Leaving Alexandria

by Richard Holloway

  If language is difficult at the immanent level, the level that is available to our senses, then it is infinitely more difficult at the transcendent level, the level beyond the physical where we locate the possibility of the mystery we call God. I was to reach a point where I would find any language about God impossible to use without a level of qualification that rendered it almost futile, but it was the women of the Advent who taught me that even the metaphors and analogies we wielded to talk about God were divisive. Their question was: why the exclusive use of male metaphors? I came to believe that it was more to do with historic male dominance of human institutions than with any virtue and coherence in the metaphors themselves. The hard thing was to find elegant substitutes for traditional masculine language. In my own writing, rather than adopting formations like he/she and his/hers in talking about human abstractions, I have preferred to alternate the gender of the pronouns, but this is more awkward when talking about God. In this book I have reverted to describing God in masculine pronouns, because that is the God to whom I have been drawn and from whom I have been in flight since my boyhood.

  The women who challenged me at the Advent did more than complicate my thinking about the limitations of religious language, however; they also stiffened my resolve to campaign for the ordination of women. Their education of me began with a humorous dispute over hymns. ‘Rise Up, O Men of God’, went one of our hymns. Did this mean women should remain seated? Groan . . . OK, but could I not understand how they felt about the almost exclusive use of male personal pronouns in our worship? Just imagine the effect it would have on me if week after week I was forced to use only female pronouns in the liturgy. Could I not drill below the surface of this apparently slight and superficial issue to see what was really going on here: an explicit and implicit relegation of women to a subsidiary role in Church and Society?

  The penny did finally drop, and the ordination of women switched from being a change to which I could see no objection, to one I now believed was essential if the Church was to be a just institution. But it would be easier said than done to achieve it everywhere. The debate over women’s ordination illustrates the peculiar difficulty religious institutions have in negotiating the changes in human understanding and organisation that are such a pronounced mark of our history. I remember how opposed my mother was to the appointment of a woman to her GP practice in Alexandria. At first she insisted on always seeing Doctor Macaulay when she went on one of her many visits to the practice, but she mellowed in time and by the end of her life preferred to be seen by a woman. But she had never claimed that a woman could not be a doctor, only that she preferred men. This is normal social conservatism of an everyday variety. It is not rooted in sweeping ontological claims. It is a preference; something we are used to and prefer not to change. What bedevilled religious debate about women in the ordained ministry was that it was not just conducted on the basis of ordinary human resistance to change; opponents claimed that the difference between men and women was ontologically so profound that it rendered women incapable of being priests. Women could manifestly do priestly things, but they could not be priests, any more than men could bear children. It followed that female priestly acts would be spiritually fraudulent, and the people they ministered to would be receiving not the grace from God that only men had the power to impart but its counterfeit. I’ll look at the sources of this magical thinking later in this book, but I want to notice here that its influence hung around me for longer than I care to admit, and it was the scornful incredulity of theologically sophisticated American women who finally laughed it out of the court of my mind. What they showed me was that beneath the proud theological language of the opponents of women’s ordination there lay a deep, unacknowledged layer of hatred and mistrust of women that was rooted in ancient religious taboos. Yet the opponents of women were not intrinsically cruel men, carelessly given to the hurting of others. Their cruelty was not personal; it was a consequence of their faith. Was it true, then, that it took religion to make good men act badly?

  In spite of its hallowed place in the religious canon, I had always been troubled by the story of Abraham’s willingness, however reluctantly, to kill his son in obedience to God’s command in the book of Genesis. I had been taught to see the story as a shining example of absolute submission to God, even against the dictates of Abraham’s love for his own son. But how could obedience to God make an evil act good? Disputes about the ordination of women and homosexuals were a world away from arguing about child sacrifice; but were they not in the same ballpark? Was their something about religion itself that clouded our ability to act justly? I wasn’t quite sure at that point, but in 1984 I arrived back in Britain with a faint but fundamental unease lurking in the back of my mind on the subject. Disputes over the place of women and gays in the Church had not yet broken out over here, but anyone could see that the battle lines were being drawn. I got back in time to witness the first skirmishes in what would be a protracted war, and one in which I would be closely involved.

