Mystical Paths

Proud, arrogant, ancient, miserable and misguided, he glared at me in a pathetic plea for reassurance.

Taking his hand in mine I said: ‘Of course you’re right, Father. You always are.’

No doubt my mother would have made some very robust comment at that point.

But my mother was no longer there.

VI

The next holidays I returned from school to find that a cottage was being built for my father in the grounds by the chapel. He said it would make it easier for him to be secluded. Then he said I could visit him whenever I wished because I was quite different from everyone else and he didn’t find my presence a strain. As an afterthought he added that he couldn’t bear to go on living at the main house now that my mother was no longer there; he’d never liked living there much anyway; his middle-class upbringing as a schoolmaster’s son had ensured he had never felt at ease in my mother’s county setting.

I was stunned. My father, educated on scholarships at public school and university, had appeared to fit neatly into my mother’s world. I had had no idea he had such a chip on his shoulder about class. I knew, of course, that his mother had been a parlourmaid, but my own mother had said how interesting that was and what a remarkable woman my unknown grandmother must have been to succeed in marrying ‘above her station’, so I had accepted my grandparents’ mésalliance as merely an unusual piece of family history. Now for the first time I saw that my father also had married ‘above his station’ and it occurred to me that my parents’ marriage too had been, in a less obvious way, a mésalliance which had caused problems.

I was still recovering from the shock that my father had never felt at ease in the home I loved when he began to explain to me his plan for ensuring that my inheritance was properly looked after: he intended to let the Home Farm and found a small religious community which would run the house and tend the grounds.

I disliked this scheme – though I said nothing for fear of upsetting him – but as time passed I realised how clever the plan was. Not only did I never have to worry about the property but I never had to worry that my father was failing to take care of himself when I was away. The members of the Community tended the garden, looked after the house and worshipped my father whenever they weren’t busy worshipping God. Their devotion was my passport to a normal life unburdened by abnormal anxieties.

I finished school, went up to Laud’s, my father’s old college at Cambridge, came down with my degree, dabbled disastrously with voluntary work and dabbled disastrously with Debbie. My father was still living as a recluse in his cottage, but now in 1966, nine years after my mother’s death, he had come to terms with his loss and his biggest problem was the old age he hated so much. But I could see he was looking forward intensely to my life at the Starbridge Theological College. He said more than once how much vicarious pleasure he would receive from my career as an ordinand.

I went to the Theological College. It was awful. It seemed to have very little to do with religion – religion as I understood it from my personal experience. I was reprimanded for using terms like the Light and the Dark and told I was flirting with Gnosticism. ‘What about St John?’ I said. ‘He talks of the Light and the Dark,’ but I was told tartly that I was Nicholas Darrow, not St John the Evangelist, and that it was the sin of pride to think I could flirt with the Gnostic heresy and get away with it. In vain I told my tutor that the Light and the Dark were code-names which I used to describe a reality which for me was as true as any reality acknowledged by a logical positivist. My tutor said I should beware of mysticism as mystics so often got into trouble with the Church.

The Church was exalted as a sort of idol. Enormous emphasis was put on teaching what was liturgically correct. Church history was taught in stupefying detail. A heavy-handed, outdated biblical theology still ruled the roost, the academic successor of the neo-orthodox thunderings of Karl Barth. Radical theology was ignored – and this was 1966, three years after John Robinson’s Church-shattering blockbuster Honest to God! But the College refused to admit any shattering had taken place; the idol was not allowed to be chipped or cracked – or even renovated. Robinson was dismissed as ‘misguided’ and ‘no theologian’. There was certainly a case for propounding criticisms such as these, but I thought Robinson’s ideas, misguided or not, should at least have been debated. And I didn’t like this rampant ecclesiastical idolatry. What’s the Church anyway? Just a man-made institution. It’s God and Christ and the Holy Spirit that are important. I’m not saying we don’t need a man-made institution to deal with worldly matters. Obviously we do. And I’m not saying (in defiance of Anglo-Catholic ideology) that the Church has no numinous value and that holy traditions are unimportant. Obviously it has and they are. All I’m saying is that setting the Church up on a pedestal and worshipping it is wrong.

