What's getting at me?

It's easy really. I still can't quite forgive myself for a bum decision made when I was a theology student. Many of those that know me will have heard the story. In its bones it goes thus: the Principal took me aside, casually during a coffee break, and told me that he didn't think I was cut out to be a clergyman, but that I would make a good academic. And he had an opening for me. I simply wasn't interested. But he was right on the first point and may have been right on the second. I like to think so.

I know enough about the kind of job he had in mind for me to think that it might have led me away from theology into philosophy. At the time I was interested in St John's Gospel – there are some questions about its date and the background it arises from. And the person I was dating at the time knew the greatest authority on St John, Charles Kingsley Barrett, at Durham. So the dream goes that I might have gone to Durham to be supervised by Barrett in a study of St John's background. That, unavoidably, would have taken me deep into the philosophy of the Greco-Roman world that so interests me 40 years later. There are connected questions of liberty and democracy that are also a big interest of mine, so who knows where that might have led. And instead of that I was not much good as a clergyman, far too interested in the meaning of things to be any use at all in an average parish. I was seen as a threat by a lot of the clergy I worked with because I believed in educating the parishioners. I had to get to 65 before I found room to explore my academic talents and realise how much catching up there is to do. I did at least spend 20 years doing some sort of teaching, but it was of computing skills, and not anything to do with those questions of meaning that have bugged me for as long as I can remember.

An aside: I set up a group when I was a curate in Kingston to criticise my sermons. One comment made was that they were very educated and sometimes not too hard to follow, but what people really wanted was answers to questions to save them thinking for themselves. I was making them think for themselves, so I had it the wrong way round. An absolutely correct assessment of the situation!

In my mind I have revisited that coffee break several times. It is hard to see how the person I was then could have acted any differently. I'd had dreams of becoming a clergyman and studying theology since I was a child. I had the mistaken idea that people interested in religion were interested in it the same way I was – an exploration of meaning. I was on a track towards becoming a leader in that search. Only the search didn't actually exist in Church of England parishes, or anywhere much else apart from the dreaming spires of academe and in my head. None the less, that was the track I was on, I had got a long way down it after many years of trying, and I cannot see how I could have been deflected by a casual remark over coffee. And certainly not by Gerald – he taught New Testament, and by my 3rd year I had realised how much more about the New Testament I knew than he did. So he had the odds against him for changing my mind about anything. I won a University prize and was presented to the Queen Mum as a result, and Gerald had expressed surprise. “I knew you were good Oliver, but I didn't know you were that good.” And he called me Oliver, which everyone knew I hated. No, he hadn't impressed me, so how could he influence me?

Maybe there was a way. I was devoted to one of the teaching staff, Dr Cecilia Goodenough, who had supervised my prize-winning effort. I had total respect for her. She was indeed formidable. Nothing crossed her lips that she hadn't thought about long and hard. If she was convinced about a matter she said so. If there was doubt she explained the issues. Indeed, “issues” may have been the word she used most often.

Maybe Cecilia could have influenced me. In fact, even in a matter to which I was dedicated, she could at least have made me stop and think. But that never happened, and if it had done then the outcome might have been the same. I did wonder why Cecilia, who didn't believe in ordination, was training ordinands. But the point was that she too was engaged in a journey into truth and meaning which she couldn't let go.

I thought I had seen all this long ago. What else could have happened? So I thought I had forgiven myself. But I haven't. It is still irritating me like an itch I cannot scratch, a dull ache that will not go away. I can't get away from the thought that I had talent and a chance, and, in this one and only go I have at life, I wasted one and missed the other.

It is time to go back to the Stoics who had a unique and admirable understanding of ethical life in a deterministic world. Perhaps a short trip to Athens is called for to walk where Chrysippus walked, or to Rome to stand where Seneca stood and enjoy the view, especially as I have never been to either.