How does such hard and punishing certainty emerge from the existential gamble of faith? Paradoxically, it is lack of faith and fear of doubt that prompt it. What do you do if you can no longer live with the doubt that is co-active with faith? You try to cure yourself. And the best cure for doubt is over-conviction. A well-known mark of the uneasy doubter is over-confidence. It is like the refusal to let pity weaken you in the face of your enemy. Doubt, like pity, erodes certainty. If you are desperate for certainty because you believe only it can hold chaos at bay, including your own inner chaos, then you have to repress your doubt and pump up your convictions. Tone is the giveaway here. If you want to sell something, whether a commercial product or an ideology, hyper-conviction is an essential element in the transaction. Pooling your doubts, sharing your uncertainties, may be humanly more interesting, and may even lead to genuine discoveries that prompt a rueful, modest sort of faith, but it will never persuade multitudes. Or yourself, for that matter, which may be the real name of the game. What persuades or converts others is always dramatic conviction dramatically expressed.
The book I was to write would have all these characteristics, which is why it did well in conservative circles in the Church. It was a facile book, written in a self-consciously epigrammatic style. The publisher insisted on calling it Let God Arise when it appeared, and the bombastic title, which I did not like, caught the tone. It does not merit a reading now, but if anyone were to pay it that undeserved compliment, he would find the tell-tale cracks. Adam Phillips says that where there are excessive acts there are excessive uncertainties.61 They would be easily detected in what I wrote then. Interestingly, another trace element can be found in the book, one that would, in time, overcome the certainty I was clutching at. There was an emphasis on the importance of pity. Dostoevsky’s epigram had gone deep. It was the one carry-over from 1968 that was to stay with me in the years ahead. In time it would help to dissolve the certainties I had wrapped round myself at the end of that year. But right then, I needed a place to belong to, an abiding place; the ‘glimpsed good place permanent’ that I’d longed for in New York.
After Kelham, the closest I got to it was our twelve years at Old Saint Paul’s, but even it was a place of parting, another Alexandria. Beloved curates moved on to other positions. Parishioners who had become friends left for work in other places. And always people were dying. The most compelling part of the work of priests is their position as witnesses at the crossroads between life and death. Few other callings are practised in such chiaroscuro, proclaiming joy for the birth of those who have come hither and sorrow for the death of those who have gone hence, sometimes in the same hour. At Old Saint Paul’s, the shape of the building attached more drama to the ceremony for leaving life than for entering it. The church, built on a steep slope that descended from the Royal Mile to Jeffrey Street, was shouldered between the massive bulk of the Calton Hotel on Carrubber’s Close and the gloomy tenements of North Gray’s Close. The hall, underneath the church, was entered from a door in Jeffrey Street, which also served as the main way to the church on the level above by means of a theatrical staircase of square, grey, hammer-dressed stone. It was down those thirty-three steps that the dead were led on their last journey. It was the tradition of the parish that the dead were brought to church to lie in their coffins in the chancel the night before their funeral. At the end of the service I would lead the cortège out and down the stairs to the street below, where the hearse was waiting to take the body to graveyard or crematorium, earth back to earth, ashes back to ashes, dust back to dust. I led the dead down those stairs hundreds of times. And sometimes I never wanted to do it again. Apart from the poignancy of all that going down into death, what got to me was the fact that their names were all written down. The Church keeps records of all the exchanges it witnesses at the crossroads between life and death, but it is the naming of the unremembered dead that moves me most.
Buried 10th December 1893: Jane McLeish, 17 Borthwick’s Close, aged 5 years.
Buried 16th May 1914: Robert Brown, 111 Pleasance, aged 43 years.
Buried 16th January 1975: Muriel Robson, 10 Warrender Park Terrace, aged 70 years.
Buried 3rd September 2010: James Naylor Wynn-Evans, Priest, 1 Gayfield Place, aged 76 years.
At Old Saint Paul’s their names are not only written down, they are read out. One of the most valuable and enduring functions of religion is its role as remembrancer of the unremembered. On the anniversary of their dying, their year’s mind, the names of the dead are called out, long after no one is alive who remembers them. Sitting in Old Saint Paul’s nowadays, my religion pared away to almost nothing, I can still remember. I wait for the names to be read out. I remember their lives. I remember their dying. And I remember leading them down those stairs to the long black hearse waiting in Jeffrey Street to take them under the North Bridge to the place of their final resting.
