Mystical Paths

Father Peters recommended that I made a retreat at the Abbey while we tried to work out what was going wrong. As a tentative hypothesis he suggested I might be suffering from the cumulative stressful effect of my fiascos as a voluntary worker with the result that an awkward situation had been generated. There was certainly no doubt about the awkwardness of the situation. Plates which soar off shelves and smash themselves to pieces apparently unaided by a human hand are really very awkward indeed.

At last I said: ‘Could I have done it while sleep-walking?’

‘I doubt it, Nicholas – the noise would have been terrific. You’d have woken up.’

‘Then it must have been one of the inmates, someone who wasn’t locked up. Surely I couldn’t have triggered poltergeist activity now that I’m past adolescence!’

‘It’s unlikely, I agree, but not impossible. If you were to make a retreat we could try and solve the mystery by examining the entire situation in detail and reviewing your spiritual life –’

I switched off, knowing that the last thing I could face at that time was Father Peters playing a spiritual Sherlock Holmes. Any discussion of how I was unconsciously expending my energy by generating psychic phenomena might lead to a discussion of how I was consciously expending my energy in messing around with girls, and I wanted no one to know I had an active sex-life. Admitting to sexual intercourse would only lead to spiritual questions which I didn’t even like to think about.

Sex was a problem. As far as I could see it was now essential therapy, hiving off all the surplus energy so that I stopped smashing plates long-distance by mistake, but I knew any confessor would tell me there were other ways of calming an over-strained psyche, ways that didn’t involve exploiting women and crashing around like an animal. The trouble was that it was such a relief to crash around like an animal when my attempts to be a decent human being, ministering without pay to the underprivileged and the sick, regularly ended in humiliation.

But of course I could confess none of this to Father Peters. All I could do was confess to God in private my exploits as a crasher and pray for the grace to become effortlessly ascetic once I was ordained.

‘I’ll think about a retreat,’ I said. ‘I really will.’ And away I went to muddle on.

‘What happened?’ said my father when I returned home, but I suspected he already knew.

‘Oh, we had a good chat and I’m feeling much better.’

‘Nicholas –’

‘No need for you to worry any more, I’m fine.’

Sometimes when my father demonstrated his intuition I thought he knew about my sex-life, but most of the time I was sure he didn’t. I was careful never to think about it in his presence, and every time I felt his mind prying into mine I mentally evicted him by thinking about cricket.

Back we come again to the relationship with my father, now clouded by my chaotic career as a psychic and muddied by his agonising anxiety.

Of course sex is a subject which children often find impossible to discuss with their parents, but in my case this wasn’t my father’s fault; certainly I don’t mean to imply that just because he was a priest he was incapable of speaking frankly on the subject.

‘Christianity has been much misunderstood on this matter,’ he had said to me at exactly the right moment in my adolescence, ‘but it has always claimed –’ Here centuries of clerical misogyny were swept aside ‘– that sex is good and right.’ With the slightest of smiles he conveyed the impression of surveying numerous pleasurable memories. ‘It’s the abuse of sex, that gift from God, which Christianity condemns. That’s a manifestation of the Devil, who hates God’s generosity and longs to wreck it by converting a gift of joy into a trap of suffering.’

This made sense to me. I liked it when my father talked in old-fashioned picture-language of the Devil in order to convey the strength of the Dark, that psychic reality which I had recognised at such an early age. But then my father stopped talking about the reality of the Dark and began talking of the unreality of the sexual rules. It turned out that almost anything was an abuse of sex. In fact in a world which was overflowing with sexual possibilities – and which was soon to explode into a sexual supermarket – he insisted that for the unmarried only deprivation was on offer. With a marriage certificate tucked under one’s pillow one could have sex twenty-five hours a day and God would never bat an eyelid (provided that the sex was what my father called ‘wholesome’; I never failed to be amazed by his use of archaic language). But for the Christian it was either feast or famine where sex was concerned. No wonder the unchurched masses thought Christianity was peculiar on the subject.

