Waiting for the Last Bus

by Richard Holloway

  Also by Richard Holloway

  Let God Arise (1972)

  New Vision of Glory (1974)

  A New Heaven (1979)

  Beyond Belief (1981)

  Signs of Glory (1982)

  The Killing (1984)

  The Anglican Tradition (ed.) (1984)

  Paradoxes of Christian Faith and Life (1984)

  The Sidelong Glance (1985)

  The Way of the Cross (1986)

  Seven to Flee, Seven to Follow (1986)

  Crossfire: Faith and Doubt in an Age of Certainty (1988)

  The Divine Risk (ed.) (1990)

  Another Country, Another King (1991)

  Who Needs Feminism? (ed.) (1991)

  Anger, Sex, Doubt and Death (1992)

  The Stranger in the Wings (1994)

  Churches and How to Survive Them (1994)

  Behold Your King (1995)

  Limping Towards the Sunrise (1996)

  Dancing on the Edge (1997)

  Godless Morality: Keeping Religion Out of Ethics (1999)

  Doubts and Loves: What is Left of Christianity (2001)

  On Forgiveness: How Can We Forgive the Unforgiveable? (2002)

  Looking in the Distance: The Human Search for Meaning (2004)

  How to Read the Bible (2006)

  Between the Monster and the Saint: Reflections on the Human Condition (2008)

  Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt (2012)

  A Little History of Religion (2016)

  WAITING

  FOR THE

  LAST BUS

  Reflections on Life and Death

  RICHARD

  HOLLOWAY

  Published in Great Britain in 2018 by Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  canongate.co.uk

  This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books

  Copyright © Richard Holloway, 2018

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  For permission credits please see p. 166

  While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any further editions

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 78689 021 4

  eISBN 978 1 78689 023 8

  Typeset in Garamond MT by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  Jeannie,

  of course

  The present life of men on earth, O King . . . seems to me to be like this: as if, when you are sitting at dinner with your chiefs and ministers in wintertime . . . one of the sparrows from outside flew very quickly through the hall, as if it came in one door and soon went out through the other. In that actual time it is indoors it is not touched by the winter’s storm; but yet the tiny period of calm is over in a moment, and having come out of the winter it soon returns to the winter and slips out of your sight. Man’s life appears to be more or less like this; and of what may follow it, or what preceded it, we are absolutely ignorant.

  The Venerable Bede1

  CONTENTS

  I

  The Dance of Death

  II

  Losing It

  III

  Looking Back

  IV

  Then What?

  V

  Defying Death

  VI

  The Day After

  VII

  The Last Bus

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Permission Credits

  I

  THE DANCE OF DEATH

  The medieval parish church of Saint Mary Magdalene in the town of Newark in Nottinghamshire, England, is a huge building, so you have to look carefully for one of its most interesting features. When it was built in the fifteenth century, England was a Catholic country obsessed with what happened to people after death. It was believed that where you went when you died depended on the kind of life you had lived on earth. For the perfect, for the saint who had lived a life of heroic virtue, there was the prospect of eternal life in heaven. For the wicked, there was the prospect of eternal damnation in hell. It was a dramatic choice between endless joy and unending torment. But the Church has always been good at finding ways to soften its harshest teaching. And that’s what happened here.

  In the thirteenth century, the Church invented a half-way house between heaven and hell called purgatory, from the Latin for ‘place of cleansing’. Purgatory was a moral laundromat, where sinners who had soiled their souls on earth were slowly bleached of their stains and restored to purity. It was painful for them, but unlike the souls in hell, for whom there was never any hope of escape, the souls in purgatory had the prospect of release to cheer them on. And the assistance of the living was another source of encouragement. It was believed that the prayers of those still alive on earth could hasten the cleansing of those in purgatory. The best way to speed them on was to have masses said for them in special chapels called ‘chantries’, from the French for chanting. Chantry priests were recruited by wealthy families to pray their relatives through purgatory, much the way a lawyer for a guilty defendant might enter a plea of mitigation on their behalf in order to reduce their sentence.

  In 1505, the prosperous Nottinghamshire Markham family built a chantry chapel inside Saint Mary Magdalene and hired a priest to say mass there. On the outside of the stone panels of the little chapel, they painted a favourite subject of medieval artists called the Dance of Death. One panel showed a dancing skeleton holding a carnation, a symbol of mortality. On the other panel there was a richly dressed young man clutching a purse. The skeleton’s message to the young man was clear. As I am today, you will be tomorrow. And the money in your purse won’t help you. It was a memento mori, a prompt to observers – remember you must die – to make them think about and prepare for their end.

