The first warning bell rang during the giving of the Peace. I wandered over to the choir to shake hands in the usual way. Several of the singers turned away from me and refused my hand, including a local doctor I thought I knew well. Not everyone liked giving the Peace. It was too effusive for them, too casual. Maybe that was it. The bell rang louder during the administration of communion when a number of people, including the doctor, ostentatiously refused to take the sacrament from me. I knew something was really up when a number of people refused to shake my hand in the porch at the end of the service and gave me a dramatically wide berth. By this time Paul was really uptight. I asked what was up with the doctor who had shunned me. He disagrees with what you say about drugs in your book. Is that now an excommunicable offence, I wondered. We joined the congregation for a rather strained parish lunch till I alerted Jeannie to the need for a tactical withdrawal. We’re not welcome; I think we should leave. We said our goodbyes and drove home through the soothing green countryside.
The day after the visit all became clear. After attending the Eucharist at the cathedral, I picked up my Scotsman from the local newsagent and found myself the headline. A posse of Evangelical clergy in the diocese – prominent among them the man with whom I had spent the previous day – had called for my resignation and declared the Diocese of Edinburgh vacant. One of the main plotters was at my table for dinner that same evening. He was on the Cathedral Chapter, my advisory council, and this was their annual dinner. He walked eagerly into our flat near the cathedral, a smile on his face. I did not allude to what he had done, but my friend Graham angrily challenged him. I felt no anger, only sadness and an increasing weariness.
It was not their fault. It was mine. I was a disappointment to them, a lost leader. Rather than sheltering them from the blast, I had broken open the windows and blown in the door. It was a cold night, and I had chased them out of doors. Who could blame them for their anger? I knew it was time for me to leave them. But I waited before acting. I would not be hounded out. I would go at a time of my own choosing. A number of clergy in the diocese rose to my defence against the plotters and told me to ignore them: there was still work to do. More encouragingly, I started getting affectionate letters from people outside the Church. I was beginning to suspect there was more forgiveness outside the Church than in. And I became grateful for what the American poet Wendell Berry called ‘the magnanimity of the world’. One of his poems, given to me by a friend, came as an absolution I had not realised I needed till it was received.
And we are lost in what we are. Our privilege
is the unrelenting effort of renewal
of sight and hope out of failure –
out of impatience, anger, haste, despair,
violence to strangers, unkindness to loved ones,
disappointment at the failure of expectations
that were, at the outset, unreasonable –
out of greed, arrogance, and ruin. Our privilege
is our sorrow: to know by blindness, by falling short,
the magnanimity of the world.108
In the spring of 2000 I announced my resignation. At the end of October I preached my last sermon as Bishop of Edinburgh in Old Saint Paul’s, and I used it to look back. I told them that when I arrived as their Rector thirty-two years before I had just emerged from a period of radical doubt and had fallen into a very common trap. I reacted against my own uncertainty by attacking doubt and uncertainty in others. A closet sceptic, I condemned in others what I had been afraid to look at in myself. My first book, written in the attic at Lauder House thirty years ago, was an attack on the kind of theology I myself now wrote and was condemned for. It was the deepest irony of my life that I had ended up the kind of bishop in my sixties I had despised when I was a priest in my thirties. Now I had come back to where I started from and knew the place for the first time. I could no longer talk about God.
I felt glutted with the verbal promiscuity of religion and the absolute confidence with which it talked about what was beyond our knowing. The irony was that in one of Paul’s great poems, God chose to empty himself of language and become a life. But along comes Christianity and turns it back into words, trillions of them, poured out incessantly in pulpit, book and on the airwaves, reducing the mystery of what is beyond all utterance to chatter. I told them I had come to mind religious over-confidence more than I minded its atheistic opposite, because atheists did not claim to put ultimate reality into words. Speaking personally, and without wanting to universalise my own experience, religious language had ceased to be able to convey the mystery of the possibility of God for me because it confidently claimed to make present that which I experienced as absence; though it was an absence that sometimes feels like a presence, the way the dead sometimes leave an impression on rooms they spent their lives in. I didn’t want to go back to the days when I had to name that absence. Even then I had felt insecure whenever I was called upon to offer an account of it. The best I had been able to do was to persuade myself and others to choose to live as if the absence hid a presence that was unconditional love. That possible identification, I thought, was worth betting my shirt on. It was a relief now to name my belief as an emptiness that I was no longer prepared to fill with words. But though I had lost the words for it, sometimes that absence came without word to me in a showing that did not tell. It was the absence of God I wanted to wait upon and be faithful to.
I was well aware of the irony of using words to condemn words, and I was doubly aware that in my ministry I had poured out more words than most, in books as well as sermons. Since I was a boy I had loved words, but now I needed to purge myself of them. I was what in the trade they call a manuscript preacher. Over forty years of preaching I had carefully crafted hundreds of sermons onto paper. I still had most of them carefully filed away in folders. What did they mean now? What did they represent? An absence. On All Souls Day 2000 I gathered them together and put them in black bin bags for Edinburgh’s cleansing department to pick up on the sidewalk the following morning. I divvied out my library of theology among the younger clergy in the diocese: more words. It was time to leave Alexandria again.
