at festive seasons, bought from an old-fashioned tobacconist on George IV Bridge.

  Parish work could be exciting, especially when we went into campaigning mode in the community. We responded to the homeless callers and rough sleepers in the district by starting a soup kitchen. There were a number of hostels and lodging houses in the Cowgate and Grassmarket that catered for a large population of unsettled and homeless people, many of them men with a drink problem. A shop in the area exploited this clientele by selling them industrial quantities of a cheap hairspray to drink. They called it Bel Air. We called it instant cirrhosis. We acquired an empty shop next door to them at the bottom of Blackfriars Street and opened a soup kitchen called the Ritz. Under the leadership of Betty Strang from Jeffrey Street, it became the cheapest café in Scotland. Tuppence got the customers a cup of tea and a sandwich, another penny got them a plate of home-made soup. It was staffed by volunteers from the congregation, and soon we were feeding fifty a day, most of them homeless and without means. At first we opened it five mornings a week from ten to noon, then the young people of the congregation volunteered to open it on Saturdays as well. The labour was free, so we were able to meet the running costs easily. We got bones for nothing from local butchers and vegetables at cut prices from local grocers. Soon it became a community as well as a café, and men would sit for hours playing cards and dominoes.

  Occasionally there was trouble, but nothing we couldn’t handle. The heartbreak of the work was listening to the stories of men who had lost everything. The prominent solicitor with the gambling demon who lost his family and his big house in Glasgow’s West End; the former soldiers who could not hack it in Civvy Street when their service was up; and always there was Scotland’s oldest regiment, the drinkers, men and women who had abandoned everything in their dedication to the bottle. There was something almost holy in their dereliction, their lives stripped away to nothing. Sitting with them over a bowl of soup, out would come the press-cuttings, the honourable d
ischarge papers, the grubby photographs, reminders of the now of then that they were powerless to bring back again.

  A lot of homelessness was the consequence of personal tragedy, but much of it was systemic, a consequence of the way society was organised, so we prepared a more strategic attack on homelessness in Lauder House, where the Scottish inauguration of the charity Shelter was planned. A number of factors coalesced to create the momentum behind its creation. Jeremy Sandford’s television play Cathy Come Home revealed the plight of the homeless to a mass audience for the first time. It was followed by a series of articles about landlords who got rich by factory farming the homeless at the nation’s expense, a phenomenon I knew well from Gorbals. Churches responded to the crisis by forming housing associations, like the one we had started in Glasgow. We formed Castle Rock in Edinburgh shortly after I arrived in the city, and it is still a massive provider of social housing in the east of Scotland. As well as campaigning for political change, Shelter was invented to take over fund-raising for housing associations so that they could concentrate their efforts on supplying homes. Working for Shelter became the idealistic thing to do, and the London and Edinburgh offices were soon filled with young women with long hair and short skirts, dedicating their lives to making a better Britain.

  So there was a lot of excitement around the place, but the heart of our work remained that brooding building on Carrubber’s Close and the elusive mystery it represented, the presence at once given and denied that lies at the heart of religion. Like everything else in human affairs, it was subject to the pressures of change and the eruption of fashionable trends. There are fads in religion, as in everything else, inventions and rediscoveries, aimed at titillating the jaded palate or stirring up the moribund conscience. At Old Saint Paul’s we were not immune to the surrounding religious environment, though it might be more honest to say that I was far from immune to it. A crisis I had after my fortieth birthday precipitated me into my next attempt at finding a resolution to my inner turbulence. At Kelham we called it ‘the Doom’, this mood of despair and aridity that haunts the religious person trying to make sense of his commitment to a presence both given and denied. Maintaining a good relationship with a living, breathing person is hard enough: think how tough it is to maintain a passionate commitment to the Silent Invisible One who is at the heart of the religious relationship. Clergy do it by techniques of prayer and by going into periods of retreat, like marriage enrichment courses designed to rekindle their early ardour. And sometimes new spiritual crazes erupt onto the scene, claiming to be able to set the dead embers of faith ablaze with new heat and intensity. The one that hit the Seventies was the Neo-Pentecostal movement, and I wondered if it might be the answer to my own prayers.

  The sexual analogy is inevitable in trying to talk about this, or inevitable to me. And there is precedent for it. The mystics often use erotic language in describing their experience of God. And since sex is as notorious for what it fails to deliver as for what it does, it is a suitable analogy. The search for personal completion through the discovery of our ‘other half’ is as ancient a theme as Plato’s Symposium, and its corniness only emphasises its enduring power. We feel ourselves incomplete and we try to assuage the lack through sex, hoping to find the one who will make us whole not just for tonight but for ever. That ancient transaction is easily transposed into religion, which can be defined as the need to join ourselves to One whose love will never fail to satisfy. Sadly, it does fail. As with erotic longing in general, religious longing promises much but delivers little. And it is not hard to diagnose the problem. It is the unavailability of the Great Lover. If sex with an available person can be problematic, it is infinitely more problematic with the Great Absence. I have already discussed the devices religion uses to compensate for that absence, the different forms of prayer, the sacramental practices, all designed to fill the emptiness and compensate for the lack of response from God. One that particularly appealed to me during an arid phase at Old Saint Paul’s was the ancient craft of collecting beautiful prayers. The Christian tradition is full of these exquisite miniatures of longing. I filled my notebook with them and read them as compulsively as I read poetry, but it was my own poet who defined their limitations:

