He enjoyed a five-course dinner, followed by coffee, a liqueur and a cigar. For that passing hour he ‘was taken up, caught up and carried away in it, with all the happiness of Christmases past brought back and remembered again’.
The waiter, who had looked after me with great attentiveness and cordiality, brought the bill to me, proffering it on a plate. I smiled at him with my most winning smile, regretting that I had seemingly omitted to bring any cash with me and suggesting that, no doubt, the hotel would accept my signature on the bill?
The house detective, ‘a man of great good nature and some cordiality’, invited him to his private room. There Geoffrey told him the story of his breakdown, his years in hospital, loss of position, family, friends and everything else that had gone to make up his life. Was there no one to whom he could turn? He mentioned his brothers ‘in the North country’ who had broken off relationships with him long before. Pressed, he gave the detective their addresses and phone numbers.
Without asking me further, he picked up the telephone, asked for numbers, and finally contacted one of my brothers; they were all enjoying Christmas Day together at one of their homes. He spoke at some length to my brother; I sat, half listening, but thinking more of what once was and now seemed had gone for ever.
The house detective replaced the phone and sat in silence.
Your brothers, he said, will pay the bill, and I am to give you a couple of pounds for yourself; they hope that you have had a good Christmas Day and that all will go well for you.
Silently, I rose and took his hand. He pushed two notes into the breast-pocket of my jacket, escorted me back to the Carriage Room, to the cloakroom where I was helped into my overcoat, scarf and gloves; then escorted from the hotel with every courtesy and well wishing from all, into the cold crisp air which flew steadily up from the Thames into the Strand.
I stood for a moment on the pavement, catching the elusive, fleeting, yet eternal feel and sense of it all; Christmas Day had come, was here, and always would be.
Christmas might always be there, but he wouldn’t be. After a few tumultuous winters in Edinburgh, he died. He outlived the Lauder House community, however, and might even have helped deliver it the coup de grâce. We were all stressed by the routine we had imposed upon ourselves, and I was becoming increasingly aware that, far from being a sociable creature who liked a lot of people around him, I preferred solitude to society, a good book in my study to a noisy crowd in the kitchen. Even worse, I was discovering that I had the kind of personality that resented interruptions to the purposes I had set for myself, and life in Jeffrey Street had become one long interruption. I talked piously about living in the now of life, went on about the sacrament of the present moment and how it disclosed God’s presence – mainly to myself, because the others were all better at coping with interruptions than I was. I went on about meeting whoever came to the door as a divine visitor, no matter what else we might be doing at the time. Whenever the bell went – and it went a lot – we would joke that Jesus was at the door again. I grew to resent the frequency of his visits. I began to wish we could render the house invisible several days a week, so that we could get on with our own lives unharassed by the sacred wanderer. And it was tough on our children, who rarely got us to themselves. How much of their father did the married monk thing leave for them?
One night, after a particularly crazy meal when we had a heavier atmosphere than usual round the table, with a number of people groaning into their hands and the children understandably fractious, I knew it could not go on – or I could not go on. The following morning at the weekly staff meeting I suggested throwing in the towel on the community. David was moving to another post, anyway, and it might be better if the Shaws and Holloways got a bit more time to themselves, just to be families in their own right. There was relief all round. We voted for immediate disbandment. I had the top off the big table by lunchtime. That evening, for the first time in ages, there were only five of us round the table. There continued to be a lot of traffic through the house, and it was always a busy place, but we had removed a crucial element of extra strain. And I had learnt that I was not cut out to be a guru with a colossal extended family around me.
I also discovered that my relationship with God had changed. Far from seeking to justify myself to God for my constant failures, I began to feel that he should occasionally justify himself to me. As the creator of all things, ultimate responsibility for everything had to rest with him, especially for the pains and sorrows of the admittedly weak but not entirely wicked children of the earth whose unanswered cries had been beating against his gate for centuries. My wrestling with my own compulsions, as well as my experience of the tragedies of others, did not demonstrate any discernible improvement in the human condition as a result of the death of Jesus – allegedly decreed by God for our salvation. Except in one way of reading the story. I became obsessed with the question put to Jesus by John the Baptist: ‘Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?’67 After listing a series of miracles he had performed, including the raising of the dead, Jesus added a mysterious coda ‘blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me’.68 Well, I was increasingly offended in him. In my parish I saw no dead rising, no lame leaping, no blind seeing. Again and again I led the dead down those stairs and under that bridge. The lame continued to stumble and the blind to feel their way with a stick. In spite of the claims of Revivalists, the world did not seem any more redeemed after than before Christ. What I started preaching was not that tragedy could be overcome by the action of God, but that in responding to tragedy meaning could be imposed upon it. It was at this time I first read André Schwarz-Bart’s novel, The Last of the Just. It was the story of Ernie Levy who died in Auschwitz in 1943, another victim of unredeemed history. At the end of the novel, Ernie is on a train to Auschwitz and the gas chambers. He is surrounded by children, one of whom is dead.
