It is this theory, based on little in the way of historical evidence, which is the biggest source of division among Christians. You can call yourself a bishop; you can wear the gear and strut your stuff under a three-decker mitre; you can swing your crozier with a drum major’s dexterity; but if you did not receive your authority through that official pipeline of grace, then you are a deceiver and not a true bishop. One of the most passionately played board games in Christianity is Who’s On and Who’s Off the Pipeline? The Roman Catholic Church claims exclusive ownership of it and either invalidates or qualifies the orders of all other Churches. It claims, for instance, that the Anglican Church switched to a rogue supplier at the Reformation and therefore has no valid ministers. But that’s only how the game begins. Anglicans claim that their orders are intact, because they did not switch suppliers at the Reformation but merely added a new branch to the pipeline. Calvinists, on the other hand, are not only proud to have switched suppliers, they claim that the Catholic pipeline had been degraded from the beginning and was never connected to Christ but to SOMEONE ELSE. Enough! I am becoming sarcastic. Suffice it to say that a new move was being proposed in the pipeline game, and I need to mention it before moving on, because how it was played had an important effect on my own thinking about the Church. Suppose you went along with the pipeline theory of ordination out of respect for tradition or because of its symbolic value or because you thought it guaranteed some kind of professional accreditation for ministry: what would happen if a woman’s head were put under the pipe and what, if anything, was to stop us doing it? Those questions were being asked with increasing urgency, and the opposing battalions were already lining up their theological artillery against each other.
A moment of further thought on these ecclesiastical disputes brings the recognition that this heightening and abstracting of professional roles is by no means confined to religion, and is, in fact, an aspect of the male dominance of all institutions throughout most of history. This was the point that had been repeatedly put to me in my office at the Advent by the women who had challenged me to think more deeply about the matter. Patriarchal religion may add a transcendental spin to male assertiveness and apply an extra coat of brightly coloured enamel to male vanity, but it is essentially a subgenre of the universal power game among men, the only difference being that its pretensions extend the action into the next world as well as controlling it in this one. It was women who really understood what was going on here, and it was women who helped to open the eyes of men to the games they were playing. Apart from my female Advent parishioners, another woman who helped to open my eyes was Virginia Woolf. In her tract Three Guineas she contrasts the private house, woman’s sphere, with public life, man’s sphere.
Your world, then, the world of professional, of public life, seen from this angle undoubtedly looks queer. At first sight it is enormously impressive. Within a small space are crowded together St Paul’s, the Bank of England, the Mansion House, the massive if funereal battlements of the Law Courts; and on the other side, Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament. There we say to ourselves, pausing, in this moment of transition on the bridge, our fathers and brothers have spent their lives. All these hundreds of years they have been mounting those steps, passing in and out of those doors, ascending those pulpits, preaching, money-making, administering justice. It is from this world that the private house . . . has derived its creeds, its laws, its clothes and carpets, its beef and mutton. And then, as is now permissible, cautiously pushing aside the swing doors of one of these temples, we enter on tiptoe and survey the scene in greater detail. The first sensation of colossal size, of majestic masonry is broken up into a myriad points of amazement mixed with interrogation. Your clothes in the first place make us gape with astonishment. How many, how splendid, how extremely ornate they are – the clothes worn by the educated man in his public capacity! Now you dress in violet; a jewelled crucifix swings on your breast; now your shoulders are covered with lace; now furred with ermine; now slung with many linked chains set with precious stones. Now you wear wigs on your heads; rows of graduated curls descend your necks. Now your hats are boat-shaped, or cocked; now they mount in cones of black fur; now they are made of brass and scuttle shaped; now plumes of red, now of blue hair surmount them. Sometimes gowns cover your legs; sometimes gaiters.3 Tabards embroidered with lions and unicorns swing from your shoulders; metal objects cut in star shapes or in circles glitter and twinkle upon your breasts. Ribbons of all colours – blue, purple, crimson – cross from shoulder to shoulder.
Even stranger, however, than the symbolic splendour of your clothes are the ceremonies that take place when you wear them. Here you kneel; there you bow; here you advance in procession behind a man carrying a silver poker; here you mount a carved chair; here you appear to do homage to a piece of painted wood; here you abase yourselves before tables covered with richly worked tapestry. And whatever these ceremonies may mean you perform them always together, always in step, always in the uniform proper to the man and the occasion.93
Woolf makes two observations about this male exhibitionism, this parade of peacock’s feathers. It is, she believes, a way of demonstrating superiority over other people; more significantly, it encourages a disposition towards war. She meant the observation literally – she was writing in 1938 as the clouds of war gathered over Europe – but there are different kinds of warfare, and theological warfare is one of the most petty and pernicious. She might have said to the garishly uniformed executives of the Church, ‘You pride yourselves on being men of peace and concord, but your finely graduated distinctions of dress, with their heavenly justifications, are but the religious manifestation of the power game men have been playing for centuries. If you must go on playing it, at least have the courage of Nietzsche to admit your power lust and spare us your pieties.’ She wasn’t around to make those points when the game reached a new intensity in the Eighties and Nineties. I was, and it would change my life.
