Laws

Sexual repression gets that bit easier, with time, if the food is good and there’s plenty of exercise. And there’s a network – you’re on a train and a family sitting opposite recognises that the fish-pendant is a symbol. It was a gift, made in stainless steel by a craftsman cousin who was glad to see you at the right end of Kenneth Street. I suppose I was going along more now for the stories and for the sense of being in a congregation when that huge groundswell lifted to follow the melody offered by the precentor. I usually went to the Gaelic services. I’d picked up a bit but not enough to follow the sermons. That was maybe just as well. The rhythms of the whole thing swept you along. And then there was the warmth in the handshakes, as you went outside. The anticipation of the Sunday dinner, roast meat and gravy, almost a smell in the air already, like smoke over the town.

The olaid went now and again to her own church up the road, the moderate Church of Scotland. There were two of these to pick from. I gave that a try but it was just like I remembered. The olaid reminded me I used to kick my feet that much they won a dispensation for me to take in the gory volumes on the Bruces and Stewarts, Wallace and Montrose. The olman would go along too, to keep the family together and because the olaid wouldn’t trust him with the dinner and even himself didn’t have the nerve to go to the loom shed on the Sabbath. He’d hand out the pan-drops before the sermon.

Now these you could understand and they usually seemed quite sensible but they didn’t have the passion and the rhythms I was now experiencing in the Free Kirk Gaelic.

There were also letters to the Gazette, with names under them that you recognised. Sometimes an aspiring elder but nearly always from a male. Unless radical female evangelists from Lewis wrote under pen names, like George Eliot. The issues would alternate when the editor would come in to say that correspondence on the issue was closed for now. But they went in a cycle, with a few variations, as sure as a weaver’s pattern. The tyranny of Rome. The need for vigilance in protecting our youth from the appetites induced by the unscrupulous makers of immoral films. The condoning of homosexuality by those in Parliament with a duty to legislate for the safety of all. The demon drink, of course.

The best one though was the guy who blamed the Roman Catholic Church for the Vietnam War. See, we’re free-thinkers here. This guy was ahead of the game, dislodging the haloes from these Kennedys, of Irish background, lest we forget.

Once or twice another porter or a bored houseman doc, on the night shift, would ask me how I could go along to that church when these public statements were made. I’d just tell them I took the letters as entertainment, an extreme line to challenge and debate and most people on the pews would say the same.

There’s something about hospitals. People would just ask you what you really thought, on a regular bloody basis. That didn’t happen much at Uni. Take Transubstantiation.

I remember that one, watching the son of an ice-cream maker sip from the bottle of Bardolino along with the Spanish Basque priest, after I’d attended a Mass on the far, far end of Kenneth Street. I didn’t dare risk it in case I’d get a real thirst and seize hold of said bottle. I was getting used to the non-taste of water.

This is the crunch. These guys have to say they really believe the other wine, sipped in church, becomes blood and not just any blood. The wafer, no kidding, becomes flesh and not human flesh. There’s communion all right, even amongst the breakaways – the Free Presbyterians and now the breakaways from the breakaways – but none of these guys believe that the stuff has changed its physical character. Both wine and bread are symbols.

I could see that but I still couldn’t bring myself to do the preparation for taking the step forward to take said bread and wine even on the understanding that you weren’t expected to believe it had changed its physical nature.

Doubts are good shit sometimes. Believers can be dangerous. Political ones too. But what must it have been like for a guy who fought in the Spanish war, as a communist, and lived to see the tanks roll in to Prague and then see footage of poor Jan who set himself alight. At what point do you say, this is not what I signed up for?

I’ve got to tell you about a book. It’s called the Kitáb-i-Aqdas which is Arabic for ‘The Most Holy Book’. This is the Bahá’í book of laws for a new age. An early critic of the Faith translated it but that was from a hostile standpoint. I was at a seminar where a keen young devotee did some research by way of just asking an Arabic speaker, present in the room, to translate some passages. The legal code was pretty Islamic.

And sure enough, not long after, a Synopsis and Codification of the book of laws was published. But not a translation of the contents. Not yet the time, the introduction said. It did say that the penalties for certain crimes were listed. But it didn’t say what these penalties were. Now one of the attractive things had been this phrase – ‘Independent investigation of truth’. Maybe I’d failed to ask the right questions.

Someone else asked exactly what the penalties were.

They were meant for a future state of society, not applicable now.

But what were they? What about that slander about Bahá’ís believing in the death penalty? An eye for an eye. If a man should set fire to another he should be burned?

‘Penalties are indeed listed but it is clear that these are not for society as we know it now and in any case there is the possibility of mitigating such penalties to imprisonment for life.’

I was struggling.

How could you not be struggling? Knowing that one prescribed penalty for an arsonist was to burn him or her. When the guy whose seed is in you escaped from a disabled tank in the battle of El Alamein. So that was one World Religion firmly in touch.

Or was it? Next week, The Two Minute Silence printed a single letter on a single topic, from a main man in our Last Bastion of the Faithful, the official Free Church of Scotland, accept no substitute. It was on ‘The Majesty of Capital Punishment’. A later epistle under the same name likened predatory homosexuals to jackals. Appropriate biblical language, of course.

Which brings us to Palestine. Or rather the State of Israel which was then still occupying significant chunks of territories that their tanks had rolled through, during their own blitzkrieg in the Six-Day War. And perhaps it still is.

At the end of the year-out as a hospital porter I had plenty of dosh. I’d been depositing shift-disturbance allowance and I wasn’t drinking or smoking. Not even tobacco. It was the olaid who said I should get myself travelling. Take another year out before I got back to the course. Maybe take my fishing rod along with me. I didn’t take it on the first trip but it came along on the second.