Ernie said, clearly and emphatically, so that there would be no mistaking him, ‘He’s asleep . . .’ Then he picked up the child’s corpse and with infinite gentleness laid it on the growing heap of Jewish men, Jewish women, Jewish children, joggled in their last sleep by the jolting of the train.
‘He was my brother,’ a little girl said hesitantly, anxiously, as though she had not decided what attitude it would be best to take in front of Ernie.
He sat down next her and set her on his knees. ‘He’ll wake up too, in a little while, with all the others, when we reach the Kingdom of Israel. There, children can find their parents, and everybody is happy. Because the country we’re going to, that’s our kingdom you know . . .’
‘There,’ a child interrupted happily, repeating the words rhythmically as though he had already said, or thought, or heard, them several times, ‘there, we’ll be able to get warm day and night.’
‘Yes,’ Ernie nodded, ‘that is how it will be.’
‘There,’ said a second voice in the gloom, ‘there are no Germans or railway-trucks or anything that hurts.’
‘No, not you,’ an enervated little girl interrupted, ‘let the rabbi talk, it’s better when he does.’
Still cradling the dead boy’s sister on his knees, Ernie went on . . .
But a woman digs her fingernails into Ernie’s shoulder . . .
‘How can you tell them it’s only a dream?’ she breathed, with hate in her voice.
Rocking the child mechanically, Ernie gave way to dry sobs. ‘Madame,’ he said at last, ‘there is no room for truth here.’69
There is no room for truth here. Like Ernie’s story to the doomed children, was religion a consoling fiction – necessary, but still a fiction? Was I called to preach it not because it was true, but because there was no room for truth in a world so desperate for hope? Did I really believe it myself, or was I just trying to pump hope into myself? I knew we could help to ameliorate the human condition. Christianity, in spite of its flaws, had been good at that, was still good at it. That’s why those people came to our door and
were insistent on being helped. This, they seemed to be saying, is what you are for. We know it, you know it, so open up and get on with it. And we did. We fed the hungry and visited those in prison and clothed the naked and tried to share our goods with the poor. But the dead did not rise, the lame did not walk, the blind did not see. We could help the poor of the world but we could not heal the woe of the world that made them poor and would go on making them poor for ever. Woe was for keeps. What I was left with was a version of Ernie’s story, the beauty of which became its own meaning and justification. I became lyrical in reaching into tragedy to find the answer not beyond but within the sorrow.
What I came up with was a naming of the fact: ye now therefore have sorrow. That was the human condition. There was no escape from it, but naming the fact without cringing before it offered a kind of transcendence. But it was not theology that brought me to this point. Theology had ceased to help. Its abstractions rarely illuminated the tragedy of life, and there was something demeaning about its attempts to justify God. God needed to be accused not excused, challenged not crawled to on bended knee. Fiction helped in this. So did poetry. Neither sought to explain, only to express, to give voice to the earth’s anger and sorrow. Maybe religion was best understood not as a science that explained why there was suffering, but as a way of gathering people round the mystery of suffering itself and sitting with them before it. And sometimes that gathering was on a death train where only the consoling, necessary lie had any right to speak. That or silence. What if God was on the train, too, and was the child on Ernie’s lap and her brother on the heap of Jewish corpses? There either had to be no God or a dying God. Not dead, dying, always dying. Was that what the story of the dying Jewish carpenter was about? Not about magical rescue and redemption from tragedy, but a picture of tragedy itself, a fiction that gave us the power to endure and not be defeated. In another great holocaust novel, Elie Wiesel’s Night, a child is hanging on a gallows in Auschwitz.
And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes. And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished.
Behind me, I heard the same man asking:
‘For God’s sake, where is God?’
And from within me, I heard a voice answer:
‘Where He is? This is where – hanging here from this gallows . . .’70
That could mean either of two things. In Auschwitz God is dead – God is over – and we are alone in a pitiless universe. Or in Auschwitz God is dying, dying beside us on all our calvaries. Dead or dying. Which God was it? Whatever my answer, dead or dying, he was no longer the God I had started out with.
11
A DOUBLE-MINDED MAN
I began the journey of this book weeping in a graveyard. I stood there mourning the loss of my youth and its ideals. But there was more to it than that. I was also mourning the passing of a way of life which had filled that place with laughter and aspiration and disappointment for three quarters of a century. But there was more to it than that. I was mourning time itself and the way it steals everything from us, and I was confronting the way I had disappointed myself. Certain phrases from the New Testament can still overwhelm me with something that is not despair but is close to it. I have already referred to Paul’s lament, ‘Demas hath forsaken me, having loved this present world’, and the way it summons up a whole complex of regret in me. Part of the regret is over things I have done and things I have failed to do. Any normal human heart feels the knife edge of regret at moments of retrospection and self-examination. But there is another kind of regret that is more difficult to explain. It is sorrow not over what we have done but over what we are. It may even be sorrow over what we are not. And I don’t mean not handsome or rich or charming. One of the lessons a long life teaches is how formed we were by characteristics and circumstances that were entirely beyond our control. Being who we were, we were bound to act the way we did. To have acted differently we would have had to be a different person. Maybe a better person, because, tragic as it may appear, even unfair, there are good people, not so good people, and bad people. And the big discovery we make in life is the person we have been revealed to be. We don’t have that knowledge when we start out. We imagine there’s a list of characteristics we can acquire if we fancy them, whereas the main lines of our personality were cast before we knew it. This does not mean that we have no control over our decisions and choices. It does mean that we will have little control over them till we acknowledge who we are and accept the reality of the hand we have been dealt to play.