Jeffrey Street is a short winding street, built at the end of the nineteenth century by the city’s Improvement Trustees. It goes in a semi-circular sweep from the head of the Canongate behind John Knox’s House to the southern end of North Bridge, the Scotsman Bridge to locals, because for a hundred years it was the headquarters of the famous Edinburgh newspaper. Always up early, I would watch gigantic rolls of paper being fed into the print shop under the bridge where Jeffrey Street meets Market Street. The city’s newspapers were not the only industrial activity in the area. Jeffrey Street was also the city’s Fruit Market, and refrigerated lorries would park outside our door in the early hours, engines running, waiting for work to start at four. There were no buildings on the north side of the street, which opened above Waverley Station, looking to the Governor’s Palace of the old city prison on Calton Hill and the windowed cliff at the back of Saint Andrew’s House, office of the Secretary of State for Scotland. The street is a funnel for the haar, the east-coast fog that sweeps into Edinburgh at all seasons, but is particularly chilling in winter, when it can suddenly wrap the Old Town in mysterious drifting shadows. It was a street of plain tenements till it reached number 39, which was a tall baronial house built in 1886 to house the clergy of Old Saint Paul’s. Donated to the parish by Cornelia Dick-Lauder, whose nephew was Rector at the time, Lauder House has a crow-stepped gable and a conical-roofed turret. Were it on a windswept rise of land on the outskirts of Edinburgh, it might double for the house the orphaned David Balfour came to in search of his uncle in Stevenson’s Kidnapped. Instead, it is set back a few feet from the row of tenements it abuts in Jeffrey Street, and opens onto the sidewalk. There was a small, neglected, overshadowed garden in the back, thrillingly shielded on the west side by Trinity College Apse.
The Collegiate Church of the Holy Trinity had been founded by Mary, Queen of Scotland in 1462 to pray for her ancestors. Situated in the valley between the Old Town and Calton Hill, it was dismantled and the stones carefully numbered when the North British Railway company bought the site for Waverley Station. By the time they moved what was left of them in 1872, a number of the stones had been stolen, so only the apse of the old church was reassembled on a level piece of ground at the bottom of Chalmers Close, before it sloped down into the foetid valley that was being covered in railway lines. When they started redesigning the area ten years later, the apse found itself tucked behind the tenements in Jeffrey Street. Later to become a brass-rubbing centre when the city needed to generate income, in our time it was an Edinburgh Corporation Reading Room, supplied with every conceivable magazine and newspaper, and patronised mainly by elderly homeless men, who dozed their days away in its municipal warmth. I was delighted to have such a resource a minute from my front door, and used it frequently to read the English newspapers and to catch up on ecclesiastical gossip in the Church Times.
In spite of the cold in our first five winters in Lauder House – before central heating was installed – we grew to love the house. We filled it with curates and young people in need of a place to live, as well as a stream of waifs and strays
. It was a bustling place, and it was Jean who was left to preside over the bustle. I was adept at bringing people into our home, then escaping from them to my study and its coal-burning stove to read and prepare sermons and think great thoughts, while Jean dealt with the turbulent energies I had unleashed into the house. I loved Lauder House, but it was the church along the street that stole my heart.
The site occupied by Old Saint Paul’s – old because another Saint Paul’s was later built in York Place for the burgeoning middle classes of Edinburgh’s New Town – had been in use as a place of worship for rebellious Episcopalians since 1689. Ejected from Saint Giles’ Cathedral when the Stuarts were kicked out of Scotland and the Church of Scotland was established on the Presbyterian model, Bishop Rose made a chapel out of an old wool store in Carrubber’s Close, where the congregation has remained ever since. When the old building became ruinous, the present church was assembled upon the site, starting in 1880, to a design by William Hay – a pupil of George Gilbert Scott – though the actual building was executed by Hay’s partner, George Henderson. The chancel and north part of the nave were built by 1883, the south half by 1890, the Lady Chapel on the side of the nave by 1905. Finally, in 1926, as a memorial to the men from the parish who had died in the Great War, the Warriors’ Chapel and the great Calvary Stair were added to the west of the chancel aisle, and the building as we have it today was complete. Given its position, towered over by the hotel on North Bridge that is its immediate neighbour to the west, shouldered by tenements on North Gray’s Close to the east, backed up against the tenements on the slope of the Royal Mile to the south, and with its only open face down on Jeffrey Street to the north, Old Saint Paul’s is not immediately visible to the casual beholder, which is why people, when they actually come across it by stepping through the little side door on Carrubber’s Close, feel they are the first to have happened upon an enchanting secret.
The chances are that when they go in through that little door the lights will be off in the church, so it will take them a while to get accustomed to the tenebrous atmosphere, as weak light filters through the high windows. They will probably sit at the back to let the space introduce itself to them in its own way. What overwhelms me about the building is the sense of watching and remembering it conveys. The eye is drawn to a high stone arch and the iron tracery of an Art Nouveau rood screen beneath it, and then to seven points of light burning in the shade of the distant sanctuary, and to smaller arches and a glimpse of white in a corner, and to the little chapel with the gold reredos over there, like a place made ready for the troubled to creep into and hide in. But there is more happening here than a contrivance of stone and wood and oil and a trace of sweet incense in the air. This is a building that has brooded upon its past and distilled it into a palpable sorrow. It is sorrow for the living as well as for the dead, but first for the dead whose names are written down. In Old Saint Paul’s some of these names are written on stone as well as on paper in bound volumes.
