Robert Sutton (diplomat)

Transcription

-Good evening and welcome to you, and to our guest this evening, Richard Holloway. [Applause] This is a talk in our 'Ideas at the House Series' and we're absolutely delighted that Richard, between some quite intensive Writer's Festival Commitments in other cities, has made time to come and talk to us. And I do need to tell you, you need to be particularly nice to him, because he's on his way to Brisbane where, where at The Writer's Festival, among other things, he's going to be the captain of a debating team whose other members are Germaine Greer and Bob Katter [Laughter] So, part of your job here tonight is to: don't ask him anything too scary or stressful. Just make sure that he has a very enjoyable evening, as I'm sure we all will. The 'Ideas at the House Series' includes, as you would know if you've come to some of our other talks, a whole range of speakers and, um... ...in a way we've had a collection, by by accident, and to some extent by design... we've had a sequence of very prominent atheists speak to us, at various times over the last couple of years. Just this year we're having had heard from both Richard Dawkins um... ...and Alain de Botton about, you know, talking about 'Religion for Atheists'. And, and, in a way this is, this is a, this is another part of that puzzle... that we're going to hear from Richard tonight. He's going to be talking to us about his wonderful memoir, ah, Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt... ...that is the story of his extraordinary life, um... and how he, from a very young age, lived what was essentially a monastic life, as part of his education. How he went on to hold ... various um ... take on various religious roles, culminating in his period as Bishop of Edinburgh and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church between 1992 and 2000. Um, the book also chronicles his journey of a different kind. His struggles with issues of faith and doubt, as the title tells us um... and his incredibly prolific writing on, on those kinds of topics. It's very interesting reading Richard's book to find that ...um, you will get the sense that he's just written a book, in terms of the narrative, but you will not see a moment of time, in his account of his life, where he could have done that. And, obviously, and since his retirement, I think, if anything, you know, his prolific-ness has increased. So, his books include, obviously, Leaving Alexandria, which we're talking about tonight, but, working backwards, some amazingly, some wonderful titles: Between the Monster and the Saint; How to Read the Bible; Looking in the Distance: The Human Search for Meaning; On Forgiveness; Godless Morality: Keeping Religion Out of Ethics- obviously, a title that, in New South Wales, with the debate about ethics/class, would have something, something to tell us all. Dancing on the Edge: Faith in a Post-Christian Age; Anger, Sex, Doubt and Death. Well, I think I can't understand why we haven't got him yet at The Festival of Dangerous Ideas. Um, Who Needs Feminism; and ... and, and a number of others. So, he's somebody who has a, a life of reflection on these issues, in different forms. Um, and, as you will know if you've read the book, but you will find out tonight, is a wonderful story teller... a... a wonderful ah, re-counter of his own life, in a way that is both, um, in a human sense, a very rich story, but also one that explores the world of ideas, and how that can impact on a life in a really interesting way. Please welcome Richard Holloway. [Applause] -Well thank you very much for that very generous introduction. Um, and it's a great pleasure to be here. I was in Sydney a couple of years ago, and greatly loved my time in the city and it's very nice to be back. On the 8th of July in the year 2009, I was standing in a graveyard in the middle of England when my phone went. And it was my American daughter phoning me on her birthday. And when I tried to explain to her where I was, I burst into tears. She immediately phoned her mother and said, "Get hold of Dad. He's standing in a graveyard in England crying". But it wasn't just any old graveyard. It was the graveyard of the Society of the Sacred Mission, at Kelham near Newark, in Nottinghamshire, right in the middle of England. It was the mother house of The Society of the Sacred Mission from 1903 to 1973. S.S.M. was formed by one of those remarkable Victorian maverick geniuses. A man called Herbert Hamilton Kelly. And he thought it strange that God only seemed to be calling middle-class men into the Anglican ministry. And so he founded a religious order that would train uneducated boys, working class boys... for the ministry. In a monastic setting, because obviously they didn't have a lot of money, he would incorporate them into the life of a community. They would do all the chores and work that needed to be done um, in the house itself, and the House of the Sacred Mission, Kelham Hall, in Nottinghamshire. And they bought Kelham Hall, when the family- it was owned by the Manners-Sutton family- became bankrupt. And it, it went into, bankruptcy and the society bought Kelham Hall. Now if you want to know what Kelham Hall looks like, picture Saint Pancras station in London, if you've ever seen it. It's an enormous extravaganza of red brick and turrets and minarets. It was also designed by Gilbert Scott, the famous Victorian architect. And he had designed Kelham as a kind of rehearsal for Saint Pancras Hotel. So the society came there in 1903, got into difficulties in 1973 and left. And Kelham Hall is now the district headquarters of the local government. Sherwood and Newark District Council. But the society kept the graveyard. It's very difficult to find. It's enclosed in very high yew hedges, it's very penumbral, very mournful. And for some reason, over the last twenty years I've been insistently going back and standing there, sometimes weeping. Because I went to Kelham as a boy of fourteen, and it transformed my life. I was a very romantic youngster brought up in the Vale of Leven. The Leven is the river that flows out of Loch Lomond, the biggest body of water, inland water, in Britain. A very powerful current shoves itself into the River Leven which, which flows down into the River Clyde. And lots of little villages grew up on the banks of the Leven because it was famous for dyeing cloth, silk works, bleach works, that kind of thing. My father was a factory worker there. But it was surrounded by wonderful hills and Ben Lomond dominated the whole valley. It's an enormous kind of lavender-coloured ziggurat from a distance, from four miles away in the Vale. It stands up there on the north east of the Vale and it dominates the whole landscape. And I was a little boy who was fascinated by the hills. I spent a lot of time out in the hills. And I had the kind of romantics impulse to, to find meaning, otherness, something, the 'beyond' in the midst of nature. Is there something other than all of this? If I scrape my way through could I find purpose, and meaning, and God, and transcendence? Is there something that this is the imminent expression of? There was a sense to me of, what one writer calls, "resonant absence" What R.S. Thomas calls "An absence that feels like a presence" And it's something that afflicts some human beings- this sense of the longing for otherness to give this here and now-ness meaning. Does it exist? Are we alone in the universe? Or is there an ultimate creator, an ultimate artificer of the whole thing? Or is it just simply, inexplicably, a reality that popped into existence and will one day disappear, leaving not a rack behind? Now not everyone is obsessed with these questions. I'm told that not many Australians are. William James defined human beings into two categories. The