  It’s a far cry from how we do things today. Now we spend a lot of time and effort not thinking about death. To face our own death is, quite literally, the last thing most of us will do – if we’re conscious enough at the time to do it even then. Even if we wanted to, the chances are we won’t have much control over how we leave the scene. Death and dying have been taken over by the medical profession; and there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that it sees death not as a friend we might learn to welcome but as an enemy to be resisted to the bitter end. And the end often is experienced as bitter, as a fight we lost rather than as the coming down of the curtain on our moment on the stage, something we always knew was in the script.

  People in the Middle Ages didn’t have that luxury, if luxury it is. For them, life-threatening illness was as unpredictable and unavoidable as the weather, and they never knew when the lightning might strike. And, considering what came after, it made sense to be prepared for death. In contrast to health professionals today, who advise us to remember the dos and don’ts of healthy living in order to delay death as long as possible, the medieval Church was an advocate of healthy dying. It produced a guide on how to do it called Ars moriendi (The Art of Dying), a handbook for making a good end. Repenting and confessing your sins was the most important advice they gave the dying. And the reason why is captured by Hamlet in Shakespeare’s most famous play. The young prince finds his hated stepfather at prayer and decides to kill him:

  Now I might do it pat, now he is praying;

  And now I’ll do it: – and so he goes to heaven;

  And so am I revenged: – that would be scanned:

  A villain kills my father; and, for that,


  I, his sole son, do this same villain send To heaven.

  O, this is hire and salary, not revenge . . .

  Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent:

  When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage;

  Or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed;

  At gaming, swearing, or about some act

  That has no relish of salvation in it, –

  Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven;

  And that his soul may be as damned and black

  As hell, whereto it goes.2

  The message was clear. If you die before you’ve had time to examine your conscience, own your guilt and confess your sins, you’ll go straight to hell. And since you never know when the bell will summon you, the safest course is to be ready at all times, with your bags packed and your soul scrubbed clean. The other big piece of advice in The Art of Dying was about money. There are no pockets in a shroud, so you can’t take your money with you when you die. But disposing of it wisely while you are alive will help you secure decent lodgings on the other side. And there was a saying of Jesus that confirmed the message: ‘Use your worldly wealth to win friends for yourself, so that when money is a thing of the past you may be received into an eternal home.’3 Those were the important messages packed into that little cartoon on the wall of the chantry chapel in Newark’s parish church.

  I had travelled to Newark on a golden September day to visit Kelham Hall, a few miles away on the banks of the River Trent. And I was wondering if it might be my last visit. I had been returning insistently over the years to prowl the grounds and remember my life there more than sixty years ago, then a young monk trying and failing to give his life away to God in a grand gesture of self-sacrifice. I knew this constant returning was an unhealthy obsession, but I couldn’t shake it. The Victorian parson poet Charles Tennyson Turner had already warned me of the dangers of trying to recover lost time:

  In the dark twilight of an autumn morn,

  I stood within a little country town

  Wherefrom a long acquainted path went down . . .

  The low of oxen on the rainy wind,

  Death and the Past, came up the well-known road

  And bathed my heart with tears, but sirred my mind . . .

  But I was warn’d, ‘Regrets which are not thrust

  Upon thee, seek not . . . thou art bold to trust

  Thy woe-worn thoughts among these roaring trees . . .

  Is’t no crime

  To rush by night into the arms of Time?’4

  These long-acquainted paths had witnessed great changes since I had lived there in the middle of the last century. Kelham Hall was no longer the home of a religious order that trained poor boys for the ministry of the Anglican Church. Now it was a stately hotel, and on the day of my visit it was hosting a large British Asian wedding. For the ceremony, the massive, domed chapel that had dominated my boyhood and haunted my dreams had been converted into a shrine to the Hindu God Ganesh. And it was filled with hundreds of joyful and colourfully dressed wedding guests. Did they catch the vibration of the hundreds of black-robed young men who had once tried to sacrifice themselves to God in this haunted space, now dominated by the friendly presence of the Elephant God? It certainly did not feel like it to me, but to my surprise this did not deepen my ‘woe-worn thoughts’. It banished them. I was touched by the cheerful indifference of the wedding guests to the ghosts that whispered in my ear. Suddenly, something lifted in me. And I knew I wouldn’t have to come back here again. What had been, had been. Now it was no more. I remembered Binyon’s ‘The Burning of the Leaves’:

  Now is the time for stripping the spirit bare,

  Time for the burning of days ended and done,

  Idle solace of things that have gone before:

  Rootless hopes and fruitless desire are there;

  Let them go to the fire, with never a look behind.

  The world that was ours is a world that is ours no more.5

  I decided to let the past go and turn to what was left of my future. I left Kelham happier than when I arrived. But the day’s surprises weren’t over.

  The great tower of St Mary Magdalene dominated the flat Nottinghamshire landscape. I had been noticing it for most of my life, most recently from the train window on trips between Edinburgh and London. But I had never entered it, never seen what it was like inside. If my compulsive visits to Kelham were over, this was my last chance. So on my way to the station in Newark, I went in to look around and found that skeleton doing his dance of death. It had an interesting effect on me when I saw it. It did not compel me to rush off to confession to purge my conscience of its sin, but it did remind me that I was speeding towards the final curtain. It made me think.

