by Mary Cullen

In Willy’s 2019 memoir, Life is not a long quiet river, he writes of his long association with Open House since its founding in Dundee in 1990. He was a committed board member and writer of editorials and film reviews. They weren’t strictly speaking film reviews, he said, more ‘essays on a wide range of cultural and political subjects that were connected to religion’. Cinemas were the new cathedrals.

The title of his memoir comes from the 1998 French satirical film, La vie est un long fleuve tranquille, in which a bourgeois Catholic French family discovers that one of their children was swopped at birth and brought up in the slums. When they take the boy back, aged 12, he soon has the other children drinking and stealing, and the mother, distraught, turns to pills and alcohol. One of her children comes home from school and tells her what he has been learning: that ‘Jesus was a good man. And he got crucified. Maman, life is not a long quiet river’.

Willy quotes Socrates, who said that the unexamined life is not worth living. The premise of the memoir is that our retirement years are for reflection on what our existence has been all about. They should include time to be alone, silent and contemplative. The book covers all the stages of Willy’s life, from birth to old age, facing the challenges that came from trying to live in the world as a Roman Catholic priest, called to live according to the Gospel. He offers his thoughts to those seeking to complete their lives ‘grace-fully’.

His was an eventful life. He was a student in Rome at the start of the Second Vatican Council, which was called by Pope John XXIII to determine the role of the Church in the modern world – a key question for Willy. We need to be converted by our pilgrimage through life, he wrote, to share what we have with others. He notes that for Pope Francis, the imitation Jesus’ poverty is more important than the habit of clerical obedience. He endorsed Francis’ model of church as field hospital where those most in need should get help.

The book ends with a short note written just before Willy’s 80th birthday, which announces that he has been diagnosed with a tumour in his bladder. A nurse told him that if he didn’t die of cancer, he would die with it. So I am not ill, he wrote, I am a person living with cancer.

His friend John Miller, a former Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, reviewed Willy’s memoir for the June edition of Open House in 2019. We reprint it here as a tribute to their long friendship and to Willy’s continuing importance to all those whose lives he touched.

Life is not a long quiet river

This compact volume, Life is not a long quiet river, is really several different books compressed into one. It is a self-searching autobiography, reviewing a lifetime of rich and varied achievement. It is a portrait of the ordained priesthood in the generation following Vatican II. It is a revelation of the immense worldwide reach of the Roman Catholic Church. And it is a testimony to the significance of Jesus of Nazareth to the person who would live a meaningful life.

The author accepts the scriptural assertion that human beings live for 70 years, or for 80 if we are strong. As he himself approaches the full share given to the strong, he examines the role played in his life by his three vows – ‘promises’ as he calls them in respect of a ‘secular’ priest of the parish, such as he has been. He sees that old age tends to enforce these promises on us all – poverty and celibacy and obedience.

The book has a three-part structure, each part focusing on one of the promises: Obedience, Poverty, and Celibacy. And in each part the major themes of the book are closely interwoven.

Obedience

The book’s narrative follows a chronological path through Willy Slavin’s life, and he speaks with affection of his parents and family life. He is trained in obedience at home and then as a boarder at Blairs College. For a minister of the Reformed Church, as this reviewer is, it is difficult to imagine making a promise of obedience to the authority of someone higher in the hierarchy. But we see that in fact, while Willy promises obedience to the authority of the bishop, his own insights and his persistent curiosity frequently bring him into conflict. We learn that such differences of opinion often lie behind him being moved from one parish to another, albeit in obedience to the bishop’s instruction.

Poverty

We can discern that Willy performed important roles in one field after another. He trained as an educational psychologist and learned about urban poverty in Glasgow. From Glasgow he moved to Bangladesh. In the Xaverian education centre in Jessore he put the whole college grounds under cultivation to produce food. Back in Scotland, he became secretary of the Justice and Peace Commission; and he was a key member of a small residential community of activists pursuing a Justice and Peace agenda. As chaplain in Barlinnie Prison he foresaw the infamous riot in 1987, and established a charitable fund for remand prisoners who had no privileges and few visitors. He was organiser of the Scottish Drugs Forum in its first five years. Moving to St Alphonsus’ parish, with the Glasgow Association of Family Support Groups he started an annual Service of Remembrance for those who had died through drug-related problems. He initiated a men’s group, to enable men to reflect on their spiritual life. He served as Chaplain to Yorkhill Hospital for Sick Children. In twelve years as parish priest in St Simon’s, Partick, he created a cafe for the homeless; and he founded Glasgow Emmaus, which offers structured support and community life for homeless people. The uniting characteristic in initiating all these enterprises was Willy’s compassion for people facing difficulty.

Celibacy

The final section explores the narrowing place of celibacy in an increasingly sexualised culture. Willy affirms the traditional case for a person to remain unmarried: without a wife and other dependents the priest is free to devote his life and his love to a wider range of people. He regards the fluency of his own way of life as having been made possible by the dynamic of his three promises.

Willy’s writing style compresses a mass of information and opinion into each paragraph. Elliptical sentences and epigrams flow from his pen. So swiftly is the reader moved from one theatre of action to another, and so lightly does the author touch the surface of large events and his response to them, that sometimes the significance of Willy’s activities and interventions can be overlooked.

Finishing the book the reader will be in awe at Willy Slavin’s prodigious energy and imagination. I am certain that his influence still echoes in the places where he set foot, with individuals paying tribute to his challenge, his insight and his devotion. Although he says ‘it is possible to see only the embers of faith’, he has written a genuinely evangelical work. It speaks well of the Church he has served, and of the one whose name and spirit the Church bears.