Leaving Alexandria

by Richard Holloway

  The Advent was kept locked for security reasons, though visitors could be buzzed into the building by the parish secretary. Though I understood the policy that kept the church closed, I always felt it deprived it of a life of its own where it could have gathered memories into itself and opened itself to the sorrows of humanity. It closed itself against those who needed to slip in quietly and unseen to sit in the dark with their own hopelessness. It takes confidence to ring a buzzer and invite yourself into a building to look around. And the confident did it, many of them. But what happens to the unconfident who want to hide themselves away for a while, unseen?

  . . . creep,

  Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind . . .82

  I see now that all the time I was at the Advent I was grieving the loss of Old Saint Paul’s, so I do not think I allowed myself to see the Advent for what it was in itself, a beautiful and generous building that had attracted an astonishingly varied and creative congregation from all over Boston. Most of the misjudgements I made were attempts to impose the pattern we had evolved at Old Saint Paul’s over my twelve years there onto the Advent almost overnight. The symbol for my grieving tactlessness was what happened to the seven sanctuary lamps. The lamps in Old Saint Paul’s were genuine oil lamps. Restrained and elegant, each showed not a flame, but a small white star of light. The Advent also had seven lamps in the sanctuary. They had the confident handsomeness of all the furnishings of the church in Brimmer Street, but they were no longer oil lamps. For convenience, each held a nightlight in a little glass, which was regularly changed by the sexton. And they were red. I sat in the nave when I first arrived, trying to bond with the building, but those red lights held me at bay. They were in my face. They were too assertive. There seemed to be no sorrow in the place, no sense of uncertainty, no sense of absence and loss. I pined for the seven white dots of light I knew were burning quietly in the shadows of Old Saint Paul’s. I asked the sexton to replace the red nightlights with white. He did so, but they looked even less numinous than the ones he replaced. You could see they were candles burning in small tumblers, whereas the dark red glasses, to be fair to them, revealed only the flames. We went back to the red lights. There were other changes I made, mainly to the liturgy, all aimed at conforming the usage to what went on at Old Saint Paul’s. I offered solid reasons for my changes, because reasons were demanded by the congregation, as befitted its American suspicion of autocrats who knew what was good for other people. Most of the changes worked and were, in time, integrated into the life of the Advent, but I can see now what I was up to: rather than patiently letting the new place disclose itself to me, I was intent on making it as much like the old place as I could get away with. If I had understood myself better, and acknowledged what was going on in my heart, I wonder what would have happened had I said to them: I am heartbroken over what I have left behind. It will help me if I make this place look more like the place I came from, so please bear with me. They argued and challenged with that assertive democratic ease that is the cultural hallmark of America, and I got away with most of it because I argued back. But what was increasingly obvious to me was that I had the psychology of a visitor not a settler. In my heart I hoped to go back to Scotland one day.

  But meanwhile I had a fine team of clergy and many hard-working lay leaders and a lot of good work was done. The only enduring legacy of my four years at the Advent was the Community Dinner we started for the homeless. Boston had a large population of street people, victims both of their own demons and the tough reality of America’s ethic of personal responsibility. An Irish writer, Timothy O’Grady, who also loves America, was as troubled as I was by this harshness. Talking of what he found on his return to Ireland, he observes:

  I found something else there that I’d seen little of in America – the idea that chaos and helplessness are never far away from anyone, that they just take you as a strong wind takes a tree, and that their victims are to be commiserated with rather than scorned.83

  I did not see much of that relaxed Hibernian tolerance in the US. You either swam or you sank, and there wasn’t much lifesaving equipment available on the riverbanks of America other than what was provided by private enterprises, including the churches. The Boston churches were supporters of the Walk for Hunger, the proceeds from which went to support a dinner programme and other services for street people. We joined with the Old West Church in providing a dinner on Tuesday nights for 150 guests, the whole thing cooked in the Advent’s well-appointed kitchen, and served by volunteers from the parish. There was rarely any trouble from our guests, but I sometimes wondered what our well-heeled neighbours made of the queue of survivors that started to form outside the Advent on Tuesday evenings, especially when the deep New England cold settled over the city. We got to know the regulars and to miss them when they did not turn up. They seemed to me to be American versions of the characters I’d met at the Ritz in Edinburgh. The difference was that everything seemed heightened and enlarged over here, the destitution more extreme, the violence more frightening, the hopelessness more intractable. And there was a stronger sexual theme. One of our regulars was a flamboyant character who drenched himself in eau de Cologne and sometimes drank it. A priest on the staff told me that he was reputed to give the best head in Boston, occasionally as a favour but usually for a small fee. I hadn’t heard that way of putting it before, but I had noticed the unembarrassed openness of the Boston gay scene.

