Leaving Alexandria

by Richard Holloway

  Paul was right about praying in tongues. Love was more important, but it was also harder. Glossolalia was easy, and it was also more fun. The history of religion is full of revivals like this, attempts to experience the god in new ways and whip up enthusiasm and inspiration among his followers. The word enthusiasm means to be possessed by the god. The word inspire means to be blown into by a transcendent force. Behind this longing for experience of the god is the frustration that is intrinsic to all religion. The mystery that beckons us is both given and denied, but denial is the more common experience. Small wonder that we seek ways to pump the god into ourselves, so that, if only for a few hours, we can get out of ourselves and into the god or get the god into us. Compare video clips of pop concerts and revival meetings. It’s the same phenomenon, afflatus, the god blowing joy into its devotees. Watch those shining faces. Observe those arms in the air, waving, reaching up, trying to lift themselves off the ground and out of their earth-bound lives for an hour or two. Most of it is harmless, and some of it is therapeutic, releasing tension, loosening clenched muscles, giving ourselves a break. Paul did not deny that praying in tongues was a gift of the Spirit, he just said it was a trivial gift, an escape – but people like to escape.

  This is something the severely rational person neither understands nor approves. Understandably, because escape into ecstasy can be demonic as well as benign. There can be ecstatic destruction and genocide as well as ecstatic joy and release. We may claim to be rational animals, thinking, calculating animals, but beneath our capacity for reason other forces are at work in us. Psychically, we are not that far away from our evolutionary forerunners whose emerging consciousness must have been frightening as they looked out on a dangerous and unpredictable world and tried to make sense of it. No wonder they posited angry forces Out There. No wonder they invented ways to propitiate them. And no wonder they sought occasional release from the tyranny of consciousness. The positing of a tremendous Other was humanity’s response to its own bafflement. It put a kind of meaning on life and gave form to longings we only ever partly understood. That is why we should be slow to condemn those who find religion a help in making it through the maze of life. My heart won’t let me condemn it, though I am stunned by the cruelty that is never far beneath its surface. Part of me is still moved but part of me is offended by multitudes of weeping worshippers, eyes closed, arms in the air, reaching, reaching beyond themselves to the tremendous lover in the sky. Religious ecstasy is a potent source of escape, even if it is only into an imagined meaning. But it has a dark side. A side that conjures memories of traumatised children going under the knife and bawling animals whose blood is daubed on doorposts to keep the angel of death from destroying those within. All of that is in there, hiding behind the pillars of memory, waiting to release itself in ecstasies of disapproval and destruction. It did not take long for the enjoyable ecstasy of the Charismatic Movement to morph into something darker.

  If giving lukewarm believers a sufficiently powerful experience of God has always been the Church’s biggest pastoral challenge, its biggest theological challenge has been to keep them believing in a God who saves the world, in spite of powerful evidence to the contrary. From the beginning, Christianity claimed to be a religion of redemption from the forces of evil and suffering. Theologies like this are common among oppressed people, as the Ghost Dance movement among Plains Indians in nineteenth-century America reminded us. The unbearable sorrow and anger of an oppressed people transposes itself into a conviction that God is about to act. He won’t delay much longer. Things have gone too far. His children are being ground into the dust. Soon, soon, he will come soon. The New Testament suggests that Jesus saw himself as such an instrument of eschatological hope, the agent through whom God would transform the world into a kingdom of justice. The first Christians expected this supernatural transformation to happen in their lifetime, which was why Paul spent a lot of time in his letters to these expectant communities, cautioning them not to give up their worldly responsibilities – such as working for a living – because no one knew the day or the hour. But this kind of eschatological hope dies hard and human history is full of poignant longing for supernatural rescue from the tragedies of time. It did not happen in Paul’s time and it has not happened since. But that does not stop the longing from welling up to such an unbearable degree in the hearts of believers that it metamorphoses into a certainty that the time, at last, is near.

  That’s what happened to the Neo-Pentecostal movement of the Seventies. What began as a movement to cheer up bored believers stranded in the departure lounge of history, ended as a full-blown eschatological movement convinced that the Second Coming was at hand. He was coming back, and it would be soon! I never did believe in a Second Coming in history, so this twist in the story of the Neo-Pentecostal movement did not convince me. But it worried me. Bad religion can be comforting, a blanket that protects us against the chilly winds of an empty universe, but it can be dangerous too. Belief in the imminence of the Second Coming became the preserve of the Christian Right in America, where it fed the growth of a conspiracy theory that became one of the most powerful weapons in America’s culture wars. One of its leaders is a writer who is hardly known outside the US, Tim LaHaye. LaHaye has been named as the most influential Christian leader of the last quarter century, more influential even than Billy Graham. He is the co-author of the Left Behind series of novels about the end-time, which have sold more than 30 million copies through outlets such as Walmart. LaHaye sees all around him a conspiracy of humanists, liberals and feminists, who are out to destroy the family and eliminate Christian values from the US. The dangerous thing about the movement is that, rather than looking for ways to address the problems that beset the world, the apocalyptic mind-set welcomes them as signs that the end is accelerating towards us. The late Jerry Falwell, a co-conspirator of LaHaye’s, when asked about the growing degradation of the planet said it did not concern him. Jesus would be back soon to end the world, so we should use it before we lose it.65 I spent a lot of time agonising over God’s failure to rescue us from the pains and sorrows of time, and worked my way to a kind of resolution, but before looking at it I want to say more about the Spirit’s swoop through Old Saint Paul’s.