healthy minded who just accept life as it is and they live it and they enjoy it. And the unhealthy minded like me. Sick souls who constantly ask questions about, "Does it mean anything?" "Did it come from anywhere?" Gauguin's famous questions in that great painting of his when he heard of the death of his daughter, slashed up there on the top left hand corner, "Where do we come from?" "What are we?" "Where are we going?" And these are questions that come with our humanity because we are strange creatures, we human animals. We've got these big brains. We're self-consciously interested in ourselves. We're an object of interest to ourselves in a way that the other animals aren't. My little dog Daisy is interested in the next walk, the next dish of food. I don't think she agonizes at all about her Dog-hood. She certainly, she certainly doesn't turn up in occasions like this to listen to talks from superior dogs about Dog-edness, about the meaning of Dog-hood, about the possibility of an ultimate transcendent Dog. But we do. At least some of us do. Um, and it's these questions that's given rise to the three great and dynamic institutions: religion, philosophy, and science. And I, as a wee boy, was captured by the intensity of that. Um, a romantic has been described, especially a romantic seeker after God- God being the ultimate object of the romantic's quest, ever disappearing from desire; never, never capturable, elusively disappearing round the corner ahead of him. And so, there I was, this, this little boy with these romantic longings and they were fortified by the movies. I was a great movie goer, particularly 'western' movies. Um, because the western movies that I loved, Shane with Alan Ladd- disappointed to discover he was half my height later on- but, um, but he looked magnificent, tall in the saddle. And the sense you got from a lot of those early romantic western movies, of men, always men, giving themselves to a great purpose, usually for the sake of others. Um, men without stars, men without places to lay their heads. Jesus said that of himself. But who went and rescued others and saved them um, from the local baddies. And then they rode away into the sunset. They never got the girl, because 'a man had to do what a man had to do', and that was: ride away and leave, um, whoever it was, standing at the white picket fence, wiping tears from her eyes, and the wee boy runs after Shane shouting sh- I sounded like Sean Connery there- Sh Sh Sean Connery, Shhhhane- you know how he's got that lovely lisp? Remember that last scene? "Shane! Shane! Come back". And so the combination of this longing for ultimate meaning and not finding it, and roaming the hills and looking for the unfindable, possible, other thing, and this idea of some men giving themselves away to a great purpose, they've given away life, they sacrificed life for the sake of others, and it all came together one day, when my wee cousin died of spinal meningitis, and my mother said, "Come home to your cousin Mary up the street because I'll be comforting her". And when I was there, the rector of the local Episcopal church came in and, at the end of making arrangements for Carol's funeral, he asked my mother who I was and she said, "That's my boy Dick." "Can he sing?" "Aye Dick's got a good voice". "Dick, would you like to come and join the choir at St Mungo's?" "Aye I'll come. What time?" And I turned up there on the Sunday morning at half past ten. And he was an advanced Anglo-Catholic, an unlikely hero for a boy. He had a wrap-over baldy haircut. Um, and when he used to visit me Kelham later on and play tennis with us, it used to drop down over his shoulder and float around in the breeze. And when he took us swimming it trailed like a scarf behind him. You wonder why they do. I mean, as a baldy myself, I sympathize. Um, but it's better just to get rid of what you have. But, this was the man who called me into my life's work. He turned this little red sandstone church, that was never completely finished, on the edge of Alexandria, um, the town that I was brought up, and he turned it into an Anglo-Catholic shrine, with six big candles on the altar, lights, and incense, and a sense of mystery, and somehow it came together with my longings on the hills. It suggested 'elsewhere', something beyond um... a light high up in a tower, a door half open somewhere. It suggested the other place to me. I fell in love with it. I didn't know anything about religion, about doctrine, about its claims to perfect truth. I just felt it appealed to my romantic wee heart And I threw myself into it. And two years later, I diffidently said, I felt that I was called to be what he was, a priest. And he said, "We'll send you to Kelham". And so off I went at fourteen to Kelham Hall, in Nottinghamshire. It was um, a kindly place. Very highly disciplined; military in its discipline. We did all the chores. We had no servants. We cooked, we cleaned, we scrubbed floors, we kept pigs. But it was also a place filled with the eccentrics. And when I go back to the graveyard, it's partly, and I scrape the lichen off- there are thirty-five gravestones in three rows- in my book I compulsively detailed um, the very formation of the graveyard because, on that visit in 2009, I felt, "I have to write this down. I have to explain to myself why I'm coming back here insistently year after year, after year, long often I left the place". And I would scrape off the lichen. Here's Father Edmund. He was a small, tubby teddy bear of a man, asthmatic, [breathes loudly] when he breathes and prostatic too. He had prostate problems. And he was a hopeless Old Testament lecturer. And he never really succeeded in giving a complete lecture, because he was always... ...he was always kind of clearly agonizing, to trot out to the local loo, and we would bring two tumblers of water in and sit at the back of the lecture hall and pour water slowly, and noisily into the other tumbler, and sooner or later he would, he would say.... "I must go" And he would trot off. And there was Father Stephen Bedale, my hero, He looked like an eagle. He was my idea of what an authentic ascetic saint should look like: a kind of hunched figure. Um, he too was asthmatic and he lectured violently, passionately, in the Letter to the Romans. And he would paw the ground and shout, and he would be... ...and when I stand before his gravestone, I feel accused. Because I feel that what happened to me after my grand gesture of giving my life away, I would have disappointed him, and many of the others, Because, in the year 2000, I walked away from it all. And I wrote this book to try and figure out why. How? How it happened. How I found myself in that position, and how it ended in that way, um, in the year 2000. Kierkegaard said, "We live our lives forward but we understand our lives backward." And, it's only when you've lived a bit and you look back, that you think you can get some kind of handle on what your life has meant. And I wrote this book, partly as an exercise in personal archaeology, to try and discover who I was... that that's the way my life worked out. A friend of mine who is a Norse scholar, she lectures on Norse folklore, sent me an essay a couple of years ago, which was one of the, one of the early clues I got, as to why maybe my life had panned out the way it had, that, that I hadn't become um, the permanent 'given away hero' who's had a kind of consistency, um, to his life. She sent me this essay, and it was about the metaphor of the 'loom'. The metaphor of weaving in Norse folklore, as a way of explaining the reality of the human existence. I was brought up to believe that we'd complete free will, we were a blank sheet and we made our lives by the choices that we made. We were free to make these choices. Not so, I now can see. And her metaphor