Stephen Mitchell reviews On Reflection – looking for life’s meaning by Richard Holloway.
Canongate (Edinburgh 2024) Hbk. 238 pages.
This is a captivating book, and if I had the means, I would a send a copy to every member of the network. Richard Holloway will need no introduction to many readers – he’s been a speaker at our conferences and his books have been reviewed in Sofia. His backstory can found in a bibliography of over thirty books, from Leaving Alexandria to Waiting for the Last Bus, his thinking, from Godless Morality – keeping religion out of ethics, to Doubts and Loves – what is left of Christianity.
Now, having celebrated his 90th birthday, he writes ‘In a long life, on reflection, I have changed my mind about many things: here are some examples.’ And he wants us to reflect too: ‘It is because we are reflective creatures that we have been able to banish some of the worst evils in our society.’
With passages that sound as if they’ve been lifted from our promotional material, one might be forgiven for thinking he was a member of Sea of Faith: ‘It is because religion is a human construct…’ (p.79), ‘For me, religion, like art, is a human creation, a work of human imagination . . .’ ‘Religion, like art, should be understood as an entirely human creation’. But whereas for many of us that is the end of the matter, for Holloway it is just the beginning.
Religion, like art, does not have to be put into words. ‘I have felt glutted by the verbal promiscuity of religion . . .’ and ‘it came as a relief to me when I was able to name my belief as an emptiness that I was no longer able to fill with words’ (The Absence of God).
Religion, like art, begins (to quote W.B. Yeats) ‘in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’. This is not to diminish its worth. We will value it in a different way ‘less interested in the authority of its origins than in the gifts of interpretation it offers us for understanding our own lives’. (Where all the ladders start).
Religion, like art and play and exuberant purposefulness, ‘can promote love of life and of those others with whom we share the planet – and they can even make a sense out of sorrow and loss.’ (Mutilated world). Religion and art, stand ‘astonished before the being of being, the there-ness, this-ness, that-ness of things, and they respond with both wonder and horror.’ But religion has a fatal need to explain. However, ‘if you abandon religion’s explanatory function, you can sometimes get it back as an art that refuses ever to lose sight of life’s horror’ (Where all the ladders start).
These quotations are in danger of giving an entirely misleading sense of the book. Each chapter (and many are quite short) is suffused with poetry, extracts from novels, personal reflection and reference to his own Scottish heritage. Dazzled by the clarity and simplicity of his writing, it’s easy to forget that the author has been a bishop, Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, a professor of divinity, a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a chair of the Scottish Art Council.
More than that, he has been a controversial and outspoken critic of the church, resigning from it in 2000. His passionate, lifelong support for many causes in the fields of human rights, sexuality and bio-ethics is clear from the outset, continuing through chapters like Are Christians allowed to be gay? Improvising ethics, Creating Hell, Walking away from the Church, Secular Society.
In one moving chapter, entitled Messiaen: Quattuor pour la fin du temps, we are taken in less than five pages from Ridley Scott’s sci-fi movie Blade Runner to Stalag VIII-A, where Messiaen composed his famous quartet. Along the way he urges us to both reflect on those moments in which we have lost all sense of time, whilst contemplating the end of own lives.