Hope amid all the hatred

It all happened in the late 1970s when I was a Church of Scotland minister in Easterhouse, Glasgow. I was living with my family in a street filled with big families, many of whom had at least one member boarding out in the Big Hoose, Barlinnie.

I do not tell you this in order to appear heroic, because I certainly did not feel it. I remember in the early hours of one Sunday morning being awakened by a commotion. I looked out out of the bedroom window and saw a gang-fight going on. Teenagers were fighting with swords. One lad had a swing at a dog, missed, and the sparks flew up from the street where his sword struck the pavement. I determined that I was not going outside to shed my blood - after all, in a few hours I had a sermon to preach about loving your neighbour. At that moment I knew that whatever else I was, St Francis of Assisi I was not.

What the experience did was to teach me something about the circumstances in which violent crime flourishes. Over eight years, I got to know some of the most frightening and some of the most fantastic people I have ever met. The experience changed my life.

I also learned that the herding of people into ghettos, into urban Sowetos, suited society at large. To stick disadvantaged people together into a reservation with few jobs or facilities, then demonise them, was an effective distancing tactic, one which permitted a denial of responsibility.

Ordinary people, many of whom had had very abusive childhoods and who were struggling for survival, became ''evil'' in the eyes of those who wanted none of the potential trouble anywhere near their own back yards.

I learned at first hand the gulf between ''us'' and ''them''. Some people in the Kirk, quite proud of having one of ''us'' living among ''them'', would ask me: ''Are you winning?'' Winning what, precisely? What I knew for sure was that others were losing, drowning even.

A friend of mine, George Wilson, used to go regularly to the Special Unit at Barlinnie to teach a man serving a life sentence for murder how to look after budgies. It seemed bizarre to me. It gave ''I'd like to wring her neck'' a new meaning. But no necks were wrung. The violent lifer learned how to care tenderly for budgies. And became more human in the process.

George felt that I should visit. The only problem was that the Special Unit had been declared - by a vote of inmates and staff - a clergy-free zone. George spoke to them persuasively, and they voted. So I became the first meenister to darken the doors of the Special Unit.

I got to know James Boyle - not the kind of man one would choose as Sunday School Superintendent. We talked. He sculpted. He made beautiful and expressive things, did this murderer. He sent me letters. I learned about his background. What would I have become, if I had had his upbringing? I had no answer to that question.

Nothing could excuse his crimes. He had been a really hard man, working for loan sharks in the Gorbals. But was he evil, the monster the tabloids talked about?

Under the old prison regime, Boyle had attacked prison warders, and covered the walls of his cell with his own excrement. But now that he was being treated as a human being instead of a piece of shit himself, he was making sculpture. The man had a talent.

The tabloids screamed against the Special Unit. When Boyle was allowed out to attend one of his own exhibitions, people went crazy

What I discovered was that there were powerful people who wanted him to fail, in order to prove their own theories that the likes of Boyle couldn't change. One former Moderator was vehement in his view that the Special Unit should be shut down forthwith. There were church people who - and I choose my words carefully - wanted Boyle to re-offend.

The sight of such a notoriously violent man changing was, strangely, too much for some clerics. His redemption wasn't according to church formulae. He didn't grovel enough, didn't show enough self-loathing, didn't use the right coded language. Somehow a changed, articulate Boyle was more of a threat than one who lived like a caged animal.

The rage became even worse when Boyle wrote about his experiences. Then when another lifer, Larry Winters, made a powerful sculpture of a naked Christ, the anger was truly murderous. Christ was the property of the Church, not of evil murderers! And despite the biblical accounts of the crucifixion, the Word-became-flesh was acceptable only if it was androgynous, sanitised, and wearing first-century Palestinian Y-fronts.

I cannot justify Boyle's crimes. I cannot justify the crimes of Mary Bell, the child killer who was the daughter of a sado-masochistic prostitute. If it had been my child who was killed, I too would be filled with a murderous rage.

But nor can I justify the creation of urban ghettos, and the monsterising and scapegoating of people. As a journalist, I cannot justify the ethics of newspapers which pay vast sums for obscenities, then shriek ''blood money'' at Mary Bell and identify her daughter. As a human being, I cannot justify the lynch mob at the door, or the words of my privileged, populist Prime Minister.

I do not know the answers: but in my manse there is a special sculpture which is a symbol of hope. And there are desperate people, in Easterhouse and in Barlinnie, who have taught me more than theologians about the meaning of that most precious word, redemption.