Leaving Alexandria
Page 27
I was musing in this way because there was no doubt the Church was shrinking in Britain – except among Evangelicals, although there was even some doubt about the nature of their success. Some analysts thought they were only recycling other Christians into their own swimming pool, rather than recruiting absolute outsiders. I gave them the benefit of the doubt and thought they probably were bringing in fresh blood. I just didn’t much care for what they did with the new blood when they got it. Bishops at the time, no matter the discomfort they felt about the subject, were supposed to be leading their dioceses in an aspiration called the Decade of Evangelism, designed to turn back the tide of faith from Matthew Arnold’s ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’.96 We were to reverse the statistics of decline. Christianity was a missionary religion, we were told. It did not grow by osmosis; it grew by selling itself, which was difficult if your theology did not easily lend itself to the kind of packaging that seemed to work in today’s religious marketplace. But where was there to turn?
I was intrigued to find a little book by John Saxbee, called Liberal Evangelism. Maybe it isn’t an oxymoron after all, I thought. What I liked about Saxbee’s book was what he called the Parable of the Two Tunes. He referred to the American modernist composer Charles Ives, who discovered as a boy that he could hear two tunes in his head at the same time and follow them both faithfully. That, said Saxbee, is what liberal Christians do. They listen to the Christian tradition, but they also listen to the best tunes of the time in which they live, its science and philosophy and ethics and its struggles with human change and discovery. Living that way, being faithful to two tunes at the same time, produces tension, but it is an honest tension, a creative tension. It is more honest than only listening to the past and ostentatiously turning off your hearing device when the present intrudes, which is what the more conservative traditions do. Shortly after receiving that insight, I was in Arkansas speaking at a conference. My co-presenter was a young American priest called Alice Mann, who was talking about how to make the Church more inviting, how to draw people by its beauty of caring, by its warmth and welcome, and by its openness to the future. Bingo, I thought, she’s what we are looking for, if this Decade of Evangelism thing is to reflect the ethos of the Scottish Church. Back home, the Scottish bishops agreed to give it a go. We covenanted with Alice to work for us, and a Church Growth programme with a difference was born. Liberal Evangelism! We called it Mission 21. If it did nothing else, it cheered us up and helped us realise that there was something about us that was worth inviting others to join.
Mission statements were part of the rhetoric of the time, and the one I dreamt up for the Scottish Church seemed to sum us up, though it probably only summed up my own wishful thinking: ‘We are the Church for people other Churches won’t take in.’ It sat well with another buzzword of the time. The Liberation Theologians of South America, soon to be on the receiving end of the Papal censor, had coined a phrase that spoke to me. They said the Gospel had a bias towards the poor. I agreed, but not just the economically poor. The ones who loved Jesus most were not just the economically poor, they were the ones who also understood their own moral and spiritual poverty; yet this man, this Son of Man, loved them and took them to himself just as they were. I couldn’t see why this saving theme could not also apply to our poverty of belief. Was there a place around Jesus not only for the morally poor but also for the theologically poor, for those who were not able to afford the expensive packages on offer in the confident Churches? Was there a gap for a Church that accepted the theologically confused because it acknowledged its own theological confusion? Was there a gap for a Church that accepted the unacceptable because it knew itself to be unacceptable? As I thought about it, it did not seem to me to be an eccentric mission statement. It would have fitted the earliest days of the Jesus movement, when it consisted of the ritually and morally impure, the tax collectors and sinners, the ones excluded from the ranks of the righteous, the doubters and the uncertain. I belonged there myself. I was uncomfortable with high-octane believers and high-performance spiritual achievers. Of the priests in the province who caught the vision, a significant proportion were gay and were therefore already officially unacceptable. Like gay priests in most places, they were the ones working in the tough and struggling parishes, while the thriving evangelical parishes tended to be in prosperous neighbourhoods where holding the right kind of religion seemed to be another mark of success. My mission statement was a signal to those who felt themselves excluded by the more upmarket brands that our doors were open to them and we hoped they’d come and join us. Many of them did. But not everyone was happy with this theological downward mobility. There was the other Church, the Church of the elect, the Church of the redeemed, the ones who been fished from the sea of destruction. What kind of evangelist started swimming with the damned instead of hauling them into the boat? The warning signals were being hoisted again. And, consciously or unconsciously, I seemed to be going out of my way to provoke those who were running them up the pole.
Never good at guarding my tongue, I became more careless. Was I subconsciously sabotaging my own position, offering free ammunition to my enemies? I was becoming a riddle to myself and a scandal to others, some of them good friends. I was in a position of authority, but I had become anti-authoritarian. Ordained to defend the faith and uphold sound doctrine, I started trying to revise – if not actually subvert – key aspects of the Christian moral tradition. There was plenty of precedent for what I was doing, but it was not a popular role for a bishop. Reforms to Church and Society usually come from the edge, from those who are the victims of the cruel certainties of power, though they try to find allies at the heart of the institutions they are seeking to change. The victim’s role on the margins is well understood, even by those in power; but what are we to make of people in power who start doubting their own position and subverting it in public?