14
DRIFTING
It would be wrong to give the impression that the life of a bishop, or the life of the Church for that matter, is one of constant struggle and controversy. Religion is certainly a vexatious subject, and it gives rise to a lot of disagreement, as the history of splits and schisms in Christianity clearly indicates. But if conflict is a constant in Christian history, so is consolation, and the Church’s ancient ministry of comfort to the afflicted goes a long way towards mitigating its record for discord and intolerance. Even bishops can be useful here. If not by rolling up their purple sleeves and getting themselves stuck in, certainly by identifying areas of need in their community and finding the right people to tackle them. I had already encountered HIV/AIDS in Boston and seen it scything remorselessly through the gay community. I had heard the hatred the epidemic had prompted from some sections of the Christian community. I had also seen other sections of the Church organise itself to respond with love to people who were HIV-positive and to those with full-blown AIDS. I had seen the crisis bring out the best and the worst in people, but it was the best that prevailed and, in the end, it silenced the taunting voices of the Christian Right. It was to prevail in Edinburgh as well.
Catching up with the press on my return to Scotland, I was surprised to see that Edinburgh had been labelled ‘The AIDS Capital of Europe’. The demography of the epidemic was different to the one in Boston, however. It was certainly taking its toll of gay men, but the biggest risk group were intravenous drug users, and dirty needles were identified as the culprits. This new twist in the story of the virus, now an irresistible combination of sex and drugs, was a delicious mix for the puritan mind to obsess about. We heard all the traditional anthems that identified HIV as God’s judgement on sin, but they were more muted than in the States, and we did not waste much energy opposing them. I was already clear that there was no point in negotiating with fundamentalists. By definition, they did not negotiate. You had to accept them as an inevitable part of the dramatis personae
of the human comedy, like the old man who for years had been walking Princes Street wearing a sandwich board announcing that The End of the World is Nigh. We didn’t argue; we organised. As was the case in the US, the medical profession was in the forefront. Soon free needle-exchanges were set up and free condoms were handed out in clinics and health centres. A hospice for the dying, Milestone House, named after an old Roman milestone found near the site, was opened in 1991 by Princess Diana, who continued to support its work till her own death.
The churches of Edinburgh across the ecumenical spectrum weren’t far behind the doctors in rising to the challenge, and a host of imaginative ventures was established. One, conceived and administered by Helen Mein, the wife of a priest in the diocese, was called Positive Help. As the label suggested, its large team of volunteers provided help and support to people with HIV and AIDS, such as driving them from Edinburgh’s most afflicted housing scheme on the north side of the capital for treatment at the City Hospital and Milestone House, miles away on the south side. Jeannie did her share of ferrying. Like many of the clergy, I gave my support to a lot of these activities. I sat on committees and spoke at events, but the biggest contribution I made was to identify the unusual gifts of a woman in the diocese, whom I appointed as our chaplain to people affected by HIV/AIDS. She was an example of the hidden work of love that goes on everywhere behind Christianity’s bluster and posturing, and helps to redeem them. She possessed in abundance a gift I conspicuously lacked. It was the gift I had already noticed and envied in Lilias and Geoff back in our Gorbals days, the capacity to abandon their own interests and preferences and, as Hugh MacDiarmid put it in the poem I have already quoted, sink:
. . . without another care
To that dread level of nothing but life itself.
MacDiarmid went on to describe it as the capacity for ‘mere being’, and he thought it was more common in women than in men. It is the ability to wait beside someone when the waiting is all that can be done or ought to be done. I have been too driven and purposeful in my life to be good at this, and that failure is now one of my deepest regrets. I have, of course, screwed myself up to do it when I had to. I have waited by bedsides of the sick and dying, but I have always been conscious of the meter whirring away inside my impatient soul, calling me to the next thing and the next. Jane Millard had the capacity for waiting, the ability to sink to the level of nothing but life itself, and she had it to an unimaginable degree. During the heavy early years of the epidemic in Edinburgh, before doctors developed combined drug therapies that kept people alive, AIDS was still a death sentence, and a grim one. This meant that Jane’s was a parish of the dying and the grieving. It meant waiting, again and again, beside men and women whose young lives were being stolen from them by the virus. It took its toll on her, the way war takes its toll on soldiers who live with relentless grief. At the height of the crisis she was involved in two hundred funerals. An aspect of the art of her ministry was to craft services that gave expression to anger as well as grief. Above all, it was an art that celebrated the courage and humour of those she had accompanied to the end. Of enormous cost to her were sixty long vigils she kept by the bedsides of dying friends, as she helped them slip their moorings and drift from life. During these vigils she kept notes scribbled on the backs of envelopes or any other scraps of paper she could lay her hands on at the time. She called her scraps ‘Fragments of the Watch’. In one of our regular meetings to find out how she was coping, she told me about them, and I asked to see them. The next time we met she brought them in a plastic bag. Scraps of torn envelopes, pages from old notebooks, anything she could lay her hands on at the time to record the going out of another life. They were more moving to me than the famous ‘AIDS Quilt’ that was touring the world at the time. In 1987 a group in San Francisco had started the Names Project, in which three-by-six foot quilted panels, memorialising those who had died of AIDS in America, were stitched into a quilt. As the toll mounted, the quilt kept growing till it could have filled hundreds of football pitches. Part of it came to Edinburgh, and I went to see it. It was hard not to be stunned by the loss of these thousands of young lives, each represented by the tender art of the quilter. It reminded me of how hurt I felt at Old Saint Paul’s when, after leading them down the stairs and under the bridge to their final resting place, I had to come back and write the names of the dead in that heavy old book in the sacristy. Death had undone so many, and I had to write down their names. Jane’s fragments brought back that sorrow. To sift through them was to touch worlds of grief. I asked her to let me publish them, but she refused. They were sacred to her and she wanted to keep them secret. More than twenty years later, she has allowed me to include four of them here in their raw state.
