Now I Know (21 page)

The others have ordinary jobs outside, except for William, who is the youngest, twenty-four, and only recently made a full member. He came to the house two months ago and is still looking for a job, so at present he helps Kit when he isn't job-hunting. David is an electrician working with a building firm in the town. Mark is a teacher in a local primary school. Dominic I'm not sure about yet but he seems to have something to do with social work among unemployed teenagers. John is a gardener with the council and works in the park and local cemetery.

What happens is that they all go off to their jobs like ordinary people at whatever times they have to. Dominic, for instance, has irregular hours sometimes. At home, they do their monk work and keep the daily timetable as best they can. They don't put themselves out to convert people. They think of themselves as representing Christ in ordinary life, and they only talk about their faith if someone asks them about it. They believe what they are and the way they live is what matters, not how many converts they make or whether people even know they are monks. When they're outside they wear ordinary clothes exactly like the people they work with. In the house, during Silence and for chapel, and when they are being monkish, they put on habits like the one I described Kit wearing.

Whatever they earn they pool. And they allow themselves a certain amount of pocket money each week so that they don't have to cadge from their workmates. They don't believe in begging or living off other people's charity. They think that working for their living is part of being like other people and not becoming somehow special. At the end of the year, what's left over from their earnings, if anything, they give away so that they never have anything to rely on or ever get cosy and lazy and right-wing.

There's a lot more to tell, but later . . .

Anyway, they aren't a bit like I expected. Not pompous or devout in a stuffy way. You don't feel they're going to pin you in a corner and give you the holy third degree. Which somehow only makes you keen to talk to them about what they believe. I'm quite impressed in fact. When they're together during Recreation and meals, they're lively and quite funny—they're always making ghastly jokes. So I'm beginning to enjoy myself, if I'm honest.

The way they behave in chapel is the most interesting of all. They do everything in a kind of routine way, but somehow they make it seem special as well. Can't explain it yet. But I quite look forward to the offices already, just to watch them and be part of the ritual. It's like a play or a very serious game, yet it's also private and—I don't know—
essential.
If they didn't do their chapel work, they wouldn't be anything, just a bunch of reasonably nice blokes living in the same house and pooling their pay. What they do in the chapel seems to make them into what they are outside chapel. As individuals as well as a group, I mean.

This is all confused. I'm too tired to explain properly.

I'll just tell you about what Bro. K. said to me this afternoon, then I'm off to bed. He explained about the community, then asked me how I'd like to spend my time here. All depends on how long I'm staying. Said I could just treat it like a holiday. Or I could go on like today, helping out and joining in with as much of their life as I like. (You needn't suffer all of Meditation! he said, laughing.) Or I could do a proper Retreat, which he would ‘direct'—i.e. guide me about what to do. This is a kind of organized three or four days when I try and think seriously about myself and what I believe and my attitude to religion, etc.

I didn't know what to decide so Bro. K. suggested I think about it over night and tell him tomorrow. I made this the thing I concentrated on during the Silence this evening. I've almost decided I'd like to do the Retreat. Might as well, as I'm here, and it's something I've never done before. And you've made me think about spiritual things. Though, the only result so far is that I don't know where I stand at all now, whereas I was quite sure before.

I told Bro. K. that I think I'm an atheist.

He said: At least we can try and help you to be a good one.

I said: What's a good atheist?

He said: The same as a good Christian—one who doubts.

I said: Do you doubt?

Sure, he said, thank God!

I said: Why thank God? Don't you want to be sure?

He said: There's a line in a book by Graham Greene: ‘The believer will fight another believer over a shade of difference. The doubter fights only with himself.'

I quite like that line, too.

Love,
Nik.

†

The first three opticians on Tom's list were of little help. There was no quick way, they said, to trace the owner of the specs, even if he did happen to be a customer. With enough time and trouble they would be able to work out from the remaining, cracked lens what the prescription was; then, if they searched their records, they might be able to match prescription to customer. But only
might.
Besides, it would all take days not hours, and was a long shot because the likelihood was that the owner wasn't a customer.

The fourth optician wasn't at first any more keen to get involved.

‘We do traces for the police sometimes,' he said, ‘but frankly, it costs so much time and effort I'd only be willing if the case is really serious.'

‘Serious?' Tom asked.

‘Murder, rape, something of that order.'

Tom smiled. ‘Would crucifiction count?'

The optician cocked his head. ‘You're kidding.'

‘Confidential info, sir.'

‘Grief!'

The optician bent his head to inspect the twisted spectacles lying on his desk where Tom had delicately placed them.

‘All right to touch?'

‘Carefully, sir.'

The optician shifted them with the end of his pen, bent closer, and used a small magnifying glass to inspect the inside edge of one of the arms near where it hinged to the frame.

‘Could be in luck,' he said, straightening. He was a tall man, thin, grey-haired with a bald patch on the crown that Tom thought looked like a monk's tonsure. Grey-suited, rugby club tie, rotary club badge in his lapel, flushed complexion, very precise manner. Probably near retirement. One of the town's pillars. Would know everybody. Worth keeping on his right side; never know when he'd come in useful. Like now, maybe.

Tom gave the optician his best schoolboy grin of excitement.

‘For a time,' the optician said, warming to the work, ‘we stamped a small mark on our frames. Thought it might prove useful, save time in other ways. Turned out not to be the case, so we gave up the practice about a year ago.'

‘And there's a mark on these?'

‘Must have been among the last pairs we did.'

