Mystical Paths (3 page)

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 nick- named 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 Bishophad 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.’

This was fine but he was only telling me what I already knew. What I really wanted him to tell me was how to muzzle the maxi-erection so that it only occurred with the right girl; or in other words, I wanted to know how I could stop being hooked on Tracy and start being hooked on Rosalind.

‘... and I need hardly point out to a young man of your intelligence,’ he was adding, ‘that fornication is worse than Russian roulette because a person other than yourself is also involved in this potentially suicidal gamble. Don’t risk it, Nicholas. Wait for marriage. It may be the toughest exercise in self-restraint that you’re ever called to make, but very often the most worthwhile things in life can only be achieved with considerable effort by people who have the strength and wisdom to act as mature human beings, not selfish children.’

I nearly tied my tongue in a knot in my haste to say: ‘Right. Actually I’m getting married. In fact I’m unofficially engaged.’

‘You are? But that’s wonderful – how very exciting!’ said the 39 Bishop, sagging with relief. ‘Who is she? Do I know her?’ ‘Rosalind Maitland.’

‘Oh, an excellent girl — what a splendid choice! And how pleased your father must be!’

‘Um.’

‘Wait a minute — you’re signalling there’s a fly in the ointment — ah yes! Now I see what you were driving at: you’re strongly tempted to try a spot of premarital sex.’

‘Well —’

‘No, hang on, I’m on the wrong track again, aren’t I? I’m talking too much — time for me to shut up and listen. Why don’t you tell me exactly what’s bothering you?’

This was the moment I had been dreading. ‘Well ...’ But disclosure was now impossible. After his resounding approval of Rosalind I could hardly admit I wasn’t as enthusiastic as I should have been about marrying her. And I certainly couldn’t admit that it was not Rosalind Maitland of Starrington Magna whom I found sexually irresistible but Tracy Dodds of Langley Bottom. A long and desperate silence ensued.

‘I’ve got it!’ said the Bishop suddenly. ‘You’ve sown a few wild oats and your conscience is troubling you. Well, of course young men do sow wild oats, even young men who want to be ordained; we’re all liable to succumb to temptation, even the best of us. You’ll remember St Paul’s words, of course. "Let him who thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall."‘

‘Yes, Uncle Charles.’

‘What you have to do now, Nicholas, if you repent — and I’m sure you do or you wouldn’t be here seeking my help — is to put the wild oats firmly behind you, set yourself a high standard of conduct for the future and ask God’s grace to enable you to be a first-class husband to Rosalind. Getting married to an excellent girl who loves you is without doubt the best possible course you can take.’

‘Yes, Uncle Charles.’

‘Meanwhile I do see you still have the problem of abstaining from sex, even though chastity does become easier when there’s a definite end to it in sight. Of course it would be easy for anold buffer like me to say to a young man like you: "The solution is to take cold showers and work hard." It would be easy — but it would be wrong. It would imply a view of man based on the Pelagian heresy, the view that man can improve himself by his own efforts without God’s grace. But grace is all. And prayer is vital. I presume the Theological College has at least given you some useful teaching about prayer even if it hasn’t been busy lecturing about sex?’

I seized the chance to race away from the subject of my sex-life. ‘Well, to be honest, Uncle Charles, I’ve found the College’s teaching on prayer a dead loss. It doesn’t connect with anything I do at all.’

The Bishop, who had been so commendably open, now began to close up. He loved that College as a child loves a favourite toy. He had rescued it from the slough of sloth into which it had slumped during the years following my father’s retirement. He had nurtured it, poured his precious time into it, attended every governors’ meeting he could, redesigned its syllabus, basked in the glow of its rising reputation. To hear this cherished fiefdom repeatedly criticised by a mere ordinand was to experience the trial of his Christian patience to its limit. ‘And what, may I ask,’ he said dryly, ‘do you "do" when you pray?’

‘Flip a switch in my head and tune in.’

There was a pause. Then Uncle Charles said: ‘Have you discussed this with your father?’

‘Don’t need to.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s one of the subjects we don’t have to talk about in words.’

‘I think most discussions are more profitable when conducted in words,’ said the Bishop, now speaking very dryly indeed, ‘and since your father’s such a distinguished spiritual director —’

‘He says he can’t be my spiritual director because he’s too emotionally involved.’

‘Ah well, yes, Pm sure that’s right, but nonetheless I’d have thought that on such an important subject as prayer he .. . well, never mind. Remind me: who’s your personal tutor at the College?’