How do you think dying is?
I think I will fly
Bird or plane?
Bird, eagle or something
My mind fills with passages – Isaiah, psalms, already on my way to making his service of celebration and thanksgiving.
But he is very close to death now. An eye flutters open.
‘Going by boat,’ he says distinctly.
Upsetting my plans.
So at his service I read the story where Peter walks on the water, and Our Lord catches him, and then gets into the boat to go the rest of the journey with him
. . . just to make sure he gets there.
I only had one conversation with you, and only because I knew you had been a jockey, could discern it was something about horses. Your Mum and Dad had been sent for as you had taken another dip in your laboured breathing. I wanted you to know that you could just slip away, or wait for them to arrive, so I offered a journey.
It’s a crisp summer afternoon – a real Scottish summer – and you are riding down a path in a wood. The path is covered in forest debris, and the hooves make that muted thud of a measured stride. You are bareback, and can feel the warmth of his skin against yours, feel the power from his rippling muscles in the springy step of his keen walk.
It’s up to you when you move on a pace. Remember that you are bareback and will come to the point when you are losing control, his heaving, sweaty sides like glass. If you want to wait for them, keep him back under your control.
If you are ready, let the reins go slack and get the rush from the exhilarating gallop.
At the bottom of the track is a high gate. Jumping that is your transformation. Remember you are the one to urge him on or hold him back. You are in control.
Your Mum and Dad are on their way, and can be with you as you jump that gate if that’s what you want. He’s a wonderful horse, you are well matched. Ride well.
Days from dying, he insisted that he teach me to fish, and we made a precarious journey to Flotterstone so he could talk fishy tactics. In his day, he could catch fish with his hands.
When he was dying, he began to bleed heavily from most orifices, but the nurses graciously allowed me to accompany him undisturbed by clean bedding. The warmth of the blood on his thighs became the numbness of water on wading boots as I used his teaching from those few days before to take him fishing. I had in my mind’s eye that the scooping of the fish from the water in a rainbow of droplets would be his leaving. But it wasn’t like that. He began to gulp air like a fish, he became that fish, and I couldn’t put him back in the water.
She was very afraid of dying. ‘I don’t want to die. Him upstairs will get a big stick and shout at me, tell me to go to hell. I’m frightened. I don’t want to be shouted at.’
And I hugged her, bereft of anything theological to say that sounded real, and she snuggled in.
‘Talk to me,’ she whimpered.
‘There was a man who had two sons . . .’ and I told her the story of the prodigal son and loving father.
‘Will you be with me when I die? Be sure and tell me that story.’
So I did, about an hour ago, now we are waiting for the undertakers.94
At the height of the American epidemic a Manhattan doctor had re
minded me of Camus’ words about another plague, that ‘there are more things to admire in men than to despise’.95 Holding Jane’s ‘Fragments of the Watch’ in my hands, I wondered if Camus’ words could be applied to the Church. I tried it: there are more things to admire in the Church than to despise. Not a bad fit, I thought. Not perfect, but good enough. And people don’t always hear it. They hear the scary voices. Sadly, there seemed to be a lot of Christians who liked making the scary voices. The congregations that were growing, the ones good at evangelising, were the scary ones, the ones that spoke with absolute conviction about everything. Conviction sells. Did that mean that uncertain, unjudging Christianity was on the way out? Or was there something we could do about it? Was liberal evangelism an oxymoron? Can there be an evangelism of uncertainty, if what seems to attract people to the churches that are growing is their hard-edged certainty? I felt there was something unhealthy about an approach to Church growth that worked by persuading people they were suffering from a terminal disease called Sin for which only their Church had the cure. I liked neither the message nor the effect it had on the people it persuaded. It hardened them and gave them a sense of their exceptionalism. And they didn’t negotiate! How could you engage with people who did not negotiate?
Leaving Alexandria Page 26
