Sunday 30 December 2012

A life in letters: Holloway, Richard (1934-) 2



Besides these experiences of Richard Holloway’s which resonated with me, there were at least a couple of things which I had never before seen so clearly articulated. The first of them was his insight that life is not so much about finding and choosing the path we want to follow, but rather about discovering through our actions and reactions who we are: ‘the way we act does not so much make us as reveal us,’ he says (p349). ‘Roads choose us and what they unfold before us is not the person we want to be, but the person we already are, the person time slowly discloses to us.’ (p11)

Holloway is not saying that we have no freedom of choice, but that ‘the main lines of our personality were cast before we knew it’ (p227) We will only gain true freedom to choose as we accept who we are. This seems to me to be a wise insight, and not incompatible with the Christian call to conversion and change. I cannot change who I am, but I have choices when it comes to living out the consequences of being me. Only when I accept my unique identity, and bring my unique identity to God will I be free to be me.

The second thing I learned from Richard’s book, something I had known instinctively without being fully conscious of it was the distinction between instinctive and intentional goodness.  I have often longed to be one of those people from whom goodness towards others flows with apparently effortless spontaneity in contrast to my laboured attempts to display grace and compassion. And I assumed that if only I could find the key to drawing closer to God, God’s presence in me would ensure that goodness would flow.

As it is as diagnosed by Holloway, my kind of goodness is ‘intentional’ rather than ‘intuitive’ goodness, arising ‘from conscience, not compassion.’ (p127-8) Unlike the ‘intuitively  good, the intentionally good have to work hard at it. And it can show. They may perfect the acts of love but they never learn the dance because they never lose themselves.’

I guess my goodness is intentional rather than intuitive and that I am destined, as Richard puts it, referring to the characters in Peter Schaffer’s play and film Amadeus ‘always to be Salieri, and never Mozart.’ (p128) In other things, in speaking and writing for example, I have my Mozart moments, but in doing good I am, I think, forever Salieri. And that’s OK – what matters is that the goodness is done, as an enormous amount of good was done in Richard Holloway’s various ministries, that it’s done sincerely, if not intuitively. But do I really believe that last sentence, or do I feel that if my goodness were instinctive and intuitive it would achieve so much more?

By the end of Leaving Alexandria Richard Holloway has come to regard religion as ‘a work of the human imagination, a work of art,’ (p343) a consoling fiction which gives us courage to endure. ‘Maybe religion was best understood not as a science that explained why there was suffering, but as a  way of gathering people round the mystery of suffering itself, and sitting with them before it.’ (p224)

He had come to this position through pondering his experiences of the absence of God, and it was these reflections which were, for me, the most fascinating aspect of the book. ‘At the heart of religion’, he believes, ‘lies the presence at once given and denied.’ (p202) He senses this absence experientially – writing of his time at Kelham he says ‘the absence had always been more real to me than the presence’ despite his asking for ‘a sign that [the Holy Spirit] truly was present in the absence’ (p164).

But he is also aware of the absence of God in a tragedy-riven world: ‘My wrestling with my own compulsions, as well as my experience of the tragedies of others, did not demonstrate any discernible improvement in the human condition as a result of the death of Jesus – allegedly decreed by God for our salvation. Except in one way of reading the story.’ (p221)

(What, I wonder, does he mean by that ‘one way of reading the story’?  I suppose he possibly has in mind an ultrafundamentalist reading which sees the world as doomed and god-forsaken, and places much of the emphasis on spiritual salvation rather than including an emphasis on making the world whole.)

For many years, Richard Holloway resolved to live as though Christianity were true while experiencing no corroborative emotions, and seeing no evidence of God’s nearness. He describes this as ‘the ancient game of faith’ in which we say ‘let us suppose that God exists and Jesus is his revealed meaning and life in faith as if it were true.’ (p185). He says ‘I decided to act as though I believed there was a meaning to the universe. And not just any meaning. Love’s meaning.’ (p168) And again he says it is as if ‘the absence hid a presence that was unconditional love.’ (p336) For a considerable part of his life, Christianity for Richard Holloway seems to have expressed itself in this living in faith that God was their without any sense of God’s presence, or perception of God’s activity.

Bur having come to see the great story of the Judeo-Christian metanarrative as masterpiece of human creativity, it seemed to him that the most honest position for him was to simply acknowledge the absence of God and to live with that absence.  ‘It was a relief now,’ he says (p336) ‘to name my belief as an emptiness that I was no longer prepared to fill with words. …. It was the absence of God I wanted to wait upon, and be faithful to.’

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