The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God (52 page)

Not that my adulthood is as yet neatly buttoned up and concluded, of course. Far from it. Count no man faithful till he’s dead, and don’t be too sure even then. Rather as the story of Jack is open-ended - unfinished business that could finish very shamefully - so is the story of his author. For sure I’m soon going to be excused from pretending to be Douglas Edison Harding, relieved from being so hooked on that little fellow. What isn’t at all sure is how I’ll take being let off the hook. Thanks to a general softening up - if not to senile dementia or madness itself - Jack and I could go back on all we ever stood for, slinking away into some safe and comfy hide-out and there dying terrified out of our remaining wits. Nothing’s certain but uncertainty.

Even so, even if the worst were to come to the most shaming worst, nobody can include the Truth in his fall, dragging it down about his ears like eyeless Samson in Gaza. The pillars of Jack’s Defence - reason, tradition, the map, the tests - stand firm and four-square, no matter to what depths the Defendant may tumble. Even if he were to sink so low as to play Judas to his Christ, he could never un-Christ himself. Never. The Truth sets us free, free even from all our human lies and betrayals.

Thank God it’s
God’s
Truth.

To conclude, a little more about the Plymouth Exclusives and me.

Since breaking out of the fold sixty years ago, what little I have had to do with them can be summed up in two or three lightning sketches.

The first is my father’s funeral in Lowestoft. The year is 1954. (This was before ex-Exclusives were banned from attending the funerals of their Exclusive relatives.) A dismal hall like all those the Brethren meet in, a place as harsh as its coconut-matting and as bleak as its distemper, a place that looks and smells as though no one had ever laughed in it, or child played, or heart leaped, a place that even the flies stall and drop dead in. The coffin’s propped up there in the middle. I’m put next to it. Around it sit twenty brothers in newly pressed dark suits, and as many sisters in long skirts and high blouses and colourless hats. The brothers get up in turn and lugubriously praise Gord (which is the name of their deity, don’t ask me why) for the dedicated life and service of their dear brother - given so freely, but terribly saddened by the defection to the Devil of his elder son. A blasphemer long past praying for, I’m prayed at. To conclude, we are told that after the burial we shall return to the meeting hall, where tea will be served - served to all except me, the chief mourner, and my wife! One gets the message that, since burning at the stake isn’t legal, they’ll settle for this truly British second-best.

Afterwards, my sister and I have some business. She won’t come to my place because it would contaminate her. I can’t go to her place because I would contaminate it. We can’t go to a hotel or restaurant because the Brethren shun those unholy places, and anyway are forbidden to eat with non-Exclusives, let alone ex-Exclusives. So we meet in a lay-by on the A12. As briefly as possible.

My friend Susan Kimber, who is researching the recent history of the Exclusives, updates me somewhat. I learn that, compared with the Exclusives of today, those of my childhood were broad-minded to the point of laxity. Susan’s tale is of a sect that requires its householders to live in detached homes and thus avoid being yoked with unbelievers, to put down their pets, and never again go off on holiday; that requires its doctors and dentists and architects and lawyers to resign from their professional bodies (all devilish), unscrew their brass plates, and make a living as best they can; that requires its housewives to throw away such worldly attachments as house-plants, and even the most colourless of hats; that requires its meeting-house managers to brick up the windows that look out on the world, and substitute skylights that look up to heaven; and that requires its young couples to throw out their old mum if she declines to join the Brethren, and to send their child of twelve to Coventry for the same reason.

Brethren aren’t forced to obey these rules. It’s just that their life is made hell till they do so.

This partial catalogue of injunctions and prohibitions is doubtless out of date by now. But be sure the list doesn’t get any shorter or less rigorous with time... ‘Rigorous’ isn’t quite the term I want. As an ex-Exclusive-child I can’t help putting myself in the shoes of one of those ostracized kids of twelve, whose early submission (with no outside friend to turn to, and almost no idea of what’s outside anyway) is a near certainty. Among all the forms of legal child-battering (yes, legal!), is there any more cruel?

And yet - I’m bound to add - if the child
doesn’t
succumb, but keeps his counsel and bides his time, the cruelty can begin to look a lot less cruel. As I say, speaking personally, I have in the end no complaints at all. But that’s partly because I was born into this sect so long ago, when they were comparatively sane.