  I had been taught to treat skeletons with respect while I was a curate in 1960s Glasgow by my Rector’s son, a medical student who went on to become a distinguished physician in Africa. He had invited me to a student party and was disappointed when he discovered that one of his fellow medics had borrowed a skeleton from the anatomy lab and laid it in the bath to surprise visitors to the lavatory. I was amused by the prank till he reminded me that the skeleton had once been a pulsing, laughing human being. Someone had once known and loved this object of fun now lying in a bath in a student flat on Byres Road. Skeletons remind us that devouring time will get us all in the end. It has been reckoned that since we appeared on the planet there have been 107 billion human beings, 7 billion of whom are alive today. That means that the skeletons of 100 billion of us have faded into the earth. Occasionally we come across one that has been buried for thousands of years, and we wonder about the life it had, its joys, its sorrows and what it made of the world it found itself in.

  I remember thinking about this when I first saw the famous photograph of human skulls at the Nyamata Genocide Memorial in Rwanda. In 1994, a million Tutsis were massacred by the forces of the Hutu-led government of Rwanda. Taken in 2007, the photograph shows a tray of some of the human skulls recovered from the killing fields, relics of one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century. It is the empty-yet-staring eye sockets that haunt the viewer. Vivid lives cut short; and the knowledge that, one way or another, we’ll all come to this. We’ll end as skeletons or as the ash of skeletons. ‘As I am today, you will be tomorrow.’

  And the process starts well before we die. It wouldn’t be so wrenching if we never aged and didn’t see death coming for us, with or without a machete in its hand. We’d run and laugh and climb mountains and dive into the sea with undiminished energy our whole life long. Then, at an unexpected moment when we were in the middle of our song, we’d be taken by death in the glory of our being — and it would be over in a second. That is not how our dance towards death usually goes. If we live long enough, we become witnesses to our own slow dying and the revelation of the skull beneath the skin. Psalm 90 says:

  The days of our age are threescore years and ten; and though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years; yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow; so soon passeth it away and we are gone.6

  I have reached fourscore years, and though my life is not yet ‘but labour and sorrow’, I am aware that the shutting down of my body has begun. I am well into the last swing of the dance, and I can feel the beat quickening. That’s what has prompted these reflections on being old and facing death.

  I remember when I noticed that coloured patches like stains on old stone had started to appear on my face and body. When you get old, the garbage-disposal mechanisms designed to clear out waste in your skin cells start to break down. Instead of clearing the rubbish away, like lazy bin men they leave it lying around in the street, your skin. And it clots into those yellow-brown patches called ‘lipofuscin’, better known as age spots. A few years ago at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the press team photographed the writers with a special camera that subjected their skin to a ruthless high-definition exposure of every flaw and wrinkle. When my picture went up in Charlotte Square a few
days later, it revealed a face blotched and stained with patches of lipofuscin even I hadn’t noticed before. The bin men of my epidermis had obviously gone on permanent strike. That was when I realised that the wind-down of my body was well advanced and there would be more to come. Mind you, for me the process had started in my twenties, when I started going bald.

  Baldness is not a terminal disease, of course, but it is a permanent condition. And I hated it when it started. I fought it in all the usual hopeless ways. I even bought pills advertised in a church magazine. The manufacturers probably thought the readers of Church Illustrated would have a stronger gift of faith than other baldies. Their pitch worked on me. I sent off for the pills. Nowadays the law would require an accurate description of the chemistry of the product that came through my letterbox a few days later, but none of that was required in 1958.

  They looked like little brown Smarties. And like Smarties they were probably made of sugar. I started swallowing one a day. My hair continued to recede. Hopelessly, I flushed the remaining pills down the toilet and started combing what was left on top to the front, trying to look like Marlon Brando as Mark Antony in the movie Julius Caesar that was out at the time. It was a vain response to a disagreeable reality. It may delude the owner for a moment, but the comb-over is an embarrassment that takes no one in. Depressed yet defiant, one day I cropped the whole thing off and that’s what I’ve done ever since. It was an early lesson in accepting things about myself I did not like but could not change. I see now that losing my hair was a good preparation for ageing and death, the skeleton being the ultimate baldy. Maybe I’ve been lucky to have had an early rehearsal.

  My unsuccessful struggle with baldness taught me something about the human condition. Humans are afflicted with a tragic self-consciousness that does not seem to bother the other animals. All animals feel pain, but the one pain that seems to be unique to humans is an awareness of our bodies that is so keen it can lure us into depression and self-hatred. We are not only aware of our own bodies; we are aware of others’ awareness of them. We are conscious of looking at others and being looked at by them. And we wonder what they make of what they see when they see us.