I also took a dim view of the way the College staff played down mysticism as they converted theology into just another academic subject such as history or English literature. Theology ought to be alive, vivid, related to real life, not a system debated by intellectuals. Did the mystic Julian of Norwich have a theology degree? Of course she didn’t. But she knew God. She had ‘gnosis’, special knowledge. She saw visions and she KNEW. But if she’d been unfortunate enough to attend that Theological College in the 1960s, the only vision she would have had would have been a vision of the bliss which marked the end of term.

Of course I couldn’t tell my father what a travesty the College was. Having run the place so successfully in the ‘forties he would have been deeply upset to know how far it had gone downhill. I learnt to keep quiet at College too because I didn’t want anyone thinking I was ‘unsuitable’ and trying to boot me out. One ordinand did say: ‘I think we should have courses on pastoral work and discuss things like sex,’ but he didn’t last long. Sex was the great unmentionable among the College staff because no one had the guts to discuss ethical issues realistically. As I mooched around, bored out of my mind, I wondered how the Church could survive the twentieth century when one of its most famous training-grounds had been so wholly smothered by the dead hand of an irrelevant past.

My boredom eventually produced the inevitable result: my interest in sex, damped down by the Debbie débâcle, began to revive.

I may have given the impression that I was formidably promiscuous but in fact by the standards of the mid –’sixties I was almost staid. My habit of going steady with one girl at a time – and usually only seeing her once a week – was my way of paying lip-service to my father’s belief that men should try to be more than mindless animals, so before the affair with Debbie I had changed girlfriends no more than once a year. However now, goaded on by the mind-blowing boredom of College life, I traded them in every six months. Doreen was a waitress at The Copper Kettle, Angie was a salesgirl at Boots and Tracy, like Debbie, was a little dolly-bird typist.

Naturally I went to great lengths to cover up this behaviour which was so very unacceptable for a would-be priest. Knowing my father would be wondering if I’d picked a successor to Debbie, I created a smokescreen by running a platonic romance in tandem with my sex exploits; this meant that I took a nice girl home and introduced her to my father so that he could see how virginal she was and deduce how well I was behaving. I need hardly add that I didn’t take home girls called Doreen, Angie and Tracy. I took home girls called Celia, Lavinia and Rosalind, girls I met from time to time at the tedious upper-class parties that for some reason people expected me to enjoy.

At the beginning of 1968, the year of the Christian Aysgarth affair, the year I was due to be ordained, I was sleeping with Tracy and taking home Rosalind. ‘Sleeping with Tracy’ meant a quick swill at the Adam and Eve in Starbridge’s Chasuble Lane, a quick binge at Burgy’s on the Market Place and a quick retreat to her bed-sit which, like Debbie’s, was down at Langley Bottom by the railway station. (It was actually quite difficult to find working-class girls with bed-sits; they tended to live at home with Mum unless there were family problems.)

On the other hand, ‘taking home Rosalind’ meant a leisurely stroll through Starrington from her house to the Manor, a leisurely listen to my Beethoven records and a leisurely call on my father in his cottage by the chapel. Sometimes we would dine at Starbridge at The Quill Pen in Wheat Street and attend a performance at the Starbridge Playhouse. Hands were held. A goodnight peck on the cheek became part of the routine. There was the occasional friendly letter. It was all light years away from the world where I bucketed around the bed-sits of Langley Bottom.

This may sound to some people as if I had my private life in perfect order, but as an ordinand to whom religion was not just a dead letter but a vital part of life, I knew the apparent order masked a dangerous chaos. I found it spiritually exhausting to lead a double life, and this knowledge that I was becoming increasingly debilitated made me realise how far off-course I was. In other words, I knew that what I was doing was not only objectively wrong, violating a moral code which I planned to devote my life to upholding, but subjectively wrong in that it was preventing me from being integrated, dividing me from my true self. Why then, it may be asked by the moral stalwarts and the sexually pure, didn’t I pull myself together and abandon this disgraceful behaviour which was so utterly unworthy of an ordinand?

