Leaving Alexandria

by Richard Holloway

  But first I had to prepare myself. It was the night vigil in Kelham Chapel all over again, a time for self-examination and resolution. I went from Oxford into a silent retreat in Kent, where the past ambushed me with an old loss. When I rolled up at the convent at the beginning of the week I was to spend there, the Guest Mistress informed me that they had a temporary chaplain in residence, someone who knew me. At Evensong I recognised the black cowl and red girdle of the Society of the Sacred Mission. And I remembered him who was wearing it. How could I not? We spoke to each other briefly that evening before I went into silence. I discovered that he was back in England after thirty years in South Africa. He was seeking release from his vows to the Society, vows pledged under the great dome that softened the jagged silhouette I always searched for above the distant trees as the train rushed through Newark. He was another leaver. He looked tougher, more weathered, both within and without, but he was much as I remembered him. We did not reminisce about the holiday we had taken together in Devon and Cornwall many summers ago. On my last evening I made my confession to him in the convent chapel. As I expected, he was gentle. He knew whereof I was made, remembered I was but dust. And as Father Stanton used to say to the poor of late nineteenth-century London from the pulpit of Saint Alban’s Holborn, ‘You can’t always expect dust to be up to the mark.’ I wasn’t up to the mark either, but I experienced absolution’s rush as my old companion spoke the familiar words over me.

  He came out to see me into my car the next morning, the morning of my departure. I was about to turn the key in the ignition when I remembered the rosebay willowherb flaming at the roadside that long ago summer. I mentioned it, recalled the vacation we had taken together.

  ‘We were in love,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. A quiet disturbance threaded my mind, an invisible procession going by. ‘Can I do anything for you, help in any way?’

  ‘A radio,’ he said. ‘I’d like a transistor radio for the flat I’m moving into.’

  ‘Is that all I can do?’

  ‘That’s all.’

  I promised to send him one (and did) and drove off to take my vows in Edinburgh. The disturbance came with me, carrying the memory of an old disappointment. My emotion on the day of my consecration had nothing to do with defending Christian Orthodoxy; it was all about not disappointing God again. Would it be different this time?

  Scotland had changed a lot in the years I had been away, as it moved inexorably towards the restoration of its own parliament after 300 years, but Edinburgh was the same. I made my promises in Saint Mary’s Cathedral on a shining June day. Though I had always admired Saint Mary’s, she was another magnificent building I had never been able to love. I was proud of the way she dominated the Edinburgh skyline from many perspectives, particularly the view from Calton Hill, well tramped by me and my dog Kip in our Old Saint Paul’s days. From there you looked the length of Princes Street to the West End where the three great towers of Saint Mary’s sat confidently on the horizon. Bishops don’t run their cathedrals, but they spend more time around them than in the other churches in their dioceses, so I was able to get to know Saint Mary’s intimately over the next fourteen years. She was another Gilbert Scott Victorian Gothic spectacular, completed in 1879. I grew fond of her, but my affection never deepened into helpless love. But one corner moved me and touched that old regret. The diocese of Edinburgh had been established by King Charles I in 1633, and there was a little chapel in the north transept of the cathedral dedicated to the royal martyr, as loyal Episcopalians described him. It wasn’t used a lot, but I liked it when I was at the Eucharist there early on a winter morning, the wind howling outside, the cathedral hushed as the surrounding city began to wake in the dark. I thought of the king’s last days of freedom at Kelham Hall before his arrest in 1647. I pictured his disconsolate walk there, a walk I knew well. I remembered the twelve yew trees, the hidden graveyard, as another circle closed. But Saint Mary’s moved me most on late October afternoons when shadows peopled the nave and the chancel was bright with red-cassocked choristers singing Evensong.

  In the stillness of autumn quiet,

  We have heard the still, small voice.

  We have sung Oh where is wisdom?

  Thick paper, folio, Boyce.91

  Apart from lurking round cathedrals, what do bishops do? As is inevitable in an institution that takes itself very seriously and robes even its most straightforward activities in transcendental garments, the meaning of episcopos has been mystified by the Church over the centuries. The word means ‘overseer’, which suggests bossing, but can also be translated as ‘looking after’. In particular, the bishop looks after those who look after others, the clergy. He saved others, himself he cannot save. Those words had haunted me since my years in Gorbals. They capture the spiritual loneliness of clergy. They look after others, themselves they cannot look after. And the bishop is supposed to fill the gap.

