Читать книгу Mystical Paths - Susan Howatch - Страница 37

I staggered across to the chapel, which stood near my father’s cottage on the floor of the dell. A hundred yards away I could see the wall which surrounded the grounds of the Manor, and I could also see the door there which the members of the Community used when they brought provisions to my father. It was easier to park the car beyond the wall and walk the few yards up the track to the cottage than to carry the shopping-bags for ten minutes along the meandering path from the main house, and in those days, before crime became a problem even in rural areas, my father kept the door in the wall unlocked during the daylight hours.

I was in such a state that I nearly bolted straight down the track to the road and hared to the village pub for another shot of brandy, but the chapel exerted its familiar magnetism and I headed across the floor of the dell instead. The chapel was young, about a hundred and twenty years old, and had been built in the style of Inigo Jones with such panache that it never seemed like a pastiche of his Palladian designs. It was small but perfectly proportioned, austere when viewed from the outside but fussier when viewed from within. This fussiness arose from the fact that my father had been unable to resist decorating the interior with various sumptuous Anglo-Catholic aids to worship. They formed a bizarre contrast with the plain, stark beauty of the altar’s oak cross, made by him before he had left the Order.

There were candles everywhere – my father was mad on candles – candles on the altar, candles to the side of the altar, prickets for the burning of votive candles at the back behind the pews. There was a holy water stoup by the door. Another candle (no electricity; that would have been cheating) burned before the Blessed Sacrament which was reserved (of course) in a pyx. The whole place reeked of incense but I didn’t mind that; I’d grown up with it, and a strong whiff of the Fordite Special always made me feel relaxed and at home. What I minded were the pictures, florid representations of biblical scenes which in turn represented my father’s uncertain taste in art. This uncertainty found its most embarrassing expression in a sentimental plaster statue of the Virgin and Child, vulgarly coloured and placed to the right of the altar on a fake-jewelled plinth. This had been installed after my mother’s death. My mother, a Protestant who had loved my father not because of his Anglo-Catholicism but in spite of it, would have booted that statue out of her ancestors’ chapel in no time flat.

It interested me that my father, who was extremely ascetic in so many of his habits, should choose to worship in this particular way. Ritualism does tend to be attractive to mystics because it’s designed to express those mysteries which are beyond the power of words to describe, and indeed I believed my father when he said a rich liturgy infallibly created for him a deep sense of the numinous and a consciousness of the presence of Christ in the mass. Yet now that I was older I thought there was also a psychological reason for his attraction to this lavish, extravagant classical ritualism which had been such a daring liturgical fashion in his youth. He had had a sedate upbringing in a little Victorian villa where money had been far from plentiful, and this had given him not only austere tastes but an inverted snobbery about the luxuries money could buy; he always had to pretend he hated luxury, but I think deep down he found it attractive and the only way he could give vent to this attraction was in his religious life. That somehow sanctified the illicit passion which could never be consciously acknowledged, and becoming an Anglo-Catholic had been his way of escaping from the emotional constipation and straitened circumstances of that Victorian middle-class upbringing.

But I hadn’t had that kind of upbringing, and now that I was old enough to think for myself, I felt increasingly confused about Anglo-Catholicism. It was well over a century since the Oxford Movement had relaunched the Catholic tradition within the Church of England, and the ageing of a once dynamic movement was becoming all too apparent. Undermined by Vatican II which (so the traditionalists said) had Protestantised the Church of Rome, the Anglo-Catholics had been left high and dry with a bunch of rituals which were going out of fashion not only among the Romans but among the Anglicans. The new trend towards a weekly parish Eucharist, that watered-down version of the mass, now made the Anglo-Catholic services look archaic and – that most damning word of the 1960s – irrelevant. And the majority of English churchgoers – the Protestant majority – hated ritualism anyway.

Yet I had been brought up an Anglo-Catholic. It was my wing of my Church. I belonged there, and as a mystic I too was drawn to the numinous qualities of the services. Yet although I knew I couldn’t abandon Anglo-Catholicism I was deeply dissatisfied with it. I felt strongly that it should be modernised but the traditionalists who ruled the roost were holding fast to the old ways as they developed a siege mentality. No hope of change there, and meanwhile that fatal old-fashioned look was becoming tinged with decadence. Often it seemed to me that the idol of the die-hards was now a god called LITURGY – and there were other even more unsavoury hints of decadence than idolatry, hints that were beginning to surface in the sexual hothouse of the late 1960s. Anglo-Catholicism had always attracted a homosexual element, but in Victorian times the homosexual priests had committed themselves to the celibate ideal and followed the fashion for intense friendships which were never consummated. Now celibacy was on the wane and society worshipped the idol called SEX. No wonder Anglo-Catholicism was in trouble. Sometimes I thought even heterosexual Anglo-Catholics were only interested in providing a camp stage-show of all the fashions imported from pre-Vatican-II Rome.