‘I expect you’re thinking now that this is all idealism which has no relation to reality,’ said my father, reading my mind so accurately that I jumped, ‘but human beings must have ideals to look up to and examples to copy if they’re not to sink to a most unedifying level.’ (More fascinating archaic language. Unedifying! Ye gods!) ‘In this world no one’s perfect. But one can aim high and try to be good. To do so is a sign not only of maturity but of –’ My father made a vast verbal leap forward into the twentieth century ‘-psychological integration. Religion is about integration, about successfully bringing the selfish ego into line with the centre of the personality where God exists, as a divine spark, in every human being. Religion is about helping man to live in harmony with his true self and become the person God’s designed him to be.’

We seemed to have wandered away from the subject of sex, but the next moment my father was saying: ‘Casual sex is just the gratification of the ego. The ego sits in the driving-seat of the personality, but unless it’s aligned with the true self it’ll steer an erratic and possibly disastrous course.’

‘Hm,’ I said. I thought it was about time I said something.

‘In addition, casual sex is the exploitation of another, and to exploit people is wrong …’

Later I felt he had exaggerated this. Later, when I was no longer so innocent, I thought: what exploitation? The girls loved it. I loved it. No one got hurt. Where was the harm? Of course there would always be people who made a mess of their pleasures, I realised that. But I wasn’t one of those people.

After the disaster at the mental hospital I yielded to my father’s pleas to bring my voluntary service to a premature end. By that time I had whiled away twenty months of the two years I had allotted myself, and I was due to begin my training at theological college that autumn, the autumn of 1966. The summer stretched before me, and telling my father that I was going to embark on some serious theological reading I loafed around listening to my records and dipping into books on reincarnation.

It was then, quite without warning, that I got into a mess with a girl, but being me I didn’t get into the usual mess young men get into with girls. It was a psychic mess. Typical.

Back we come again to my disastrous career as a psychic. ‘Beware of those glamorous powers!’ my father had droned to me years earlier before I had gone up to Cambridge, and I had thought: yes, yes, quite so, of course I shall always be psychically well-behaved. But during my years as an undergraduate I had found it increasingly hard to resist a psychic flourish now and then. The girls loved it. I loved it. No one got hurt. Where was the harm?

In that summer of 1966 I found out. I was twenty-three years old and spending my Saturday nights with a little dolly-bird typist called Debbie who had a bed-sitting-room down in Langley Bottom, the working-class end of Starbridge. I’d met her in the Starbridge branch of Burgy’s, which I had discovered was the ideal place for picking up girls whom I couldn’t take home but couldn’t do without. Being currently intrigued by the research into reincarnation I hankered to reproduce the Bridey Murphy experiment, and with Debbie’s eager consent I hypnotised her in order to find out if she could recall a past life. She could. Greatly excited I took notes as she described her life as a medieval nun. Then the disaster happened: I was unable to bring her out of the trance.

By that time she had stopped talking and evolved into a zombie, eyes open, responsive to my commands but unable to communicate. I panicked, terrified by the thought that I had produced permanent mental impairment. Having manoeuvred her into my car I headed for the emergency department of Starbridge General Hospital, but then I suffered a second bout of panic. Supposing they thought she was traumatised as the result of a sexual assault? Supposing a scandal aborted my career as a priest before it had even begun? Bathed in the coldest of cold sweats I drove past the hospital and fled home with the zombie to my father.

He asked me only one question. It was: ‘What’s her name?’ and when I told him he took her hand in his and said: ‘Debbie, in the name of JESUS CHRIST I command you to return to your body and reclaim it.’ The cure was instant. There was no permanent mental impairment. But I never went to bed with her again. She wanted me to; she cried, she pleaded, but I couldn’t. I’d seen the Dark. I’d felt the Force. It had been shown to me very clearly how vulnerable my psychic powers made me to demonic infiltration, and in my revulsion Debbie now seemed fatally contaminated.