of the loom helped me to understand that in Norse folklore, your actions do not make you, they reveal you. They tell you, cumulatively, who you already are, because most of what we become is already formed in us. We're determined by all the forces in the universe leading right up to this moment, the moment of our birth, to the family that we chose. And I discovered, looking back, that the character I inherited was incommensurate, was not consistent with the vocation that I felt I had, especially in its latter stages. Do you know the famous Larkin poem? I'll bowdlerise it because of this tender audience, but do you know the famous Larkin poem: "They muck you up, your mum and dad. They do not mean to, but they do". "They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you". "But they were mucked up in their turn By fools in old-time hats and coats," "Who half the time were soppy-stern, And half at one another's throats". "Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf". "Get out as quickly as you can, And don't have any kids yourself". [Laughter] And Larkin, of course, didn't. Larkin was a pessimist about human nature. But there's a deep truth in what he said. We do not choose our character. I think there's almost a kind of fatalistic sense in which it's given to us. The one angle we get on real human freedom is self-knowledge. Leading... ...leading a life um, that examines itself. Plato said the unexamined life was not worth living. I wrote this book of mine to examine my life, to figure out why these things happened to me. I made a number of discoveries, and the first discovery that I made, looking back, although the signs were there from the very beginning, looking back, um, from my perspective as an old man, I can see now that I was completely lacking in the institutional loyalty gene. We need loyalists to institutions, to cultures, to systems. They're the ones who keep the process going and keep it running. Um, they're obedient, they obey the rules, they always stop at red traffic lights, even when there's no one in sight and it's a Sunday morning in Edinburgh, and there's clearly not going to be anyone coming for another ten minutes, I think you should turn off all traffic lights on Sundays myself, I ignore them, but the point, the point I'm coming to is that I'm, I belong to that group of humanity, that doesn't have intrinsic loyalty to institutions. I'm not seeing that as a virtue or even as a vice but simply as a fact. And looking back from my perspective now, I could see that the signs were there very early. My church didn't permit the remarriage of the divorce until fairly recently, but when I, even when I was a curate, I was marrying divorced couples, who wanted, a second shot at happiness. They'd fouled up. They'd been unfaithful. It had broken down, it had never been compatible and they found someone else and they wondered is it just possible to reclaim some kind of happiness? Is it possible maybe to get a second go at this life? Or am I to be defined forever by this failure which is eating me up inside? And they would knock on my door and they would come and they would say, "Is it possible? Could you marry us?" "We've met each other, we're both rather broken..." "But we really want to have another go at finding contentment and relationship and happiness." The rule said I couldn't. "Can you do it?" And I ignored the rule, because it struck me as an unmerciful rule. And it's interesting that my church has now changed the rule, and that it's been, it's now been possible, for the last ten years in Scotland, it probably is true in the Anglican church here, for the divorced to be remarried. But think of the mercilessness of saying, "no." One shot. You get one go at it, you failed. Misery. For the rest of your life. I married my first gay couple in 1972, before there was even a debate about the issue in, in the churches. I'd always known lots of gay priests because they're very prevalent, in the Anglo-Catholic part of the Anglican tradition. The man who'd brought me into the church was gay. I didn't know it, but I can tell now. And most of the mercy, and the forgiveness, and the grace that's been ministered to me, has been ministered by gay priests. Men who've been uncomfortable. They've been drawn to Jesus because they somehow felt instinctively a sympathy there, and because he was surrounded by broken people who didn't make it, who weren't successful, who weren't morally sorted. And he was surrounded by that kind of person, which is why I think a lot of people, who feel, um, they're not accepted by the respectable majority are still drawn to Jesus. "This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them." He was condemned for that. And there came a time in 1972, I'd been rector of Old St Paul's, this wonderful church in Edinburgh on the Royal Mile, I'd been rector there for four years. And a young man came from London to be interviewed for a job in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. He was a nurse, and he came to be interviewed for a job, Sister Tutor at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. The Old Royal Infirmary up there in Lauriston Place, a magnificent great, Victorian, kind of baronial thing. They've now turned it into flats, and they built a bland new hospital, out at Little France, South of Edinburgh. Peter came up, he got the job, but while he was up paying his visit, he walked down The Royal Mile, and he, he saw a notice board advertising a church called "Old Saint Paul's" and it was down a Close called Carrubber's Close. A scruffy Close, with kind of beer barrels out the back, because there's a hotel there as well that towers- if you know Edinburgh- um, the high lands, the tenements, um, tower over these dark closes, these alleys that run like ribs off the spine of The Royal Mile. And he walked down Carrubber's Close and he saw a church. A strange, gloomy, soot-begrimed church, and there was a, a wee blue door halfway down the close, and he opened the door, as many have done, before and since, and he walked into an amazing space. A space of grace and acceptance, a space that somehow withholds and yet discloses, something of that 'ultimacy' we all, or some of us are seeking, and he, he felt welcomed by this building. And there was a man over in the corner, polishing brass. Richard. Richard was a closeted, shy, introverted gay man, who scuttled through life, furtively keeping his, his jacket collar up, didn't want to be noticed anywhere, and he said, "Would you like me to show you round the church?" And he said "Yes please." And by the time they'd finished the tour an hour later, they'd fallen in love. And Peter got the job and he came back to Edinburgh and became Sister Tutor and he joined Old Saint Paul's. And they came to me one Sunday after high mass and they said, "It's probably not possible, I know..." "...but we would like to spend the rest of our lives with each other." "We would like to promise 'til death do us part." "It's not possible is it? You're not allowed to do it are you?" "Because we're gay; because we're not really accepted here are we?" And I said, "Yes." And one Sunday night, after Evensong, no one else there, it was a private thing. It wasn't legal It wasn't theologically appropriate. It was not allowed. It didn't have any status except in their eyes, and in the eyes of their God. And I stood in front of them, in the little Lady Chapel that rides like a, like a lifeboat, up above the nave and Old Saint Paul's, a lovely Giotto, golden reredos behind me, and I read the prayer book wedding service over them. They were together 'til death. But I wasn't allowed to do that. The law didn't permit that mercy. It didn't offer them that opportunity. And so, from the very beginning, I was not keeping the institution's rules, which has made me