  A regular visitor during my years there was a saintly ascetic called Neil Russell. Neil had found his way through that little door in Carrubber’s Close, and it had changed his life. After years working in Africa, he was made Bishop of Zanzibar, but because the poverty in which he chose to live became a reproach to the ostentation of the local ruler, he was expelled and returned to his native Edinburgh. He became a member of a small religious community that lived in intense simplicity at Roslin near the famous chapel, and was made honorary assistant Bishop of Edinburgh. Not long after his return he came to the door of Lauder House. I thought he was a tramp I hadn’t met before, and was about to go into the kitchen to get him something to eat when he introduced himself. When the Spirit blew noisily into Old Saint Paul’s, Neil desperately wanted the refreshment of the gift of tongues, but it wouldn’t come. This was a man who lived like a desert father; a man who had given away everything he possessed; a man who lived on hand-outs and wore only second-hand clothes, including a pair of desert boots of mine, abandoned because the soft suede revealed the ugly shape of my knobbly toes; a man who spent two hours every morning in silent prayer; a man who was so manifestly holy he scarcely seemed to be of the earth at all. Yet no matter how hard he tried he could not pray in tongues. I watched him being counselled by callow university students who could switch tongues on and off like electric guitars, he sitting at their feet like a novice before advanced practitioners.

  In the tongues business, getting the gift was referred to as coming through. Imagine my excitement, when devouring the recently published Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Verse edited by Philip Larkin, I came across a poem by D.H. Lawrence, ‘The Song of a Man Who Has Come Through’.

  Not I, not I, but the wind that blows thro
ugh me!

  A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time,

  If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me!

  If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift!

  If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed

  By the fine, fine wind that takes its course through the chaos of the

  World . . .66

  Neil never did come through, in spite of the ministrations of his youthful mentors. Observing that irony was for me the beginning of the end of the experience, though it did leave a little gift behind. One evening my daughter Sara couldn’t get to sleep. She had a sore stomach that nothing would soothe. I knelt beside her bed. I put my hands upon her head, closed my eyes, and prayed in tongues over her. Sara giggled. The pain left. She went to sleep. Christianity was a funny business, outsiders could see that. But it was also poignant, I could see that.

  The tongues gradually fell silent, but the wind hadn’t yet finished blowing through me. There was something else I had to try. An interesting aspect of the Neo-Pentecostal movement was its rediscovery of early Christian communism. The leaders of the movement, including Graham Pulkingham, pointed out that the first Christians held everything in common, which was why Pulkingham had founded the Community of Celebration. If you were serious about Christianity you had to abandon the nuclear family, get out of the rat race, and start living in communities that held all things in common. It was the answer to the problems of gross inequality that disfigured capitalist economies. If Christianity became a network of these communities, they could absorb the victims of the world’s greed and cruelty into their own lives and bring them healing. It was a message that touched the old monastic nerve in me. I had put my hand to that plough as a boy, but I had looked back. I had caught a glimpse of the way of self-denial in community and had forsaken it. Was this a way to recoup my spiritual losses, a second chance at the common life? By this time Lauder House had been divided, and a new curate’s apartment provided on the upper floors. Martin Shaw and his wife Elspeth and their son Ben lived there. We had the rest of the house, with plenty of room for people who needed a place to stay for longer or shorter periods. David, the other curate, was in a flat in Jeffrey Street. I broached the idea of binding us all into a single economic community. They went along with it. Jean did too. A few weeks later I wrote these words in the parish magazine.

  Shortly after Easter the Shaw and Holloway families and David Boag entered into a commitment to live together in community. There is no elaborate constitution. We pray together twice a day and study the Bible (which is why the daily offices are now said in Lauder House), and we have pooled all our money and have a common purse. We eat the main meal of the day together, at 5.45 in the evening (and we are always happy to see members of the congregation at the meal, as long as they let us know they’re coming).

  Our reasons for doing this are quite simple: we felt that God had called us to do it, in order to learn more about loving each other the better to love others.

  Neil Russell came to Lauder House to hear our vows. The event did not have the solemnity of the religious professions I had witnessed at Kelham, where the novice spent the night alone in the great chapel before giving himself utterly away to God at mass the following morning. In my heart I still felt I had failed the call of God to follow him with absolute abandonment. I was a muddled, compromised, divided man who had let God down. Was this a chance to regain his approval, prove I had the right stuff? It wasn’t Kelham Chapel, with the shadows gathering round me as I sacrificed my life on the long grey altar under the looming Rood, it was only the kitchen of Lauder House. But it was something, was it not? And I did try to inject a little drama into our promises. Neil began:

  Following the example and command of our Lord Jesus Christ, the holy Apostle Paul summons us to grow together in unity and love so that we may become a temple of the Lord and a visible expression of Christ’s presence in the world. And we read in the Acts of the Holy Apostles how the first believers held all in common and were united daily in prayer and the breaking of bread.

