However courageous and cogent the atheist’s claim is, it is a hypothesis, a call to live as though it were true and take the leap into emptiness, knowing there are no everlasting arms waiting to receive us, but insisting that we can glide on our own. It is a kind of faith in human strength, the only one available to us.
The other hypothesis also calls for a leap, but in the opposite direction. For those who cannot settle for uncertainty or who cannot find the courage or the conviction to leap into nothingness and fly, there remains the leap toward God. The justification goes like this, and most people still find it persuasive: if everything comes from something, and nothing comes from nothing, where did the universe come from? It is hard to believe it just popped into existence from non-existence. There has to have been some pre-existent condition from which it emerged. One possible circumstance that might explain it is the pre-existence of a reality that brought it into being from its own super-abundance. Since the highest form of life we have encountered so far is self-conscious human intelligence, then the originating reality must, at the very least, be some kind of super-intelligent self-consciousness; maybe even one that it is possible to relate to. Positing the existence of such a reality leads inevitably to the question of its existence: who created it? Thus we start spiralling down the groove of an infinite regress. In order not to go mad, therefore, let us create a platform on which to stand by positing a being that is uncreated and uncaused, a self-existent reality dependent on nothing but itself. Terry Eagleton puts it like this: ‘God . . . if he does turn out to exist has absolutely no reason for doing so. He is his own reason for being.’51 The existence of such a being is a possible solution to the riddle of the universe, so let us buy this ticket and start the God game. If you can do that you can start to play. What is the next move?
The obvious thing to notice is that you cannot have a relationship with a hypothesis. The word means foundation, something to build on. It is from this point that the real leap has to be made. So far we have a flat, two-dimensional surface. Next, like watching the latest video game on a screen, if we pop on the 3D spectacles it comes alive and takes on the third dimension of depth. The technical term for this stage of the process is revelation, like a cinema screen that bursts into living colour or a curtain in a theatre that opens to reveal the play that is about to begin. In Christianity both parts of this activity are focused on the historical figure of Jesus, a Jew born in Judea 2,000 years ago who lived for about thirty years and was executed by Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor of the province. In the Christian imagination, Jesus is both the curtain and what lies behind it: he is a character in history, but he is one through whom the Eternal reveals itself. In this life, goes the claim, the before is made manifest in time, and that which was before ‘was’ existed shows itself to us through the mediation of a human life.
Christianity is a reverse strip-tease in which a naked figure is gradually clothed in garments of increasing splendour and is finally enthroned at the right hand of God. While we may wonder about the authenticity of the heavenly setting, some of us continue to be provoked by the traces Jesus left in history and we reach back to him through the clouds of theological incense that billow around his memory. I fell in love with this system of mediated encounter with the man of Nazareth. I saw him as a distant figure on the shore of a vast sea. He was tiny to the point of disappearance, yet he irresistibly compelled my attention. Like a medieval knight pledging himself to the service of a beautiful but unobtainable woman, it was the tantalising inaccessibility of Jesus that was a strong part of his appeal to me. And unavailable he remained, in spite of attempts on my part to get close. The Church went to a lot of trouble to get me close. What it offered me was an ancient device for making the god present to his worshippers. The idea was that though God himself was transcendent and unavailable to our senses, his presence could be mediated to us through a device called a sacrament that made actual physical contact with him available to our senses. Just as the Invisible Man in the old Hollywood movies would put on a coat and hat and pop a pipe into his mouth to make his presence available to his friends, so the invisible listener clothed himself in sacramental form to make himself accessible to me.
At Kelham there was a tiny upstairs oratory, called the Chapel of the Holy Spirit, where the Sacrament of Holy Communion was reserved in an ambry, in front of which a white light perpetually burned. Reserving the Sacrament in such a wall safe or cupboard began as a practical arrangement in the Church. In cases of sickness or emergency it meant the Sacrament could be made immediately available to those who needed it. A white light was hung in front of the ambry to mark the presence of the Sacrament. In time it became a focus for devotion, one that, in Anglicanism, marked off the Catholics from the Protestants. Anglo-Catholic schoolboys on church crawls in strange cities would look out for the telltale sign of the white light, a sure mark of ‘sound’ practice. Really high churchmen disapproved of the modesty of a wall cupboard, and preferred the ambition of a Tabernacle built into the reredos above the altar, preferably flanked with six candles, one of the signs of the ‘full’ Catholic position. Kelham disdained this Eucharistic showmanship and kept the Sacrament tucked away upstairs in this tiny chapel. It became a focus for devotion among more ‘advanced’ students, a trickle of whom would ascend the stairs after Compline to pray before the white light burning in the darkness. I was one of them. I liked the white light. It was alive and suggested a presence; but it was a presence that also suggested an absence because it reminded me of what was not there. He was not there. Instead, behind the flickering light there was a box in the wall containing a silver ciborium full of wafers of white bread. I knew how it was done, the making of it; but that was not the problem – as though having seen how the magician did the trick had ruined it for me. The sacramental system, for all its beauty and potency, is based upon the presence of an absence – and the absence had always been more real to me than the presence.
