The Minister and the Murderer by Stuart Kelly, Granta, 342pp, £20
In 1969 James Nelson battered his mother to death. He was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Fifteen years later, when he had been released on licence and had studied theology at St Andrews, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland debated, and voted upon, his application to be ordained as a minister.
The debate divided the Church, for obvious reasons. On the one hand, Christ came to call not the righteous, but sinners to repentance; on the other, ministers hold a special position. Would parishioners accept a murderer as their spiritual guide? And Nelson’s murder was peculiarly horrible. Kelly observes that there are many murders in the Bible, but not a single case of matricide.
This is a remarkable book. Nelson’s story is at the heart of it but it ranges far beyond that, into theological and philosophical questions, into matters of high culture – Kelly is a notably acute literary critic – and popular culture too. It examines the difficult question of forgiveness – who is entitled or required to forgive and on what terms? Nelson, it seems, could forgive himself. His father understandably could not forgive him.
The book is deeply rooted in the history and practices of the Church of Scotland and its democratic nature. Nelson’s application might be approved, but he would not be a minister until he had found a parish to accept him for, in the Kirk, parish ministers are chosen by the congregation. Nelson would eventually be called by two linked parishes, not far from where he had killed his mother. Many families there had been removed from Glasgow slums and given a second chance in new housing estates; they voted to give Nelson a second chance too.
Kelly remarks that, though there are many differences of doctrine between the Kirk and the Jesuits, “both prize intellectual subtlety and view intelligence as a means towards God, not an impediment to be overcome”. So it resolved Nelson’s case with a double negative. “The Kirk was not saying, you are definitively a fit and proper person to be the shepherd to a flock. It was saying,we can’t say that you’re not.”
In one sense the matter of Nelson’s fitness for the ministry remains unresolved for, if it’s hard to know oneself, it is all but impossible fully to know another. “Every emotional part of me,” Kelly writes, “wanted him to be a genuine convert, and every intellectual part of me whispered he was a clever fake … I had made the mistake I always make. I thought it could be thought through.” Of course it can’t, for one is brought up against the question: how do we know people – by their acts or by their nature?
A good book is a voyage of exploration for both author and reader. Considering Nelson, Kelly explores his own relation to religion, to the Church and to God (three different questions). He was reared in a church-going family in the Scottish Borders. His father was an elder and the session clerk and his mother played the organ. (Nelson’s father and sister were in church at choir practice when he murdered his mother.) The young Kelly was a pious child, precocious in his reading of theology. As an adolescent, he rejected religion, and displayed, in peacock fashion, a proud atheism. At Oxford (Balliol) he was all but seduced by the charms of the Church of England. They withered when he broke up with the girl who represented Anglicanism to him. Now, in early middle age, after a painful divorce, he has argued himself back to the faith, in the humility of one who is prepared to ask questions without assurance of answers. “In the absence of God,” he concludes, “the Church must be enough for me.” This is an unfashionable position at which to arrive, but one supported by historical experience.
The Bible and the history of Christianity tell of many murders. Saul of Tarsus, before he became Paul, “consented” to the stoning of the first Christian martyr, Stephen. There have been murderous popes and bishops, while the founding father of the Church of Scotland, John Knox, was at the least an accomplice in the murder of Cardinal Beaton, the archbishop of St Andrews. So why, one may ask, strain at the gnat that was James Nelson? Because matricide is peculiarly horrible, the killing of the person who has given birth to you? Perhaps yes, yet there are too many cases of mothers murdering their children. It is understandable that Kelly gnawed for so many years at the question of the Minister who was a Murderer, or rather – for the order of words is important – the Murderer who became a Minister.
It is not made less so by the evidence that in most respects Nelson was rather a dull man, and one of the other curious features of the story is how matter-of-fact he was, not beating his breast and proclaiming himself the chief of sinners who had seen the light, but apparently regarding the ministry as a job he was competent to do rather well. Dull man, perhaps, but this is a sparkling and at times disturbing book.
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