Absolute Truths (20 page)

Few bishops could have claimed to be a more loyal supporter of
the monks and nuns in Anglican orders than I was, but it is a fact
of life that parents want their children to marry and procreate.
This is obviously such a deep-rooted human desire that one might
call it a biological absolute truth, and it explains the surge of
disappointment felt by parents when for whatever reasons their
children abstain from marriage. I know there are Roman Catholic
cultures where parents consider it an honour if their child chooses
a celibate life, but I have noticed that the child is usually one of a
large family and can be spared without too great a sense of loss.
I did not have a large family of children. I had two sons and I
wanted neither of them to be cut off from the complex dimensions
of human fulfilment which I had experienced as a husband and
father.

Indeed the fact that Charley was my adopted son only made
me more anxious that he should wind up a married man with
two-point-three children — or whatever current statistics rated the
norm for a middle-class Englishman in the mid-twentieth century.
If he deviated from this norm I knew I would fed that despite all
my efforts I had failed to bring him up properly — and I did not
want to think I had failed in any way with Charley. I needed
Charley to be a success. It justified all the hardship I had endured
in the early years of my marriage. Like his hero-worship of me,
his success was part of my reward.

Telling myself that this new crisis was merely a manifestation of
his continuing immaturity, I fought back my panic and toiled to
appear mildly surprised. I said: ‘Isn’t this a trifle sudden?’

‘
Yes, but it’s abundantly clear to me now that
I’ve
no hope of
serving God properly unless I’m in an all-male environment and
soaking myself in asceticism.’ Apparently unconscious of any irony
he took a most unascetic mouthful of hot buttered crumpet.

Still immaculately courteous I enquired: ‘But what’s driven you
to abandon all hope of marriage?’

‘
The realisation that I’m desperately in love with a married
woman who finds me repulsive.’

‘You mean —’

‘
Yes. I’m besotted with Venetia,’ said Charley, again referring
to the young woman who had been Lyle’s protégée. ‘I think of
her constantly. I dream of her. I toss and turn in bed every night
until I’m drenched in sweat —’

Much relieved to receive this new evidence that Charley was
sexually normal I said dryly: ‘How very
inconvenient.’

‘
Inconvenient!
Dad, I can’t tell you — words fail me — it’s imposs
ible for me even to begin to describe the quality of my erections —’

‘
Dear me.’

‘
— and they always come at exactly the wrong moment!
Never
in
all my life have I experienced such —’

‘
I’m sure they’re most remarkable. But Charley, I suspect the
real question here is not why you should have fallen in love with
Venetia but why you should always be falling in love with women
who are unavailable for marriage. After all, Venetia isn’t the first
of these hopeless passions of yours, is she? There was the married lady-dentist when you were up at Cambridge — and then there was
that nun who gave those lectures on the mystics —’

‘
Those were just adolescent infatuations. This is the real thing
— and what slays me, Dad, is that I could have married her when
she was single back in 1%3! If only —’

‘
You weren’t sufficiently interested or you’d have done some
thing about it. Obviously it wasn’t meant that you and Venetia
should marry.’

‘
Well, I couldn’t possibly marry anyone else, and since all
women are now a torment, reminding me of what I can’t have,
what other choice do I have but to become a monk as soon as
possible?’

‘
If you’re called to be a monk I’ll cat my mitre, but don’t listen to me, I’m just a married bishop. I’ll ask Jon if he’d be willing to
see you.’

Charley groaned and sighed and bit deep into his second crum
pet, but this suggestion seemed to satisfy him and I realised he
was much happier now that he had acted out his feelings in such an exasperatingly self-indulgent manner. I felt wrecked, of course,
but I had long since discovered that feeling wrecked was an occupa
tional hazard of parenthood, nothing to get excited about. I
assumed I would eventually recover.

I was still trying to calm myself by predicting my inevitable
recovery when Charley said in a low voice: ‘If I don’t go into a
monastery I might wind up making a mess of my private life,’ and I heard at last the genuine cry for help which in my distress I had
failed to recognise earlier.

