Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt
By Richard Holloway
(Canongate, R295)
Leaving Alexandria is a profoundly moving account of a spiritual journey. Richard Holloway was born to a working-class family in Alexandria, north of Glasgow.
A bright boy, he was accepted at the age of 14 as a seminarian in a monastic community.
Captivated by the vision of the “given-away life”, he entered the priesthood and sought to live out this vision by immersing himself in a succession of different roles – the celibate, the Anglo-Catholic curate, the self-denying foreign missionary, the Pentecostal enthusiast, the priest committed to the poor who converts his home into a mini commune, the campaigner for the rights of women and homosexuals, the reforming bishop.
In all these incarnations, Holloway’s introspection left him with a profound sense that he had failed himself and failed God.
His self-definition was of a seeker after truth moving between doubt and faith, his doubt-filled life being sustained as a grace-filled life by “the tiny figure of Jesus [that] can be seen on the seashore, kindling fire”. But ultimately our identity is determined not only by our self-definition but also by the perceptions of others, and Holloway found himself defined by people who equated faith and certainty and on that basis judged him to be beyond the Christian pale.
One Sunday he experienced excommunication by evangelical parishioners who turned away from him at the Peace, declined to receive communion from him and refused to shake hands with him after the service.
This is Not the Way: Jews, Judaism |and Israel
By David J. Goldberg (Faber&Faber, R220)
There is much common ground with David Goldberg’s This is Not the Way. The rabbi emeritus of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue observes that “the rearguard action that is being fought by progressives in the Church of England [more exactly, the Anglican Communion] against the assertiveness of its evangelical wing” is but one manifestation of the internal paradox, common to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, of how to cope with increasing fundamentalism on the one hand and increasing secularisation on the other.
Judaism has always placed more emphasis on works than on faith and has accorded the community priority over the individual and so is better placed to deal with this dilemma than Christianity.
When faith goes, a Jew is still culturally a Jew, whereas Christianity distinguished itself from its parent Judaism from the start by the creedal assertion en- capsulated in the formula Jesus Christ.
Again the complexities of identity occupy our attention. Goldberg is a liberal Jew living in the Diaspora and is critical of the identification of Judaism with Zionism, the injustices perpetrated by the state of Israel against the Palestinians and the exploitation of the Holocaust to ensure that Israel is not treated like any other nation. Meanwhile, the ultra-Orthodox, who dominate Israeli politics, have the religious power to define Jewish religious identity.
From their perspective, a gentile who questions Israel’s actions is anti-Semitic, while someone like Goldberg is dismissed as a “self-hating Jew”.
The burden of both books is a critique of institutional religion. Fearing defection, apostasy and assimilation, Judaism rejects reform, taking refuge in conser- vatism and, like all religions, finds it easier to exclude than to include.
This reflects Holloway’s anguished perplexity: “The Church can never just do the right thing because it is the right thing to do; it has to find religious reasons for doing it. It can’t just abandon its rigid code, like the Good Samaritan, and go to the aid of the needy person on the side of the road; it has to find theological reasons for doing so.” But then, according to his opponents, he got the parable all wrong.
These are two excellent, thought-provoking books that illuminate each other in a most rewarding manner.