The Minister and the Murderer: A Book of Aftermaths by Stuart Kelly
The Minister and the Murderer: A Book of Aftermaths By Stuart Kelly Granta Books £20 Oldie price £13.88 inc p&p
This is a strange farrago of a book – but indeed, like Tristram Shandy, it was meant to be. An opening prayer is followed by 36 chapters (two of which consist entirely of the grainy photographs that now grace so many literary productions). Each is headed with a scriptural text, interspersed with four ‘sermons’ in a darker font, each, again, headed with a text from scripture, with the whole capped by a fifth styled ‘The Fire Sermon’.
Scripture also bristles from the text, and by no means the most comfortable or familiar passages. The reason for this elaborately godly apparatus is that The Minister and the Murderer is a gothic meditation on a curious episode in the recent history of the Kirk, the Presbyterian Church of Scotland.
In 1984, the General Assembly of the Church found itself called upon to debate the candidature of one James Robert Nelson for the ministry. The debate was held in a degree of secrecy, but did not go unreported – indeed, the heat generated in the chamber spread to newspaper columns and letters pages.
The Church was riven; parties formed; resignations followed. However, Nelson was granted his candidature,
ordained and eventually selected by a parish in which he served without scandal, in spite of a remarriage and a couple of television appearances, until his death in 2005.
The source of the contention? Nelson was a convicted murderer. On 30th October 1969, the 24-year-old battered his mother to death at the family home in Garrowhill, near Glasgow. Having spent the night wandering the streets, he handed himself in and made a confession. He was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment, from which he was released in 1979.
As Kelly observes, the question of Nelson’s candidature – unlike the other controversial questions of the day such as the ordination of women or same-sex partnerships in the ministry, which are effectively matters of policy or church discipline – cut to the very heart of Christian belief.
What was the Church for if it could not embrace a repentant sinner? Who was to set limits to the efficacy of grace? Who was to say that Nelson was not among the chosen and God’s instrument in the ministry? Judge not…
As in all human affairs, the mists of indifference – apart from the odd flare-up in the press – closed over the fate of James Robert Nelson. But not in the mind of Stuart Kelly, who has gathered here the rich aftermath of his reflections.
Around a reconstruction of the events of Nelson’s career, Kelly weaves the history of the Kirk and its many schisms.
He adds in meditations on forgiveness and the doctrines of grace; on murder and matricide in the Bible and ancient literature; on the perils of the ministry as reflected in Scottish literature; on the secular ideology of rehabilitation and its literary sponsors; on multiverses and ‘theriocephalic’ (animal-headed) gods; on his own precocious zeal as a child – ‘I was a pious little shit’– and his equally precocious atheism; on his divorce; on his tremblings in solitude and his own tentative return to belief.
His conclusion is a Christian one: that he will never know the true nature of Nelson’s crime, nor of his repentance, nor of his calling, nor indeed that of his own faith, but must be content to live out his life in the arid field of speculation as a member of the Church.
The amplitude of his scripture learning is matched by that of his references to poets and philosophers; his colourful Scots diction is matched by etymologies from the classical languages. Alongside the Kirk as a formative influence stands Balliol College, Oxford. Both have developed in their charge a profound passion for literature of every kind, for new lights as much as for the old.
One further anecdote for the farrago: a mutual acquaintance in Edinburgh once claimed that he had seen Kelly walking alone one summer evening along a busy road in pouring rain – he was reading a book.