  You are gathered together here because you believe God is calling you to follow the example of the holy Apostles, by joining yourselves together in a household of faith in order the better to praise God and be his witnesses in the midst of the world.

  Then we made two simple promises, pledging ourselves to live in the community with all lowliness and meekness, with patience, forbearing one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. I had a joiner screw an enormous slab of compressed wood onto our already huge kitchen table, so that up to twenty people could sit round it for our evening meal. Jean told me much later that her heart sank when Elspeth Shaw said to her son Ben, now you have a second mummy. I didn’t notice. I was launched on a new adventure.

  It lasted six months. It’s hard to say exactly what collapsed it, but I suspect it was exhaustion – as well as creeping self-knowledge on my part. In addition to the core community, we always had one or two people with mental health or addiction problems staying with us, and they took their toll. One was brought to us from the stage of the Traverse Theatre, where he had gone mad during a one-man show he was doing. It had taken the management time to realise that what was happening wasn’t in the script and was, in fact, the beginning of the manic phase of a bipolar swing. They brought him to our door just after ten in the evening and we took him in for the night. Though we put him to bed, we discovered next morning that he had not slept; instead, he had spent the night going through our cupboards and drawers, not with any malicious intent but compulsively, manically. At breakfast our children were electrified to see him at the table wearing Sara’s Brownie uniform, singing snatches of opera to himself, with the family cutlery and dish supply arranged in symmetrical patterns all round the kitchen. I took him to the Royal Edinburgh Hospital where they managed to bring him down. He spent the rest of his life creatively, though he was to die in the first phase of Edinburgh’s AIDS epidemic in the Eighties. And he was not the only visitor whom we tried to absorb into the quasi-monastic flow of our new life.

  The chaplain of a prison in the south of England phoned and asked me to look after a man they were about to release. He had been gaoled for a clever fraud, and his advisers recommended a complete change of scene for his own safety and the possibility it might afford of a fresh start. A brilliant accountant, his catastrophic alcohol problem had not only led him to prison, it had lost him his wife and children; and his own brothers had been forced to distance themselves from the chaos of his life. I met him on platform 11 in Waverley Station and took him under North Bridge and along Jeffrey Street to Lauder House. He was dapper, bowler-hatted, charming, animated, full of plans. Grateful for our hospitality, he said that once he had found a place to stay he would set up as a tax accountant. As long as he stayed off the bottle, all would be well. He was not able to stay off the bottle, and things turned out badly for him, but the ride he took us on was hilarious as well as tragic. He did make money as a tax consultant, but after a week or two of sobriety he would hit the bottle. Then he would come back to Lauder House to detox or do cold turkey on a bed in my study, helped by our GP who was always prepared to come at a moment’s notice to inject him with Largactil, an anti-psychotic drug that brought him down lightly. During one of his sober spells I got him to write down some of his memories. Apart from an addiction to semicolons, his writing voice captured his rather stately style of utterance. He called one of his essays ‘The Carriage Room’, and I published it in the magazine.

  That winter of 1968 in London was a hard, cold and bleak one. I had been living rough most of the time since I had taken my discharge from hospital earlier on in the year and I had so far failed completely to get back into the mainstream of life. That week, before Christmas, I had managed a bed in a hostel for a few nights, but the final blow came the day before Christmas when I was told at ‘the Ministry’ that my benefits could not be paid until a
fter Christmas; all my protests were of no avail and I had no one I felt I could turn to, so I spent the night of Christmas Eve on the Embankment, waiting for the day to come.

  I pondered long, feeling deeply alone, rejected and despondent. Finally my mind became resolute. I spruced up, the best I could, in a public washroom, and approaching Christmas dinnertime I made my way to the Carriage Room.

  The Carriage Room was a new and rather elegant restaurant in a large hotel in the Strand; I knew it from outside, and from the bill of fare encased in glass at the door, knew that it offered something special, albeit expensive, for Christmas dinner; I had no money, but I buried that knowledge away deep down; somehow an answer would be provided, and even if not and I finished up in the cells, at least I should have warmth and shelter and human contact again. In my hunger and longing I did not think too far ahead, anyway; my compelling need was to sustain a tradition and belief which I had treasured all my life.

  Bracing myself and bringing out my old bonhomie and self-assurance, I entered the Carriage Room; asked for, and was given, a well sited table for one; and proceeded to go through the card as though all was well in the best of worlds. I ate slowly and carefully, not to put too sudden a task on a stomach grown unused to food; drank moderately but enjoyably, savouring the warmth of a good wine. Little by little I mellowed and expanded, noticing people at tables about me, smiling with them and exchanging Christmas greetings with warmth, cordiality and great friendliness.