  IV

  1986–2000

  13

  NEW CLOTH

  My father occasionally stole from his employer, the United Turkey Red, in whose freezing and dilapidated factory on the banks of the River Leven he laboured much of his life away. I say stole, but it did not feel like that to him or to us. It was more like a covert form of redistribution, a way of evening the odds that were heavily stacked against the workers who earned the owners their profits. He would occasionally wrap round his small wiry body the discarded tail-end of a batch of cloth he had been dyeing, and walk through the factory gates at the end of the working day with his raincoat on to disguise his added bulk. Most of it was given away. The contraband would reappear in our neighbours’ houses as curtains or cushion covers or cheerful dresses for the women. It helped to brighten our street, with the added spice that it was also an act of subversion.

  Another thing that surprised me about my father was that, in his quiet way, he was a social organiser, someone who got things done. Admittedly, they were usually contrived round activities in which he was himself engaged. For example, there was a small gambling school he ran that met on Sundays on a disused railway line in the countryside above Jamestown. I went with him once but was so bored standing around while the men gambled that I never went back. Sundays in Scotland were heavy and lifeless, and if you did not go to Church there was not much else to do. My father sought to banish the blues in several ways, and the most regular was the gambling. Men would go out for an innocent walk on Sunday mornings, picking up the Sunday Post on the way, and would end up on what was called ‘the Bogie Line’, far into the hills and well beyond the prying eyes of the Law. There they would gamble in a fairly crude and immediate way. The game was called ‘Banker’, and it involved betting on the highest card, the winner taking the bank. No notes, only coins. My father enjoyed gambling. He did the football pools as well, and there was always excitement in the house on Saturday evenings as he jotted down his scores. Apart from the immediate thrill of the bet, his gambling kept hope alive for us. We were not miserable people trapped in grinding poverty, desperate to make a break for it, but we were poor, and it was exciting to sit round the fire on a Saturday night as the results came in on the wireless, dreaming that this might be the moment our luck changed. Hope is always worth a gamble. He did the horses, too, with occasional success. But it was with the gang up the Bogie Line on Sunday mornings that he achieved his most frequent successes, however modest. Whenever he won the bank he would come home in great good humour and empty his pockets onto the kitchen table, allowing his children to divvy the coppers and thruppenny pieces between them. It meant more McCowan’s Highland Toffee for us on the way to school on Monday mornings.

  Another of his anti-Sabbath ruses was the drinkers’ bus run. Pubs did not open on Sundays, nor did off-licences, so it was a hard day for seasoned imbibers, made worse by the sullen silence that hung like a cloud over the Vale. The one loophole available was th
e fact that hotels could serve alcohol to ‘bona fide travellers’, and it was through this gap that my father sent the occasional omnibus. They were all-male affairs. He would hire a bus and advertise an outing to scenic spots in the surrounding countryside. Men would pile onto the bus at the Fountain at the top of Bank Street and they would head up the east side of Loch Lomond to Drymen, which had a nice hotel. As bona fide travellers the hotel bar was open to them, and they would experience the Absolution of the first pint and the Amen of the dram that followed. So went the day. Aberfoyle, Callander, Stirling, Kilsyth, Kirkintilloch, Duntocher for last orders, and back to Alexandria, where they staggered out of the bus, loud and happy at the huge fast one they had pulled on the powers that be.

