It’s day two of the 2018 Beyond Borders International Literary Festival and Richard Holloway is on the stage, talking about forgiveness. Actually, he’s supposed to be talking about his latest book – Waiting For The Last Bus – but with this most straightforward of men, he can’t seem to get away from the subjects that really interest him – honesty, compassion, doubt, the meaning of life and of course, forgiveness.
What follows is a masterclass in the meaning of forgiveness, between Holloway and his interlocutor, author Stuart Kelly. They discuss forgiveness and our need to make it happen, not so as to help the perpetrator but to help the recipient of the harm; forgive, and you do yourself a favour, you can move on with a lighter heart. As philosopher Immanuel Kant put it: “forgiveness interrupts the consequences of resentment”.
Both participators are erudite and the quotations are coming fast. Suddenly Holloway is quoting Larkin’s This Be The Verse with its first lines, so famous and true: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad, they may not mean to but they do…” The audience loves it and soon we get another quote. Perhaps more appropriately for a minister and former Bishop, it is by Gerard Manley Hopkins SJ: “My own heart let me more have pity on; let me live to my sad self hereafter kind…”
Towards the end we get another corker, as Holloway says that we should not feel too ashamed of our mistakes and faults. After all, as John Updike says “We get to play the hand, but we didn’t deal the cards”.
Richard Holloway has been providing this kind of direct, non-judgmental and compassionate message in his writing and his spoken presentations for a number of years now. Particularly so since the year 2000, when he resigned his position as Bishop of Edinburgh for reasons of conscience and doubt concerning his personal beliefs.
After the session and the inevitable book signing, he kindly gives me time for an interview. Here it is, lightly edited but mostly verbatim.
I’ve heard you talk at several festivals and I think your whole stance and your spiritual journey is fascinating and admirable for its honesty and openness.
Thank you and I’ve done too much of that talking at festivals – hot air everywhere
I heard you talk about the Gauguin picture D’ou venons nous? Que sommes nous? Ou allons nous?* And I wanted to ask you, because those are such terrifying questions and we are all of us waiting for the last bus, whether you yourself, as you get on that bus, will have any sense at all that you’re any nearer to answering any of those questions?
I get little glimmers of the possibility of some larger meaning to it all, but a bit of me still wonders if the whole thing isn’t all a terrible but wonderful, colossal accident almost and there’s ultimately no meaning. Except of course the meaning we give it ourselves. The thing that keeps me on the edge of the possibility of an ultimate meaning is the fact that in our 15 billion odd years into the history of the universe, we come along and start thinking about it. I mean, in us the universe is thinking about itself and we may be the only creatures in the whole vastness of the universe who are doing that. And these minds of ours, they’ve conceived a lot of hatred but also a lot of pity and forgiveness and mercy and all of that keeps me pondering, but a bit of me still wonders. I can see the logic of ‘it popped into existence out of nothing and it will vanish back into nothing’ but in between, between those two brackets, there will have been us thinking about it and I don’t know what to do with that. Except be in a kind of awe of it and be grateful that I’ve been given a ride in it, however brief and it’s taught me to be thankful. You know what Auden said: “Let all your last thinks be thanks”. I try to live like that in my old age – to live thankfully now.
I feel that so much too. But even what you said about being grateful implies being thankful to something or someone.
Ah yes. When I’m out walking in the Pentlands, I do a walk that makes me just want to be thankful and who is there to thank? Is there a someone or something? Or is just maybe the fact of being alive enough for me? And I think it’s possible to just feel thankful in general without having someone particularly in mind to thank.
It’s quite difficult not to imagine some kind of a god who you can thank but on the other hand, the record of the universe is so grim as well.
Yes. D’ou venons nous? I have absolutely no inkling of what there was or what happened before I was born, so what right have I got to imagine there’s something after I die?