  Before I arrived at the Advent someone sent me a copy of the glossy magazine, Boston, and pointed me to a particular entry. It was one of those filler columns magazine editors love: best cup of coffee in the Hub, best place for oysters, best Irish pub, and so on. My eye was drawn to the item circled in red by my anonymous correspondent: ‘best place for a gay pickup: coffee hour after High Mass at Beacon Hill’s Church of the Advent’. So I was not surprised to find that many if not most of the men, young and old, in my new congregation were gay. Most of them were Out and proud of it, some of them were married and in the closet, with the door slightly ajar. Aware of the more camouflaged nature of the gay scene in Britain, I was at first disconcerted by the openness of the Advent, but I soon grew to welcome it. I got used to gay couples coming to me to discuss their flagging sex lives, though I doubt if I was ever much help at restoring their early ardour for one another. Boston was a city of refuge for gays, and it attracted hundreds of refugees from the disapproving atmosphere of the American heartland. And the Advent was a magnet. This was partly because a gay priest had been on the staff of the parish for decades before my time and had mentored generations of gay men during the long winter of persecution that was the story of their lives.

  Not that there was anything unusual in that. Anglo-Catholicism has had a strongly homophile if not exactly homosexual ethos from its beginnings. Indeed, Geoffrey Faber, in his controversial book Oxford Apostles, published on the centenary of the movement in 1933, explored the homoerotic atmosphere of Newman’s Oxford circle in the 1820s and ’30s.84 Faber pushed his homoerotic angle too far, but there is no doubt of the homophile energy in Newman’s friendships and the communities in which he enclosed himself, both before and after his conversion to Roman Catholicism. The nature of the early founders aside, there is no doubt that Anglo-Catholicism, as it evolved, became attractive to gay men, though the reasons for this are probably more theologically rooted than is commonly understood. The high camp aesthetic of the more florid wings of the movement was clearly attractive to a certain kind of gay sensibility, as anyone who has had to negotiate a high mass in one of the more fashionable outposts of Anglo-Catholicism will testify. This is surface attraction, however, and there is usually a certain amount of self-parody going on. At a deeper level something more interesting and more moving is happening.

  Even in societies that have stopped persecuting homosexuals, gays remain a minority community, and minorities are always under some kind of threat from the surrounding majority, even if it is only from their curiosity about or incomp
rehension over their sex lives. Gays will always be outsiders in straight communities, and it is their status as outsiders that draws some of them to Christianity and, in particular, to its Anglo-Catholic variant. I have known many gay priests over the years. What has moved me most about their persistence in remaining within a Church that at best only grudgingly accepts them, and at worst actively persecutes them, is their identification not with campery and high jinks in the sanctuary, but with the figure of Jesus, the great Outsider. Many of them intuit that Jesus was himself probably gay, but whether or not that was the case, there is no doubt of his appeal to the rejected and discarded in ancient Israel, an appeal that is still strong today. This meant that, at its best, Anglo-Catholicism was a form of Christianity that was hospitable to the unrespectable, to people who were not good at bringing their desires to heel, people who knew their need of mercy and forgiveness because they were never going to qualify morally for entrance into the members’ enclosure of the more respectable religions. Gays may have been drawn to Anglo-Catholicism for complex reasons, but they informed the tradition with their own experience of the search for acceptance, which is why the churches they served often became havens for people who would not have survived in the thinner atmosphere of congregations of the disciplined and the good. In a world that judged and outlawed them, it was a relief to find communities that did not make them feel bad about themselves. That tenderness towards human frailty meant that other outsiders were drawn in. It was a gay priest with a drink problem who drew me into the Church and set me on my path in life, and he was a priest whose brokenness led to his expulsion from the ministry. It was gay priests who helped me understand that not everything can be fixed and some things just have to be lived with. ‘If you can’t fix it, you gotta stand it,’ as the gay cowboy put it in the film Brokeback Mountain. It was that kind of courage the Church needed when its gay children started going through their great ordeal in the Eighties.