At once I said: ‘Of course you won’t make a mess of your private
life! I’ve brought you up, you’ve modelled yourself on me, you’re
going to be fine.’

Charley looked relieved, as if I had recited a magic incantation guaranteed to keep all disastrous futures at bay, but I was aware
that a shadowy uncertainty was trying to rise from some burial-ground deep in my mind. I could not analyse this uncertainty. It
merely hovered for a second in my consciousness before I blotted
it out.

Pouring myself some more tea, I began to calculate which train
I could catch from Waterloo.

At Waterloo I telephoned Lyle. ‘I’m getting the six-fifteen,’ I said.
‘Have a stretcher waiting at the station.’

‘Did you murder that ghastly Bishop of Radbury?’

Not quite. But I feel in the mood to murder our Mr Dean.’

‘
Don’t tell me Jack’s prize piece of gossip involved Stephen!’

‘
Imagine the worst and multiply by ten. Darling, I’ve got to see
Jon before I explode with the force of an H-bomb and devastate the diocese. Can you ask Edward or Roger to take the Rover to
the station so that I can drive straight to Starrington?’

‘
Oh Charles, don’t overdo it! You’ve been rushing around all
day long –’

‘
I’ll have a nap on the train. Oh, and phone the Community at
the Manor, would you, to tell them I’m coming – I want to make
sure the door in the wall is unlocked.’

The operator came on the line to demand more money. Hastily
I said to Lyle: ‘Sec you later,’ and hurried away on my journey to
the one man who was always able to restore my sanity whenever
I wanted to retreat to the nearest lunatic asylum.

SIX

‘
Oh God, save me from myself, save me from myself ... this
masterful self which manipulates your creation ... this self
which throws the thick shadow of its own purposes and desires in every direction in which I try to look, so that I
cannot see what it is that you, my Lord and God, arc showing
to me. Teach me to stand out of my own light, and let your
daylight shine.’

AUSTIN FARRER

Warden of Keble College, Oxford, 1960-1968

Said or Sung

I had met Jon in 1937 at the time of my first catastrophe, an event
which I have discreetly alluded to as a spiritual breakdown. I judge
it unnecessary to describe this episode in detail here, so I shall
merely say that although I never lost my faith I became for a time incapable of functioning as a priest. This nightmare was the result
of various psychological conflicts which Jon helped me to resolve.
He was then still a monk, the abbot of the Fordites’ Grantchester
house where I made a prolonged retreat in order to master my
problems.

At the time of my second catastrophe – my capture by the
Germans at Tobruk – Jon had left the Fordite Order and was
living in the Starbridge diocese with his second wife. It was here,
in 1945, that he again played a vital role in steering me back to
spiritual health, and since I owed him so much it was not surprising
that I tended in those days to view him through rose-tinted spec
tacles. But as the years passed I realised that although he was a
most gifted priest he was not without his problems and failings.

Jon did not leave the Order because he wished to remarry. His
departure, approved by his superior, was in response to a call from
God to return to the world in order to use his gifts on a large/
stage, and after many trials and tribulations he was led to the
Starbridge Theological College which he ran most successfully in
the years immediately after the war. (It was only after his retirement
that the College descended into the mess which I had to mop up
when I became bishop in 1957.) This post-war career of Jon’s
primarily exploited his gifts
as a
leader and teacher, and it was not until he retired from his position as principal that he was able to concentrate solely on his favourite work: spiritual direction.