Talk about the meeting of extremes - these people are
all
contradictions! The Brethren came together early in the nineteenth century to set up an anticlerical democracy of the Spirit, of whom all the male members were to be priests and mouth-pieces. By the end of the century it had become a more thorough and insidious dictatorship than any I can think of. A dynastic one, at that. Through the first half of the twentieth century Big Brother was a New York linen salesman called James Taylor. I remember him as an unsmiling but apparently harmless enough fellow. Every inch the draper, and not a hint of the führer he really was. In fact, he had only to breathe a word about anything - from sisters’ hair-dos (hair-don’ts: don’t put it up, don’t cut it) to the iniquity of belonging to the Automobile Association - for ten thousand Exclusives the world over to jump to attention and be led by Big Jim up the crazy paving of the latest garden path. He died in 1959, mourned by all. After some hesitation the more-than-papal crown alighted on his son, J. T. Jr, said to be an alcoholic not averse to getting into bed with the sisterhood. (To test their virtue, he explained, when caught.) During his reign whisky-drinking became quite the thing, and on occasion led to maudlin goings-on in Meeting, even at the Lord’s Supper. The ‘liberty of the risen Christ’ they called it; and anyway, they were only following Holy Scripture and the advice of Paul to Timothy, ‘Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake.” In 1970, J. T. Jr, mourned by many and powered by 65 per cent-over-proof spirits rather than mere wine (which was reserved for sisters, those ‘weaker vessels’), took off for the Meeting in the skies. Since when the saints, fragmented into Taylorites (to whom my sister,
malgré tout,
adheres) and Anti-Taylorites, have gone their mutually exclusive ways. I have lost track of them, but am assured that Jehovah’s command to the Children of Israel - ‘Come out from among them, and be ye separate’ - is being interpreted as quirkily and obeyed as fervently as ever. And that the great contradiction goes on. Show me a blue-nosed puritan, a creeping Jesus meek and mild, and I’ll show you a tyrant and an orgiast - a satyr rosy with grog-blossom - struggling to get out. And occasionally making it.

The first and decisive decades of my life were spent as a third-generation member of this very rum sect. They have determined the rest of it - inevitably, and in all sorts of subtle and not-so-subtle ways. I don’t pretend that I can begin to live down my upbringing. Nor do I want to. I’m content to have inherited the ancestral gene (call it virus if you must), which is the certainty that God has entrusted me with a Quite Wonderful Truth, for lack of which His world is destroying itself. (In my case, the Truth that sets a new standard in OBVIOUSNESS.) While our symptoms couldn’t be more different, there’s no denying that the condition they are symptoms of is one and the same. I no more took off from the Brethren than a wayward branch takes off from the parent trunk. No, my escape from that family tree - Dutch elm disease and all - lies in acknowledging that I’m just as bound to it up there as I’m free of it down here, in the Everlasting Ground from which the whole forest springs.

The Trial of the Man Who Said He was God
could only have come from the pen of an ex-Exclusive Plymouth Brother - with emphasis on the ex. If the writing of it has been my homage to the Wide-open One, my rejoicing in Him who is Inclusiveness itself (and it has been just that), I shall forever owe the fact to the Brethren. And most of all to the best and dearest of them all, to the brother who was also my father.

Finally, a footnote to a footnote. A few months back I wrote to my sister (we’ve neither spoken nor written since that tealess funeral in 1954) to give her my love and to assure her I’m not the blasphemer she takes me for. That I’m as addicted to God (not to say Gord) as she is. And by no means resentful of the peculiar childhood years we share.

‘You are now an old man,’ she replied, ‘and already licked by eternal flames. Every day I pray that you may yet escape them, by returning to the faith of our dear father.’

Little does she know, bless her heart!

1
From the sixth to the eleventh centuries Christ was portrayed as enthroned on the cross, robed as priest or king, and often wearing a royal crown. There were no signs of suffering. His arms were outstretched horizontally, embracing his world. The drooping, agonized Saviour developed as the Middle Ages became increasingly obsessed with pain and death. It’s for you and me to find out which of these aspects of our own crucifixion comes to the fore, once we accept and live with the fact of it.

Check-list of Experiments

Tick the appropriate box

If your score in column 2 is 17, you have dined with God.

If it is much less, you have breakfasted with Him.

If it is nil, you’ve eaten His menu instead of His meal. I hope it gives you such indigestion that you have to take repeated doses of the first three experiments to ease your heartburn.

Table of Contents

Contents

Prologue

The Trial

The Charge and the Plea

The Prosecution Witnesses and the Defence Rebuttal

THE POLICE OFFICER

THE HUMANIST

THE SCHOOLGIRL

THE LAVATORY ATTENDANT

THE PASSENGER

THE HAIRDRESSER

THE OSTEOPATH

THE NEUROSURGEON

THE PSYCHOTHERAPIST

THE SOCIAL WORKER

THE OCCASIONAL BARMAID

THE STORE MANAGER

THE CANADIAN WIDOW

THE PSYCHIATRIST

THE NEW APOCALYPTIC

THE SUFFRAGAN BISHOP

THE ATHEIST

THE DEVOTEE

Recess

The Judge in Camera with Counsel and Accused

THE VENERABLE BHIKKHU

THE BODY WORKER

THE EX-SANYASSIN

THE ZOOLOGIST

THE MULLAH

THE REGISTRAR

THE MAN OF BUSINESS

THE COUNSELLOR

THE BORN-AGAIN CHRISTIAN

Prosecution Summing-up

Defence Summing-up

Judge’s Directions to the Jury

The Verdict

Epilogue

APPENDICES

The 8 x 8-fold Plebeian Path

Autobiographical Postscript

Check-list of Experiments