Richard Holloway was Bishop of Edinburgh and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church. A former Gresham Professor of Divinity and Chairman of the Joint Board of the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen, he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Leaving Alexandria won the PEN/Ackerley Prize and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. Holloway has written for many newspapers in Britain, including The Times, Guardian, Observer, Herald and Scotsman. He has also presented many series for BBC television and radio; Waiting for the Last Bus originated as a five-part series on Radio 4 in 2016.
Also by Richard Holloway
Let God Arise (1972)
New Vision of Glory (1974)
A New Heaven (1979)
Beyond Belief (1981)
Signs of Glory (1982)
The Killing (1984)
The Anglican Tradition (ed.) (1984)
Paradoxes of Christian Faith and Life (1984)
The Sidelong Glance (1985)
The Way of the Cross (1986)
Seven to Flee, Seven to Follow (1986)
Crossfire: Faith and Doubt in an Age of Certainty (1988)
The Divine Risk (ed.) (1990)
Another Country, Another King (1991)
Who Needs Feminism? (ed.) (1991)
Anger, Sex, Doubt and Death (1992)
The Stranger in the Wings (1994)
Churches and How to Survive Them (1994)
Behold Your King (1995)
Limping Towards the Sunrise (1996)
Dancing on the Edge (1997)
Godless Morality: Keeping Religion Out of Ethics (1999)
Doubts and Loves: What is Left of Christianity (2001)
On Forgiveness: How Can We Forgive the Unforgiveable? (2002)
Looking in the Distance: The Human Search for Meaning (2004)
How to Read the Bible (2006)
Between the Monster and the Saint: Reflections on the Human Condition (2008)
Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt (2012)
A Little History of Religion (2016)
This edition published in Great Britain in 2019 by Canongate Books
This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books
First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
Copyright © Richard Holloway, 2018
The moral right of the author has been asserted
For permission credits please see p. 166
While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any further editions
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 024 5
eISBN 978 1 78689 023 8
Typeset in Garamond MT by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire
Jeannie,
of course
The present life of men on earth, O King . . . seems to me to be like this: as if, when you are sitting at dinner with your chiefs and ministers in wintertime . . . one of the sparrows from outside flew very quickly through the hall, as if it came in one door and soon went out through the other. In that actual time it is indoors it is not touched by the winter’s storm; but yet the tiny period of calm is over in a moment, and having come out of the winter it soon returns to the winter and slips out of your sight. Man’s life appears to be more or less like this; and of what may follow it, or what preceded it, we are absolutely ignorant.
The Venerable Bede1
CONTENTS
| I | The Dance of Death |
| II | Losing It |
| III | Looking Back |
| IV | Then What? |
| V | Defying Death |
| VI | The Day After |
| VII | The Last Bus |
| Acknowledgements | |
| Notes | |
| Permission Credits |
I
THE DANCE OF DEATH
The medieval parish church of Saint Mary Magdalene in the town of Newark in Nottinghamshire, England, is a huge building, so you have to look carefully for one of its most interesting features. When it was built in the fifteenth century, England was a Catholic country obsessed with what happened to people after death. It was believed that where you went when you died depended on the kind of life you had lived on earth. For the perfect, for the saint who had lived a life of heroic virtue, there was the prospect of eternal life in heaven. For the wicked, there was the prospect of eternal damnation in hell. It was a dramatic choice between endless joy and unending torment. But the Church has always been good at finding ways to soften its harshest teaching. And that’s what happened here.
In the thirteenth century, the Church invented a half-way house between heaven and hell called purgatory, from the Latin for ‘place of cleansing’. Purgatory was a moral laundromat, where sinners who had soiled their souls on earth were slowly bleached of their stains and restored to purity. It was painful for them, but unlike the souls in hell, for whom there was never any hope of escape, the souls in purgatory had the prospect of release to cheer them on. And the assistance of the living was another source of encouragement. It was believed that the prayers of those still alive on earth could hasten the cleansing of those in purgatory. The best way to speed them on was to have masses said for them in special chapels called ‘chantries’, from the French for chanting. Chantry priests