Let me now say something about the qualities which made Jon
such an original priest. He was a mystic — by which I mean he
was one of that army of people, existing in all religions, who
understand themselves and the world in the light of direct experi
ences of God. Such people do not fit easily into conventional
ecclesiastical structures, as their individuality is at odds with insti
tutional life, but the best Christian mystics, the ones who have
been able to explore their special knowledge of God to the full by
attaining a holy, disciplined life, are always those who have man
aged to integrate themselves into the institutional life of the
Church. The mystic who insists on steering his own course runs
the risk of isolation, self-centredness and delusions of grandeur,
and this is never more true than for those mystics who are psychics.
Not all mystics are psychics and not all psychics are mystics, but
there is a degree of overlapping between the two. Both groups
tune in to the unseen, but mystics do not necessarily experience
the paranormal phenomena which are considered by all spiritual
masters to be more of a hindrance than a help to those following the spiritual way. I should stress that neither psychic powers nor
mystical inclinations guarantee spiritual health. Any gift can be
prostituted; or
as
Jon would say, anyone can dedicate their gifts
to the Devil.

Jon was one of those mystics who are also psychic, but he had
long since dedicated his psychic gifts to God’s service and he kept
a firm grip on them by operating within a strict framework of
Anglo-Catholic religious practice. Before I met Jon I did not
believe in psychic powers. I still do find it hard to believe some of
the things that appear to go on in defiance of rational expectations,
but since I had become a bishop I had learnt that pastoral help is
consistently sought by people whose lives have been made miser
able by paranormal phenomena, and that although most of the
cases prove capable of a rational explanation, there remains a group
for which no explanation is possible. As an academic theologian I
am not at all keen on this state of affairs, but unfortunately the phenomena do not depend for their existence on whether or not
I happen to be keen on them. Jon helped me to keep an open
mind and restrained my urge to retreat into a furious scepticism.

His own psychic speciality was telepathy, which stood him in
good stead in his counselling, and he was also a clairvoyant,
occasionally experiencing visions. He never spoke of these gifts to me until we had been friends for at least twenty years, although I
had suspected from the start that his insight into my problems
hinted at the existence of rather more than a well-developed
intuition. For a brief time in the 1940s he had been involved in
the ministry of healing and deliverance, but this had ended in
disaster and he had always refused to take an active part in helping
me solve paranormal problems.

As an academic theologian of the twentieth century I do not,
of course, believe in the dassical ministry of deliverance which
involves the rite of exorcism, but unfortunately — yet again — the
need for it exists whether I happen to believe in it or not. Over
the years I have come to the reluctant conclusion that a little holy
water sprinkled by my representative in a ‘haunted’ place can do
no harm and often produces a more peaceful state of mind in
those who have complained about the disturbance to their local
clergyman. (Naturally one never lets the story get to the press.)
On the exorcism of people I have more negative views, but luckily
the demand is so rare that my natural distaste has seldom been put to the test. Psychiatric treatment for those tormented is obvi
ously the best solution, but honesty compels me to admit there
a
re cases where the practitioners of orthodox medicine have no
effect whereas a skilled exorcist, backed up by a prayerful Christian
community, can achieve a healing. Jon regarded this as such an obvious truth that it hardly needed stating, and became very irri
tated with me when I tried to work out explanations involving
theories of multiple personality and the power of hypnosis.

He was twenty years older than I was, so in that February of
1965 he was three months short of his eighty-fifth birthday. His health was excellent, and he lived alone in a small cottage which
had been built for him after his second wife’s death. The cottage stood in the grounds of her manor house at Starrington Magna.
Both the house and the grounds were now run by a small Anglican
community, founded by Jon to preserve the inheritance for his son
Nicholas, the only surviving child of the marriage.

I find it hard to give a thumbnail sketch of someone so unusual
as Nicholas, so I shall simply say that he was a psychic like his
father and a very odd young man indeed. He seemed popular
with his contemporaries, who were apparently fascinated by his
oddness, but he never had a special friend. He told me once that
he did not need a special friend because he had his father. Lyle thought that he and Jon were much too bound up together and
that it was a great burden for a young man to have such an ancient
parent. She also said that Jon had made the greatest possible mis
take by embarking on parenthood again when he
was
over sixty,
but Lyle was always rather tart about Jon. I suspect it was because
he was one of the few men who had always found her wholly
resistible.

