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-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 ***."
"Can he sing?" "Aye ***'s got a good voice".
"***, 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 *** 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 *** 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]