Never constituted to be a saint*

I finished reading Richard Holloway's Leaving Alexandria last week, but was overtaken by sunshine and the desire to be out of doors so that by the time I might have blogged about it I was too tired to make sense - and I feel that Richard himself might have approved of my priorities.

The book is subtitled A Memoir of Faith and Doubt, and while I was reading it I saw a tweet from an acquaintance opining that surely he'd talked enough about both these things. I disagreed - in 140 characters, natch - because it's obvious that both have been a presence for most of the author's life. If something matters, you talk about it, especially if your talking and your writing are fluent and persuasive.

I loved it. I loved the way it conjured up the childhood of the movies and the hills, and I was appalled at the thought of a boy of fifteen going to the school that would turn him out for ordination - or not - at the end of his studies there. Fifteen! Holloway is painfully honest about the guilt that the normal preoccupations of a teenage boy cost him; his description of his struggles with sex seems to hold at once the pity of the older man for his youthful self and the rawness of that self at the time.

The book was enlivened in another way by the familiarity of knowing not only the author but some of the people mentioned, being familiar with Old St Paul's both in the time when he was Rector there and again now, when I also know the house in which he and his curates lived and where that disastrous attempt at communal living took place. I found lights coming on in corners of my memory, of conversations illuminated decades after they took place. I laughed aloud at the thought of the matching donkey jackets, boots, trousers and bicycles, and was glad that the author too seemed to be laughing.

But it is in the defining of faith and doubt that this book makes its mark, and when it reaches the point at which Holloway resigns as Bishop of Edinburgh, he spells out the precise nature of his problem:

I felt glutted with the verbal promiscuity of religion and the absolute confidence with which it talked about what was beyond our knowing. The irony was that in one of Paul's great poems, God chose to empty himself of language and become a life. But along comes Christianity and turns it back into words, trillions of them, poured out incessantly in pulpit, book and on the airwaves, reducing the mystery of what is beyond all utterance to chatter.  (...) Religious language had ceased to be able to convey the mystery of the possibility of God for me because it confidently claimed to make present that which I experienced as absence; though it was an absence that sometimes feels like a presence ...

And then I am back in the words of another hero of mine, the poet R.S. Thomas, and realise that there is only one word more needed from me.

Amen.

* Leaving Alexandria, p.350
There is a great new review from Ruth here

Bows and cheesy grins

Yesterday the Diocese of Argyll and The Isles had a ball. Not the kilts-and-ballgowns type of ball, but the exuberance of a Diocesan Festival which had all the hallmarks of this diocese at its best. With Bishop Martin as MC, Richard Holloway as the preacher at the Eucharist, and some imaginative planning that gave ownership of all the action to everyone present, it was far and away the best festival I’ve ever attended (and I’ve seen a few, believe me).

The culmination of the event was undoubtedly the Eucharist, but the Singing Workshop which occupied everyone between eating and worshipping was a highpoint for many who had not previously experienced Mr B’s take on singing. With their rib-cages high, two imaginary shopping bags in their hands and their face muscles hooked over their ears, the congregation learned John’s Kilbride Mass and sang it with enthusiasm and accuracy – a congregational choir in the best sense. The Cathedral choirs – from St Johns, and the St Maura singers from Cumbrae - sang their own small offerings, but this was a communal effort and all the better for it.

Bishop Richard preached a powerfully relevant sermon on the flawed, broken people of God, reaching the figure of Columba by way of Graham Greene and Paul Tillich. I don’t know how many of us were as struck as the people around me by the image of those who had broken their own hearts and who were yet afforded grace when they least seemed to expect it, but it would have been worth making the journey just for that moment. And there was a hair-raising prayer in Gaelic, and a beautiful Gaelic sung meditation which touched us all, even if we had to read the translation.

But the abiding impression of the day was of joyous interaction and friendship, as Bishop, Dean and preacher cracked jokes at/about one another, as the Dean instructed us how best to exchange the Peace when there was the threat of The Plague (you can give a Buddhist bow – Bishop, demonstrate – or a cheesy grin), as we all greeted one another with added enthusiasm as if to make up for the lack of handshaking or were hugged in complete disregard for the possible contamination from Dunoon people. (If you have been on another planet: Dunoon is currently the swine flu capital of Scotland, if the meedja are to be believed).

This was the diocese at its crazy Argyll best. People had travelled absurd distances to be there, including Tim, temporarily relocated to Argyll and at the festival because I tweeted it, and there were bizarre conversations – Your jacket is from Skye Batiks (mine, and it was) – how do you prepare a sermon? (have a meeting. It makes you feel better) – Is your accent from Hyndland? (mine again. Yes) – have you seen their kitchen-in-a-cupboard? (fabby idea: must copy). We were totally knackered by the time we left, and we still had two hours’ driving before home and dinner. But, for all my misgivings when it was first mooted, I had enjoyed a day in which every moment was filled with what felt right. And for all the problems of this tiny diocese, it was a day when I would have belonged no-where else. Slainte!

Note: you can see more photos from the day here