  . . . cries countless, cries like dead letters sent

  To dearest him that lives alas! away.63

  Was there no way of bringing ‘him that lives alas! away’ nearer, so near that I could experience him personally rather than imagining him or writing to him or reading about him? Was there no way of getting out of myself and into Him? Did religion have to be confined to the mind and the heart? Was there a way it could involve my body and make me feel something like the ecstasy of good sex? Some claimed to have had such an experience. Paul talked about being caught up into heaven. And in the Acts of the Apostles there was an account of the community of Christians going into an ecstatic rave in Jerusalem as the spirit of God fell upon them. Such ecstasy is a well-known characteristic of fervent religion. As the word implies, it takes the worshipper out of herself. Getting out of ourselves is something we all need from time to time, whether or not we are religious. It is why we use euphoric and psychoactive substances. It happens at raves and rock concerts as well as at evangelical rallies, all designed to take us out of ourselves and give us a break.

  That’s what the Pentecostal or Charismatic movement did for its practitioners in the Seventies. The inspiration came from that incident in the Acts of Apostles when the disciples of Jesus gathered in Jerusalem on the feast of Pentecost fifty days after Passover. Saint Luke, the author of Acts, says the Holy Spirit fell on the disciples and they all began to speak in foreign tongues, to the amazement of foreigners who heard their own languages in this outbreak of ecstatic utterance. The phenomenon is called ‘speaking in tongues’, and it comes in two forms, glossolalia and xenolalia. Glossolalia is easier to explain. It means to babble with the tongue, make mouth music. You only have to try it, if you are uninhibited enough, to know what fun it can be, and how psychologically releasing. More problematic is what they call xenolalia. The claim here is that, under the inspiration of the Spirit, people don’t just babble ecstatically, they actually speak languages they do not know. Acts claims that this is what happened in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost. Charismatics believe God prompts this activity, sometimes in real languages, sometimes in joyful noises. What then happens is that interpreters, also under the inspiration of the Spirit, claim to understand what has been uttered, in either mode, and provide a convenient translation. A lot of this went on in the young Church and Saint Paul was dubious about it. He saw it as a way of letting off steam with very little consequence for anything, apart from having a good time. His hymn to love in 1 Corinthians 13 was his most considered response to the phenomenon:

  Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.64

  In 1970s Christianity a lot of brass-sounding and cymbal-tinkling went on, some of it in Old Saint Paul’s. It hit Carrubber’s Close because I wondered if it might be the answer to my own need for direct experience of God. I started reading about it. I was sceptical about the claims to xenolalia, though I knew odd things went on in the world, but I thought glossolalia was interesting. An American guru of the movement, Graham Pulkingham, had brought his group to live in England. Called the Community of Celebration, it seemed to be cheering people up with its brand of expository preaching and upbeat new music, written and performed by their own choir, the Fisher Folk. I phoned Pulkingham, and asked if he would see me. We arranged to meet in London, in one of the rooms at All Saints, Margaret Street. I made a special trip to see him, going down on the early train and coming back in the evening. When we met, after gentle questioning, he asked what he could do for me. I told him I was spiritually empty and wanted a shot of energy to revive my wilting faith: would he pray with me? He put his hands on my head and started to pray for me in American English, which soon morphed into a
stream of pure sound with no meaning I could discern. I experienced a joyful surge of energy, and soon I too was making strange noises – the difference being that I thought mine sounded like Chinese. One of the books I’d read claimed that this had happened at a prayer meeting in the presence of a woman from Shanghai, who said that one of the participants had just chanted the Lord’s Prayer in Mandarin. Had this happened to me? The competitive bit of me thought that xenolalia would be a cut above glossolalia. Whatever it was, it was enormously releasing and I couldn’t stop when I walked out of All Saints for the train back to Scotland. Which was a problem. How could I sit silent for six hours on my journey back to Edinburgh? When the urge overtook me I resolved the difficulty by slipping into the lavatory where the clatter of the wheels disguised the sound of my mouth music. The train wasn’t busy, so no one banged at the door when I was in there for hours, pouring my heart out in meaningless ecstasy or speaking words of wisdom in pure Chinese, an idea that was growing on me. I still had that wee man perched on my shoulder, observing my performance with appreciation. I could get quite good at this, I was thinking. When I got off the train at Waverley I spied a young woman who looked Chinese, so I decided to test my theory. Going over to her, I unleashed a burst of what I had been chanting in the train lavatory. She fled up the exit to Waverley Bridge into the city. Unperturbed, I made my way into Market Street, under the bridge and into Jeffrey Street. Though I was no holier after my day in London, I was back with a lavatory-seat-shaped halo round my arse. In Lauder House Jean waited my return with growing apprehension. She was afraid I would come home with yet another call to pursue, yet another will o’ the wisp to blunder after. What I was thinking about meant staying where we were and expanding our already expanded family even further, but before that could happen there was this new enthusiasm to spread.