interested in institutions. We need institutions: religious, political, cultural, economic. But the trouble with the institution as a human form, is that most of them were created to fulfil a particular purpose. A great religious vision, a political ideal, an artistic purpose... but they end up existing in order to exist. They end up existing for their own sake. The purpose of their preservation, their, their holding together, becomes why they are at all, because they tend to get taken over by people who are good at running institutions. And we know this. In all institutional history, Nietzsche, who was a great student of human psychology said that, "Humanity needs these stable communities that hand on culture, and politics, and religion, and education." But he said, "The trouble with stable institutions of that sort is that they are followed like a shadow by stupidity." They become increasingly stupid, because they become increasingly locked into a permanent sense that they are already fully formed and all truth is within them. And this is particularly true of religious institutions, because they have persuaded themselves that they're not just another human form but that they, that they are a hybrid form that's part human and part divine, and, and therefore they, they are in a state of sanctified permanence. Let me give you an example of the kind of stupidities, that we've seen in human institutional history. Think for a moment about the status of women. Women were excluded from participation, at any significant level in most of the institutions um, that were run in the world, certainly in my culture, until within living memory. They didn't even have the vote until shortly after the First World War in Britain. Because, the idea was that the institution was permanent in its form. It was run by men for men and women had a collateral role, a, a, a subsidiary role- a submissive role. And if you know anything at all about the debate that followed, and the brave women that challenged this, because, of course, what always happens is that institutions, as well as having power structures, have victims. And they only change because the victims rise up and make them change; they never voluntarily handover their power. Mark said, "That change comes not from the weakening of the strong, but from the strengthening of the weak." And women increasingly rose up and said, "This should not be any longer." And they chained themselves to railings, and they threw themselves in front of horses, and they bored their menfolk to death until the stupid men... started changing their minds. It happened a long time ago, but it's still not fulfilled, that revolution, and it hasn't even started in most religious institutions. And, of course, in a religious institution, there's an extra trick. There's another thing that's added on. When women where, as it were, storming the political institution and trying to open it up, they only encountered what you might call 'secular stupidity.' The men simply said, "Oh women don't understand politics." Tell that to your Prime Minister. Tell it to Margaret Thatcher. Women don't understand. Their brains are not formed in a way that can encompass the reality. Only men can understand that. They always...power always develops weak ideologies to support it. But, they're essentially rationalisations of a desire to hold onto power. In religious institutions it's even worse, because it's not only simple male arrogance and desire to hold onto power, they also have a particular understanding of the sacred texts that they believe are their title deeds. And so, when five minutes ago, because it only started happening really in my church, the Anglican Church, in the late eighties and the nineties, when women again started trying to storm the sanctuary, the men -in frocks incidentally- [Laughter] I know not in this Archdiocese, because they, they don't do that. But, the men in frocks said, "We'd, sisters, we'd love to have your up here in the holy place." "We'd, we'd like nothing better." "My humanity reaches out to...to you." "But it's God." "It's the Bible." "It's in there." "It says that you're, you're man's helpmate." "You're subordinate to us." Paul says, "Women shouldn't speak in church." "And if they don't understand the sermon, they should ask their husband when they go home to cook him a dinner after." And you see what's going on here? What happens in religious, in sacred institutions, is that there's an extra hurdle to go over before you can actually affect 'just' change. Religions cannot do the right thing simply because it's the right thing to do. They have to find religious reasons to do it. Now in the case of women's ordination, there is a text in the New Testament that actually helps you over the lump. There are lots of texts, um, that subordinate women, even in Paul. Um, and if you've been married according to a traditional prayer book wedding rite, you, you, you'll recognize this. I understand in this Archdiocese women have to promise to submit to their husbands. That surprises me, with what I know about Sydney women, but there we go. There's a text, in the Letter to the Galatians. And we leapt upon it. "In Christ, there is neither male nor female." Thank God for that. "Slave nor free, Jew nor Gentile." And that text enabled us to move on in the debate and to find good religious reasons, for doing the right thing. So, we made that change. Slowly, painstakingly, agonizingly, and not universally because the Anglican Church is still a patchwork of places where it hasn't happened. And, of course, it hasn't even been addressed in the mighty Roman Catholic Church, where there's not even a topic of debate. But the next big issue that's coming along and challenging religious institutions and asking them, "Surely you can change?" "Surely you can see that you are preserving attitudes that were appropriate in the... ...in the Age of Bronze, but are not in the twenty-first century." And the big topic today, of course, is the status of gay people. Increasingly, I became associated with the campaign to rethink the Church's traditional attitude of, not just distrust of gay people, but of condemnation. I was challenged in um, the Queen's lavatory at Windsor... ...a few years ago... ...by an Archbishop. The Archbishop of Southeast Asia it turned out to be. There we were, doing our business in the Queen's urinal... [Laughter] It was a meeting of Anglican Primates, um, Anglican archbishops. And he said that I was filling hell with homosexuals, because I was giving them permission to commit a sin, that would damn them forever. I nearly decked him. [Laughter] But I let him piss his wormwood and gall into the urinal, the Queen's pristine, white urinal. [Applause] But, just think about it for a minute. Just think about that. It's not just a question of saying, "I don't agree with it." Or, "I don't think- I think it's unnatural." Or whatever. But to say it would land someone who loved a member of his own sex... in hell forever, and ever, and ever? Do you catch the monstrous disproportion in that? Of course, the whole idea of hell is monstrously disproportionate. There's a famous sermon in James Joyce's, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when a Jesuit priest, in a retreat for boys um, describes... what it's like in hell. The thickness of the walls that are blazing. The, the fact that the, that the whole person is on fire. That their eyeballs, and the eye sockets are writhing... that their entrails, the, the, their innards are permanently aglow and burning. And he says that, "Fire on this earth has the property that it burns out, but in hell it has the property that it burns eternally." And religious people, in certain elements of institutional loyalty to their faith, have proclaimed that that is the fate that meets people