‘You used that child,’ said my father, hammering home the truth with a fury which failed to conceal his terror that I should be so vulnerable. ‘You exploited her in order to satisfy your curiosity about a psychological mystery which has been adopted by those who believe in the heretical doctrine of reincarnation. You’ve behaved absolutely disgracefully and I’m ashamed of you.’

Strong words. I hated myself. Worse still, the temporary withdrawal of his love made me more aware of my vulnerability than ever. I saw that even though I was now a grown man of twenty-three I still had to have his powerful psyche enfolding mine in order to keep the Dark at bay.

‘I shan’t comment on the sexual relationship which you’ve obviously had with the girl,’ said my father. ‘You know exactly what I think of young men who are too selfish and immature to do anything with women but exploit them. Please don’t attend mass until you’ve made a full confession to Aelred Peters.’

This was the final horror. I couldn’t bear the thought of Father Peters knowing how I’d behaved. ‘You hear my confession,’ I begged my father, but he refused.

‘Confessing to Aelred would be a real penance,’ he said. ‘Confessing to me would be a soft option. Off you go to Starwater.’

Away I sloped to the Abbey, but cowardice overwhelmed me as soon as I crossed the threshold, and although I told Father Peters about the psychic disaster I was unable to speak of the sexual relationship. Fortunately Father Peters was so fascinated by Debbie’s story of life as a medieval nun that he quite forgot to ask me what I’d been doing in her bed-sitter, and after we had completed the travesty of my formal confession we settled down for a cosy psychic chat.

‘How could she have invented such a detailed description of an utterly alien way of life?’

‘Well, my theory is …’ Father Peters expounded on his theory. He said that although we remembered everything that ever happened to us, only a small part of our memory was accessible to our conscious thoughts; Debbie had probably seen a film featuring a medieval nunnery and she could well have elided this memory with a theme from a novelette. So in fact it was not a former life which had been revealed, but the extraordinary depth of memory which lay buried deep in the subconscious mind.

This intriguing speculation certainly took my mind off my troubles, but as soon as I parted from Father Peters I realised that a cosy psychic chat was no substitute for a full confession. The chapel at Starwater had a section set aside for visitors. Scuttling in I sank to my knees and served up the fullest possible confession, heavily garnished with expressions of remorse and repentance. What God thought of it all I have no idea, but afterwards I felt slightly less guilt-ridden. One of the best things about the Church of England is that it never says you must make a confession to a priest, only that you may. Anglo-Catholics may follow the Roman tradition of confession, but there’s nothing to stop even an Anglo-Catholic taking the Protestant path and confessing his sins to God without the aid of an intermediary.

‘You made a full confession?’ said my father when I arrived home.

‘Yep,’ I said, mentally adding the words: ‘But not to Aelred.’

There was a pause during which I became uncomfortably aware of his mind pussyfooting suspiciously around my own. Then just as I was daring to believe that my honest expression had convinced him all was well he announced: ‘Sometimes I think you tell me only what I want to hear,’ and gave me his most baleful stare.

God only knows how I kept my honest expression nailed in place. Sometimes I felt that having a psychic parent was an intolerable cross to bear.

IV

I must now say something more about my father in order to flesh out this lethal relationship which was developing between us as my psychic career went from bad to worse. This particular path which led to the crisis of 1968 needs to be examined in more detail.

By the time of the Debbie débâcle my father was very old. Born in 1880 he had been sixty-two when I had arrived in the world, and so every year of the 1960s was bringing him closer to his ninetieth birthday. By the time the Christian Aysgarth affair began in the spring of 1968, two years after the mess with Debbie, he was nearly eighty-eight.

Being over eighty was very difficult for my father because he finally had to face up to the fact that he was old. Previously, having excellent health and a strong will, he had avoided this truth by cantering around like a man twenty years his junior, but at eighty he was felled by a prostate operation and although the physical problem was successfully treated the psychological consequences lingered on. Old age now stared him in the face. My father was livid, then deeply depressed, then livid all over again. With his strong will unimpaired and his brain untouched by senility he regarded his body’s enfeeblement as nothing short of traitorous. Looking back I can see he was secretly frightened – not of death, which in his faith he could face with courage, but of dying without dignity. My father was a proud man. He always used to say that his pride was his biggest weakness. The thought of his body decaying in a humiliating fashion while his mind remained sharp enough to suffer every indignity to the full was intolerable to him.

