Keeping faith through life's trials

If ever there was a time when Lloyd Geering's detractors might have hoped to find him prostrate before God, begging for a place in heaven, it would have been now.

The only New Zealander ever to be tried for heresy is an old man these days - 88 years old - and arguably in sight of the end of his long life.

But while his mostly long-dead critics hoped to find relief and reward at the Pearly Gates, the sprightly Christian atheist is quite happy with the concept that this life is it. After all, he smiles, his voice rising in mock disdain, "the traditional pictures of heaven are more like hell to me. What would you do? I mean, when you finish your harp lessons, what would you do?"

Geering has made a career out of challenging Christian orthodoxy since well before he was hauled, as a young Presbyterian minister, before the church for denying the physical resurrection of Christ. You could say he's been Wrestling with God all his life, so that's what he called his autobiography, released on Tuesday and published by Craig Potton.

Yet Geering does not believe in a supernatural being that he can actually fight with any more. He doesn't think that way about God.

"God has become for me a symbol for what life is all about or, if you like, a symbol for life itself," he says.

"In a way, Wrestling with God is wrestling with life and trying to find meaning in life, and to find fulfilment of some sort. It's not just ideas. It's how you respond to them and what you do. And my particular task, first as a minister and then as a teacher, was trying to help other people struggle with life."

Asked how well he has achieved that task, Geering leans back into the tan velour armchair in his Wellington apartment and smiles.

"Well, I've helped a lot of people. But on the other hand, I've disturbed a lot of people. I've been caught in the middle in a way. "

Geering burst on to the public stage 40 years ago with a little article in the Christian magazine Outlook in which he challenged Christians to view the resurrection in a modern light.

"I felt a responsibility to the church and the theological hall [of which he was the principal]. Was I bringing it into disrepute? And yet I felt so confident in what I was saying."

In essence, what he said was that many Christians found that what science revealed to be true about the world was no longer compatible with a literal interpretation of the New Testament. It wasn't possible, for example, for Jesus to have physically risen from the dead, so he must be buried somewhere in Palestine. A massive public furore followed.

Then, just as it died down late in 1966, Geering delivered a sermon in which he argued that "man has no immortal soul". There was a petition to have him removed from the church. At the same time the rationalists' association offered £1000 to anyone with scientific proof that man possessed an immortal soul.

The growing fundamentalist movement in the church remained deeply offended and was out to get Geering's ministerial head.

The next year, 1967, the modest minister from Canterbury was called before the church hierarchy and tried for heresy, over two days of live TV coverage.

He was acquitted but would never again settle back into an anonymous church life. He became the focal point of the church war between liberalism and conservatism and is still vilified by Bible-believing fundamentalists today.

"By 1967," he explains, "there was hardly a day that there wasn't something in the newspaper about it. During that period, more people talked religion than ever before. Even when you went to a bar they'd be talking about what happens to you when you die and all that sort of thing."

And wasn't that exactly what he wanted to achieve? "Oh, it's a very healthy situation," he says. "I was excited that people were talking. What was unpleasant about it was that I was the butt of it all.

"I quite like a good vigorous discussion but it was because it became so unpleasantly personal, particularly when your family gets caught up in it. My children were adolescents at the time and couldn't do anything to protect themselves.

"My wife had to field very nasty phone calls. We had all sorts of death threats. At one stage I was even offered police protection. They were veiled threats - 'You're not going to last long', 'Something's going to happen to you, we'll see that it does' - that sort of thing."

This from people who professed to be Christians? "Oh yes, and that's the tragedy of it all. I mean you always felt that Christians are supposed to love one another but it didn't work out that way. I felt tremendous sorrow for the church." And sometimes he still does.

Throughout these years Geering has stayed a Presbyterian minister and stayed loyal to the church. But that loyalty has been tested.

Last week the General Assembly voted 230 to 124 against allowing gay and straight people in defacto relationships to be church leaders. The decision epitomised exactly what Geering has been wrestling against for decades. For a brief moment, he was so disappointed he felt like quitting the church. "But I never seriously would take such a decision."

In this case, Geering sighs, the church was ignoring the 20th century scientific revelation that a proportion of people are born homosexual. It's a fact, he says. "We have to accept that. That's why it was such a disastrous rejection of modern knowledge that took place at the General Assembly. It was tragic. Tragic."

The church, he reckons, has become more conservative. He can't even imagine what it would be like now to be a young man, proposing the ideas he put forward 40 years ago.

"I'm a product of a different period. I couldn't imagine what I would be if I was, say, your age now coming in. I'm pretty sure I never would have become a minister for one thing."

Not that he regrets embracing Christianity. He was raised in a non-religious family but turned to the church because of the lifestyle and sense of purpose it offered him as a young man.

"But as time went on and things changed I've had to develop those ideas and try to re-express them in terms much more relevant to the world we live in."

Fundamentalists, though, say that it is a copout to discount the parts of the Bible that are difficult to believe in.

"Well yes, of course. But when you come to think of it, isn't it odd that a set of books written 2000 to 2500 years ago would be directing what we do today? I mean the thing's absurd."

Fundamentalists say Geering has no right to call himself a Christian; he says they are dangerous.

"Christian, Islamic and even Hindu fundamentalism is growing, partly because it gives people security.

"I feel it's going to lead to a climax and the climax will probably lead to violence because the Bible means so much to Christian fundamentalists and the Koran means so much to Muslim fundamentalists that it's like a little bit of a blanket they can't do without.

"Here you have al Qaeda, a fundamentalist group, fighting America, which is also fundamentalist - I mean Bush is a Christian fundamentalist. He's backed by Christian fundamentalists - you've got this clash going on which unfortunately is not going to be solved easily. Matter of fact it might get worse and worse."

These days Geering, officially retired for 20 years, is on a new crusade - this time for the environment. He has written about the greening of Christianity - its responsibility to look after the environment. And he has joined the Green Party.

He considers it a "deep tragedy" that Al Gore missed out on becoming president to George Bush.

He continues to lecture at the St Andrews society, on religion and the environment, and travels the world as an internationally acclaimed speaker.

He is fit, healthy, and looks at least 10 years younger than his 88 years. To the dismay of church conservatives, in 2001 he was awarded this country's top honour, the principal companion of the New Zealand order of merit.

That year his wife of 50 years, Elaine, died suddenly of a cerebral aneurism. He lost his first wife, Nancy, to tuberculosis. Did he find it tempting to reject the finality of death, when he had lost people he loved so deeply?

"On the contrary," Geering smiles. "I found my beliefs a great comfort to me. The belief that your loved one is in some other wonderful sphere I didn't feel at all. And consequently I didn't feel separated from her. She was with me. She is in me. She is in our family. That's what remains of her.

"I found that much more comforting and it enabled me to carry on from there."

Possibly it enabled him to have another go at love. Months later he met Shirley, who had known Elaine. They married in 2004.

"I've been very fortunate really. I feel sad for people who lose their mate at this age and feel lonely. But it's just a matter of luck really. A lot of things are just luck in life."

Wrestling with God: the Story of my Life, Bridget Williams Books/Craig Potton Publishing, $34.99