  I wonder now if my father had a deeper effect on me than I realised at the time. Did I get from him a sense not that laws were made for other people, but an implicit recognition that most of them were arbitrary, many of them were stupid and some of them were unjust? The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. No wonder I came to believe that Jesus’s most subversive claim rendered all social and religious law provisional, and not just because he said it, but because it was manifestly true. Had I really grasped the force of my innate scepticism towards institutions would I still have agreed to become a bishop in 1986? Probably, but I would have known that it was more vanity and ambition that prompted me than the wisdom of self-knowledge. To be fair to the person I was then, I did not yet know myself. We live ourselves forward and understand ourselves backward, but I had not lived long or reflectively enough to know who I was. In particular, I had not unravelled the complexity of my attitude towards religion. I knew I was not an atheist. The invincible thing about atheists and what gives them coherence is that they refuse to accept any explanation for the riddle of existence that comes from outside the universe. For them there is no Outside. There is the universe and only the universe. It alone is available to our explorations. And no god has been discovered within it. What I did not know then was that I was not quite a theist either. The invincible thing about theists and what gives them coherence is that they take their search for explanations for the riddle of existence right outside the universe, and that is where they find the solution they are looking for. It is their confidence that makes these apparently opposing positions so interchangeable, with a stream of thinkers switching from one position to the other with equal conviction. I am used to theists who once were atheists and atheists who once were theists challenging my uncertainties. Confidently sure of themselves, they tell me they sorted the issue years ago: ‘We called the chess-board white – we call it black.’86 At that time I had not yet discovered I could not settle permanently on either square. I knew I was religious. With Emily Dickinson, I felt this world was not conclusion. With Ludwig Wittgenstein, I accepted that to be religious ‘is to know that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter’,87 and that ‘even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all’.88 And I thought I had a god I believed in. He was the father in Jesus’s Parable of the Prodigal Son, the patriarch who abandoned all standards of proper behaviour and rushed like an insane lover to embrace his delinquent son. He was the god A.S.J. Tessimond called X in his poem ‘Heaven’.

  . . . X is never annoyed

  Or shocked; has read his Jung and knows his Freud,

  He gives you time in heaven to do as you please,

  To climb love’s gradual ladder by slow degrees

  Gently to rise from soul to soul, to ascend

  To a world of timeless joy, world without end.

  Here on the gates of pearl there hangs no sign

  Limiting cakes and ale, forbidding wine . . .

  And X, of whom no coward is afraid,

  Who’s friend consulted, not fierce king obeyed;

  Who hears the unspoken thought, the prayer unprayed;

  Who expects not even the learned to understand

  His universe, extends a prodigal hand,

  Full of forgiveness, over his promised land.89

  So I was comfortable with my religious position when the call came. Besides, I wanted to get back to Scotland, preferably to Edinburgh. If I knew anything about myself by this time, it was that I loved that city above all other places. Saying ‘Yes’ to my election as Bishop of Edinburgh in 1986 was to come home. But it was a twisting road I took to get there.

  In the spring of 1984 John Macquarrie, one of my professors at Union, then Canon of Christ Church and Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford, wrote to me in Boston to ask if I would be interested in becoming vicar of Saint Mary Magdalen’s in Oxford, Christ Church having been patrons of the living since the Reformation. It was a church I knew, a church I was fond of. I had spent part of my last summer before leaving for America leading a preaching mission in the parish. I had come to associate it with the duality that I realised was part of my make-up, though it was the sense of geographical dislocation that marked my consciousness that summer. Oxford was lovely that June, and between my engagements in the mission I walked in Christ Church Meadows and Port Meadow reflecting on my situation. I was suspended between two realities, the one I had just left in Edinburgh and the other across the Atlantic I would soon travel to. Oxford was a good place for such a mood. As I walked through those sunlit days, I asked myself where I belonged. I was uprooted from one spot and not yet planted in another. I wondered if I had settled anywhere since leaving Alexandria. I had rooted myself in Kelham and been snatched away. Since then it was as though a bit of me was always poised for flight, with my rucksack packed, ready to leave at a moment’s notice while everyone else was sleeping. Mary Mags, sometimes just Mags to her members, was tender to my mood. She was a kindly church, softened by the light that filtered through her windows, evoking a mood of quiet English tolerance.