Why indeed.

But I think at least two of the great saints of the Church would have sympathised with me. ‘For the good that I would I do not,’ St Paul wrote, ‘but the evil which I would not, that I do.’ ‘Lord, give me chastity!’ St Augustine had pleaded to God. ‘But not just yet.’ I bet those two knew all about how tempting it is to use sex to escape from one’s problems, and of course they would have understood that ordinands aren’t supermen, automatically sanctified by their calling. Ordinands are only human; I knew I wasn’t the only student at that College who scooted around on the quiet in his spare time, and if the moral stalwarts and the sexually pure are now flinging up their hands in horror and gasping: ‘Surely not!’ may I remind them that this was the 1960s when the Church was being shaken to its foundations by the permissive society.

If the Church had become the idol of the scared traditionalist die-hards who ran the Theological College, then sex without doubt had become the idol of the secular world which existed beyond the walls of the Cathedral Close. The Theological College staff thought they could avoid one form of idolatry by turning to embrace another, but they were wrong. You don’t beat idolatry by holding fast to idols. You beat idolatry by holding fast to God, but that’s easier said than done.

I lived my double life for over a year. Then in 1968 my nerve finally snapped and I asked Rosalind to marry me.

There were several reasons propelling me towards this proposal. The first, obviously, was that I could stand the strain of a double life no longer. The second was that I had begun to suspect my father had intuited what was going on with the result that he was becoming ill with worry about me – and I just couldn’t risk him getting sick; he was now at an age when any illness could kill him. The third reason was that my ordination was looming on the horizon and I knew that once I was a priest no more dabbling with Debbies and Doreens would be possible. And the fourth reason was that I had just had a bad fright when a condom had broken and Tracy had mused: ‘It might be kind of fun to be pregnant.’ This remark horrified me so much that I even felt it was a call from God to reform. I prayed feverishly for the grace to alter my life, and on the morning of the day when I was due for my next chaste date with Rosalind I opened my eyes, sat bolt upright in bed and thought: I’ll do it.

So I did. I proposed and was accepted. Happy ending. Or was it?

The best thing about Rosalind was that I had known her all my life and found her familiarity relaxing. She was the granddaughter of a certain Colonel Maitland, now dead, who had been a friend of my mother’s and who had owned the largest house in Starrington Magna apart from the Manor. Rosalind still lived at this house with her parents. She was a church-goer, musical, intelligent and good-looking in that slim, slightly equine way which is such a recurring feature among the English upper-classes. She had a part-time job doing special flower-arrangements for a Starbridge florist, and was beginning to receive freelance commissions to plan the floral side of weddings. Kind, friendly and a good organiser, she clearly had all the right attributes for a clerical wife, and I could now look forward to living happily ever after.

‘There’s one big favour I want to ask you,’ I said. ‘Could we keep the engagement unofficial at the moment? I’d like to announce it on the day of my ordination.’

Now, why did I say that? I didn’t like to think. But Rosalind, perfect Rosalind, said what a super idea, we’d then have a double reason to celebrate, what fun it would be tossing back all the champagne.

‘Do we keep absolutely mum?’ she added. ‘Or do we let the cat out of the bag to a favoured few?’

I was anxious to set my father’s mind at rest. ‘Okay, a favoured few – but no notice in The Times yet.’

Rosalind’s parents were delighted. Rosalind’s best friend was delighted. Rosalind’s favourite godmother was delighted. My father professed himself delighted but went right on being crucified by an anxiety which was invisible to the eye but searing to the psyche.

A week later I wound up in bed with Tracy at Langley Bottom.

At that point, being twenty-five years old and no fool, I realised that unless I got help in double-quick time I was going to crash into the biggest mess of my life. I couldn’t talk to my father. He might have died, finally tortured to death by his anxiety. I couldn’t talk to Aelred Peters. Resourceful though Father Peters was in treating the problems caused by abnormal psychic activity, I felt that mopping up something so prosaic as a sex-mess would be beyond him. But there was still one man who I thought could help me.

