Name: Leaving Alexandria
ISBN: 9781786898913

Richard Holloway

This Sunday Times bestseller is a memoir about faith and doubt, with a strong meditative and philosophical heart

A Memoir of Faith and Doubt

Leaving Alexandria

Winner of the PEN/Ackerley Prize 2013. The acclaimed writer, respected thinker and outspoken former bishop Richard Holloway recounts a life defined by the biggest questions: Who am I? And what is God?At fourteen, Richard Holloway left his home in the Vale of Leven, north of Glasgow, and travelled hundreds of miles to be educated and trained for the priesthood by a religious order in an English monastery. By twenty-five he had been ordained and was working in the slums of Glasgow. Throughout the following forty years, Richard touched the lives of many people in the Church and in the wider community. But behind his confident public face lay a restless, unquiet heart and a constantly searching mind.Why is the Church, which claims to be the instrument of God's love, so prone to cruelty and condemnation? And how can a man live with the tension between public faith and private doubt? In his long-awaited memoir, Richard seeks to answer these questions and to explain how, after many crises of faith, he finally and painfully left the Church. It is a wise, poetic and fiercely honest book.

Gavin

The emotional case for not being religious. I should like him - he is the most honourable instance of a public figure rationally changing his mind in living memory. And another thing sorely needed: a sympathetic, literate public nonbeliever. Also he quotes poetry from memory - for its sense, not in order to curry literary status. (We know this because he leaves the attribution of the poems to the endnotes.) He is adorable, basically, and quotable to boot. But there's a clunkiness too, one I can't quite articulate.

As a boy he loved religion's melodrama and un-Scottish grandeur; he goes away to an eccentric militarist monastery, aged 14: 

  

  We were up at six-thirty for a cold shower followed by mass and breakfast. After household chores we were moved into study mode until the next visit to chapel at midday. After lunch, afternoons were given over to heavy labour, either scrubbing and shining floors or labouring for Brother Edward in the grounds... back to study at four, till bells summoned us to Evensong at six-thirty. Then dinner, more washing up and more study. The day ended at nine-thirty with Compline, then lights out... Each evening we left chapel in silence, under the spell of fading plainsong that marked the ending of the day. 

Fun! Rammed full of order and space, but not religion per se. He was always unorthodox: he gave communion to just anyone who walked into church, happily married off divorcees, joined the LGBT movement and even claims to have held a Catholic gay marriage in the 90s. I am childish enough to enjoy his swearing, as the Bishop said to the actress. He had no more place on a government bioethics committee than any other nice clever old man, but I don't suppose he did any harm at all.

In one sentence: Religion is pretty nice, but you must take it less seriously.

Leaving Alexandria A Memoir of Faith and Doubt

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