‘So you know who the owner is?'

‘When we gave it up, the records were stored in the basement. Almost threw them away, but somehow, records being records—'

‘When do you think you might know?'

‘Let's see . . .' The optician consulted his appointment diary. ‘Busy the rest of the day. Won't be free till after we close. Then time for the search. Say seven. How will that do?'

Tom, champing at the bit of his impatience, said, ‘Okay, sir, if that's the soonest you can manage. I'll call back then.'

‘I'll do my best.'

The optician inspected the frames with his magnifying glass again, jotted down the mark. Tom carefully retrieved the evidence.

‘Seven o'clock, then,' he said and left, feeling at once excited by his success and irritated by the enforced delay before he could get his hands on the reward for playing his hunch.

†

NIK
'
S LETTERS
:  

Dear Julie
: Meditation this morning was no better than yesterday. Is my mind always this slapdash and all over the place? After Silence, when I had to polish the upstairs landing (hands and knees and old fashioned gluey wax you have to buff up, which takes ages if you put too much on—sweat, sweat), I had a session with Bro. K. I told him I thought I'd like to do a Retreat but that I didn't think I'd manage.

Bro. K.: Why?

Me: Because I've discovered I can't concentrate for more than two minutes, never mind for three days.

Bro. K.: We all have trouble with distractions. It's normal. Most people never notice how much their minds jump from one thing to another. They can't concentrate for long on one thing. One of the things Meditation teaches you is how to focus your attention, all your being, on one thing, one idea.

I said: But apart from that, I don't see how I can spend three days meditating and what you call praying when I don't believe.

He said: I thought you didn't know what you believe?

I said: I don't.

He said: Then this is as good a time as any to start finding out. Use your Retreat for that. You've got to start somewhere. Start there.

I said: But how?

Bro. K.: How does anybody do anything? Take something obvious. For example, how does somebody who wants to be a football player become a football player?

Me: Practice?

Before that. How does he know he wants to be a football player?

Probably because he saw football being played and thought he'd like to do it.

Right. Then what?

Gets a ball and kicks it about?

And?

Gradually learns to control it.

Watches good players playing?

And learns from them. And joins a team. He'd have to do that because football is something you have to be in a team to play.

Bro. K.: So he slowly gets better and better and if he really likes the game and is good enough at it, he might end up playing with a major side.

Me: Yes. But belief isn't a game, is it?

Bro. K. laughed. No, he said, but it's something you have to decide you want. Like you begin by deciding you want to be a footballer. At first you don't know anything about it. But you find a ball and play with it. And—this is the important thing—you copy what real footballers do—the people who already know how to play well. The same with belief. You learn about it by doing it. And you learn what to do by copying what believers do. You want to know about belief? Behave like a believer. But the first thing is deciding you want to believe. Deciding to play football is an act of will, isn't it? So is belief.

Me: Julie—the girl we're praying for—says that belief is a gift. She means a gift from God.

Bro. K.: Doesn't she ever doubt?

Never asked her.

Ask her then. I think what she might really be talking about is conviction—a kind of
knowing
—rather than about belief. Most people who believe in God have times when they doubt. When they lose their sense of conviction. But they go on believing. They make a decision to accept the idea of God, even though they're doubtful, rather than the idea that there's nothing. In other words, they make a conscious act of will to believe. There's no other way.

But that seems hypocritical to me.

It's only hypocritical if you pass yourself off as someone who
knows.
You only have to say you
believe
but don't
know.
A true believer is someone who's searching for knowledge. That must be true, mustn't it? Because as soon as you
know
something, you're not a believer any more. You're a
knower.
You've found out the truth and can prove it. But first you have to be a believer. So a believer is simply someone who's decided what kind of knowledge he's searching for. Not just any knowledge, but knowledge of what he calls God. Just like a biologist searches for knowledge about animals and how they live, and a medical doctor searches for knowledge about human sickness and how to cure it. They can be those things—biologist or medical doctor—and be a believer as well—a searcher after knowledge of the ultimate, the above all, the source of all knowledge. See?

I see what you mean. Don't know if I accept it!

Sounds to me like what you want to be is an academic, God help you!

It's just that I don't have any strong feeling 1 want to believe. All I think I want is to know about belief.

Bro. K. sucked in his breath. Then you're on dangerous ground, he said. Because where belief is concerned, you can't find out about it without taking the risk of accepting it—of becoming a believer. So watch out!

Why?

Look, Nik, the problem is that you're trying to behave like a biologist studying the behaviour of an animal, when the subject you're studying isn't an animal and can't be investigated like that. You've made the classic mistake of using the wrong tools for the job. Like wanting to know what the air around you is made of and trying to cut it open with a hammer and chisel to find out.

With belief, he said, you have to live it if you want to know about it. You have to be your own laboratory, your own set of tools, your own specimen. You have to observe belief at work in yourself, if you really want to understand it. That's why some people say belief is a mystery. You can't take it out and examine it. You can't cut it open on a dissecting table. You can't even describe it very successfully. And you can't explain it to someone else. Plenty of people have tried, and they've all failed. You can only experience it and know what it is by living it.

I said: But you have to will yourself to believe first?

No other way, I'm afraid, Bro. K. said.

By the time we'd got this far, it was coffee break.

After coffee I told Bro. K. I'd stay till the end of the week, and do a Retreat, and that during the Retreat I'd think about what he'd said about belief and try and behave as if I believed. I mean, what had I to lose?