Churches as powerful as Old Saint Paul’s usually contain the memory of a remarkable figure from the past, recent enough not to have been forgotten like the haar that swirls round the closes of the Old Town on a summer morning only to be evaporated by the sun at high noon. There was such a man here. His name was Albert Ernest Laurie, and he spent most of his life at Old Saint Paul’s. He came first as a lay worker to the parish and its teeming slums. He stayed on as Curate after he was ordained, and became Rector in 1893. He died in an armchair in Lauder House before Evensong late on an April afternoon in 1937. The city fathers had to close the streets in the Old Town on the day of his funeral because the poor gathered in their thousands to watch him being carried down the stair he himself had built as a memorial to their own dead. There is one story about him that clutches at my heart. It is not the story about him going down the Canongate at five in the morning to light the fires of bed-ridden old women and make them a pot of tea before opening the church for morning prayer. It is not about the clubs and guilds and schools he opened to ease the lives of the poor in one of the most densely packed slums in Europe, however picturesque it was to the eyes of early twentieth-century visitors to the Royal Mile. Nor is it about the way his sermons drifted lovingly all over the place as he got older, causing the famous Platonist A.E. Taylor, Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, and a member of the congregation, to sit at the back of the church groaning audibly, ‘No, no, stop, dear man, stop, please stop. Oh no, no!’
The story that overwhelms me concerns the chapel he built at Old Saint Paul’s when he came back from the Great War. Hundreds of boys he knew from the parish went off to that catastrophe and never came back. He had followed them into battle as a chaplain, and was awarded the Military Cross for crawling about in No Man’s Land between the lines, comforting the wounded and dying as hell was breaking around him. The memory of the boys he lost in the Calvary of the Great War never left him, and he determined that their names would not die with him. After the war he employed Matthew Ochterlony to design a Warriors’ Chapel in their memory. Beginning from the Calvary Stairs that mount under a vaulted ceiling from Jeffrey Street to the church, one finds the chapel above the stairs lying alongside the chancel. It is lined in plain stone on which the names of the dead are recorded in bronze Roman letters, with a continuous stone bench beneath running along the wall. High above, regimental flags hang under the oak wagon roof. And nine oil lamps hang in front of the columned names.1 On sleepless nights, his mind heavy with memories, Laurie would go along Jeffrey Street and climb the new stairs into the church, where he would kindle a piece of charcoal in a tiny thurible, sprinkle a spoonful of incense on the burning coal and swing the smoking pot before the 149 names recorded there in bronze letters, each one a child from the sleeping streets that lay near his silent church, calling them out softly one by one, remembering them. I have no doubt he believed they had gone on to another life where sorrow and pain were no more, but I am also sure he was in anguish over their loss of this life, and angered by it. And puzzled, perhaps, by his own anger? If he really believed in the resurrection of the dead, why mourn them so? Why build these stairs to tread the Calvary of the trenches again every day? Why build this chapel with its flags and lamps, yet in such a way that it became a place of sorrow rather than a trumpet blast of pride like so many other war memorials? Why make sure their names are all written down here, on this wall, if you know they are already written down in the Book of Life, the record God keeps of the 60 billion souls who have peopled his creation and lived their lives and died their deaths and vanished without memorial from the earth? It is because he was not, could not be sure of these confident claims, and was hurt, like Dante, by the knowledge that death had undone so many, and continues, inexorably, to undo them.
That is the pain and the puzzle that lies at the heart of religion, and it is what will keep it going, in some form or other, as long as humans go on being born and living their lives and going down the stairs and under the bridge to join the increasing army of the forgotten dead. Religion names the dead in protest as well as in hope, and God is the object of the protest as well as the hope. It is because the dead do not speak to us and because we cannot know what has become of them that we protest and hope at the same time. But God does not speak to us either, so we are left with our names and our protests and our hopes, and we build places that blend them together, places to which we can speak, but which never speak back to us. Laurie built such a place, a place where he could say the names whose loss haunted him but who never spoke back to him. Another place like this, but on a vaster scale, was built in Washington in 1982. The Vietnam War Memorial is a list of names inscribed on black granite panels, and it too is a place of speaking and withholding. Robert Pogue Harrison talks of:
the solemn gravity of the wall – the encrypted presence of the dead – which seems to turn the deaths of those memorialised into a stubborn question. The silence with which it responds to this question gives the wall’s inscribe
d black granite panels an almost overwhelming power of withholding. The irresistible need many visitors feel to touch a chiselled name, kiss it, talk to it, offer it flowers or gifts, leave it notes or letters, is evidence enough of the dead’s private presence in the stone – a presence at once given and denied.62
Leaving Alexandria Page 17
