Waiting for the Last Bus , livre ebook

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 EH 1 1 TE
canongate.co.uk
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
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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 Bede 1
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
T he 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 were recruited by wealthy families to pray their relatives through purgatory, much the way a lawyer for a guilty defendant might enter a plea of mitigation on their behalf in order to reduce their sentence.
In 1505, the prosperous Nottinghamshire Markham family built a chantry chapel inside Saint Mary Magdalene and hired a priest to say mass there. On the outside of the stone panels of the little chapel, they painted a favourite subject of medieval artists called the Dance of Death. One panel showed a dancing skeleton holding a carnation, a symbol of mortality. On the other panel there was a richly dressed young man clutching a purse. The skeleton’s message to the young man was clear. As I am today, you will be tomorrow. And the money in your purse won’t help you. It was a memento mori, a prompt to observers – remember you must die – to make them think about and prepare for their end.
It’s a far cry from how we do things today. Now we spend a lot of time and effort not thinking about death. To face our own death is, quite literally, the last thing most of us will do – if we’re conscious enough at the time to do it even then. Even if we wanted to, the chances are we won’t have much control over how we leave the scene. Death and dying have been taken over by the medical profession; and there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that it sees death not as a friend we might learn to welcome but as an enemy to be resisted to the bitter end. And the end often is experienced as bitter, as a fight we lost rather than as the coming down of the curtain on our moment on the stage, something we always knew was in the script.
People in the Middle Ages didn’t have that luxury, if luxury it is. For them, life-threatening illness was as unpredictable and unavoidable as the weather, and they never knew when the lightning might strike. And, considering what came after, it made sense to be prepared for death. In contrast to health professionals today, who advise us to remember the dos and don’ts of healthy living in order to delay death as long as possible, the medieval Church was an advocate of healthy dying. It produced a guide on how to do it called Ars moriendi ( The Art of Dying ), a handbook for making a good end. Repenting and confessing your sins was the most important advice they gave the dying. And the reason why is captured by Hamlet in Shakespeare’s most famous play. The young prince finds his hated stepfather at prayer and decides to kill him:

Now I might do it pat, now he is praying; And now I’ll do it: – and so he goes to heaven; And so am I revenged: – that would be scanned: A villain kills my father; and, for that, I, his sole son, do this same villain send To heaven. O, this is hire and salary, not revenge . . . Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent: When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage; Or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed; At gaming, swearing, or about some act That has no relish of salvation in it, – Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven; And that his soul may be as damned and black As hell, whereto it goes. 2
The message was clear. If you die before you’ve had time to examine your conscience, own your guilt and confess your sins, you’ll go straight to hell. And since you never know when the bell will summon you, the safest course is to be ready at all times, with your bags packed and your soul scrubbed clean. The other big piece of advice in The Art of Dying was about money. There are no pockets in a shroud, so you can’t take your money with you when you die. But disposing of it wisely while you are alive will help you secure decent lodgings on the other side. And there was a saying of Jesus that confirmed the message: ‘Use your worldly wealth to win friends for yourself, so that when money is a thing of the past you may be received into an eternal home.’ 3 Those were the important messages packed into that little cartoon on the wall of the chantry chapel in Newark’s parish church.
I had travelled to Newark on a golden September day to visit Kelham Hall, a few miles away on the banks of the River Trent. And I was wondering if it might be my last visit. I had been returning insistently over the years to prowl the grounds and remember my life there more than sixty years ago, then a young monk trying and failing to give his life away to God in a grand gesture of self-sacrifice. I knew this constant returning was an unhealthy obsession, but I couldn’t shake it. The Victorian parson poet Charles Tennyson Turner had already warned me of the dangers of trying to recover lost time:

In the dark twilight of an autumn morn, I stood within a little country town Wherefrom a long acquainted path went down . . .
The low of oxen on the rainy wind, Death and the Past, came up the well-known road And bathed my heart with tears, but sirred my mind .