I said nothing of my dissatisfaction to my father. A relic of another age, the age when Anglo-Catholicism had been a dynamic movement sweeping all before it, he would have been deeply upset by my critical thoughts. He might even have thought I was a closet Protestant but I wasn’t. I just hated seeing Anglo-Catholicism go down the drain, and during my terms at Theological College I had found it a relief to retreat into the churchmanship of the Middle Way which I found not only in the College chapel but in the Cathedral. There was an Anglo-Catholic church in Starbridge – St Paul’s at Langley Bottom – but I never went near it. The Principal of the College said it had fallen into the hands of cranks. (‘Cranks’ was his shorthand for homosexuals and/or nutcases). Even my father, who thanks to his small circle of distinguished visitors was well primed with diocesan gossip, said once that he did hope I wouldn’t go there, and I was relieved to find I had no difficulty in giving him the necessary reassurance. I had no interest whatsoever in a square, dated ritualism oozing eccentric decadence. It would have been far too painful to watch, particularly since I attended my father’s services and knew how with the right priest even a dated ritualism could be made fresh, exciting and above all spiritually alive.

The big irony of this decline in Anglo-Catholicism was that a great many Anglo-Catholics were still able to kid themselves that everything was fine. This was because the Archbishop of Canterbury himself stood in the Church’s Catholic tradition, but if one stopped being sentimentally proud of the Archbishop, the uneasiness soon began. Although Ramsey might look old-fashioned he certainly wasn’t decadent and he certainly wasn’t out of touch with the harsh ecclesiastical realities of the 1960s, but I was now convinced he wasn’t typical of the High-Church wing. That wing needed to be revamped, given a hormone shot, dragged kicking and screaming into the midst of the Now Generation … or so I found myself thinking for the umpteenth time as I sat down amidst the florid, old-fashioned Catholic trappings in our family chapel that afternoon, but then who was I to criticise my elders and betters? I was just a twenty-five-year-old ordinand who had gone clean off the spiritual rails.

As I tried to crawl back on the rails again I knelt in the front pew, gave thanks to God for my deliverance from the demonic power unleashed at the séance, and prayed that Katie might be restored to full health. Then I set about making a comprehensive confession. I had become accustomed to making a private confession to God after every sexual lapse – a meaningless exercise, as I well knew, since I had had no intention of giving up fornication, but at least I’d found it helpful to go through the formal motions of repentance, and at least I had been able to tell myself that if I prayed regularly for the grace to be chaste there was always the chance that God might respond to my request. However, the catastrophe with Katie was in a very different league from my regular bouts of fornication and required not merely the acting out of a repentance ritual but a full-blooded, utterly honest confession combined with an unqualified promise to God that I would never behave in such a disgusting way again. This time my prayer for the grace to reform would be unmarked by insincerity. As I begged on my knees for forgiveness, every word would come straight from the heart.

Off I started. One by one I dragged my sins out of my memory and laid them carefully before God like a cat laying all manner of mangled little corpses before his owner. Pride, arrogance, lust, selfishness, vanity, disobedience, deceit (these last two related to the interview with my father) – and worst of all, the sexual abuse of a damaged human being. This was cruelty, a sin which always seemed to me to be much worse than mere lust. Nobody got much worked up about lust nowadays except my Uncle Charles ‘Anti-Sex’ Ashworth, but cruelty … Yet I hadn’t meant to be cruel. I’d meant to be – no, God only knew what I’d meant to be.

Thinking of God recalled me to my confession. I went on kneeling, mentally pawing over all the sins, but eventually I recited the Jesus prayer. This had a calming effect. Afterwards I scooped up all the sins, offered them to God and said without words: sorry, sorry, sorry, I want to reform, I want to turn around and lead a better life, please forgive me, please help me, please rescue me from this awful mess my life’s become. I prayed very hard, wordlessly, along these lines for some time. I did indeed feel deeply ashamed.

Finally I topped off the confession with the Lord’s Prayer and flipped the switch in my head to tune in to the Light. To my great relief a calmness instantly enveloped me, and I knew I’d been forgiven, I just knew, it was –

But my father hated that word ‘gnosis’ which recalled the Gnostic heresy.

Some people said Jung had been a Gnostic. My father had introduced me to Jung’s writings on religion with the caveat that I should beware of anything he wrote about Christianity. Jung was sympathetic to religion but often got in a muddle about Christianity and misrepresented the orthodox view.

‘Nevertheless he’s a profoundly religious man,’ my father had said, ‘and his writings are of immense interest as we all, priests and laymen alike, struggle to understand the human spirit.’ My father had long since grasped that the languages of Christianity and psychology could form two ways of expressing one truth, but I longed for a detailed synthesis which would make Christianity blaze across the minds of the unchurched mid-twentieth-century masses and render its message meaningful. It’s no good performing the classic academic exercise of expressing Christianity in terms of the latest fashionable philosophy. That appeals to no one outside the universities. For the mid-twentieth century you’ve got to express Christianity psychologically because even the average moron at a cocktail party has heard of the Oedipus complex. Or in other words, psychology’s the grassroots intellectual language of our time, and if you can translate Christianity into that, everyone will finally understand what the preachers are wittering on about in the pulpit – and then with understanding will come spiritual enlightenment …

I went on planning the conversion of England, but of course I was just an ordinand who had gone clean off the spiritual rails and was busy kidding himself he had crawled back on to them again.

At last, convinced that after such a successful confession I was now free to embark on the moral life which would signify my repentance, I set aside all thought of sin and realised I had missed lunch. To my surprise I found I was hungry. Back at the house I raided the larder, consumed two large roast-beef sandwiches, retired to my bedroom and slept.

Of course I never went to Starwater Abbey to see Father Peters.