On Reflection: Looking for Life’s Meanings

A review by Beverley Smith of Bishop Richard Holloway’s book with this title. Retired Anglican Priest Stephen Mitchell, writing for the UK Sofia magazine, said ‘this is a captivating book.’ For this reader, who has read many of Bishop Holloway’s books, I found insights often missing from my reading on spiritual matters.

-Religion is basing its morality on two-thousand-year-old values.

For most of history, we thought it was moral to enslave other humans, which is why ten million Africans were put on states of the USA, till the slave trade was finally abolished in 1865.

-It was decided in Britain in the early part of the twentieth century that it was both absurd and immoral to deny women the right to vote in parliamentary elections, so they got the vote (in England) in 1918.

On reflection, the Church of England decided that it was both absurd and immoral to deny women entry into its priesthood, so it started ordaining them in 1994.

-The Bible is full of gladness when it describes nature, and it says that the hills themselves jump with joy. Wordsworth calls this feeling ‘sublime’. Walking impels in us the mood of rejoicing- he writes ‘I once stood by the Grand Canyon listening to a group of tourists ejaculate their compliments into the wind, and I longed for them to fall silent. Nature should deepen our thinking not prompt us to strike poses before it.’

-Religion, like art, he begins (to quote W.B.Yeats) abides ‘in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’. This is not to diminish its worth. We will value it in a different way ‘less interested in the authority of its origins than in the gifts of interpretation it offers us for understanding our own lives’.

Holloway offers many more insights.

Beverley Smith