I understand, and I have reached that stage where I don’t want it – a life after death. I know lots of people do, and I’m still a practising Christian, however agnostic I may have become, and there’s a lot of stuff about life after death in that. But I kind of tune it out for myself. I no longer desire it nor expect it. I may be surprised, and there may be a continuation in some sense – in which nothing is ever lost. They say energy is never lost, so in some sense something of me may live on. And of course we live on in the memories of others – family and friends; my books perhaps for five minutes. But I suspect I will be just ‘over’ soon, like everyone else. I can’t believe that I’ll go on just like myself now, with a personal self-consciousness. I find that quite hard to believe. But who knows, I just can’t see any sense in which I’ll know that I’m going on. But I don’t fear non being in that sense and I don’t fear dying. I’m looking forward with interest to the experience although I hope it’s not too painful. I certainly want to get a sense of it happening. I want to live through it if I can – I know that’s a paradox. It happened to me one day on a walk through the Pentlands when it came to me that I no longer expected a life after death and it didn’t trouble me, because I won’t be there to know about it anyway.
You would know the work of Elizabeth Kubler Ross and her observations of people dying and their apparent joy at the moment of death and I wondered what you thought of all that.
There’s evidence that I write in my book, about near death experience and you can interpret it in many ways. Some people are for, some against. You can certainly interpret these experiences and indeed a minority have grim experiences – feelings of desolation and so forth. I don’t buy into all that my self but on the other hand I’ve had one or two psychic experiences myself which would suggest that the mind can operate towards other minds almost without materiality and communicate in strange ways. My mother was psychic about me and always knew when I was Ill, even over long distances, which I find very strange. I’ve had several experiences myself where I’ve had to go into situations where there’s been psychic disturbance of some kind, so I think there’s so much we don’t know about how our minds are different from our brains. They interact co-actively but I think we transcend our neurology. I hate reductive science and all that neurotransmitter stuff.
I experience significant moments that I can’t explain fully. I listen to music that I find transcendental and I hate being told that it’s just sound waves affecting my brain. I love poetry which touches my heart. I experience significance, not just brainwaves. Whether it’s ultimate I don’t know. Music can trouble my brain. There’s beauty in it, there’s mercy in it I know, but it’s so difficult to take it any further than just feelings.
Taking it further is a great way to think about it, as how do you take it further – so many people try to take it into a religious system or into some kind of reductive thinking system where it has to be this or that. I just don’t know and I know I don’t know. So let’s just keep it in the moment and do our best for that moment. Let’s live in the wonder of not knowing
Absolutely, so do you think it all really just boils down to Pascal’s Wager** in effect?
I think a bit of it does though I tweak it a bit. We should so live in a way that maybe we’re going to go on for ever and we don’t want to be too ashamed of the way we mucked it up. If there turns out to be nothing at the end of it all, then in a sense we’ve proved ourselves better than the universe because we will be the ones who invented love and compassion and mercy and forgiveness or the simple act of offering a cup of cold water when visiting a prisoner. When there’s so much mindless violence around. In us, we’ve somehow proved ourselves better than that mindlessness and violence of a chaotic Universe. So we have somehow subverted that and that might make us creatures of a universe in which we be proved ourselves the better. I don’t know – it’s baffling isn’t it?
It’s baffling but fascinating and absorbing to talk about it and it’s been a pleasure and a privilege.
Let’s go on, being gloriously baffled
As I take my leave, there are others waiting to talk to him. He is generous with his time as he is generous with his thoughts and insights. This remarkable man appeared to some to have sabotaged his life when he voiced his doubts of belief, resulting in his leaving high church office. He is now defined by his response to these doubts. And his example appears to have given inspiration to many. And I, though we have been discussing doubt for thirty minutes, feel energised and strangely comforted.
*D’ou venons nous? Que sommes nous? Ou allons nous? (Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going to!). Gauguin painted this in 1897 in Tahiti shortly after hearing the devastating news of the death of his favourite daughter Aline, in France. This caused him to reassess his view of God and his own existence.
**Pascal’s Wager. The argument that it is in one’s own best interest to behave as if God exists, since the possibility of eternal punishment in hell outweighs any advantage in believing otherwise. Proposed by seventeenth century French thinker Blaise Pascal.