  She had been on her plot at the foot of Saint Giles in Oxford since Hugh of Lincoln rebuilt her in 1194 to replace a wooden church burned down by Viking raiders, and she had lived through many changes. In 1841 the young architect who would go on to build Kelham Hall in Nottinghamshire was employed to ‘improve’ her while he was working on the Martyrs’ Memorial immediately north of the church. Her most radical change had occurred in the 1950s, during the incumbency of Colin Stephenson, who had revved up her already Anglo-Catholic style into a liturgy that made pontifical celebrations in Saint Peter’s Rome look like Calvinist funerals. Even in her improved state, there was something unassumingly medieval about Mags. It was a building that seemed to me to be more tolerant of than committed to the antics of its Anglo-Catholic inhabitants, probably because it had long memories. Its closest memories, however, were of generations of students, John Betjeman among them, whose faith had been fanned into life by the colourful extravagance of its liturgy.

  Those were the days when that divine baroque

  Transformed our English altars and our ways.

  Fiddle-back chasuble in mid-Lent pink

  Scandalized Rome and Protestants alike . . .90

  I made lifelong friends at Mags, but the unease I had experienced in my debates with Graham Leonard in Chicago in 1979 resurfaced with new urgency. Mary Mags had become the bell-weather of extreme reactions to the ordination of women among Anglo-Catholics, an issue that was now well and truly confronting the Church. My predecessor as vicar of Mags had gone to Rome over it, and my successor was to do the same, along with a significant group of parishioners who relocated themselves to Saint Aloysius Catholic Church just along the Woodstock Road. I was not in Oxford long enough to make any lasting impression on the congregation or to influence its thinking on the issue of women’s ordination that was so obsessing the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church. It was my successor’s successor who helped Mags through this painful time and guided it into a more inclusive type of Anglican Catholicism. But brief as they were, I began to confirm something about myself during those two years in Oxford, something that would become a s
ource of anger and disappointment to others not only in Anglo-Catholicism, but, ultimately, in the wider Church.

  Its outward sign was an increasing passion for long-distance walking. One of the reasons I was glad to be back in Britain was that I was now able to do the kind of hiking I needed. New England was intensely wooded and walks were invariably between trees till one got to the bald summit of the hill and could see the view. I loved being back in open country, and I soon got to know the walks near Oxford in long treks on my days off and during holidays. I was a fast walker, intent on covering the territory, rarely looking round me as I moved, always in my head. This need to push on and eat up the miles is why I prefer to walk alone. It was the writing of Bruce Chatwin that helped me understand that as a man walks so he lives. Chatwin loved nomads. He believed that most of the ills we suffer from are the result of settling down, not moving on; of trying to possess and exploit creation, instead of treating it with the courtesy of passing guests. I began to realise that my walking was symbolic, the sign of a nomadic nature, a non-settler, yet my other mind longed for a place of abiding. And with this divided nature I had found myself as a leader of the wing of an institution that thought of itself as possessing fixed and unalterable truth. At this stage I hadn’t made the moves that would find me out, hadn’t even found myself out. It was the next move that would do it, the bishop’s move. Bishops are supposed to be defenders of the Faith. Like the medieval knight sworn to defend the chastity of his lady against all assaults, the bishop was supposed to be the protector of the integrity of Christian doctrine. History contradicts the perfection of the theory, of course, as it contradicts all perfect theories. The record shows that bishops are as prone to dispute and disagreement as any other species. But the theory had the magnetic attraction of all shining delusions, and bishops had to pledge it their allegiance. The Diocese of Edinburgh elected me as their Bishop on a March Saturday in 1986, and I accepted the call. They set 11 June, the Feast of Saint Barnabas, for my consecration, the same day I had been ordained a priest by Francis Moncreiff in Glasgow in 1960.