Glamorous Powers (19 page)

I became aware that Francis was speaking. He had overcome his inner chaos sufficiently to say: ‘Tell me exactly what happened,’ and I found I could obey him calmly in a manner which could neither exasperate nor threaten him. ‘It wasn’t a vision,’ I added when the moment came to comment on the experience. ‘There were no physical symptoms preceding it, no dislocation of time and space. I believe it was what Julian of Norwich would have called a “showing”.’

Francis finally managed to recapture his favourite defence, the debonair theatrical manner. ‘You alarm me exceedingly! Can we keep Dame Julian out of this?’

‘You’ll understand my state of mind better if we bring her in.
After her own “showings” she felt so happy, so confident, so convinced that all would be well –’

‘Am I to deduce from these somewhat emotional utterances that you feel you’ve received a divine reassurance?’

‘You can deduce that I now see my recent behaviour – all the lies and evasions, all the fears and anxieties – as demonstrating the most shameful lack of trust in God. I know now that all I have to do is have faith and trust that all will be well. If the vision’s genuine I’ll be led to a new life in God’s service. If the vision’s false you’ll arrange for me to be cared for until I can continue to serve God in the Order. So my task here’s not to worry about whether you can exercise the charism of discernment; my task is to trust God by trusting you because only by putting myself without reserve in your hands can God’s will for me ever be conclusively revealed.’

In the silence which followed I sensed Francis’ wordless thanksgiving but all he eventually said was: ‘That sounds like a promising approach. Am I then to assume –’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’m going to tell you everything at last. Everything from Alpha to Omega.’

‘The truth’s so painful,’ I said, ‘that over the years I’ve buried it by reconstructing my memories into a pattern which I could endure. You suspected this, of course, but I couldn’t dispense with the defence this reconstruction offered; I had neither the courage nor the faith to do so.’

Francis’ sleek powerful psyche, which always reminded me of a giant member of the cat family, was now entirely still and the stillness was mirrored in his motionless body. He had surmounted the acute strain generated by the burden of his responsibility, and having turned inward to dwell upon his own ordeal he was now turning outward to dwell with a new strength on mine.

I said: ‘Everything I told you about my marriage was true,
yet it was all false because I couldn’t paint the past in the right colours.’ As I groped for the right words I again ignored the rule which forbade a monk to stand while his superior was seated. I moved to the window. The dark events of 1940 were being enacted against the background of a brilliant summer, and instinctively I tried to fight my way through my own darkness by staring at the light sky beyond the rooftops.

‘My marriage was hell,’ I said. ‘I hated my life as a husband. I was miserable, isolated, trapped with this woman who hadn’t the faintest idea what my life was about. Sexual intimacy was the only compensation and even that in the end became a mockery underlining my loneliness. But the real nightmare was that this tragedy was all my fault. Betty was a nice girl in her own way and she tried hard to be a good wife. She really did love me – but I couldn’t love her, not after the romantic passion was gone, and of course she came to realize that. People always know when they’re not loved. She became angry, possessive, demanding – and the more demanding she became the more I withdrew from her. I couldn’t help myself – not when my psychic space was being continually invaded and my whole inner life was cut to ribbons … If I hadn’t gone away to sea the marriage couldn’t have survived, but at sea I could recuperate until I had the strength to face another harrowing spell ashore – oh, what hell it was! And all the time I felt cut off from God by my failure to love as I should. I was in despair.’

I paused to calm myself. I examined the pattern of the roof-tops with care. I even counted the chimney-pots.

‘When she finally died,’ I said, ‘the full horror of the tragedy dawned on me. She’d died after I’d psychologically abandoned her, and I’d abandoned her for no valid cause. She’d loved me; she’d committed no sin, but I’d made her suffer and suddenly as I saw the exact dimensions of my cruelty I felt unfit to live. That was when the crushing burden descended upon my psyche – I talked of the burden, didn’t I? And I admitted the burden was guilt, but I only revealed a fraction of it, the guilt I felt when I jilted Hilda. My guilt was far deeper than I disclosed to
you. It was a huge, crippling, back-breaking guilt, and I carried it with me during all those years I spent as a widower.

