Complete Text of Bishop Holloway's speech at St. Alban's, London
Lesbian and Gay Christians 22nd Annual Lecture
St Albans, London
Saturday 18th April 1998
Napier University in Edinburgh has a widely scattered series of campuses, but its main administration block is in a giant Italian villa a couple of miles south of Princes Street. The building was opened in 1880 as the Craiglockart Hydropathic Institution. It occupies a magnificent site and its central tower commands one of the best views in Scotland, looking away over the Firth of Forth to the distant mountains of Perthshire. The original facilities had included Turkish and swimming baths, and "ladies' and gentlemen's special bath-rooms, with all the varieties of hot and cold plunge, vapour, spray, needle, douche and electrical baths, with special galvanic apparatus". In spite of these impressive amenities the place had never prospered and in 1916 it was taken over by the Army for officers suffering from shell-shock. If it had not existed, some of the best poetry in the English language would never have been written.
In July 1917 an army officer who was already a well-known poet, Siegfried Sassoon, published "A Soldier's Declaration": "I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it". Afraid that his friend would be court-martialled, Robert Graves fixed it with the Army for Sassoon to be sent to Craiglockart where he was treated by the remarkable army psychologist W.H.R.Rivers. Though he never retracted his statement, Sassoon went back to active service in France, because he felt that his work was now to tell the world through his poetry what the war was really like. The whole episode was beautifully fictionalised in Pat Barker's novel, Regeneration, recently made into a fine movie, to which I'll return in a minute. Sassoon in 1917 was already a mature poet with an authentic voice. The same could hardly be said for Wilfrid Owen, whom he met at Craiglockart that summer.
Owen was born in 1893 in Shropshire, where his father was a railway worker. He had always longed to go to university and become an educated man, but Shrewsbury Technical College was all his family could afford and he was always a bit self-conscious about his modest background and provincial accent. Beneath the diffidence, however, there was a formidable human being who emerged to be the greatest of England's World War I poets, though he would have wanted his readers to recognise his Welsh background, to which he attributed his poetic genius. After a period assisting in a country parish (he contemplated ordination at one time), he left in 1913 to teach English in Bordeaux and returned in 1915 to join the army. He was commissioned in the Manchester Regiment in 1916 and on December 30 was sent out to the base camp at Etaples. In March 1917, after days under fire, he fell asleep on a railway embankment, somewhere near Savy Wood, and was blown into the air by a shell, a near-miss that left him helpless, lying close to the dismembered remains of another officer. When he got back to camp people noticed that he was in shock. Inevitably, the commanding officer called his courage into question. Fortunately, the doctor diagnosed "neurasthenia" and it was decided that the best place for him would be Craiglockart War Hospital in Edinburgh. He arrived there in June 1917.
Owen experimented with verse from an early age and had read widely, but in 1917 his work was still self-consciously poetic when he took it shyly along the corridor at Craiglockart to Sassoon. Sassoon, whom he fell for instantly, taught him that poetry was about reality and helped him to see that it was the war he must deal with. Sassoon's friendship and advice released Owen's genius, and the final year of his life gave us the poetry that we remember today. In one of his notebooks Owen scribbled a preface to the poems that were not to be published till four years after his death in 1920:
Above all, this book is not concerned with Poetry.
The subject of it is War, and the Pity of War.
The poetry is in the Pity.
A few weeks ago I went to see the film Regeneration, which is based on Pat Barker's fiction about this episode. The irony of the regime at Craiglockart, brought out very well in the movie, is that the deeply understanding and sympathetic Doctor Rivers, who understood the horror these men had gone through, cured his patients in order to send them back to the front. Though Sassoon and Owen had lost belief in the war, they went back to it willingly, Owen to the front, where he was killed a week before the war ended, shepherding his men through an artillery barrage on the Sambre Canal in November 1918. He is acknowledged today as the most outstanding of the World War I poets, and it is impossible to read his poems, filled as they are with contempt for those who drove the war on and love and compassion for the soldiers who were its victims, without feeling an angry love rise in you. The film provokes a similar anger and love and I watched it with deep emotion. Most of the anger I felt was against the folly of the ruling ascendancy who sent all those brave young men "to die as cattle", in Owen's own phrase. But that was only part of my anger; the other part had a different root.
