Romney follows
every victory
with a blunder
The Cafe
The Donald
Barra may have
independence
before Scotland
John Cameron
I wouldn’t start from here
Peter MacAulay
To mis-paraphrase Bill Clinton, it’s the zone, stoopid (Kenneth Roy on Joyce Wethered, 14 February).
The zonal thing became public last summer at the Barclays Scottish Open near Inverness. No less a personage than Sir Alex Ferguson was blanked,
from a distance of a mere few feet, by Colin Montgomerie at some green or other.
So, wondered the papers next day (as they do), did he deliberately snub the great man frae Govan? ‘No,’ replied Montgomerie, ‘I never noticed him – I was in the zone’.
So that explains it. Joyce Wethered was in the zone all those 92 years ago.
Bruce Gardner
I am surprised and dismayed by an apparent refusal of a church to bar anyone, let alone one of our brightest political commentators, David Torrance (9 February). That it was a presbyterian church lies beyond my powers to explain.
I am reminded of a diffident man I found loitering in a church car park in the Western Isles, when I was a parish minister there, 20 years ago. I was about to enter the church door for the morning service when I saw the man and noted his hesitant manner. I asked him if there was anything wrong. He explained that he belonged to a denomination on the mainland, from which, apparently, you needed a letter of introduction in order to attend a service elsewhere. He had forgotten this heavenly passport in the dash to get away on his holiday, so he was in the car park, plucking up the courage to ask if he could come to our humble wee kirk.
‘May I ask you a question?’ I responded.
‘Certainly,’ he replied, almost jumping to attention.
‘Are you a sinner?’
He looked surprised. ‘Er, yes.’
I grinned. ‘Well, that’s the only qualification you need to come into my church!’
My invitation was accepted, we went into church together and sang our hearts out.
For Richard Holloway,
‘maybe’ is an
important word
Alex Wood
In his final excoriation of his theological opponents – ‘Oh the miserable buggers, the mean-minded wee sods’ – he perhaps returns, at least linguistically, to Alexandria.
His 12 years as rector of Edinburgh’s Old St Paul’s provide a moving testimony. He laughs at his brief flirtation with the Pentecostal movement and speaking in tongues but he re-finds that profound identification with tradition. A city centre parish with its myriad poor, the church itself, its Calvary chapel in which are carved the names of the church’s war dead, the discipline of the high church liturgy, the dedication of his predecessors, all move him but nothing moves him more than the particular ritual of leading out the coffins of the dead and the annual reading of their ‘unremembered’ names.
His doubts, but also his identification with the victims of injustice, were reinforced on his move to Boston. The beginnings of the AIDS crisis and the presence of a considerable gay community as well as powerful, articulate women in his congregation, impelled him to consider both the church’s prohibitive dogma on sex and sexuality and women’s role in the church.
It is hard for this Presbyterian atheist to judge Holloway’s portrayal of himself as a bishop, to separate his commitment to religious myths from his humanist world-view. Long before his consecration he had questioned whether God was the ‘ultimate desire of the romantic imagination’. Having published ‘Godless Morality: Keeping Religion out of Ethics’ in 1999, he effectively separated himself from the church of which he was a distinguished but sceptical leader. His resignation as bishop in 2001 was in the aftermath of debates on homosexuality in the Anglican community. In his final excoriation of his theological opponents – ‘Oh the miserable buggers, the mean-minded wee sods’ – he perhaps returns, at least linguistically, to Alexandria.
He has the capacity to leave his one-time associates feeling betrayed: the Anglo-Catholics, over his position on women and gays and the broader Christian community because he has removed the rug from under their ethical feet by insisting that moral conclusions must be reached empirically rather than by reference to scriptural truth. The watchwords of his old church are Evangelical Truth and Apostolic Order. He has certainly fired too many powerful salvoes at these concepts to be welcomed back. (And I’m not convinced that his continuing journey might not guide him back yet.)
Perhaps Holloway’s appeal in Scotland is that he has always been both apart from the mainstream and free of absolutes. His preference for narrative and myth above dogma, his willingness to prioritise pity and to see ‘maybe’ as an inordinately valuable word, all separate him from Scotland’s more typically combative style of intellectual and a world away from the certainties of our Calvinist and Roman clerics.
Alex Wood is a retired head teacher and former political activist