who've made love to members of their own sex. The disproportion is obscene. And it was that debate, that tumult in the Anglican Church that finally finished me off. It happened at the Lambeth conference of 1998. Lambeth conferences are meetings of all the Anglican bishops on earth. And they come to the University of Kent. Just imagine it: 700 men in pink frocks, living in student accommodation. [Laughter] In 1988, they meet every ten years, in 1988, it was predicted that the Anglican Church, which is a loose federation of autonomous provinces, that it kind of formed itself by accident, a bit like the British Commonwealth, or the British Empire, and it, it's kept together by affection rather than anything else, um, by a shared liturgical language, although there is an increasing and, I think, disastrous centralising tendency going on. Um, and at Lambeth 1988, because cultures move at different, according to different time clocks, the great debate, the great issue that was finally going to sunder and sever the Anglican communion, was the ordination of women. Because it had happened in places like North America, Canada, the United States, in New Zealand. It was being debated here. It was beginning to be debated in Europe. There are places that refused even to debate it; that refused even to think it was conceivable that a woman could in fact do these things. I think, in fact, it was an Australian opponent of the ordination of women said, with great eloquence, "You could no more ordain a woman, than you could ordain a meat pie." [Laughter] Because it was held, you see, it was held that women, could not receive the grace of orders which is, which is, as it were injected into a man. When the bishop lays his hands upon the man, this, this metaphysical implant inheres to his soul. But, apparently, it wouldn't take in a woman. [Laughter] And that doctrine is still held. But what happened at Lambeth 1988 was interesting. The Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, who presides at Lambeth conferences, was an elegant diplomat. A very tactless one, I loved him dearly, called Robert Runcie. And what he did was, he glided the issue into the long grass. He, he, he, came up with a classic Anglican fudge. He said, "We disagree about this issue." "Some are doing it. Some will never do it." "Some can't make up their mind whether even to think about doing it." So let's appoint a commission to study the matter... ...to report back sometime before the Second Coming." [Laughter] "And meanwhile, those that are doing it will go on doing it." "And those that are not doing it can go on not doing it." "And we will all jolly along together." And it worked, and on the whole it's beginning to spread. Although in Britain, there still isn't a woman bishop. 1999 came along. And the issue that was going to break up the Anglican Communion, was not the ordination of women... bowled that into the long grass. That buying of time had bought a certain kind of quietness into the argument. But the big issue was the status of gay and lesbian people in the Anglican Church, and whether it was even possible to consider their ordination. I went to Lambeth '98. I didn't enjoy, Lambeth '88, but I hated Lambeth '98. I went to Lambeth '98 thinking, "We'll do the same thing." "We'll, we'll appoint a commission." Because we're in- There's a whole range of different perspective, different ways of looking at it. There are some people who still want to stone gay people, who want um, gay people to be capitally punished. There are some people who want it still to be outlawed. There are some people, um ... who want to, really not look at the issue at all. They just: 'don't ask, don't tell' kind of policy. There are some people that want a strict sexual ethic imposed upon them. There are some people that recognize that they are who they are, and they should be allowed to love and commit themselves as they can. And there were one or two other positions even further left than that. And I thought we'll appoint another commission. We'll buy time. No, that's not what happened. There was a horrendous debate simply on this issue. Um, and the thing that killed something in me was that, it wasn't like normal debates when you can be passionate in your disagreement. You can say, "No, that's not right. That's not what the scripture says." Or "That's not according to nature." Or, "That's not appropriate." You, you, you can argue passionately and I'm a Scot, I'm used to passionate argument. What this turned into was a feast of hatred. Bishop after bishop got up and denounced gay people as animals, as dogs. The language was virulent. One bishop said to me it was like being present at a, a Nuremberg Rally. To hear all that anti-Semitism, revved up. I felt unclean. Horrifying. Bishops. Men of God. Followers of Jesus told to turn the other cheek, to love their enemies. And something in me died. What is it about religion that can provoke this cruelty? Because cruelty is the worst aspect of human nature. And if it's fortified by religion and by your view of God, I can't, I can't be there. I can't take that understanding of God. Shortly after the debate, a Nigerian bishop performed an act of exorcism on a young gay man who was present. He was a deacon in the Church of England. And he, he tried to pull the demon of homosexuality out of him. A demon came out of Lambeth 1998, and it was the demon of intolerance, of homophobia, and it didn't work to keep the Anglican Communion together, because it's already breaking up into little fragments. Some that are prepared to consider the possibility of these changes. And some who are implacably opposed to it. I came home to Scotland. I wanted to leave at five o'clock in the morning; get in my car and just come away. I was, I was crying inside. And it was the Archbishop of Canada, Michael Peers, who prevailed upon me to stay to the end. I had a dust-up with the Archbishop of Canterbury, because I had to stay behind for a Primate's meeting. A meeting of Archbishops, in whom more and more power is being inhered, and I think that's a mistake. What you want to do with power centres is dilute them and spread them out. You don't want to concentrate them. The one thing that history shows us, is that we do not handle power well. And men of God don't handle it any better, um, than, than politicians or plutocrats. I came back to Edinburgh, and I wrote a book. I wrote a book called, Godless Morality: Keeping Religion out of Ethics, because, it seemed to me, that bringing God into debate about these neuralgic and contentious subjects, made them even more difficult to deal with, because it trumped all possibility of arguing a different point of view. Because, if you could say, "This is what God believes..." and looking back over the history of our understanding of God, what Karen Armstrong in her great book called "the history of God," it seems to me that God has either constantly changed his mind, or we have constantly changed our mind about God. And it might be that we've made up most of God anyway. God apparently permitted slavery, until the 1800s. Did he change his mind? Or did we change our mind about God? That maybe he didn't approve of it at all? Maybe that bit was a human construct? Something that was part of the code of the time, and it simply got sanctified, as these things do. God had subordinated women until the 1990s. Did he change his mind in the 1990s? Or did we change our minds about God? And there are many, many other examples. Um, God fixed people in their demographic condition. "The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate. God made them high or lowly, And ordered their estate." And stick with it. This is Alexander's famous hymn. So we constantly revised and edited our understanding of the nature of this mystery and the way it