‘At first,’ I said after a rapid recount of the chimney-pots, ‘I thought I saw how I could alleviate the guilt. I decided I’d do my best to love my children by being an exemplary father to them.

‘But I couldn’t.

‘I should have applied to work ashore so that I could be at home with them – it was two years before the War so I didn’t have to be at sea – but I couldn’t face the thought of either my mother-in-law or a hired woman keeping house for me, destroying my psychic space – and worse still I knew I wouldn’t be able to cope with the children, all the noise, all the mess, all the emotional demands – I couldn’t do it, I just couldn’t do it, I wanted to but it was beyond me, I’d have gone mad, broken down utterly – no, I felt it was quite impossible for me to be permanently ashore, but oh, how I despised myself, and oh, how guilty I felt! So I never alleviated the burden after all. What happened, in fact, was that I doubled it.

‘My meetings with my children became so awkward; I tried hard to show them I cared and I did care, but … I couldn’t express my love adequately. The guilt crippled not only my power of expression but the love itself. Perhaps if the children had been more like me communication would have been easier, but Ruth, reminding me of Betty, only exacerbated my guilt, while Martin remained beyond my reach no matter how hard I tried to build an understanding between us. I did make an effort to share my life with him when he was an adolescent; I talked of the Church and my work and how happy I was in God’s service, and there was a time when I thought he might become a priest – it was around the time of his confirmation – he was genuinely devout – I hoped … even prayed … which was stupid of me because I was just praying that my own selfish wish should be granted and not pausing to ask that God’s will might be done. However I was still hoping that he might become a priest when he told me he wanted to be an actor – an
actor
–’ I could no longer continue.

‘Yes,’ said Francis. ‘Yes. There’s no need to explain how you felt.’ And as he spoke I felt his psyche brush mine faintly in the dark.

I had to pause to focus my gaze on the view again. The sky beyond the chimney-pots was a radiant blue.

‘I should have discouraged him,’ I said. ‘I should have insisted that he went up to Cambridge before making any decision about the future. But I didn’t. And I wasn’t being a noble understanding father. I was being a bad selfish one. I wanted to enter the Order so desperately that I put my needs before his welfare – I let him go into a notoriously amoral world so that I could have the life I wanted. How bad a father can a man be? I abandoned Martin – and I abandoned Ruth too; I let her marry a man I disliked because I wanted to get her off my hands and be free … And so I failed my children, failed them as I’d failed my wife, and the burden of my guilt lay unredeemed.

‘But by that time I’d worked out how I could finally exorcize the guilt. I knew I had to atone for what I’d done, atone for all my sins and my terrible failures. I had to live in imitation of Christ and suffer as he suffered on the cross – it was the only way, Francis, the only way, and I know that sounds as if I enjoy suffering but I didn’t, I don’t, I hated it, I hardly knew how to bear it, but I endured it because I knew it was the only hope I had of setting down that appalling burden which had been crushing me for so long.

‘However there were two aspects of my call to the cloister, and unless I describe them both you won’t understand the exact nature of the force which has kept me in the Order for all these years. The first and most obvious aspect involved this exorcism of the guilt by a spiritual purification. But the second aspect … well, I hardly know how to put this, I feel so embarrassed, but as the years passed and my children flourished I came to believe that my atonement, my suffering, was somehow enabling them to live free of the shadow of my past sins. I came to think … Francis, I know this sounds superstitious to the point of blasphemy, but I thought I’d succeeded in driving a bargain with God. I was desperately afraid my children’s lives
would go wrong because I’d been a bad father, so I told myself that so long as I remained a good monk God would repay me for my sacrifice by keeping my children safe. What pride, what intolerable arrogance to think that one can ever drive bargains with God! What a theological perversion ever to see the concept of atonement in those self-centred primitive terms –’

‘Nevertheless it was still an attempt to raise up and reconcile all things in Christ. The form of the attempt might have been misconceived but the desire to atone was obviously genuine enough.’ Francis’ psyche, heavy and blunt yet trained to move with an elegant delicacy, encircled mine and supported it. Again his body mirrored the psychic action. Rising to his feet he crossed the room, guided me back to my chair and moved his own chair around the desk so that he could sit at my side.