These two men, both brave beyond any possible bravery, both poets who enriched our literature, and one of whom, Owen, was a great poet whose work will endure, were gay, though theirs was a love that dared not speak its name at the time. Had the establishment that exploited them and sent them to the trenches found out about their true nature they would have hounded them to another sort of death. Sassoon the warrior scholar gave Owen more than the freedom to be a great poet; he also gave him the courage to accept his own nature; and these two freedoms were almost certainly related. By saying no to the war and yes to himself Owen's genius was liberated. Sassoon introduced Owen to his London friends, who included Robert Ross, the great Wildean loyalist, and Osbert Sitwell. Through them he got to know Charles Scott-Moncrieff, who fell in love with him, and who was to make use of Owen's experiments with assonance in his great translation of Proust. After his release from Craiglockart, Owen trained at Scarborough and Ripon, but his return to duty was punctuated by visits to London to see his new friends, all of whom seem to have recognised his genius as a poet almost immediately. He had found love, and through that love he had found his work, War, and the Pity of War. Owen's tender, yet angry love for his men surges through his poetry. It was why he went back to the front a determined soldier. Early in October he won the M.C. on the Hindenburg line, even though he hated the war and no longer found any virtue in it. Like E.M.Forters, another gay man of genius, his loyalties now were to his friends, not to the great establishments that rob us of our humanity as they seduce us with the blandishments of their approval. Owen died for his friends and I find in his death and in the great poetry that came before it an eikon, a representational symbol, of the place of gay and lesbian people in our culture, and especially in the culture of the Church.
I do not come before you today with new arguments to support the liberation of gay people in Church and society - how offensively beside the point the arguments all seem when placed against actual human suffering, your suffering. No, there are no new arguments, but let me touch briefly on the old ones before putting them away. I'll leave aside the ugly facts of fear and prejudice that add such a destructively unconscious energy to the arguments and make it so difficult to counter them. The real difficulty, the main stumbling block, is the way religions associate God exclusively with their opinions. You can argue against an obvious human injustice, you can demonstrate the absurdity of a particular type of intolerance, you can poke fun at bigotry and hatred, but how can you argue against God? This is the real difficulty religions face in every area of human development. If they weld particular phases of human life and cultural development to the will and commandment of God, how can they ever make changes to their life? In fact, many passionately honest people believe that traditional religions are incapable of making these liberating changes, so they abandon them completely as primitive superstitions incapable of development. This is why many feminists have abandoned Christianity. They see it as incurably patriarchal and oppressive towards women in both its theology and its structures. The adult thing to do is for women to leave it and find their own maturity in freedom, the way people sometimes have to walk away from abusive and oppressive parents if they are ever to grow up.
The thing that frustrated feminists most in their debated with Christianity was not that the men in charge said honestly that they did not want to share power with women, or that they liked all the male language about God in the bible because it flattered their own sense of gender superiority - there would have been a certain kind of refreshing honesty in that, and the laughter it provoked might itself have been cleansing and transforming. But that's not what they said. They said, "We ourselves have no prejudices against women; indeed, if it were up to us we would alter things to accommodate their obvious frustrations; unfortunately, God has different ideas. He has fixed these things for ever, and who are we to fight against God?" A manifestly preposterous claim like that brings us to the real point of decision for Christianity, and our response to it will determine whether the church can be allowed to find a way of responding to the best of contemporary aspirations, or whether it is destined for ever to be locked into a world-view that is simply incredible to idealistic people in our time. If we deny the very best of modern aspirations, the longing for justice, freedom and tolerance, and bind God inextricably to attitudes that run counter to this energy of liberation, then we are simply identifying God with a previous social dispensation, and God becomes a fetish, a way of comforting our own fear as we contemplate the tide of history. This kind of fetishistic Christianity was captured by Sydney Carter in his poem, Like Lot's Wife:
She was a pillar of integrity,
She would not budge an inch.