  It started slowly. My first encounter with what was happening was an urgent call to visit a dying parishioner in Massachusetts General Hospital, the famous MGH, which lay at the other end of Charles Street on the northern boundary of Beacon Hill. I did not know him well, and he had disappeared from the Advent a year earlier. This was not unusual in a shifting urban population. I recalled the name, however, because it conjured up the image of the tall, handsome young man who bore it – and the Latin number III tagged to the end of it. A smart-suited lawyer, he was a refugee from a small town in Texas. Devoted to his wealthy parents, intimidated by his father but close to his mother, he had been unable to tell either of them that he was gay. When I arrived at the hospital I was told he was in a special isolation unit and I would have to wear protective clothing to visit him. I was shocked by the change in him. He was emaciated and covered in purple lesions I would soon learn to identify as Kaposi’s sarcoma. The closest I had seen to his present state was a photograph of Matthias Grünewald’s Altarpiece in the hospice for plague victims at Isenheim, an image that would soon be famously associated with the disease Clyde was dying from. They put me in white overalls and made me wear discardable rubber gloves when ministering to him, a stricture I would soon learn to resist, though I swallowed slightly when placing a tiny fragment of the communion wafer onto his ulcerated tongue. He died that night. His heartbroken parents took his body back to Texas for his funeral. For them, he had died of a cancer that had nothing to do with the deadly disease that was beginning to afflict gay men. Their inability to accept the truth about their son distanced them from his Boston friends, whose grief at his death might have helped console them for their own terrible loss.

  It was a pattern I was to see repeated on both sides of the Atlantic in the coming years. It measured the depth of hatred in traditional Christian opinion towards gay people, a minority that was no longer prepared to submit to such entrenched cruelty. This was my first encounter with the AIDS epidemic. The papers had labelled the mystery disease the gay plague, because it seemed to be mainly gay men who were dying of cancers and infections that had not been seen by beleaguered doctors for centuries. Cruel jokes were made by conservative commentators, thrilled that the Fag community was finally getting its dues. One writer, unable to conceal his glee at the emergence of the epidemic, suggested that gay men should have their backsides compulsorily tattooed with the tag from Dante: ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here.’ Evangelical preachers announced the disease as God’s punishment for a sin He particularly abhorred. God had gone to extraordinary lengths to concoct a virus that targeted the auto-immune system of people he disapproved of. Many of us wondered, if He was so clever, where He had been during the Holocaust or Stalin’s great purges, only to be reminded that it was not genocide that hacked off the Almighty, it was sex. AIDS brought out the worst in human beings, but it also brought out the best, not least in the gay community itself.

  Even after the virus was identified, and it was understood how it attacked the immune system and opened the body to a devastating siege from infections normally repelled with ease, there was considerable uncertainty about how it was transmitted, other than through unprotected sex. Could it be picked up from saliva? One parishioner with full-blown AIDS who came to lunch with us was suffering from oral candidiasis or thrush. He asked for an extra tumbler and kept spitting into it throughout the meal to relieve the terrible discomfort. We tried to show no anxiety while he was at our table, but when he had gone I put on rubber gloves and carefully put the tumbler and its contents into a plastic bag to dispose of safely. We soon learned to modify the more extreme protective responses to the situation, guided by the medical community who rose to the challenge with compassion and intelligence. People are able to live indefinitely with the virus today, if properly treated, but then its diagnosis was a death sentence of a particularly grim sort. At the time one New York doctor at the forefront of the campaign not only against the virus, but against the ignorance and cruelty of responses to it, quoted Camus’ novel La Peste:

  to state quite simply what we learn in times of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise. The story could not be one of final victory. It could only be the record of what had to be done, and assuredly would have to be done again by all, who while unable to be saints but refusing to bow to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.85

  I certainly found much to admire in the way some groups responded to this new pestilence. The medical profession purged the epidemic of the taint of shame that hung around the disease, especially in some religious circles. The response of the gay community was also heroic and compassionate, and it helped to steady the nerves of the rest of us. The funerals of those who had died of AIDS became acts of defiance and solidarity as well as acts of mourning, and we refused to bow to pestilence and strove our utmost to be healers.

  If the gay community of Boston taught me much about grace in the face of tragedy, it was the women of the Advent who opened my eyes to the limitations of the Church’s traditional language about God and its attitude towards women. All language about God is necessarily metaphorical and analogical. When they are discussing the limitations of language, philosophers talk about the problem of equivalence: because of the special position language holds in our culture, we think we can put everything into words – we think that if we can say it we will get it – but there is no exact verbal equivalence to even the most prosaic item. Words are the names we give things, the signs we create to point to them, but the things themselves are not what we say they are. Writers who work with language as their chosen medium know these limitations better than anyone. All the time they are trying to get beyond the words to communicate the experience that lies behind them. That’s why the guiding mantra for writers is ‘show, don’t tell’: show me your hero is charming, don’t tell me he is; demonstrate the courage of your heroine, don’t tell me she’s brave. Get as close as you can to giving the reader the experience you are trying to describe. Go beyond the words, get through them to the reality
of the experience you are trying to communicate.