influences our ethics. So I wrote a book, trying to leave all the religious stuff out, and simply to look at issues on a human level. Because it's difficult enough to agree on a human level with these contentious subjects anyway. And I felt that maybe, if we did that for a bit, we might find good, human, kindly, humane ways of moving on. And my book was um... ...was denounced. Ah, the same Archbishop of Southeast Asia, whom I pissed beside in the Queen's lavatory, two years earlier, refused to come to a conference in Scotland because of the book, and he declared the whole of Scotland a heretical province. [Laughter] ...which was tough on the people of Scotland, because many of them wanted rid of me by that time anyway, and they would probably have elected him, if it had been possible. And when the Archbishop of Canterbury got up to deliver his presidential address, mind ye, he was caught between a rock and a hard place. The hard place was the Archbishop, who wouldn't come, and the rock was the Archbishop, the Primus of Scotland, who'd written this book that was disturbing his Communion, and so he denounced the book in his presidential address. Um, that didn't chuff me, because I didn't want this Englishman, walking into Scotland like a colonial governor, denouncing the local district officer. Um, there was a little bit of a rebellion. It was at a conference called the Anglican Consultative Council, which has lay people, and they insisted that I get equal time. But, by that time, I was realizing: the game is up for you. Um, you're so out of step, you've become a scandal to people, this institution that you're supposed to guard and be an instrument of unity, you're destabilizing. People are disappointed in you. You've hurt lots of people that, that love you. And that you, and you love them. And then a couple of weeks after this, I had to go down to one of the loveliest towns in the Scottish borders. The diocese of Edinburgh takes in the lovely border country, and I had to go down to one church, to, to pay one of my standard visits. That's what bishops do, they- it's part of their queenly role. Um, they go around cheering up the parishes, visiting them, preaching and, um, and drinking tea, and eating cold sausage rolls afterwards. It's all, it's all part of the nature of the thing. And I'd loved this particular parish, and I'd helped the rector and his wife. And there was something strange about the atmosphere. When I went over to give the kiss of peace, which is part of the rite, to people in the choir, they wouldn't touch my hands. And when they came up to the altar, and I was administering the bread and the wine, the sacred elements, a lot of them refused to take it from me. And when I went to the porch at the end of the service to shake their hands, many of them swerved past me, wouldn't touch me. And I said to the rector, "What's going on here?" And he said, "It's that book, Godless Morality." And the next day, I got up. And after I'd been to the Cathedral, said my prayers, I bought The Scotsman, and I was the front page. I was the headline. "Clergy declare the diocese of Edinburgh vacant, and call for the resignation of Bishop Holloway." Not all the clergy. It was a bunch of particular- clergy with a particular kind of frame. And I realised it's over. You've become an object of offense to them. Um, they're right. You don't belong here any, any, any longer. You, you, you can't- you're making it tough for them, you're, you're breaking down the walls, you're bashing in the windows, and they want the cosy warmth of a certain package of doctrine and ethics, and you're wrecking it. And so I walked away. And I took to the hills. I wandered the Pentland Hills, a lovely range of rolling hills, south of Edinburgh. Am I still a Christian? Have I any understanding of God left in me? There wasn't much of God left in me. God had always been elusive to me anyway. He'd always been an absence that felt like a presence. I was tantalized by God, that resonant absence again. Um, and the God that I was being told about, the God who was punishing my gay friends, the God who denounced me, was cruel. And I, I, I couldn't be part of that. And yet I'm still turned, I was still turned by the longing that had got me into this. The possibility of transcendence, that there is meaning, and that the meaning might be a great pity, not a cruelty, but an absolute compassion. An absolute unconditional love, like the unconditional love of the father of the prodigal, in Luke's great parable who runs to meet his broken son, and doesn't condemn, and doesn't even wait for the confession before embracing him, bringing him home. There is that God. That's the God of Jesus. And so, one day, I went back down The Royal Mile, and I went back down Carrubber's Close, I opened that wee blue door, and I went in. And I sat, and I felt received and understood. So I'm kind of in and yet out of the Christian Church. I want it to continue, but I want it humbled. I don't want it cruel and bullying. I want it modest and serving. I want it to feel broken, like the broken Jesus, and not trying to sort people into very precise understandings of humanity. I want it to accept the totality of broken humanity. Most of us are broken, in one way or the other, and we struggle with our own meaning, with our own integrity, with our own sinfulness. And the thing I found in Jesus, and the thing you can still find some churches, is an understanding of that. "Come unto me all ye who travail and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." So I'm back. But I can't proclaim. I can't evangelise. I can't say, "This is the Truth." I don't know what the absolute truth of it is. But I still catch a glimpse of the tiny figure of Jesus, on a distant seashore, kindling a fire... ...a fire of compassion and kindness. And I've become increasingly allergic to religious certainties. They seem to me only to crucify people. There's an Israeli poet I met, and whose work I love, called Yehuda Amichai. I sat with him a few months before he died of cancer in Jerusalem, another city divided in turmoil by religion. He wrote a poem called "Ecology of Jerusalem," in which the conceit of the poem is there are so many competing religions, a bit like Victorian factories emitting fumes. He says, "There's a kind of psychic smog over Jerusalem, and it's hard to breathe." And he wrote a wonderful poem that I used as the title of one of my books. "From the place where we are right Flowers will never bloom in the spring, The place, where we are right Is hard and trampled. Like a yard. But doubts and loves dig up the world, like a mole, a plough. And a whisper will be heard in the place where the ruined house once stood. "doubts and loves." Doubts keep you humble and modest in your claims unless they're the claims against injustice and cruelty and then there should be no doubt, there should be challenge. But in thinking of the big ultimate unanswerable questions there should be a lot of modesty. But it should be allied to love. "doubts and loves." So what am I left with after a life spent wrestling with this elusive god and this strange burning-eyed prophet Jesus? I'm left with a kind of existential gamble. One of my favourite philosophers is a Spaniard, Unamuno. Obsessed again with these big questions: "What are we?" "Where are we going?" "What awaits us?" "Is there anything?" And one of his epigrams stayed with me, it rescued me in a moment of despair, when I didn't know whether to get out in my early ministry, or just to stick in because there was so much of beauty. This is what he wrote: "Man is perishing." "That may be, but let us perish resisting..." "...and if it is nothingness that awaits us..." "...then let us so live that it will be an unjust fate." And the thing that keeps me religious, is the possibility that