Jim, my beloved chaplain, organised a big farewell party and asked everyone who came to write something for me, describing the difference I had made to them. I read what they had written the morning I ceased to be Bishop of Edinburgh. It hadn’t all been clash and controversy. Things I never remembered saying had been remembered by those to whom I had said them and were now being said back to me. They knew how important poetry had been to me, so they wrote some for me now. This is from one who knew me well:
The difference was
Two priests in full fig
Dancing down Jeffrey Street,
So that the stained-glass window Jesus
In all his youthfulness
Danced across the hills of Judea.
The difference was
The catch in the voice
Over Judas and his betrayal;
And somewhere in the words,
The charismatic laughter,
The unauthorised version.
The difference was
Leaving safety
Striding out across water,
And somewhere in the deep
Of doubt, of restless faith,
A resting place of truth.109
Then I dried my eyes, and I headed for the hills.
EPILOGUE
SCALD LAW
The hills I headed for were the Pentlands, Stevenson’s ‘hills of home’, the southern backdrop to Scotland’s capital. Less dramatic than the Ben that dominated my boyhood in the Vale of Leven, they did not so much punch themselves out of the earth as flow in folds over it. It was their friendly indifference I required. I needed my feet to be moving over terrain they knew so well that I wouldn’t have to think about where I was going. It was the going in my head I had to think about now. I had just walked away from the work of a lifetime. Demas hath forsaken me, having loved th
is present world. Yet I felt that I, too, had been forsaken. I had been bereaved. But of what? My reaction to the Lambeth and Dundee ructions did not trouble me. I wanted nothing more to do with the men in pink dresses and their vehement opinions. The very uniforms they wore repelled me. I took off my bishop’s ring and shoved it in a box. It had never been a proper bishop’s ring anyway. Old Saint Paul’s had given me a real Episcopal ring on my election as bishop, but there was a problem with it. It was beautiful, a small, elegant knuckle-duster. At my first meeting of British bishops, self-conscious in my new jewellery, the Bishop of Bristol looked at it. ‘You’ll have problems with that,’ he said. ‘You’ll be shaking a lot of hands and it’ll be agony. You need one that won’t crunch your fingers.’ He was right, as enthusiastic hand-shakers soon demonstrated. Where could I replace it? Somebody suggested Carnaby Street. I took the advice and explored the options next time I was in London. The nearest thing I could find that was suitable was a Hell’s Angel ring: silver, dark amethyst, fifty quid. I practised with it, shaking my own hand to the amusement of the bikers’ jeweller who was selling it. It was comfortable. No crunched fingers. I bought it. I don’t think it was an omen. But into the box it went. As did the pectoral cross Nadir Dinshaw had given me. I had never taken to the purple shirt and had been happy to go on wearing the old black numbers from my days as a priest, so there was no problem folding it away in the drawer. The mitre had already gone into the Thames. The badges were easy to let go. I didn’t miss them.
But what else had gone? Was I in any recognisable sense still a Christian? Others had made up their minds about me on that score. What was my own mind telling me? It was in the hills above the Vale of Leven as a boy that I had made the decision to leave Alexandria. I had walked myself out of that life. Now I had walked away again. What had I lost? What had I kept? I knew the best way to walk my mind was for my feet to walk the hills again, with my new Border Terrier Daisy at my heels – and no one else. There were three trails I took, all at the northern end of the Pentlands; and I took them again and again. The most arduous was to walk in at Bavelaw, through Kitchen Moss with the sweet slope of Hare Hill to the north. Then up West Kip and East Kip to Scald Law, the highest hill in the Pentlands at just under 2,000 feet. There is always a wind up here. Edinburgh is over there to the north and behind me the hills fold away into the distance. Then it was down the steep descent of Kirk Road, through the winding Green Cleuch between Black Hill and Hare Hill, and back to the car at Red Moss. A gentler walk was through Cock Rig, up between Harbour Hill and Bells Hill, along the road past Glencorse reservoir, then a cut through the valley between Bells Hill and Black Hill to Threipmuir and down through the great beech-lined avenue to Red Moss again. Sometimes I’d carry on past Loganlee Reservoir to the Green Cleuch and back that way. Daisy ranged around for the first mile or two of the trail, and then she’d tuck herself behind my heels and follow faithfully. We rarely met anyone. I looked around a bit, but I was really unseeing, walking my mind, trying to find myself.