  The bishop is the pastor pastorum, pastor of the pastors, and it’s the best thing about the role. It means keeping in touch with clergy and their families, who are far from immune to the problems that afflict the rest of humanity, but may be disposed to pretend they don’t happen to them because of the expectations that are imposed upon them by their parishioners. It was this that most troubled me as a young priest, this sense people had that I must be purer and more rarefied than they because of the strip of plastic round my neck, when I knew that the opposite was the case. There are few jobs in the world in which perfection is part of the person spec, but it is implicit in the case of clergy, which is why it is often hard for them to handle the messy stuff that comes with being human. Not that every priest trusts their bishop with the ills that beset them. Some of them may not like you. Some of them may be afraid of how you might handle compromising knowledge about them. Some of them resent the fact that you got the job they wanted for themselves or for some other candidate more in tune with their opinions. Coming into a diocese as its bishop is not unlike the position priests find themselves in when they take over a new parish. If their predecessor has been greatly loved, or had a strong rapport with particular segments of the congregation, it can take the new pastor time to win their confidence and trust. I knew about this. Both at Old Saint Paul’s and the Church of the Advent I had encountered a lot of transitional grief in parishioners who saw me as a supplanter of better men. These are deep waters. So it takes time. Over the years, being alongside clergy through their sorrows and losses – the death of children, the grave illness of a spouse, heart attacks and cancer scares, drink problems, messy affairs, fractious congregations, bullying parishioners – the bishop can build up trust and maybe even earn some love. But never from everyone. So rejection also comes with the territory. But looking after the clergy, caring for the carers, was the best part of the job, the bit I liked most.

  The other part I enjoyed was the queenly role, the visits to parishes in the diocese for Confirmations and Special Occasions. Edinburgh was a wonderfully varied diocese to wander in. It included vibrant city and suburban churches, as well as struggling congregations in housing schemes and small towns. And there were the lovely Border towns to visit, each with its own proud history. Since you have to do a lot of speaking and preaching as a bishop, it helps if you can string words together. Even the ability to act the fool can be useful. I learnt that from Desmond Tutu, who can’t leave a church after a service without dancing down the aisle, especially if there’s a good lively hymn to do it to. It wasn’t everywhere I got away with that, but there were one or two places in the diocese that liked the service to rock a bit, and I was always game for a bit of jiving down the nave.

  But it was not all fun and rolling in the aisles. The Church is a bureaucracy and bishops are bureaucrats who spend a lot of time in meetings, which come in layers of ever-deepening complexity. There is the diocesan administration, making sure that parishes deliver their quota – ecclesiastese for taxation – and keep their property in good repair. This involves the
manufacture of many committees, the universally practised displacement activity for people who are not quite sure what they are supposed to be doing. Next, there is the provincial bureaucracy, because bishops operate as a board of directors to oversee the work of the Church at the national level. The third tier, which you get sentenced to if you become a Primate or first bishop of a province, is the international meeting of Primates, a self-aggrandising outfit I’ll return to later. It was the bureaucratic side of the job I enjoyed least, and the bit I regret most. Jesus told us in his Parable of the Prodigal Son that the young man in question wasted his substance in riotous living. He had something to show for it, however, even if it was only the moral bankruptcy that brought him home again. The Church wastes its substance in prolonged meetings to discuss and refine and endlessly reorganise itself, the mark of institutions in crisis throughout history. Those were the years the locust has eaten, barren years. I wish I could have them back.

  That said, I enjoyed my time as a Scottish bishop – much more than as an Anglican Primate – but even at the diocesan level I encountered tensions with the clergy, some of which presaged more serious challenges to come. Apart from pastoring clergy and cheering up congregations, the bishop is often described as the focus of unity in the diocese. A good analogy would be the conductor who gets a large group of musicians to function as a single instrument, an ensemble, an orchestra. Behind the image is the fact that the Anglican Church is a coalition of diverse theologies, ranging from Romanists who only recognise the Pope’s authority all the way over to Conservative Evangelicals who accord an exclusive authority to their own way of interpreting the Bible. This turbulent continuum of competing views was less pronounced in the Scottish Episcopal Church when I became a priest than when I became a bishop. The Scottish Church had been a narrow continuum throughout most of its history, ranging from middle of the road to moderately Catholic. That changed in the Eighties with the Evangelical revival and the Church Growth Movement. When I returned to Edinburgh in 1986 I discovered that a vivid new hue had been woven into the Episcopalian tartan, an electric evangelical blue.

  Until this point my attitude to evangelicals was not unlike the attitude of many people to homosexuals. I knew they existed but didn’t think I knew any. I came back to a diocese in which evangelicals were increasingly prominent. In my role as conductor of the diocesan orchestra I enjoyed my visits to the vibrant evangelical churches that had sprung up in the city. One in particular, on the eastern edge of the New Town, was making waves. It had been a famous and flourishing church, whose architecture was modelled on the Chapel of King’s College in Cambridge, but it had fallen on hard times. The congregation was reduced to a few elderly people, faithful to the sere traditions of Scottish Episcopalianism. To revive it, my predecessor as Bishop had organised what is called a ‘church-plant’. From a flourishing evangelical congregation in the west of the city a large contingent of parishioners had been infused into the dying congregation at the east end. The immigrants quickly transformed the place, and by the time I arrived in 1986 it had one of the largest congregations in the diocese, many of them students. This was because its theology had received the coveted seal of approval from the Christian Union, the evangelical association that policed the spiritual life of university students and told them which churches were safe to attend and which were to be avoided because they were doctrinally unsound. Not that I was aware of this at the time. I can’t say that the pop-concert style of worship did much for me, but they clearly enjoyed it, so I was happy to join them as often as I could. In fact, I preached there more than I preached anywhere else in the diocese, because it was one of the few churches in the city that maintained evening worship on a Sunday, a favourite time for students. It was the reaction to a sermon I preached to them about the Good Samaritan in Jesus’s most famous parable that alerted me to the fact that there might be trouble ahead. Appropriately, it’s a parable about something that happened on a long and twisting road. I thought I was talking about the four characters in the story, but maybe I was on that twisting road myself.