The trouble was, I seemed to have a need to think out loud. A friend accused me of leaving no thought unpublished and wondered why I did it, when all it did was get me in trouble. I wasn’t sure myself, but I went on issuing bulletins on how I was seeing things. I had started writing when I came to Edinburgh in 1968 and my early books were all slight and rather facile exercises in devotional theology, designed to help people struggling with issues of faith. You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to work it out. The most that can be said for those early books was that in knocking them off every other year, sometimes two a year, I was at least learning to write. When I became a bishop the tone changed and the books became less facile, probably because the struggle was becoming more existential. A turning-point was the book I published in 1988, a couple of years after becoming a bishop. The title was significant: Crossfire: Faith and Doubt in an Age of Certainty. The certainties I struggled with in the book were political as well as theological. This was the time of strong political convictions called up by Mrs Thatcher’s premiership, but it was also a time of increasing theological conviction and conservatism. The tone of the book was troubled rather than subversive. It called for a change of tone in theological debate and for greater modesty in the claims we made. It asked disputants to recognise that no certainty was available to us as we wrestled with ultimate questions, though there were glimmers and whispers to encourage us. Nine years later in 1997, when we were well into the wars over sexuality that were dividing Christians even more violently than they were dividing secular opinion, I wrote a book that was intended to be frankly subversive and challenging. Dancing on the Edge,97 which called for a re-evaluation of the Church’s moral teaching on sex, particularly in its attitude to gay and lesbian people. I called for legalised same-sex partnerships in the State and saw no reason why the Church could not craft suitable liturgies for same-sex unions, different from but modelled on heterosexual marriage. The book earned me the soubriquet of the most hated clergyman in Britain. Fortunately, on catching sight of that headline I remembered Aneurin Bevan’s nonchalant assertion that ‘the smile of
The Express was fatal’. If its smile could kill, maybe its scowl would turn out to be a blessing. Most people don’t read the books of figures who find themselves in the glare of publicity, preferring the easy headline to the graft of following an argument, but I had only myself to blame for some of the other fixes I got myself into. I wrote books that gave people the opportunity to find out what I really thought, if they were interested, but I also had a fatal flair for off-the-cuff remarks that generated headlines. Two incidents went far to justify the Press’s description of me as the current Barmy Bishop, a post in the national comedy that had become vacant on the retirement of David Jenkins from Durham.
During my brief sojourn in Oxford I had written a short book that set out to offer a positive exegesis of the seven deadly sins.98 The idea behind the book was the background reports social workers prepare for magistrates before they pass sentence on offenders. Could we not explore the classic typology of sin with a view to understanding what prompted it and maybe get a better handle on how to deal with it? The New Testament encouraged this approach. One of the Greek verbs for sin was an archery term, hamartano, which meant ‘missing the mark’. A sin was not an activity that was wrong in itself; it was misdirected effort, a good volition that went wrong or went too far. This exegesis was helpful in dealing with a sin like gluttony; it was also helpful in understanding lust. The book attracted little comment at the time, but I revisited the theme when I was Bishop of Edinburgh, and this time it caused an international brouhaha. I was invited by the Rector of Saint John’s Princes Street to deliver a series of lectures on the Church and the Sexual Revolution. It was hard to resist a topic like that, one I’d been wrestling with most of my life. A week before the lectures, I was phoned by a stringer from the Press Association. She’d seen a piece about the series in the Edinburgh Evening News and was intrigued. The journalist who’d done the piece she referred to was someone I admired, but his headline, as headlines usually do, had sensationalised what I had told him: BORN TO BE WILD, SAYS BISHOP. I’d been reading some of the new evolutionary psychology published in America at the time, especially Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal and David Suzuki and Peter Knudtson on Genethics. Their theme was the tension between the reproductive imperative and our moral sense. Human contentment was found in ruling rather than being ruled by the sexual drive – not that it was ever going to be easy, as universal human experience could testify. The woman from the PA wanted to know more. I was about to leave for Lincoln where I was to give a lecture at the Theological College. I gave her a highly compressed version of what I’d told the Evening News, and rushed to Waverley for the train. The diocese had given me a mobile phone, but I rarely had it on and hardly ever used it. For emergencies only, was my policy. It went with me to Lincoln in the off position. As I was heading for bed in the college that night they brought me an urgent message to phone my press secretary, who’d been trying to contact me all day on my switched-off mobile. When I reached him he told me that a story had gone out on the wire reporting that I had said adultery was no longer a sin and the Church should remove it from the Ten Commandments. The world press had been on the phone all day and I’d better be prepared for the shit storm that was heading my way tomorrow.