I made an appointment to see the Bishop of Starbridge, Dr Charles Ashworth.

VII

Bishop Ashworth was the main reason why the Theological College was a dead loss, but in my hour of need I didn’t let that prejudice me against him. In his pre-episcopal days he had been a distinguished professor of divinity at Cambridge. That was the problem. It’s dangerous to let divinity professors out of their ivory towers to roam unfettered through the Church of England; the temptation to convert theological colleges into minor outposts of major universities is apparently irresistible, but theological colleges are supposed to train priests for the priesthood, not intellectuals for the groves of Academe.

To be fair to Uncle Charles I have to admit he was a good bishop, and I have to acknowledge that at least he had had the guts to come out of his ivory tower and shoulder a top executive position in the real world. It wasn’t his fault that he got his kicks out of an academic approach to religion. That was just the way he had been designed by God. The important thing was that this intellectual kink hadn’t prevented him from being a devout Christian who had no hesitation in standing up for what he believed in. I wasn’t sure I believed all he believed in – he was an ultra-conservative wedded to what he called the ‘absolute truths’ – but I respected his courage and I admired him as a good man who had always been kind to me.

He was an old friend of my father’s; my father had been his spiritual director since 1937. There were very few people my father saw any more, but the Bishop was one of them. Uncle Charles kept an eye on my father. He had also kept an eye on me since my mother’s death, and he regularly invited me to the South Canonry, the bishop’s official residence in the Cathedral Close.

During his Cambridge days the undergraduates had nicknamed him Anti-Sex Ashworth because of the hard line he always took against sexual transgression, but I had long since sensed, by that mysterious process so difficult for any psychic to describe, that he wasn’t anti-sex at all but a man of the world who, somewhere along the line, had encountered a sexual catastrophe which had made him feel called to hammer out repeated warnings about how dangerous immorality could be. Seeking help from a conservative bishop tough on sexual sin – the bishop who would shortly be ordaining me – might seem as suicidal as putting my head in a lion’s mouth, but I felt I needed someone morally tough to beat me into shape, just as I needed a priest who could tackle a sex-mess without flinching. I wasn’t sure how much to tell him – obviously the minimum, but how minimal was the minimum? – and I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to tell him anything, but all I knew was that I had to try.

I called him ‘Uncle Charles’ because my father belonged to the generation who thought children should address their parents’ close friends by courtesy titles. When I reached twenty-one the Bishop had invited me to drop the title, but this had proved impossible. He was so formidably elegant and distinguished, and his date of birth in 1900 was so very far removed from mine.

‘Well, Nicholas!’ he said, giving me his best smile as we settled ourselves in his study after the ritual exchange of small-talk. Uncle Charles’s best smile always reminded me of a toothpaste advertisement. It flashed with great effect on television whenever he was hauled on to discussion programmes to oppose the permissive society.

‘Well, Uncle Charles!’ I responded warily, trying to beat back a burst of fright.

‘How are things going?’ enquired the Bishop, laying on the charm with a shovel in an effort to put me at ease.

‘Great!’ I said, feeling more nervous than ever.

‘Splendid!’ exclaimed the Bishop with enthusiasm.

We eyed each other in silence for some seconds while the Bishop kept his smile nailed in place and I struggled to master my panic, but at last I managed to say: ‘Uncle Charles, I wanted to see you because, well, I thought, that’s to say, wondered if you might possibly, sort of, well, you know, help me.’

‘My dear Nicholas, of course!’ said the Bishop, still oozing the charm which was such a famous feature of his public persona, but beyond this routine response I could sense his real self unfolding in a spontaneous surge of concern. The Bishop had an interesting psyche where sensitivity and an idealistic nature were kept under ruthless control by his first-class intellect and his considerable sophistication. Yet this complex personality, which could have produced a divided man, was seamlessly integrated. The glittering public persona was the servant, not the master of his true self beyond; its job was not to impress people but to create a shield behind which his true self had the privacy to flourish.

I hadn’t the experience in 1968 to put this judgement into words, but I did know by instinct that I had to ignore that toothpaste smile and the oozy charm in order to address myself to the genuinely sympathetic man beyond.