Jon had not been altogether successful in his attempts to forge
partnerships with women. His first marriage, made when he was
a very young priest, had been a failure but his wife’s death had released him from it, and as soon as the two children of the mar
riage were grown up he had abandoned his work
as a
prison
chaplain in order to embark on a career as a monk.

When he left the Order seventeen years later, he had quickly —
much too quickly, we all thought – plunged into matrimony again;
I can see now’ how difficult life must have been for him as he tried
to adjust to the world, and how the loss of his brethren’s support would have created a disorientating emotional vacuum. His new
wife, Anne, was a sensible, down-to-earth, competent woman, very
‘county’, who ran her family estate and always behaved as if she
had never heard of the word ‘psychic’ and never wanted to. She
was twenty-eight years Jon’s junior and had extremely good legs.
Jon adored her; she adored him; Lyle prophesied darkly that it
would all end in tears. Much irritated I told her not to be such a cynic, but as time passed I realised that the marriage
was
indeed
under stress, chiefly because Jon had only the haziest idea of how
to live as a married man. He told me once that his parents had
lived separate lives beneath the same roof, and I realised then that he had grown up in a home where marriage had been seen not as
an integrated partnership but as an association between two people
who had never become interdependent.

Pursuing his career at the Theological College after the war, he began to follow a policy of cramming far too many commitments
into every twenty-four hours. His wife often complained and he
promised to reform, but he never did. In fact after his retirement
from the College in 1950 he became busier than ever as a spiritual
director. Why did Jon overwork like this? Lyle said there was
something wrong with the marriage and that he was using his work
as an escape. I merely thought he found his work so rewarding that
he had a hard time tearing himself away from it, but eventually I
did begin to wonder if Lyle’s diagnosis was more accurate than
mine. Elderly men who have young wives should expect to encoun
ter problems as the years advance, and at last I wondered if Jon
was frightened of impotence; I asked myself whether his immersion
in his work, where he was confident his powers would not let him
down, was his way of blotting out his fear of a physical decline.

Then in 1957, when his wife was only forty-nine, she suddenly
died and he had to face up to the difficult truths which he had tried
so hard to evade. Overnight he changed into a recluse. Probably a
profound guilt that he had neglected his wife mingled with an
equally profound guilt that he was glad to return to the celibate
life, and the two produced intolerable feelings of shame and failure.
Probably too one could say that he associated this failure with his
life in the world and could only come to terms with the former
by rejecting the latter. Certainly from a spiritual standpoint one
could theorise that God, taking advantage of that compulsion to
atone for past mistakes, had then given Jon his final call: to be a
hermit, devoting his life to prayer.

It is one of the many unattractive features of the twentieth cen
tury that anyone who wishes to lead a solitary life is generally
considered to be either wholly deranged or at the very least psycho
logically disabled. Christians, I regret to say, arc not exempt from
holding this fashionable view, although anyone who has studied the history of the Church knows there is a strong eremitical tradition in Christianity. The great question to be asked when con
fronted by a would-be hermit is this: is the withdrawal from society
made so that he can be self-centred, freely indulging his neuroses
without benefit to anyone else, or is it made so that he can become
God-centred, using the drive to solitude as a means of serving
others with fruitful spiritual results? Jon eventually became God-
centred, continuing his spiritual direction by letter, still counselling
a few of his oldest friends and constantly praying for the welfare
of others, but for some months after Anne’s death I thought he
was stuck fast in a self-centred groove. Indeed I was seriously
worried about his mental health when his guilt-induced depression
showed no sign of lifting, and no one was more relieved than I
was when he began to recover his spiritual equilibrium.

No doubt he owed a considerable debt during this time to his friends among the Fordite monks who provided strong support
and took special care of young Nicholas, then a pupil at the monks’
public school, Starwater Abbey. I tried to supplement this care as
well as I could and we often had Nicholas to stay, but he was like
a puppy pining for his master and he always seemed happiest when
he was on his way home. Charley and Michael were very good, treating him as a younger brother, and I think he liked them in
his cool, detached way, but I noticed that he never made any
marked effort
to maintain their friendship.