Authors: John Cornwell
A
S THE PROFS
and boys returned and the new term began I learnt that I had a new berth in Top Dorm. My infirmary privileges had come to an end. For several days I hardly saw Father Armishaw except in class where he treated me like everybody else and betrayed no indication that there was anything special between us. I saw Paul Moreland only fleetingly, hurrying to the sixth form library with piles of books.
I explained to James what had happened at the hostel for the homeless and he was sympathetic. We were walking up and down Top Bounds, James gossiping, just being companionable. Then Derek came up to join me at break, wondering why I had not been on the train from Saint Pancras. He tried to get our private game going; but my heart wasn’t in it.
Two days into the term I collided with Father Armishaw in the cloister and he asked me to come and see him after night prayers. The house was in silence as I knocked. He told me to come in and shut the door.
‘Would you like to hear some music?’ he asked. He put a Beethoven violin sonata on the turntable. While we listened he read a book and I sat in the armchair looking into the fire. I was expecting him to say something about Paul Moreland; but he said nothing. Later we talked for a while about photography; then he said: ‘Time for your bed.’ Before I left, he said: ‘You can come here if you feel like it any Thursday after night prayers…but keep it to yourself, if you get my drift.’
I got his drift.
The next day Father Doran sent for me. It was a late spring morning, the distant hills blue with the promise of a glorious day. He was at his desk, his back to the open bay windows.
He asked me to repeat what I had told Father Armishaw about Paul Moreland. His seriousness and cold voice scared
me. After I had told him everything, he wanted to know whether I had ‘participated’ when Paul lay on top of me; whether I had attempted to resist. His tight-lipped questions put me on my guard. Under his stern cross-examination I stressed again and again Paul’s forcefulness and my unwillingness. Eventually he dismissed me without comment.
I felt perplexed; betrayed. Father Armishaw had gone to Father Doran with what I had told him. We had not been speaking under the seal of confession, but I now realised, painfully, that his first loyalty was to his religious superior. My biggest disillusionment was that he had put me in danger no less than Paul. In alerting Father Doran to Moreland’s behaviour, I had been expendable. Yet I, too, had been guilty of a betrayal. Paul had begged me to treat what he had told me, and done to me, with confidence. Had I betrayed that confidence in his interests? Or the interests of the seminary? It had not for one moment escaped me, ever since that evening’s confidence, that I had betrayed Paul in my eagerness to get closer to Father Armishaw.
The college was now entering the rhythm of its usual routines, and the rest of the morning proceeded as usual. At the end of classes we went into church in ranks for prayers before lunch. Moreland was not at his place in church. When we arrived in the refectory for lunch he was not at his place at table. Then I learnt that he had left.
Sitting there, unable to eat, I remembered Paul sitting by the railway tunnel in the Churnet valley. It struck me that Paul was capable of doing something reckless, and I would be to blame. After lunch, ignoring the lists that had gone up on the noticeboard for cricket practice and athletics, I slipped down the valley path and hurried towards Oakamoor. I wanted to know that Paul had not harmed himself, and I was desperate to say goodbye to him and to be forgiven. My eyes were blinded with tears; I stumbled and fell again and again as I ran down the steep pathways. And all the way I was imagining Paul’s
body lying on the railway track, his limbs severed, his beautiful head smashed in.
I found him on the platform at Oakamoor, sitting amidst his bags. He was reading a book. He looked at me with that absent gaze he sometimes affected, and said nothing.
I was crying. I told him I was sorry, over and over again.
Eventually he said very softly: ‘I did ask you, didn’t I, Fru, not to tell anybody…Poor Fru!’
After a while he said in a small voice: ‘I think I’m probably a better fit with the Jesuits.’ It did not occur to me then that he was being ironic.
When the train came in, bound for Uttoxeter, I stood on the platform gazing up to where he sat in the carriage by the window. But he opened his book and did not look at me again.
