I enjoyed Richard Holloway's talk but one thing jarred on me: his somewhat mawkish trope that our life on Earth is like living in an orphanage. Of course, adolescents often find their parents desperately embarrassing and perhaps dream they have come from or are going 'somewhere higher'. Even the twelve-year old Jesus, in the story of the finding in the Temple, is rude and brattish to his worried parents. But although some mothers are monsters, most are not; most do their best for their children and when these children become adults they may be able to look more kindly on their parents as human beings like themselves. It seems a bit excessive to say we are all orphans and all earthly parents are just not good enough.
I remember, when as a teenager I spent some months in Spain, how I enjoyed the haunting lullaby Salve Regina, sung in the evening. This hymn to Mary as our heavenly mother has deliciously long, yearning Ooohs!: 'O clemens! O pia! O dulcis!': 'O forgiving, O kind, O sweet…' But even then, lulled as I was, when it got to the bits: 'We cry to you, we exiled children of Eve, we sigh to you weeping and wailing in this valley of tears… show us Jesus, the blessed fruit of your womb, after this our exile', I thought, hang on a minute! I don't feel like an exile on Earth. I never have and I still don't.
Holloway walks his wee dog over the Pentland Hills, his head spinning with questions. As a child I used to talk to my pony as I rode over Exmoor, which I loved. Now it is more usually Hampstead Heath, which I still love, and, as well as nature, 'London, my most kindly nurse' – her people in all their buzzing diversity.
This reminded me of the end of the atheist William Morris's News from Nowhere, that utopian novel so firmly embedded in the Christian tradition. The heroine Ellen: led me up close to the house and laid her shapely sun-browned hand and arm on the lichened wall… and cried out: 'O me! O me!
How I love the Earth, and the seasons, and weather, and all things that deal with it, and all that grows out of it – as this has done!' I quite agree with her (though I've never said, 'O me!').
If I ever got to heaven, I'd be homesick for the Earth and for my city. Like most of us, I think, I want to love and be loved but here not elsewhere.
On a recent walk Holloway looks at 'the rowan berries up against a blue sky on Scald Law' with ecstasy. Yes, that's it! Such intense looking leads to seeing what Hopkins called the inscape of a thing, which is bliss. Or as Rilke says in his Orpheus Sonnets: 'Praise, that's it!' I thought of another Scot, Thomas the Rhymer, True Thomas. As he lay on a grassy bank he saw 'a lady bright / come riding down by the Eildon Tree' (a hawthorn or possibly a rowan tree). He cried: 'All hail, thou mighty Queen of Heaven!' (Mary) but she corrected him: 'I am but the Queen of fair Elfland'.
Then he 'kissed her rosy lips / all underneath the Eildon Tree.' He rides with her and at a crossroads on the journey she shows him three roads, the way to Heaven, the way to Hell and the winding road between, to Elfland, which they take. She keeps him in Elfland for seven years. Then she releases him and when he gets home to his 'ain countrie', he becomes a seer, a poet.
Perhaps Holloway's 'soft (SOF?) atheists', also rejecting the traditional roads to Heaven or Hell and taking the road between, still see many wonders but then return to their 'ain countrie', where they are at home on Earth.