‘Last May,’ I said when I could speak again, ‘I was so pleased to see Martin on my birthday. He looked so happy too. I thought: how wonderful it is that he’s doing so well! And I felt all my sacrifices had been worthwhile.

‘Then he told me.

‘Of course I can see now how brave it was of him, but I was so shattered I couldn’t respond to that gesture of trust. Then in his pain he started making accusations, saying it was all my fault, saying I’d never been there when he needed me, saying everything which underlined my guilt until in the end I could bear it no longer. I told him to get out – my son
– Martin
– I rejected him absolutely, but as soon as I was alone I thought: how
could
I have treated him like that? And I hated myself. But then a very strange thing happened. Once the shock had faded I felt everything changing, as if the world was turning itself inside out. Instead of thinking: how deeply I’ve failed! and hating myself, I thought: how desperately hard I’ve tried to succeed! and I resented that Martin should be oblivious of all the suffering I’d endured for his sake. My anger was no longer turned inward upon myself; it had turned outward at last, and then as my self-hatred finally began to disintegrate I saw my superstitious bargain with God for what it was: superstition.

‘The first aspect of the atonement represented by the monastic life had indeed been essential for me; I’d genuinely needed to assuage my guilt, purge myself of my sins and achieve the spiritual development which I could never have achieved in the world, but for me then to say to God: “I’ll keep on atoning if you keep my children safe,” was not only pathetic but futile. Ruth and Martin had gone their own way in the world and Martin at least hadn’t been preserved from harm. The truth was I’d tried hard to be a good parent, I’d done my best, pitiful and inadequate though that was, and now there was nothing more I could do.’ I hesitated, then heard myself whisper in imitation of Christ on the cross: ‘It was finished.’

Silence fell, and this time Francis’ psyche encircled mine not merely with efficiency but with compassion. Reaching out with his right hand he briefly covered my interlocked fingers.

At last I was able to say: ‘Of course I can see now that I’m just emotionally disturbed. The meeting with Martin destroyed my need to atone and this triggered such an upheaval in my mind that I imagined I was being called to leave the Order. But in fact what was happening was that God, in his great mercy, had finally seen fit to relieve me of my self-hatred because he had realized that my call to serve him as a monk was so deeply entrenched that I no longer needed to be kept in the Order by a psychological compulsion. At the same time he had also seen fit to purge my call of the superstition which had become attached to it; indeed one could regard the whole experience as a further spiritual purification.’ I paused. I was feeling calmer. Beyond the window the chimney-pots were bathed in a brilliant light.

‘I’m sure now,’ I said, ‘that the vision was an allegory. I believe the ruined building behind the chapel represents my failures during my life in the world, and the chapel represents my life in the Order. The mysterious suitcase still represents change, but it’s a change from a call underpinned by guilt to a call flowing from a psyche at peace. And the light at the end of my vision represents the confirmation of my call, just as Timothy said – the assurance that I’ll be able to serve God as a monk
even better than before now that I’m fully reconciled to the past.’

Francis slumped back in his chair but when I steeled myself to look at him I saw that although he was limp with exhaustion the expression in his eyes was friendly. Presently he even smiled.

‘So that’s how you finally see your situation, is it?’ he said.

‘Yes, Father.’ As an afterthought I added: ‘Please forgive me for calling you Francis just now when I was upset.’

But Francis, no longer intimidated but emanating an unmistakable air of confidence, merely waved this apology aside as if my offence were too trivial to be worth mentioning. ‘You’ve no doubt you’re right?’ he persisted. ‘No doubt at all?’