Later that day Father Doran sent for me. He told me that Paul Moreland was suffering from a form of mental illness; that he had left of his own volition and I was not to think badly of him. He hoped I would settle down to the good work of which I was capable. He had heard of my attack at home and he believed that such incidents strengthened a person’s character.
I came away from Father Doran’s office feeling calmer, and I decided to steel myself against feeling guilty for my part in Paul’s departure.
N
OW THAT
I was in the sixth form I came under the direct spiritual influence of Father Doran. After night prayers we would come forward to the front of the church, filling the first three benches on both sides of the aisle. Carrying his copy of the New Testament, Father Doran would rise from his
prie-dieu and come to sit behind us in the fourth row to give us ‘meditation points’, themes for our silent prayer the following morning.
He would read a passage from the Gospels and draw reflections for our consideration. He stressed our human weaknesses, repeatedly contrasting our disobedience with the acquiescence of the Virgin Mary. His personality came across strongly during these nightly talks: an ascetical, disciplined man, with a jaundiced view of human nature and of boys in particular. After he had finished he would walk back to his prie-dieu, his heavily shod shoes echoing through the church. We remained kneeling in contemplation until we heard him rising and passing through the double doors of the church and out into the cloister.
The next morning we would be on our knees in our normal places, towards the back of the church, to begin half an hour’s meditation on Father Doran’s points before the rest of the school joined us for their morning prayers before community Mass.
I seemed to be living through much of the week on autopilot, sustained by the rhythm of the religious round. Father Doran’s meditations dominated my mind, but there was an area of my life which remained independent of the routine – my weekly visits to Father Armishaw’s room on Thursday nights. He saw other boys on Saturday evenings, but I was the only sixth former to be invited alone to his room. This special privilege was, I knew, an act of kindness in response to my home circumstances, but I was convinced that he saw me as someone special. I was tempted to broach the affair of Paul Moreland, but I never did. Instinctively I knew that never again should I attempt to take our relationship further than the limits he had set.
Our evenings followed a pattern. There would be music, invariably Beethoven to begin with, then Bach or Brahms, then Mozart. He would smoke a cigarette or two, but he never offered me one. He liked to talk music and the merits of different
performances. He would compare, for example, the precision of Toscanini with the flexibility of Furtwängler, then he would expound the balance and contrast between freedom and control in writing: inspiration and intuition versus hard, conscious graft. He would lend me books, not all of them to my liking, and he would ask me what I thought when I returned them. The books were always outside our class work: Joyce, Shaw, George Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy.
There were times, especially after haymaking, when I almost fainted with the fragrance of the grass and the wild flowers, a mood of longing in the distant hills, the beauty of our sunsets. I was reading the early books of Wordsworth’s
Prelude
which seemed to articulate these feelings, creating an even deeper sense of mystery and presence than I had felt in earlier years. We talked of this one evening in his room, and he warned me of the danger of pantheism, the heresy that would reduce God to the level of his own creation.
We did not talk spirituality, or about spiritual reading, although I knew that he had a special interest in mystical poetry. One day I asked him what he thought of the autobiography of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. He looked over his spectacles, the way he did when he was about to say something quizzical, and asked if I had read the poetry of Richard Crashaw. I had not. He took a book down from his shelf and marked a page: it was Crashaw’s ‘The Flaming Heart’, dedicated to the earlier, Spanish Teresa.
Before handing it over, he read out a passage from another Crashaw poem which spoke of God taking up residence in the ‘mild and milky soul of a soft child’. He said that description was more apt for the French Saint Thérèse than the Spanish Santa Teresa. The problem of great mystics, he said, was their tendency to hurt as well as to
be
hurt.
For in love’s field was never found A nobler weapon than a Wound.
C
OTTON HAD A
newly appointed spiritual director from outside the college – Father Joseph Connelly, a former professor at the senior seminary, who worked on a parish five miles distant, and who came to Cotton every Thursday afternoon. I had another idea. A combination of curiosity and rashness attracted me to Father ‘Rainbow’ McCallum. I had found his attentions flattering when I was in the infirmary and he offered the prospect of real engagement.