I could sense all these secret fears and hidden rages, but I was too young then to understand the full dimensions of his psychological ordeal. All I could do was make renewed efforts to keep him happy. I had already realised that nothing should be allowed to worry him and impair his health; in consequence as he had wrapped his psyche around mine, keeping the Dark at bay, I had wrapped my psyche around his, keeping the Light alive, and gradually a sinister interlocking had taken place until we were like Siamese twins joined at the psyche. No wonder I now felt I would be unable to survive without him.

I suspected my mother had always feared my father and I might wind up in a muddle, and that this dread had stimulated her robust attitude to our psychic gifts. She was quite prepared to believe they existed, but she was determined that they should never be allowed to triumph over her resolute common sense. Early in their marriage my father had embarked on a short but disastrous ministry of healing, and I think this experience had made her nervous about any exercise of the ‘glamorous powers’, those gifts from God which were so susceptible to corruption.

She had been my father’s second wife, his first marriage having begun and ended before he had embarked on his career as a Fordite monk. This first marriage had been unsatisfactory, but my father’s big love affair with the monastic life had lasted for seventeen years before he had been called back into the world at the age of sixty. My father had been at first ambivalent about this return, but since the call had been judged genuine by his superior there had been no alternative but to obey it. Two muddled years had followed during which he had married my mother. She had eventually sorted him out, and before he had embarked on a successful career in theological education they had produced a son, Gerald, who had died at birth. I had arrived on the scene seventeen months later.

I could never make up my mind whether little Gerald would have been a bigger bore alive than he was dead, but I had no doubt that I resented the effect his memory had on my parents. They were shockingly sentimental about him. There was a grave in the churchyard which had to be visited. His birthday was never forgotten. As a child I thought this behaviour was all quite idiotic and I was very rude about it to Nanny. I liked being an only child. It was bad enough having to share my father with the two children of his first marriage, both of whom were well over thirty years my senior and lived many miles away. To share him with a sibling close to me in age and on the spot would have been intolerable.

Fortunately my parents had no more children after I was born, and by 1945 my father was running the Starbridge Theological College. To cope with the huge influx of ex-servicemen who felt called to train for the priesthood once the war was over, he opened an extension of the College at our manor house in Starrington Magna. I can clearly remember the students – the ordinands, as I soon learnt to call them – pounding across the lawn on the way to our private chapel in the woods. I became their mascot. Some of them even gave me their sweet ration. No wonder I wound up spoilt rotten by the time I was five.

However, all good things come to an end, even life as a pampered mascot. In 1950 when I was seven – eight at Christmas – the last of the exceptionally large intakes of theological students achieved ordination, the College extension at our home was closed and my father, now seventy, retired from his position as Principal. My mother had looked forward to this day because she had cherished the belief that he would then sink into a quiet life and she would see more of him, but she soon discovered that he was becoming busier than ever. As a monk he had won a reputation as a spiritual director, and now that he had fulfilled his call from God to steer the College through the difficult post-war years, spiritual direction reclaimed him full-time. Hordes of people turned up for consultations. He led retreats, wrote copious letters, made himself constantly available to those seeking counsel. My mother and I became somewhat overlooked but we never doubted that he loved us. The problem was that there were only twenty-four hours in a day.

Then in 1957 when I was fourteen, my mother suddenly died. My father was almost killed by guilt. For a long time he could barely speak. His longest silence was: ‘I didn’t make enough time for her,’ and I knew, reading his mind, that in his grief and remorse he wanted to die too.