I knelt up there in the Chapel of the Holy Spirit night after night, asking for what I knew was forbidden – a sign that he truly was present in the absence. Signs get a bad press in the New Testament because they are the antithesis of the faith that trusts the absent God as though he were present. The empiricist in me, the doubter, wanted encouragement to keep the gamble going. Not a lot, either; just enough to keep me in the game. No sign was ever given unto me. At Kelham there was a conviction that the only verification of faith on offer was eschatological. It was like a scientific experiment based on a colossal gamble, whose outcome could only be discovered at death, which was why only lifetimes counted. Yet, we were also led to believe that waiting on God in prayer could lead to experiences of God on this side of death.
Moments of great calm
Kneeling before the altar
Of wood in a stone church
In summer, waiting for the God
To speak . . .52
I was taught many ways of waiting for the God to speak. The method encouraged at Kelham was meditation on the Bible passages we read in chapel. The easiest passages to practise on came from the gospels. One approach encouraged us to try what was called ‘composition of place’. I would read the passage and in my mind’s eye I would try to imagine the scene, such as Jesus standing on the seashore or sitting on a hill teaching his apostles. I would place myself in the company of his hearers and listen to his words, testing their meaning and import. Finally, I would make a resolution that brought the meditation into the realm of action, resolving to correct a fault or increase a discipline. When I started preaching sermons it proved to be quite a fruitful way of finding something to say about the gospel for the day, but it was pretty useless when trying to meditate on the letters in the New Testament.
I tried the method one sad afternoon in the chapel in Bishop’s House, Accra. The Bishop was away on trek and I was holding the fort on my own. Suddenly smitten with a wave of loneliness and homesickness, I went upstairs to the chapel, a sunlit room full of the sound of the s
ea, and tried to meditate. There were two readings at mass, one from the epistles and one from the gospels. I could make nothing of the gospel for the day, so I tried my hand at the reading for the epistle, which was from the Letter of James.53 The opening words didn’t help, in fact they made matters worse, since they drew attention to my besetting sin.
Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man: but every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.
That was tough. Here I was, longing for the God to speak, seeking a word of comfort or reassurance, and I get a scolding. OK, I hadn’t kept custody of my eyes that morning in the cathedral, filled with those voluptuous Ghanaian women, but it was impossible to do so. I had been sub-deacon at High Mass, a ceremonial role with little to do, except hold the Patten under the chin of the communicant as the celebrant placed the communion wafer onto her tongue – yes, her, because it was women I always noticed. I towered above them as they knelt at the altar rail and, try as I might while performing my sacred duty, I found it impossible not to look down Pennsylvania Avenue, Herbert Asquith’s code for the female décolletage. So why bring women up this afternoon? They weren’t on my mind when I knelt here ten minutes ago, waiting for God to comfort me: now they are, adding lust to loneliness.
I try to move on in the passage.
Do not err, my beloved brethren. Every good and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.
Composition of place does not help here. All I can visualise are Christmas presents being lowered from the gallery in Kelham Chapel, and I don’t get the point of that. I can’t do much with ‘no variableness, neither shadow of turning’ either, except as another reminder of the constant shadows cast by my own endless turning. A judgement, I guess, another judgement. Not what I came for, but probably what I deserve. Why is it that when God does speak he always sounds like my own conscience having another go at me? Uncomforted, I close the Prayer Book and decide to take a long walk along the seashore. I know I’ll end up at that popular swimming spot near Christiansborg Castle where the local women bathe, and my lust and loneliness will increase. That’s exactly what happens. I come back from my walk repeating one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ so-called ‘terrible sonnets’:
. . . my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! Away . . .54
Six years later he seemed farther away than ever. Here I was, pounding the streets of Gorbals rather than a shore in Africa, still shouting at the great Absence. I came close to packing the ministry in at that time. A lot of clergy of that generation did leave, many of them becoming social workers. Years later I encountered one or two who had made that particular journey and ended as Directors of Social Work in some tough cities. Though godless, they could never quite shake off the old sense of demand that had imposed itself upon them in their youth. I thought of taking that escape route too. I made enquiries at the University of Strathclyde, just across the river, about doing a doctorate in the sociology of religion, another lure to unsettled priestly minds of the time. The good thing about that particular exploration was that it put me on to Norman Cohn’s book about apocalyptic religion, The Pursuit of the Millennium, a study that has grown in relevance since its original publication in 1957. In the event, I took neither of these opportunities for escape, and have regretted it only occasionally. I wanted to hold on to the poetry of religion, even if it meant having to live with some turgid prose as well.
