Brutal murderer who became man of God
ON MAY 19, 1984, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland trooped down a long passageway known as the Black and White Corridor at their Edinburgh headquarters into their Assembly Hall.
The issue they were to discuss that day was anything but black and white.
A 39-year-old man called James Nelson had applied to be ordained as a Church of Scotland Minister.
What set Nelson apart from other would-be priests was that he was a convicted murderer.
Some 15 years earlier, he had smashed in his mother’s skull with an old police truncheon, then used a brick to beat her until he had obliterated her features.
He then packed an overnight bag and disappeared into the night.
Two days later, he handed himself in to police. Asked what had happened, Nelson claimed that his mother had said some unflattering things about his girlfriend and he’d just ‘lost his head’. He felt no horror at what he had done at the time, he said, nor did he express any remorse.
At his trial, Nelson pleaded not guilty due to diminished responsibility. A psychiatrist, speaking on his behalf, declared that he’d suffered ‘years of deprivation’ at the hands of his mother.
His sister confirmed this, recalling ‘persistent beatings’ from both their mother and father.
All this put the General Assembly in a very tricky position. You might assume that the Bible takes a robustly critical line about murder — but, in fact, the line is a lot fuzzier than expected. True, the Fifth Commandment says: ‘Thou shalt not kill’. On the other hand, Moses, who, of course, brought down the Ten Commandments from Mount Sinai, was himself a murderer. In Exodus, Moses is described as killing an Egyptian whom he saw beating a Hebrew, and burying his body in the sand.
Nelson was found guilty and served nine years of a life sentence, before getting parole. He then studied divinity at university and married a fellow student.
According to Nelson, his conversion happened while he was in prison — it appears to have been a gradual process, rather than a blinding flash.
The trouble is, he also said a great many things about wanting to become a minister that make one — to put it mildly — uneasy about his motives.
On being asked why he wanted to become ordained, Nelson claimed he was only ‘in it for the money’. Given how little Church of Scotland ministers earned at the time, it seems safe to say this was a joke — albeit a remarkably ill-advised one.
When someone asked if he thought there was any risk he might murder anyone else, Nelson said he thought it unlikely — ‘I’m a wee bit older,’ he said. ‘I’m a wee bit wiser.’
This was not the sort of ringing declaration of repentance the General Assembly was looking for.
Nonetheless, after an impassioned debate, the Assembly finally voted by 622 votes to 425 that he could be ordained. Soon afterwards, Nelson became minister at Chapelhall and Calderbank in Lanarkshire — ‘a brisk 20-minute walk from where he had killed his mother’.
As far as author Stuart Kelly is concerned, ‘Nelson is a keyhole through which I can see issues and ideas that have troubled and intrigued me for decades’ — namely the nature of forgiveness, his own faith and the possible existence of evil as a real force in the world.
Nelson died of lung cancer in 2005, so clearly Kelly can’t talk to him, but he makes surprisingly little effort to contact people he knew. Rather, he’s happier to play up Nelson’s contradictions, as if to emphasise there’s a little bit of him in everyone.
However wobbly Kelly’s focus might be, there’s much to chew over here, as well as admire. Genuinely eccentric books don’t come along often and this is undoubtedly one of them — erudite, agonised and, at times, plain bonkers.
He’s particularly good on forgiveness — especially on how hard it is. He writes, too, about his own loss of faith: about how ‘what seemed to be exquisite and intricate turns out to be nothing but ash, in the blink of an eye’.
At the end of his account, James Nelson stands less as a flesh-andblood man and more as a moral weather vane, swinging wildly in one direction, then another. Showing us the very worst we are capable of and — just possibly — the very best.