there might be an ultimate purpose to the universe and that it might, as certain rumours suggest, in sacred text, be unconditional love. And it seems to me to live as if that might be the case, is not a bad way to be going. Especially if it makes us kind to one another. So that's where I've ended up. Not with very much. "A whisper will be heard..." What I hear is that little whisper. Not hectoring, bullying, preaching. A whisper will be heard. Listen out for it yourself. Thank you [Applause] -Thank you very much Richard for that wonderful talk, it, I think it's rather hard to follow something with that resonant ending um.. But we do have some time left for questions from you, ah, there are two microphones in the auditorium, one on either side. So if you have something that you would like to ask Richard, do come to one of the microphones. Um... I might just start off by saying, talking, following up on, on what you talked about ah... with a church, like the Anglican Church, um, that you want to see church humbled and full of doubt. That church is still in a state about the issues that's, that, that, ah, you found so difficult to deal with their reaction to. Um, and you talked about it dissolving, what do you think is the likely fate? I mean, ah, that there will be a smaller humbler institution? Or, that it might dissipate entirely? - I think there are two, contrary tides here. I mean, let's face it, the churches that are growing are the... ...the churches of certainty. And uh... I, I can understand that because it's, in an uncertain world... ah, give me at least something I can hold on to. Something that tells me what to think and how to act. Um, and that can be wonderful for ah... for uncertain people. And I think those are the churches that on the whole are growing. Um, who would join a church that proclaimed my kind of poetic uncertainties? Um, well there might be some, but it certainly- it's never going to become a mass movement. Although interestingly, I do increasingly meet people who've left the church, who want something um, more generous and spacious, they miss the coming together, they miss the sacrament, they miss the beauty of music, they miss the challenge to their own um... struggles to be better people. Um, and ah, but increasingly they can't, they can't hack it. Even in the United States of America the, the biggest religious demographic apparently is, is post Christians. People who are leaving. So, I don't know where we're going to go in this. Um, ah, ah you can usually find generous churches in most big cities. Um, that, that allow a certain spaciousness in people to sit as it were. Um, but the trouble is um, it's not a very strong, sales pitch. Because... -Kindness - What, what compels people is, I mean, if, if someone came into you trying to sell a vacuum cleaner said, "Well you know, I mean it's, I'm not really sure if it actually lives up to what the label says. Um you can't really be certain of these claims because advertisers always exaggerate." They'd say "What's the point in- if you're trying to sell this thing to me. Sell it to me!" Um, so I don't know where it's going and I am alarmed by, the fact that many, many young people I know are living perfectly happily outside the church and they find their spiritual sustenance in other, other places. You had Alain de Botton on, -Yes - Who's written a book called, Religion for ethic.. ah, Religion for Atheists I believe, and he started a thing called the School of Life and you go along and hear a secular sermon on a Sunday morning. People go to concerts, they come to things like this. Book festivals. There is a deep spiritual hunger. Um, Sydney Opera House probably fulfils that in many ways. This is probably a great cathedral for, for that kind of thing. Um, because great music can give you that sense of transcendence, So, I'm, I refuse to get into the prediction business here. Um, I think there are contrary currents, um, and it's anyone's guess as to how it will go, but Anglicanism used to be tradition, traditionally rather it didn't over claim it was- it was kind of a muddled church for muddled people. And since there are lots of muddled people, it did have a strong vocation. But now it seems, increasingly, um, to be a certain church for people of certainty. And I ah, I and, and a lot of the certainties are highly moralistic. I think. I think we've already fissured over the gay thing. There are provinces um, and dioceses that won't come to um, international meetings, - Yes - Because they don't wont to consort with heretics and people like that. So, um even appeasing them hasn't succeeded but of course appeasing, does- never does. So um, I'm uncertain even about the future. -Yes, mm, well it, it's an interesting question. Yes sir, to you. -Can you hear me? Ok great. Well first I want to thank you for a wonderful um, ah talk and- I came from the States a few days ago, I wanna thank you have a wonderful city. I am going to immigrate to Australia soon. [Laughter] You guys have a fantastic city here- Um, I read a book recently by, ah, by Sam Harris, ah, called Free Will. I don't know, if you've heard or not about it? - Oh yeah, yeah. - It's an amazing book, it's really kind of disturbed me, as a neuroscientist myself also, because it talks about the idea of when our minds, make a decision, or we make a decision. Our minds make the decision before we are conscientious also, of that decision by a few seconds. So meaning when I decided to come here and make the question, my mind made the decision before I made the decision myself. Which means... -Your brain had made the decision. -Exactly. The brain, exactly. -Yeah -The brain. So, basically, we have no free will at all. According to Sam Harris, or, according to the neuroscience nowadays. So how would you approach that? That means even if I, you know, want to be doubting something, or I want to be unfaithful, or I want to be whatever, it's not me. It's my brain making the decision before even I can make anything about it. Or I can even decide to do anything about it. -Um, I don't buy it. Um and um, but it's actually very interesting, and, and it's one of the big debates in science at the moment. The whole, the whole ah, nature of consciousness, um, and whether um, the mind is the brain, um, and- it certainly is coactive with the brain and- but I do not buy it. Because I think, and I think it's part of the mystery of our reality and part of the mystery of the universe. I mean, take Elgar's Cello Concerto, Wire Elgar up to a neurological measurement machine while he's composing, Elgar's Cello Concerto. You will get a true read out. This is what's happening in his brain, but you will not get the mystery of the Cello Concerto itself. Um, and the same is true of the human being, I think that, that my mind and my brain are coactive. But while I don't think there's a ghost in the machine I don't think I have an independent immortal soul. I think there is something mysterious about human consciousness. Um, and I think there's something parallel to that about the universe. Wittgentstein said "That if you could answer every possible scientific question, the problem would still remain and the problem is 'being' itself." "Where did it come from?" "How does it start?" So I think Sam Harris, along with a number of the neo-atheists has become a fundamentalist. Um, and in many ways um, the neo-atheists have become the mirror image of the thing they hate. Um, whereas I think that the, the, the true honest position is that we don't really know, but there is something here that's mysterious. And for him to reduce human goodness to, to pure neurology, I mean it, it reduces to absurdity his own book anyway. I mean how can I take a book that he's written seriously, when in fact it's simply programmed by neurological impulses in his, his