‘I’m sort of bothered,’ I said, ploughing on in the incoherent way fashionable among the under-thirties, but then found myself unable to express what bothered me most. With renewed panic I grabbed the next most bothersome subject on my list. ‘I mean, the Theological College seems to be useless to me at the moment, and … well, the truth is I don’t honestly think, to put the matter in a nutshell, it can help me in –’ I hesitated but forced myself to add ‘– in this muddle.’

‘My dear Nicholas!’ said the Bishop again, professional charm still well to the fore but his genuine concern now so strong that he quite overlooked the signpost provided by my last three words. ‘But how can the College be useless? It’s the most splendid place – I’ve entirely preserved it from the decadent spirit of the age!’

‘Yes, Uncle Charles. Excuse me, sir, but I think that could be the problem: it’s so well-preserved it’s dead. Of course I’m not suggesting it should go all trendy and liberal like some of the other theological colleges –’

‘I should think not indeed!’

‘– but I do wish the staff were allowed to talk about relevant things sometimes, I mean things that are relevant to Real Life – like, in a manner of speaking, sex. It seems sort of, well, weird to go on and on about Church history and dogmatics yet never once mention –’

‘Dear me, you young men of today with your passion for “relevance”! But tell me this: what makes you so sure that what you think is relevant isn’t instead just a passing fashion? Who makes the judgement on what’s relevant, and how is that judgement made? Subjective judgements made under the influence of passing fashion are dangerous, Nicholas. One must keep one’s gaze fixed on absolute truths, not relative values.’

‘Sex looks like a pretty absolute truth from where I’m standing, Uncle Charles.’

“Well, of course it does!’ said the Bishop, shifting ground quickly in order to extricate us from the theological quicksands. ‘Don’t think I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be young!’ Suddenly he got down to business. ‘Okay, I get the message,’ he said, very trendily for a conservative prelate. ‘Girl-trouble, isn’t it?’

‘Yep.’

‘You’re strongly attracted to a girl and you want to go to bed with her.’

‘Um.’ The situation was now so delicate that I could only hold my breath and pray for courage.

This is a very, very difficult problem,’ said the Bishop, finally casting aside the glittering public persona and speaking straight from the heart with profound sympathy. ‘Far be it from me to underestimate it. As you know, I wholly disapprove of fornication, but I’m also wholly aware how tempting it is to indulge in it. I shan’t regale you with all the familiar arguments because you’ll have encountered them numerous times before – you’ve read Austin Farrer on continence, I assume?’

‘Yes, Uncle Charles.’

‘And Archbishop Ramsey on sex and society?’

‘Yes, Uncle Charles.’

Then since Farrer and Ramsey are better priests than I am I can hardly hope to improve on what they say as they spell out the Christian point of view. So let me take a purely pragmatic – one might almost say worldly – approach. I’ve never been called to celibacy. At various times during my life this has created severe problems for me, but let me now attempt to share the fruits of my experience with you.’

Clever old Uncle Charles, knowing perfectly well that the ruminations, no matter how truthful, of two saints like Farrer and Ramsey were of little practical use to someone battling away against maxi-erections. With bated breath I waited to sample the fruits of his experience.

‘Fornication,’ said the Bishop with superb self-confidence and a total lack of embarrassment, ‘is like Russian roulette – by which I mean it can be tremendously exciting. It gives you all sorts of thrilling delusions about how dashing and masculine you are, but unfortunately the reality is that you may wind up destroyed. Now, that’s not thrilling, that’s not dashing, that’s not even a boost to the masculine ego. It’s just very silly and a tragic waste. Of course you may get away with your adventure; it’s always possible to survive Russian roulette. But why be immature enough to take such a mindless risk once you’re grown up? There’s more to life than getting hooked on adrenalin –’ the Bishop certainly knew how to turn on the trendy vocabulary; moving in the world of television had evidently taught him a thing or two ‘– and smashing up your future for the sake of a night of pleasure just doesn’t make sense, not if you’ve got anything that resembles a brain.’