Waiting for the Last Bus: Reflections on Life and Death

Richard Holloway

Canongate, £14.99

Review by Alan Taylor

TO the best of human knowledge no one has ever sent a report back from heaven or hell or, indeed, purgatory, a no less mythological place, which Holloway memorably describes as “a moral laundromat, where sinners who had soiled their souls on Earth were slowly bleached of their stains and restored to purity”.

Purgatory, needless to say, was invented by the “Church”, which, remarks Holloway, has “always been good at finding ways to soften its harshest teaching”. It has also been good at scaring the living daylights out of impressionable followers, of whom for much of a Presbyterian childhood I was one.

When, eventually, I came to my senses and dismissed such claptrap from my mind, I cannot exactly say. It may

have coincided with John Lennon’s assertion that The Beatles were more popular than Jesus. Whenever it was

it was cathartic, a Damascene

U-turn, from which I have rarely glanced back.

Like fellow atheists, I am not troubled by what will happen to me when eventually the vessel in which I am travelling runs out of puff. I am convinced nothing will happen. This is not something that consoles believers in an afterlife.

They know, as much as I know not, that there is life beyond the life they are leading just now. What they don’t know is what that life – if that’s the word for it – will be like.

For Christians and Muslims, for instance, what we make of our tenure on this increasingly toxic planet will determine where we will spend eternity. Holloway compares it to being at university.

If a Christian, say, is deemed to have achieved a pass by the celestial examiner, he or she can count on a passport to heaven. If they fail, however, hell is where they’re heading.

I imagine hell to be the last train from Glasgow to Edinburgh, which comes to a stop at Falkirk, whereupon a gang of intoxicated, foul-mouthed football fans board and proceed to sing sectarian ditties.

Meanwhile, heaven, as the Koran has it, is paradise but only, it would appear, if you are of the male of the species, who can look forward to wine on tap and “beautiful, wide-eyed young women” who will be “available for their enjoyment”. A bit like Hollywood, then, when Harvey Weinstein was in his pomp.

Holloway is the best kind of person to guide us into what Dylan Thomas – one of the many poets he quotes – called “that good night”.

A former Bishop of Edinburgh who fell out with his flock because he was honest enough to express his doubts about the literal truth of the Bible, he was also for a number years chairman of the Scottish Arts Council which, come the day of reckoning, is surely deserving of godly mercy.

He has written many books and if there is a degree of overlap with some of them in Waiting for the Last Bus, that is entirely understandable.

Death, doubt, faith, forgiveness, belief are subjects at the forefront of his mind. But it is love that is his overwhelming objective. He will not allow organised religion, with its petty rules, brutal fundamentalism and rigid commandments, to determine how he thinks or acts.

His candour is invigorating, his sense of humour ballast against the bombast of the righteous, his empathy deeply affecting. Moreover, he writes from decades of experience. “Religion,” he notes, “emphasises our fear of death in order to assuage it. It frightens in order to save. Because it takes death very seriously and thinks we should as well.”

Holloway may take death seriously but he is not frightened of it. Now in his ninth decade, he knows – pace Norman MacCaig – that he has left more years behind him than he has ahead of him.

He has watched people die and helped them too, attempting to bring comfort and consolation to those on the cusp of their last breath.

It is more important, he suggests, to relieve a person of suffering – mental as well as physical – than to allow his own reservations to surface.

In one of the many moving passages in this wise and profound little book he recalls how giving the last rites has taken a lot of anguish out of dying. “I have ministered these rites myself,” he reflects, “and seen the peace that they can bring at the end.

“I have sent good friends into the arms of a merciful God I was no longer sure I believed in. And I was convinced not only of the efficacy but of the honesty of what I was doing.”

There are many in the “Church” who will be shocked by this. Others, too, will find Holloway’s jibes at the old – “a powerfully reactionary force in politics both in the United Kingdom and in the United States” – unfair and insensitive. We are too concerned, he argues, with keeping people alive who would be better off dead.

What’s the point of living when it is bereft of enjoyment and purpose and full of pain? Old age, he argues, needs to be seen as a stage in human existence that, when properly embraced, has as many pluses as minuses.

This, then, is a celebration of life as much as it is a meditation on death. As we wait for the last bus, which of all of us hope will be delayed indefinitely, who better to find at its wheel than Holloway?