There was another New Testament phrase that made me realise I had been trying to wear the wrong clothes. They come from the Epistle to James: ‘A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.’71 It took me a while to realise that I was double-minded and unstable, if not in all my ways, then certainly in many of my attitudes and opinions. Janus-like, I seemed able to look two ways at once, be in two minds about things. Melancholy was one of my two minds, and melancholy is a conservative disposition. If we lament the constant flow of time and how it carries everything away, we will be disposed to the work of preserving or conserving what we can from the flood. We will be committed to institutions not only because they help to protect us against our own capacity for destruction, but also because they are good at keeping the past around us as long as possible. Old buildings, in particular, are important to this kind of mind. Kelham Hall is no longer the home of the Society of the Sacred Mission and the hundreds of boys who spent their formative years there, but the fact that it remains as a physical entity gives it enormous potency for those who go back to it sorrowing over lost time. It evokes what it no longer contains. Old Saint Paul’s in Edinburgh is also a sorrowing building, but the fact that it remains in continuity with its own past makes its evocative power stronger and more disturbing. One of the unsettling aspects of the place for me was the way it continued to evoke Albert Laurie’s presence long after he was dead and buried.
Shortly after I arrived in Lauder House, Laurie’s niece died. I had not realised that she was still alive, probably because she had not attended Old Saint Paul’s for decades. She had lived in Findhorn Place in the Grange area of Edinburgh for over thirty years, since Laurie’s death. I was asked by her executors if I would like any of the books in the house, most of which had once belonged to Laurie himself. I spent an afternoon going through what remained of his library, but I took none of his religious books. Instead, I asked for his collection of the novels of Anthony Trollope, some of them in the Oxford World Classics edition, some of them in the Collins Classics edition. They bore the pencilled autograph, A.E. Laurie, Lauder House. That winter I sat on Sunday evenings after Evensong reading them, conscious that I was in the same room, before the same fireplace, reading the same novels, possibly smoking the same tobacco, as my predecessor. This was about the time the skids were being put beneath the wheels of British Christianity and its demise was being confidently predicted, so that those of us in the ordained ministry were beginning to think we might be the last generation of an endangered species. This concerned me in two ways. There was a selfish anxiety. This was how I earned my living and supported my family. It was a meagre wage, to be sure, but it was more than many had to live on, and there were privileges attached, one of which was living in an interesting house that was heavy with memories. Less selfishly, I was moved by what looked like the passing of a way of life that had its own culture and charm. Reading Trollope before an open fire in Lauder House amplified the mood. Was this way of life something else that was soon to pass from the earth? I started getting books out of the library about the English Country Parson, partly to stoke my melancholy, partly to recapture remembrances of a way of life that was as dead as steam trains and horse-drawn carriages.
This instinct for elegy was fortified by the ecclesiastical tradition to which I belonged. I had been initiated as a boy into the glam
our of Anglo-Catholic religion. Though I did not know it at the time, Anglo-Catholicism was a conservative, restorationist movement, intent on bringing back to the Anglican Church, in Kathleen Raine’s words, ‘the now of then’.
If I could turn
Upon my finger the bright ring of time
The now of then
I would bring back again.72
What it wanted to bring back were many of the practices of the Catholic tradition that had been abandoned at the Reformation. There was more to it than vestments and candles and incense and processions and acolytes, though these became the badges of the movement. Trivial they may have been, but they had captured my young imagination at Saint Mungo’s Alexandria and drawn me after them into the sanctuary.
. . . under the Travers baroque, in a limewashed whiteness,
The fiddle-back vestments a-glitter with morning rays,
Our Lady’s image, in multiple-candled brightness,
The bells and banners – those were the waking days
When Faith was taught and fanned to a golden blaze.73
Behind the theatricality of Betjeman’s golden blaze there lay a serious moral purpose: an attempt to reclaim the heroic side of Christianity. Anglo-Catholicism was not all gin and lace. Beneath the pomp of the processions there was a call to a serious and holy life. Though it made me shiver with apprehension, self-sacrifice was the term that encapsulated the underlying idea. It had been a strong theme at Kelham. It had also marked Canon Laurie’s style. In fact, it had been a profound aspect of the Anglo-Catholic revival since the beginning. John Henry Newman, the poet and first genius of the movement in its early Oxford days, left the Church of England in 1845 because, among more theological reasons, he thought it had ceased to be a heroic church. In his obituary of Newman in The Times, Richard Church, Dean of Saint Paul’s, said that Newman had always sought to return to the ardour and self-surrender of early Christianity.
Leaving Alexandria Page 20