Was religion a lie? Not necessarily, but it was a mistake. Lies are just lies, but mistakes can be corrected and lessons can be learned from them. The mistake was to think religion was more than human. I was less sure whether God was also just a human invention, but I was quite sure religion was. It was a work of the human imagination, a work of art – an opera – and could be appreciated as such. The real issue was whether it should be given more authority over us than any other work of art, especially if it is the kind of authority that overrides our own better judgements. It was a massive issue for me, because it was from its claims to unique authority that its manifest cruelty arose – and it was its cruelty I could no longer stomach. It is one thing to be in a state of ignorance – to believe that women are inferior to men, that gays are an abomination – because that is the going opinion, the prevailing worldview; it is another thing to go on holding that opinion in the face of clear evidence to the contrary because an institution, whether Bible or Church, claims not on any evidential base, but simply on its own authority that what is wrong is right because it says so. Authority does not prove, it pronounces; rules rather than reasons; issues fatwas. It refuses to negotiate.
How old is the universe? Well, science painstakingly reckons it’s about 14 billion years, give or take the odd billion. Not so, says religious authority: it is 6,000 years old. Where did you get that from? The Bible! What evidence? The Bible! I see: on what grounds do you trust the Bible? Because the Bible tells me so! I had long since grown tired of that kind of circularity. It left us with no way off the roundabout. The next one was trickier. What have you got against women, and why are jobs in the holiness business not open to them? The Bible tells us to keep women in a subordinate role. (And from over the walls of the Vatican Gardens comes another voice: and so does the Pope!) First it was the Bible; now it’s the Pope. What arguments do they adduce, what evidence do they offer to support their point of view? Thebiblethepopethebiblethepopethebiblethepope. Don’t you see that saying it over and over again adds nothing, except a sense of desperation on your part?
There’s another thing: I don’t mind you sticking to a 3,000-year-old myth of creation that says God made the universe in six days. It’s eccentric, but I can live with it unless you try to impose your eccentricity on everyone else. But where women and gays are concerned it is not just an eccentric opinion, it is an active injustice, a sovereign cruelty. I have to withstand that. Your opinion has solid consequences for the lives of men and women, some of them terrifying. Your opinion gives hate crimes respectability. Another sad thing is that, because of asserting your authority rather than debating the issue, you open the whole religious enterprise to derision, even from those who might otherwise be disposed to look upon it with some sympathy.
Like other human enterprises, religion grew out of the human predicament. We are thinking animals. We may even be the only thinking creature in the unimaginable vastness of the universe, which means that in us the universe is thinking about itself, maybe for the first time! And we can’t stop doing it. It comes with these big self-conscious brains of ours from which also come science and philosophy. And art! Art is what our imagination has conjured up to express the wonder and terror of life; the stories we have told ourselves, the dreams we have dreamt, the longings and fears we have woven together. And the great gallimaufry we call religion is one of art’s greatest imaginings.
Religion is human, and like humanity it is both a glory and a scandal. It is full of pity and full of cruelty. Just like us. So is the Bible. If only we could stop using it as though it had any more authority than Shakespeare or Proust or Elgar or Gauguin or Tolstoy or Nietzsche! It belongs with them, with its yearnings and crucifying certainties. It was human, all-too human. Don’t abandon it, any more than we ought to abandon the other great flawed cruel epics of the human imagination: but don’t listen to its mad voices.
In my walks I discovered my real dilemma. I wanted to keep religion around, purged of cruelty, because it gave us a space to wonder and listen within. Purged of the explanations that don’t explain, the science that does not prove, the morality that does not improve; purged, in fact, of its prose, religion’s poetry could still touch us, make us weep, make us tender, and take us out of ourselves into the possibility of a courageous pity.
I needed somewhere to sit as well as somewhere to walk during my reveries, so my walks sometimes took me back to Old Saint Paul’s. I went under the bridge, up the close, in the side door and through the curtain into the little chapel Aeneas Mackintosh had led me to when I was a sixteen-year-old boy at Kelham. I sat, remembering Aeneas not as a priest in the Diocese of Edinburgh, but as a footballer at Kelham, a forward, the ball glued to his right foot, sprinting towards the goal. He was gone now; with all the others I had led down the stairs and under the bridge to join the unnumbered dead. I gazed at the white light of the sanctuary lamp, my mind peopled with the dead. My mother had gone too young, in her sixties. I recalled the heat on the tra
in as I travelled to the Vale to see her for the last time. I was amazed that the world did not notice. Stop all the clocks! My father made it into his eighties and died shortly after I became a bishop. Both were buried from Saint Mungo’s, my mother inside, my father outside. Because he was always uncomfortable in church, we left him in the hearse outside on Main Street.
I remembered the last time I had seen Geoff Shaw. He got out of Cleland Street just ahead of the bulldozers and wrecking balls and went into politics, soon becoming Convenor of the vast and troubled Strathclyde Regional Council. I bumped into him one day under North Bridge. He’d been through for a meeting at Edinburgh City Chambers and was dashing to Waverley for the train. I was in black; he was wearing an old raincoat. We’d lost touch, but we greeted each other affectionately. We talked about Scottish politics. He had recently been married. He was happy, but too busy, he said, stubbing out a cigarette. Then he was off for his train, down the stairs of the Market Street entrance. A few days later the paper told me he had died of a heart attack, aged fifty-one. Thousands came to his funeral.
Leaving Alexandria Page 30