She held the truth
so tightly to her heart
that it could not
grow up or wander off.
She could not see
that it was born to travel,
was afraid
her treasure might be stolen.
What she loved
had to be fixed and final.
Like Lot's wife
she weathers on the hill top,
looking back
to where she had been happy.
What she loved
is beautiful, but dead.
If we put the so-called mind of God in opposition, not to the selfishness and spiritual poverty of contemporary society, but to its most genuine moral discoveries and its desire, however incomplete, to affirm and accept men and women in their wonderfully varied humanity, then society will be justified in its rejection of us, because to do otherwise would be to turn its back upon its own best discoveries. This is always the great tension in traditional religions, but we have learned to deal with it in Christianity by recognising the symbolic and revisable nature of all human claims about god and the dynamic, surprise-laden nature of the God we struggle to talk about. This is why the great Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann, says that is the Torah that overturns the Torah, it is God who revises God, God who calls us away from where we think God has been to where God wants us to be, only to be called again to move on. This is why we are learning in our day to read the bible in a different way; not as a fixed and unchanging law, but as a flawed and fallible record of where previous generations got to in understanding the nature of their relationship with God. This is why the bible, though it is one of our greatest treasures, is also our greatest danger. We are always tempted to misuse it by turning it into an oracle to interpret our present time, rather than acknowledging it as a witness to the way our forebears responded to what was present to them. This is why we get into those unedifying arguments about the applications of particular texts to our own dilemmas.
There is, for example, the interminable dispute over the precise interpretation of the few texts in the bible that mention same-sex relationships, as though we were made for the text and not the text for us. We have recently abandoned the text's tyranny over women, as we abandoned its justification of slavery and soon we'll abandon its ignorant misunderstanding of homosexuality. The real moral issue here ought to be not the meaning of the texts themselves, but the appalling way they have been used as justification for the persecution and punishment of God's children. You will all be familiar with Amnesty International's report, Breaking the Silence, a horrifying catalogue of human rights violations against people based on the sexual orientation. The report contains dozens of carefully documented cases from countries all over the world. It shows us that, half a century after Hitler's extermination policy for gays and other social deviants blackened the skies of Europe with smoke from the gas ovens, violent homophobia is still alive and kicking, and much of it is motivated by religious zeal.
As a straight man and a religious leader, I feel I cannot continue without apologising to you for the way many religious institutions, including Christian Church, have persecuted you.
It must be acknowledged as a fact that there is a dynamic connection between the theological rejection of gay and lesbian people, based on the texts in question, and the persecution and abuse they have endured over the centuries; just as there is an obvious connection between anti Jewish rhetoric in the New Testament and the Holocaust. There is a staggering moral disproportion between the neurotic preoccupation with the precise interpretation of an obscure, ancient test and indifference to the suffering it brings upon actual living people who become the text's victims. It is easy to imagine how Jesus would scathingly cut through the theological dilemma: Alas for you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of Heaven I people's faces; you do not enter yourselves, and when others try to enter, you stop them.
Actually, as I go more deeply into it I find the argumentation itself demeaning, so I rejoice in Elizabeth Stuart's robust call to the lesbian and gay Christian community to refuse any longer to let itself to be treated as a theological problem to be debated by others, without reference to them and their experience. I marvel at your patience and good nature that you have endured this objectification of yourselves for so long and yet want to continue with us.
If we switched the categories in the debate from sexual orientation to race or gender, it would bring out the absurdity of the arguments. It's like telling the Scots that while being Scottish is itself no sin, but is merely a terrible misfortune, acting out our Scottishness is. The temptation to cry when listening to the bagpipes, to consume large quantities of haggis and to sip malt whisky with a faraway look on our faces, though understandable desires for those unfortunate enough to be born in Scotland, are moral disorders of the soul that may never be indulged in without sin. As an act of great magnanimity, we might be told, the establishment will permit consenting Scottish adults in committed relationships to watch Billy Connolly videos in private, though this concession is not to be extended to people in holy orders. Official theologians would tell us that to watch Billy Connolly is always a disorder in the natural sphere, so it is inappropriate for priests, because of the representational role they occupy. It would scandalise and dismay their people if they though that their priests, even in the privacy of their own vicarages, were watching Billy Connolly. Inevitably, there would be rumours that many Scotts in holy orders were secret watchers. It might even be claimed that some sympathetic bishops were prepared to ordain watches as long as they were in stable and committed viewing relationships, so the establishment would be accused of confusion and hypocrisy by the watching community itself.