I knocked on his sitting room door one lazy Thursday afternoon beyond mid-term. His windows were wide open and he was standing looking out towards the meadow at the head of the valley. He was wearing one of his coloured silk shirts. He said that he would be delighted to act as my spiritual director. He shut the door and turned the key in the lock, inviting me to sit in an armchair.
He offered me a drink of ‘something strong’ and a cigarette, which I declined. Sitting close to me on a higher chair, he said that anything I told him would be under the seal of confession. I could talk freely and with confidence.
He started by asking me about how his predecessor Father Browne had conducted spiritual direction. He affected to be shocked when I told him about Father Browne’s recommendation of the life of Saint John Vianney. ‘How utterly preposterous!’ he said. ‘John Vianney was a sado-masochist. He would whip himself until his bedroom was spattered with blood.’
When I told him about Father Browne’s counsel on custody of the eyes, he burst out laughing. He was still laughing when his phone rang. He answered it and spoke for a few minutes, before putting down the receiver and bringing the meeting to an end.
‘I have to go out,’ he said. ‘One of our local parishioners is sick.’
I had found his spiritual direction disappointing, and I had not been to confession, but I decided I should give it another try.
I returned to Father McCallum a week later, this time determined to make my confession. He again offered me a drink and a cigarette. Again I declined, adding that I wanted to make my confession properly on my knees. Despite the fact that I was already kneeling by his chair, he got up and poured a glass of sherry. ‘Sit down,’ he said, ‘and now drink this.’ I did as I was told. As I sat sipping the sherry he came and sat next to me, very close. I proceeded with my list of sins, feeling silly as I did so, with the glass in my hand.
Looking at me intensely, he interrupted: ‘Have you had problems with sexual sins, John?’
Something about the abrupt and intrusive way he asked this made me uneasy. I began to tell him about my difficulties two years earlier. I did not have the opportunity to explain the influence of the retreat father, Father Buxton, in my second year, because he interrupted me again.
‘Oh,’ he broke in. ‘You must not feel any guilt about masturbation. It’s now regarded by experts in sexual development as perfectly normal. In fact, it’s abnormal not to do so. You may have heard of the Kinsey report in America. Masturbation is a natural form of growing up…mutual masturbation is not such a bad thing either…all part of growing to maturity. Did you know that 99.9 per cent of all males masturbate at puberty? Don’t worry, they’re all sure to have done it: Father Doran, Father Armishaw, Father Owen, Father Browne…all of them.’ He was leaning towards me, looking at me intently and touching me lightly on the arm and on the knee.
Then he said: ‘On the other hand, there are individuals who suffer from abnormal forms of over-stimulation. Because of a deformation of the penis some boys are prone to excessive
erections. If you were to show me your penis now, John, I could easily tell by manipulating it whether you have a problem of this kind…Will you let me examine your penis now?’
Suddenly I could not breathe. The question, his silk shirt, his hand on my knee, a heady smell (hair oil, aftershave, stale cigarette smoke, a faint hint of alcohol) filled me with terror. I remembered the face of the man in South Kensington subway: that same predatory look.
I stood up: ‘No, Father McCallum, I don’t think so.’
I walked to the door, turned the key in the lock, and went out into the cloister.
I looked back. He was standing in the middle of the room in an obvious state of agitation, his hands held out towards me, shaking his head. He appeared to be pleading with me not to say anything. I had a feeling as I stood in the cloister, free of him, that I had got off lightly.
I
WAS TO
say nothing to anyone about Father McCallum. I knew that it would be my word against his; and it was too close to the Paul Moreland affair. I thought of telling Father Armishaw, but I was sure that he would take it straight to Father Doran. And Father Doran, I suspected, would be obliged to believe Father McCallum before me.