On the train back my face stared out at me from the tabloids being read by my fellow passengers. I’d done it this time. LET US SIN, SAYS BARMY BISHOP. NINE COMMANDMENTS NOW! ADULTERY OFF THE LIST. And so on. When I got off the train at Waverley’s platform 11 the Press was waiting for me, including television cameras and foreign journalists. There were about fifty of them, all shouting questions and shoving cameras in my face. My press secretary, wild-eyed as if he had not slept for weeks, hustled me into a cab. This won’t go away unless you hold a press conference and explain yourself, he said, so we planned one for the next day. That evening Jeremy Paxman gave me an amused grilling on Newsnight, where I was up against one of the leaders of the Anglo-Catholic movement in England. I don’t often wield Bible texts in argument, but I had a moment of quiet satisfaction as I watched him spluttering when I quoted the words of Jesus to those who wanted to stone the woman taken in adultery: ‘He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone.’ The press conference turned out to be a good-natured affair, and a more measured interpretation of my views appeared in the broadsheets. As well as the Press, I had to deal with letters from all over the globe, including one from a Turkish Muslim who advised me to convert to Islam because it took a more generous view of the imperious urges of male sexuality. I thanked him, but declined the invitation. When the time came for the lectures, the Press turned up in droves, as did demonstrators bearing placards denouncing me. I tried to make the lectures as boring as I could. But I was a marked man. There would be other occasions when, to borrow a metaphor from The Godfather, my office staff had to take to the mattresses to deal with a press blitz. Adrenaline got me through the uproar, but it left me feeling soiled and worried about my carelessness. And I knew it was tough on Jeannie, a reserved woman who did not enjoy seeing her husband make himself a laughing stock.
In 1983, when I was at the Advent in Boston and was still persona grata in Anglo-Catholic circles, I had been invited to lead a conference in Melbourne to help Australians celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Oxford Movement. Among the lectures I gave was one on the priesthood, based on a verse from the Letter to the Hebrews: ‘We must pay the closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it.’99 Using the image of a rowing boat that had slipped its mooring and glided silently into the mist, I warned them against drifting. Keep the rope tied tightly to the ring on the pier; secure the mooring, lest you drift gradually imperceptibly quietly away from the faith. Whether they acknowledge it or not, preachers are usually preaching to themselves. Was that what I had been doing then? I had been choked and tearful as I spoke. Was I even then anticipating my own drift away from disappointed friends watching from the shore? The image had now caught up with me and some of my friends began to worry that I was drifting towards real trouble.
If the sex fracas was created by journalistic mischief, the next one was all my own work, though it probably had roots in Random Street. I was on my way back from a meeting in London on 13 March 1996 when the BBC phoned to tell me about the massacre of children in Dunblane earlier that day. Would I extemporise a response to the tragedy on a television broadcast that evening from the cathedral? Words are useless at a time like that, yet we have to find them. Others found better words for the darkness that had engulfed us. I said what I could. What I said I cannot now remember. Jeannie, an accomplished versifier like her father, was moved to write a hymn for the memorial service on the Sunday after the killings. She found her own words.
Our children, innocent and dear,
Were strangers to a world of fear;
Each precious life had more to give,
In each, our hopes and dreams could live;
Enfold in love for evermore
All those we love, but see no more.
So brief, the joy since each was born,
So long the years in which to mourn;
Give us compassion to sustain
Each other in this time of pain;
Enfold in love for evermore
All those we love, but see no more.
Sung to ‘Melita’, her words gave grief a way of singing what it could not easily say. Neither of us could attend the service. We were booked for the Diocese of Bangor in Wales that weekend, where I was to speak at a conference organised by the Welsh movement for the ordination of women. Though the Churches in Scotland, England and Ireland had by then started ordaining women to the priesthood, Wales had not been able to gather the necessary majority among the clergy to get it through. The conference was meant to encourage campaigners for the struggle that still lay ahead. The other speaker was a young priest from England, the woman on whom the television series The Vicar of Dibley was supposed to have been modelled. In her talk she told of how the joy of the women who had been
recently ordained in England had been officially confined. They had been told not to upset those who refused to accept what had happened and were behaving as if a profound tragedy had occurred. Rather than being able to celebrate a step forward in the liberation of women from yet another shackle, the newly ordained had to act as if they were at a funeral. The Church of England, in a characteristically generous but misguided attempt to appease the refuseniks, had given opponents of women’s ordination separate little enclaves to live in, supervised by bishops whose hands had not been soiled by ordaining women. It was as if post-apartheid South Africa had provided racists with their own little laagers where they could continue the old segregations. Asked what I made of this dog-in-the manger response, I replied – more in sorrow than in anger – ‘Oh the miserable buggers, the mean-minded wee sods.’ My words became a brief diary item in the local newspaper the following week. Soon they were everywhere, another example of my undisciplined tongue. If the previous debacle was caused by carelessness, this one was a clear example of criminal recklessness. What was I up to? I seemed to have cast caution to the winds. Was I trying to get myself cashiered?
This time it got serious. A formal complaint was submitted to the Scottish College of Bishops by a group of clergy in the province. The College was required by the Canons of the Church to consider and reach a judgement on the complaint. Normally the Primus would chair such a court, but since the Primus was the one in the dock, the bishop next in line of seniority presided. I did not attend. The bishops had no option but to find me guilty of using inappropriate language. ‘Bugger’ and ‘wee sod’ might have been terms of endearment in Random Street, but they were unbecoming in the mouth of a bishop. I must apologise or resign. My own legal adviser suggested resignation, but I was damned if I’d let them have such an easy scalp. I issued an apology for my language and moved on, but for how long?