This may sound surreal to you, but we more or less said something like it to women until recently. We said that they could be baptised, could exercise their womanhood in the lay state, might even be deacons in consenting congregations, but that it was impossible for them to express their nature in the priestly or episcopal state because the bible and tradition forbade it. Oh, I can't go on. The whole thing sounds increasingly like something out of Alice in Wonderland, and I wanted to come here today not to argue, not to depress you, but to celebrate you, to thank the God who made you and endowed you with the suffering of your own gift. That's why I want to get back to Wilfrid Owen and what he represents.
Owen's relationship with the establishment was instructive. He clearly despised the way it put its own life before the lives of its casualties. Establishments, including churches, always do this. There is even a philosophical argument of some merit that justifies it. It is argued that it is expedient to let this group or that group suffer, rather than let the whole people perish. It is better to maintain or turn a blind eye to an obvious injustice, if removing it will threaten the stability of the system. This is political rather than a moral logic, but it has been used by leaders throughout history to justify injustice when powerful interests are opposed to its removal. One even has to have a certain compassion for the leaders caught up in these moral dilemmas: faced with the suffering of particular groups, their desire to offer comfort and relief is weakened, and sometimes finally conquered, by the knowledge that to do so will enrage, and cause to be organised against them, the groups for whom the injustice in question is a matter of belief. Every minority in history has been caught in this blind: racial minorities are the classic example, but so are women; and it is where lesbian and gay Christians find themselves today. It is not much comfort to you to be told that history is on your side in this great matter, and that the changes will come in the churches that have already come in the political sphere, though I believe that to be true. Your dilemma is what to do while the battle is being fought over your bodies and souls.
This is where Wilfrid Owen's example might help. He performed an act of internal emigration that enabled him to live physically within the structure he increasingly despised, while living spiritually in the country of his own integrity. He made a journey towards himself that enabled him to ignore all the voices that denied his authenticity, and in making that journey he found his voice. And he used that voice as an advocate for the doomed youth of his generation. He identified with the victims of the system he despised, the system of which he was subversive official, an enemy within, and gave voice to their suffering. It is a noble vocation, to become, in Desmond Tutu's words, the voice of the voiceless. Spiritual cleansing and moral challenge always come to self-satisfied institutions from the edges, rarely from the centre. You are on one of the edges, so you could become the poets of the outcast, the singers of the despised, and not just of gay and lesbian people. In Forster's great imperative, connect your own experience to that of those who suffer anywhere and find solidarity with them.
One of the great moral tragedies of our time is the way a generation of deeply closeted gay Anglican priests lent their support to the forces of reaction that opposed the liberation of women and their ordination to the priesthood. This is not what happened in the United States, where the gay community clearly connected its own marginal status to that of women and stood with them in their challenge to the system that excluded them. The gay and lesbian vocation is a call to stand with those who are the victims of power's arrogance wherever it is found. It is a call not only to struggle, but to the spirituality of identification and the moral imperative that makes connections. The human struggle contains, but is about more than, gay and lesbian liberation. As I salute you in your struggle, and through you thank the many gay people who have ministered grace and love to me, I want to remind you of the joy that Wilfrid Owen found in the truth that took him to so early a death, a death I believe he anticipated. The struggle towards a larger humanity is a kind of war, but in war there are meetings with strangers, and even enemies, who become allies and friends. In one of his most powerful poems, Owen imagines just such a meeting in a dream that sounds like his own death. I'll end with it:
"Strange friend", I said, "here is no cause to mourn"
"None", said the other, "save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now, I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled".
Richard Holloway