He promised me that he would never commit the sin of taking his own life but I remained terrified that his health had been fatally undermined. He became a recluse. He did eventually resume his spiritual counselling on a modest scale but he conducted the work almost entirely by letter. Meanwhile I had become what Matron at school called ‘strange’ and my father had to drag himself out of seclusion to make special arrangements for my care. That was when Aelred Peters had been recruited to sort me out. Eventually plates stopped smashing themselves in the Abbey kitchens and inkpots stopped overturning themselves in unlikely places. Staggering home for the school holidays I hoped for further help from my father but instead found myself obliged to grapple with his continuing bereavement.

I would sit with him for short periods of complete silence. Sometimes we stroked the cat together. My father always had a cat and the cat was always a tabby. After the death of my mother’s cat William (annexed by my father after his marriage), he acquired Whitby the Second (died young of a kidney complaint), Whitby the Third (run over aged ten) and Whitby the Fourth. Whitby the First, a companion of my father’s monastic years, had left a potent memory behind him and had been the hero of countless bedtime stories narrated to me by my father in the nursery.

When my father began to talk again it was the cat he spoke about. ‘Whitby’s very fond of you,’ he said suddenly in the midst of one of our long silences. ‘That’s because you’re like me, good with cats.’ Then he paused before adding: ‘You’re really very like me, Nicholas. Very like me indeed.’

Unsure what to say I at first remained silent, but gradually it dawned on me that he was wrestling with some profound temptation. In an effort to be sympathetic and encouraging I then said: ‘Great. So what are you worried about?’

The invisible wrestling-match continued. My father pursed his lips and rubbed his nose and fondled the scruff of Whitby’s neck before he at last managed to say: ‘There’s something I’d like to tell you but Francis always said it would be better for you not to know.’ Francis Ingram, a Fordite monk, had been his confessor.

I never hesitated. ‘But Francis is dead,’ I said, ‘and everything’s changed. You do exactly what you want, Father. You do whatever makes you happy.’

And then he told me the most extraordinary story.

V

He had seen me in a vision well over a year before I was born. He had seen me, aged three or four, in the garden of the Manor and had realised at once that I looked exactly as he had looked at the same age. Afterwards, during his struggle to interpret the vision, he had been tempted to believe God had given him the promise of a replica-son in order to cheer him up for the difficult times he had endured since leaving the Order, but Francis Ingram had later disputed this self-indulgent interpretation, and in fact my father had firmly believed that no parent should expect or desire his child to be a replica.

‘But nevertheless …’

Nevertheless my father, longing for a son who shared his interests, had been unable to stop himself finding the vision irresistibly attractive.

‘And then, Nicholas …’

Then, when I was three and a half the vision had been enacted in reality and my father had fallen in love with it all over again.

‘It was in 1946,’ he said. ‘Neville Aysgarth was visiting the Manor – Archdeacon Aysgarth, as he was in those days. As he crossed the lawn to join us, Nanny called your name from the terrace and you ran away to meet her – and I realised my vision had been replayed. I was so stunned that at first I could hardly hear a word Aysgarth said. I could only think: it’s all come true. I have this son who’s exactly like me and it’s all according to God’s plan. Although of course,’ said my father quickly, ‘I did realise you weren’t a replica. Not exactly. Not quite. But nevertheless … It’s extraordinary how like me you are! I’ve been telling myself I’ve nothing to look forward to now Anne’s dead, but that’s not true, is it? I’ve got you to look forward to, Nicholas. I shall so enjoy watching you live my life for me all over again – that’s to say, I shall so enjoy watching you develop into the man that God obviously wants you to be. You won’t be a replica, of course – never think that I want a replica, but –’

But he did want a replica. I could see he longed for a replica. And what was more I could see the thought revived him, entranced him, gave him not only a new interest but the will to live which would ensure his survival.

‘– but one can’t deny the very exceptional likeness between us,’ he was saying, ‘and why shouldn’t that be a comfort to me in my old age? Francis said I should never tell you about the vision because you might start believing you had to be a replica, but you wouldn’t think that, would you, Nicholas? Francis was wrong. On this point I know best – I know you’ll reverence my cherished vision as a gift from God, just as I do, and so therefore it can’t possibly have a malign effect. I’m right, aren’t I? I know I’m right. I know it.’