  Scholars vary enormously in the way they interpret the four gospels. We know they are heavily edited documents, powerfully influenced by the early Church, which read many of its own experiences back into the narratives about Jesus. This is why some scholars are sceptical about the words that have been put into his mouth by the gospel writers. But even the most sceptical scholars are convinced that in the parable of the Good Samaritan we hear the authentic voice of Jesus, and a radical and surprising voice it is. The conventional reading of the parable understands it as a condemnation of religious hypocrisy. Instead of following their religion’s code of compassion, the Priest and the Levite take a wide swerve past the man who had fallen among thieves. In fact, this little story is not about the dangers of insincere religion; it is about the dangers of sincere religion. It is not about religious hypocrisy; it is about religious fidelity. That’s the kick in the story, the surprise. The Priest and the Levite followed their religious code to the letter, a code that forbade them to touch foreigners or dead bodies, and the naked man by the roadside was probably both. Their heart prompted compassion, their religion prompted caution, and they followed their religion. But in the Samaritan, bound by the same code, compassion overcomes the strictures of his religion and he goes to the aid of the dangerous stranger.

  The story encapsulates Jesus’s attitude to the danger we are in when we allow our moral codes and religious traditions to assume absolute authority over us. We need moral and religious systems to protect us from the chaos of our passions; but if we give them absolute authority they become a greater danger to us than the unfettered passions they are supposed to curb. By this parable, and by his dismissive attitude to the rigidities of law and custom, Jesus rendered every code provisional and discardable when confronted with real human need. The meaning of the parable of the Good Samaritan was that compassion was a powerful dissolvent of inherited prejudices.92 I advised my hearers to be alert to appropriate challenges to their unswerving convictions. Something might be waiting for them round the next bend that required the abandonment of old traditions in order to respond to a new reality.

  My evangelical listeners strongly disagreed with what they took, correctly, to be the implications of my reading of the parable. Code was important to them – and a rigid code it turned out to be – with no deviation permitted from the prohibitions of traditional morality. The scriptural package was inviolable – as interpreted by them. Puzzled at first, I quickly came to realise that the source of the difficulty was the absolute authority they accorded to the words of the Bible. For them the Bible’s ancient codes were non-negotiable because they came from outside. We couldn’t handle scripture the way we would handle any other text because it wasn’t like any other text. We couldn’t negotiate the standards of the Bible the way we negotiate other conflicting opinions. Conservative Evangelicals, I discovered, did not negotiate. They asserted what had come to them from above, from Outside. It was written, so the matter was closed. If human history could be at least partly understood as a journey into new knowledge, then to go on that journey convinced you already knew everything there was to know about human relations foreclosed the future entirely. There could be no stranger waiting round the next bend offering you a new annunciation. Everything that needed to be known was already known. Apart from anything else, it struck me as a very unexciting way to live. But, then, I mused, some people did not like excitement, while I probably liked it too much. No major rupture followed between us after my sermon, but it hoisted a warning flag in their minds. There was something not quite sound about the Bishop’s theology, particularly his ethics, or the way he thinks about ethics. We’d better keep an eye on him. On my side, a distant alarm sounded. There’s potential for turbulence here. Is this something we can agree to disagree about or is it a deal-breaker? Time alone would tell. Interpreting the Bible was clearly a minefield. I’d better be careful. That was going to be difficult, becau
se I knew I was genetically deficient in the carefulness gene.

  And another warning flag was flying above the field. This one was not about bibles, but about bishops and other clergy. Specifically, it was about the attempt by women to breach these callings that had been shut against them for so long. They had won their battle for inclusion just about everywhere else. Surely it was only a matter of time before the Church gave way and admitted them to ordination. I knew from my debates with Graham Leonard that this was not going to be easy. It was the Outside dimension again. As far as the Church saw it, the Ministry was not a calling like any other, it was a transcendental vocation, so normal negotiating processes did not apply. I first encountered the height of the difficulty in a conversation I had with the Bishop of Accra when I was with him in Ghana in the Fifties. In a casual conversation over dinner one night I demonstrated a functional approach to the office of bishop as the best way to manage the pastoral and administrative needs of the Church. Coming from Scotland, I was aware that the Kirk had a different, more collegial system of church governance, called Presbyterianism. It never occurred to me that, whatever the dissimilarities in the two systems, they could be anything other than different ways of doing the same job. I was solemnly corrected by the Bishop. He pointed out to me that the Order of Bishops in the Anglican Communion was not a functional convenience, not even an anciently hallowed functional convenience, but a divinely mandated succession through which the authority of the original apostles was passed on to the Church. And it had a physical aspect to it. The first apostles handed on their authority to their successors by laying their hands on them; their successors did the same thing to the next generation; and so on right down the centuries, creating an unbroken pipeline of authority called Apostolic Succession. Break the line or go for a new supplier and you lose the original mana.