brain with which his mind is not in touch. [Laughter] -I think he mentions that actually he says "Am I writing what I'm writing..." - Yep - "Or is my brain just writing what writing and do I control what I'm writing?" - It loses the person. Now um, and it may be one of those things you just have to take a faith position on um, and I'm, I'm a semi-determinist. I think that the, the real project in life is to know- to, to know yourself. The Delphi Oracle, that's what it said above it: "Know thyself." "Gnothi seauton." And it seems to me that the one tragedy in life, is to die without knowing who you were. Knowing that you were a bad person, or that you were a good person, or that you were an indifferent person, that you were a, a bigoted person, and the thing that gives you a bit of a lever and freedom, um, is increasing self-knowledge. Um, and I think that's, that's the tragic thing about life. My Norse friend saying that, "Your choices reveal you." St Peter when he betrayed Jesus in the high priest's garden, didn't know he was a coward until that moment. He- "I will die with you." He said to Jesus, as he was being arrested and then a couple of hours later, he's revealed to be... a coward. And what you then do, and what he then did, is that you realise that I'm a coward. So, next time I will have to struggle to find courage. But until you know that about yourself, you cannot lever in the modest freedoms that make it possible. And it's the same in, in counselling and psychotherapy, and spiritual direction. It's only when you have an honest take on yourself, you're not denying the squalid reality of your life, that you maybe get a little edge of becoming a better person. Um, and that's why I do not buy Sam Harris. But, God rest him. -I agree with you. Have a nice day. Thank you. -Any other questions from you? Looks like, yes? Great. - Um, I enjoyed your talk immensely as well. It was, ah, moving at times. Um, I think you do Sam a disservice though. Certainly, ah, actually quite I agree with his um... theory regarding free will. - Yep - I think it's actually quite enlightened and, um, speaks, ah, immeasurable truth. Um, also I think it allows one to view oneself externally and ah, to make judgements about the moral things that they um, are contributing to the society. Um, more than anyone that believes in free will is able to do anyway. - Yep - Um, and also I think you did mention in your talk that you don't believe in the, how Sam would put it, "Delusion of free will." Did you not say that sir? - Mm mm - So, um, my question is um, I guess is: What's your problem exactly with what... [Laughter] ...Sam's been saying? -My problem is that I do not think that, I believe that we are largely determined but not totally determined. And that there is um, ah, I mean, I'm with Spinoza on this; I'm not with Schopenhauer or Sam Harris. Um, and I think Spinoza was a much wiser person than either of them. Um, and Spinoza said "That we are largely determined by all the facts of the universe that are poured through us including our own physiology and neurology." Um, but the more you know yourself, the more the possibility of a kind of marginal freedom becomes possible. One of the good things about Harris's book, um, and it's something I commend him for, is that, that so much of our social and penal policies are based on the folly of absolute human freedom. Um, and we're sending people into prison, um, who are incapable of having, ah, of making choices other than the ones we, ah that, that we made. And I think that's part of his purpose, and I agree with that. I think that we should be understanding what makes kids brought up in dire circumstances, um, into criminals and not make it worse by shoving them away. And, and a part of his purpose is to get us to rethink those things. I'm with him on that. But I, I can't buy the absoluteness that he reduces everything to physicality and materialism. I'm a semi-materialist, a semi-determinist. I can't go the whole way, because I think there's ultimately something mysterious about personhood, just as I think there's something ultimately mysterious about the universe. And particularly that it's produced creatures like us who transcended and, and that the universe in us is now asking questions about itself. I find that very bizarre and I don't think that you can have a completely scientific analysis of why that's happened, because something has popped into existence in us that wasn't there before. -Yeah I agree but I don't think Sam's as strict a materialist as you make him out to be. -Well you might know him better than I do. [Laughing] -Oh no, well I can, I can only say from what I've read. [Applause] -Of- I, I just want to finish with one question, um, ah, to Richard because particularly when you were, when you started your talk this evening, so, to go back to the beginning of what you said. And one of the things I enjoyed so much about the book was that sense, um, of, when it started off, of a childhood, of your love of walking, of the movies. That, in a way your discovering the church was part of this um, you know, quite a very natural thing for a child with those kind of, a desire for somewhere else and those kind of romantic leanings, the lookings, somebody looking for, for answers and meaning. Um, and I just wanted to ask you, do you think, do you feel, that in a way, it, it at a different time and in a different place it could have been something else? -Yes um... but I still think the tug of transcendence would, would be there. I mean, I do think that there are some people who, who just can't but wrestle with these kinds of issues, and, and the fact that they're irresolvable makes it, it's, it's an unscratchable itch. Um, but I might have been diverted into a different path, a different profession. Um, I'm grateful for the way it, it educated me. Um, I wouldn't otherwise have been edu- -I would have left school at 14. And, I know enough about what can sometimes happen to um, highly intelligent people, um, who, whose lives don't, you know, they can end up being very, very self-destructive. Um, I also learnt, to love writing and fiction and poetry and metaphor through it. And, and to me what religion is, it's a great story. It's a great work of the human imagination and it's a beautiful way to understand it. It is a human construct like one of the operas you have here. And it can be restorative and, and challenging and redemptive in that way. Um, and I couldn't have discovered that then. Um, although I didn't- I remember the night before I went off to Kelham. I'd never really read the Bible much and I went up to see the rector in his study, and he was out taking a call and I picked up a Bible saying I'd better get to know this and I, I flicked through the Book of Genesis and it was, you know, gobbledygook to me. [Laughter] I didn't get it. To me, the thing that had captured my soul and my heart was this romance, this, this possibility of the other. You know, the great lover. - Mm. - Um, and I've, and I've found quite a lot of that has satisfied me. Um, ah, but it conflicted with this, this great persecutor idea, this- because God is a dodgy character. I mean, a very, very bad history. Um, ah and, What is the reality, if there is a reality? If there is, an ultimate mystery that comes anything close to what we understand by God? Ah, you could do different readouts from the way history and the universe he created. And that's where I like the kinds of things that Jesus said. Um, and I don't think that He came from heaven with a particular picture of God but I think He struggled to try and make imperatives about ultimate reality, relate to justice and mercy. Um, and even if they, if the ultimate reality doesn't exist, justice and mercy do and are good enough. - Thank you very much Richard. [Applause]