For several days I could think of nothing else. Passing Father McCallum in the cloister occasionally, he would smile and greet me as if nothing had happened. But the incident had altered for ever my view of the priesthood. Throughout my time at Cotton nothing like this had ever occurred. Father McCallum had shown me what individual priests were capable of. McCallum was a ‘shitten’ priest, as Chaucer had put it in the
Prologue
to
the
Canterbury Tales.
The fact of receiving the oils of ordination did not eradicate corruption in the heart of an individual priest. Never again, it occurred to me then, could I trust a priest unconditionally and implicitly.
A week or so after the incident, I went to Father Connelly for spiritual direction. He was a man of military bearing, well groomed and friendly. He took confessions and direction in the archbishop’s suite. On my first visit, he brought me straight back to basics. His spiritual direction coincided with Father Doran’s nightly talks in church. We are by nature imperfect, he said, but by unrelenting self-discipline we can work towards perfection. Holiness had to be worked for every day of our lives. We can never lower our guard, or be complacent.
Meanwhile, night after night Father Doran talked about temptation. We cannot control, he stressed, the suggestions that come our way through chance and imagination. The crucial issue was consent. ‘Faced with temptation, as soon as its self-seeking pleasure is perceived, if we momentarily hesitate, if we resist in a half-hearted manner, we are on the way to failing.’
If I had entertained any doubts up to this point about the relentlessly ascetical, monastic nature of our sixth form formation, the experience with Father McCallum had allayed that anxiety. Any remaining concerns I had on this score evaporated after reading a book which now fired me with ascetical enthusiasm. I had been attracted initially by Evelyn Waugh’s name on the cover. The title was
Elected Silence
by the Cistercian monk Thomas Merton, and Waugh had written the preface. There was an epigram on the title page by Gerard Manley Hopkins:
Elected Silence, sing to me And beat upon my whorlèd ear, Pipe me to pastures still and be The music that I care to hear.
I read this book in one sitting on the Ascension Day choir outing. I took it with me to Dovedale and sat reading it all afternoon by the river. I read it on the bus back, and then right through the evening, missing the feast-day film. What struck me, to begin with, was its similarity in mood and prose style to
The Cardinal.
It was written in the style of a popular American novel. Like
The Cardinal,
it moved to and fro between Europe and the United States during the same historical period, ending in the early 1950s.
Elected Silence
(entitled
The Seven Storey Mountain
in the American edition), describes a coming-of-age spiritual quest which ends in Louisville, Kentucky, at a Trappist monastery where monks live in austere and permanent retreat from the world. The journey takes Merton from Prades in the French Pyrenees, where he was born in 1915, to Long Island, to Paris, to Bermuda, to Clare College, Cambridge, to Columbia University in New York City, and thence to the Abbey of Gethsemani where he enters the novitiate.
Since the writer is a young monk approaching ordination, his perspective both on his own life and on the history of the period, is God’s shaping providence. God’s ‘purpose’ for Thomas Merton, as he perceives it himself, is evident from the very first page. With resonances of Augustine’s
Confessions,
the author frankly admits his sins, and the sinfulness of the entire world.
On his spiritual journey there are false trails, adventures and misadventures of the mind and the heart, as well as acts of lechery, leading to self-disgust. If I had any doubts about the stern strictures of Fathers Doran and Connelly they were resolved by Merton’s astounding statement: ‘There has never yet been a bomb invented that is half so powerful as one mortal sin – and yet there is no positive power in sin, only negation, only annihilation.’
Merton insisted that the life of the soul had far-reaching consequences beyond himself and his own spiritual destiny.
Through Merton’s book, and as a result of the incident in Father McCallum’s room, I felt that I had reached a better understanding of our strict, monastic disciplines within the seminary, which often seemed tedious and mechanical, and remote from the world, but which were aimed at instilling long-term perseverance and resistance to temptation. But nagging questions nevertheless arose about our seminary formation, which challenged, if not undermined, my new convictions.