What convinced me to stick it out was not any advice I sought from others. Actually, I did not seek advice. This was partly due to the confident man’s certainty he can handle anything that comes at him; but it was also an occupational hazard of the priesthood itself. The trouble with priests is that they know all the ruses to keep people on-side. He saved others; himself he cannot save. By this time I was deep into my own mind, pounding ideas as my feet pounded pavements. On one walk through the rain an old Spaniard whispered in my ear. ‘You think you come from nothing and it is nothing that awaits you? So what? Perish resisting. And so live that it will be an unjust fate.’55 With that defiant gesture in the face of impossible odds, my back found its wall. It was the very weakness of the case for religion that kept me loyal. The sight of a beleaguered company trying to hold their tattered banner above the flood that was drowning them gripped my heart – as it still does. Whereas strong super-confident religion, conquering all before it, repelled me – as it still does.
Christianity was on its last legs, so it didn’t feel right to desert it. But my rearguard action took me further away from assertive religion. I decided to act as though I believed there was a meaning to the universe. And not just any meaning. Love’s meaning. In the face of what had happened in the twentieth century, it was hard to prove that love was the universe’s meaning. But to choose to live as though it were! To commit oneself to the poetry of an everlasting love that is rejected by those it longs after, yet whom it continues to follow on broken feet! I knew that was not what everyone made of the biblical idea of God, but there was enough in scripture to glean it, if only as the hint of a possibility. And were we not all editors of our own gods, anyway? Why not choose that idea of God to defend against the last wall? Now and again I had caught glimpses of a tremendous graciousness in people I had known, flawed, tormented souls, who had mediated unconditional love to me. The dispossessed of Israel had caught sight of that graciousness in Jesus, which was why it was they and not the good who had hung on his words. I had groped my way to a wall to stand against. That way I was able to stay.
But it was a vulnerable position. Willing yourself to act as though you believe when you know you don’t does not provide you with arguments against confident unbelievers – or confident believers either. It is a gesture many make in order to stay in touch with the poetry and compassion of faith. But it does not equip them for battle on the hustings of religion. That takes the confidence of the true believer, able to defend every line of the party’s manifesto against the equal confidence of the opposition. To do that you have to buy the package. I couldn’t. Within the religious enclosure, however, I could use my position to some effect, either by instilling the will to remain in other troubled doubters or by softening the impact of harsh religion on those who had become its casualties. I was to spend an increasing amount of time working with people in flight from oppressive religious systems, many of them conflicted by their own sexuality. But I was never able to train myself to become a victorious battler against philosophical atheism, mainly because I myself had never been convinced by philosophical theism. I have had to endure the pain of watching myself in some old television documentaries where I was set up to debate faith with trained philosophers who were convinced and convincing atheists. My poetics were no match for their forensics. And it showed. Sometimes there was even a touch of compassion in their contemptuous demeanour as they watched me floundering. It was like debating with clever Conservative Evangelicals, firm in their mastery of scripture and its certainties, who were equally dismissive of my lack of conviction. Both sides could parrot their contempt of my hesitations: ‘If the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare themselves to the battle?’56 Maybe I just wasn’t interested in their battles. There seemed to be many more important ones to fight.
III
1968–84
9
THIRTY-THREE STEPS
The assassination of Robert Kennedy and the chaos it symbolised turned me back to the Church as a place of meaning and reconciliation in an ugly world. The fact that I was not far away when it happened only added to its impact on me. At six thirty in the morning of 5 June 1968 I turned on the radio in my bedroom at the Barth Hotel in Denver and heard that Robert Kennedy had been shot in Los A
ngeles the night before. I left the hotel and boarded the train for San Francisco, where I was due to arrive the following afternoon. When I got there I walked to Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill. In front of the high altar they had placed the Stars and Stripes, draped in black, between two candles. The nave was full of people kneeling in prayer, most of them weeping. I too knelt to pray but no words came. What came was a kind of baffled anguish over the human condition. The good we would we did not; what we hated was what we did. I knew this from my own struggles, but in the cathedral that afternoon it was a world sorrow that overwhelmed me. No wonder the Church talked about the fall of man. No wonder it said he needed redemption. I was weeping too. For Kennedy, but for much more than Kennedy; for all of us and for everything. It was a bloody climax to a strange year.
In 1967 I had been given a fellowship to do a year’s postgraduate study at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where Geoff and Walter had been before me, and where Jean’s father had been Secretary. Apart from a chance to do some thinking and reading, it would provide us with an opportunity to spend time with Jean’s parents, now retired and living in New Jersey. As a graduation present, my father-in-law gave me a trip across the USA by train, so a few days after Commencement I left Jean and our daughters Ann and Sara – both of whom had been born while we were in Gorbals – with her parents in South Orange and flew to Chicago to get on the train that would take me across America. My plan was to go west through the prairie states to the Rockies, then head south-west through San Francisco and Los Angeles to Flagstaff in Arizona. There I would rent a car, drive to Santa Fe and catch the train back to Chicago. On my drive the place I wanted to get to was Monument Valley, where the south-west border of Utah touches northern Arizona. Like other lovers of John Ford Westerns, I had seen those massive sandstone buttes in Stagecoach and The Searchers and many other films. No matter how predictable the movie, those amazing formations added grandeur and mystery to it. I wanted to stand there and feel tiny against that startling horizon
Leaving Alexandria Page 15
