Seminary Boy (34 page)

A
FTER MANY YEARS’
absence, my journey back to the Faith of my Fathers has not been easy. At the Mass I attended on the first Christmas of my return to practice, the choir in our local church sang ‘Happy Birthday to You’ at the consecration. I staggered out into the open air, thinking: ‘I’m not going to make it.’ Where were the ancient rhythms, the sacred repetition, the Catholic musical splendours of my youth? I had to learn the benefits of the new ‘participation’, while sorrowing over the lost liturgy of my boyhood.

I soon discovered that I could not ‘return’ to Faith by attempting to recapture what I had left behind at Cotton all those years ago. Yet I found myself thinking about Cotton as if it contained a secret to be discovered, a riddle to be solved. I continued to return there in dreams which seemed to contrast my boyhood innocence with a sense of adult shame. It was not until the early 1990s that I understood what drew me restlessly back.

I returned by car one summer’s afternoon to look at the valley and the old buildings. Driving down the last stretch of the lane, I thought the outline of the college on its promontory looked much the same from a distance. But as I parked on Top Bounds I saw the extent of the devastation that had befallen the place. The refectory, classrooms, libraries and cloisters had been looted, vandalised. The floors, doors, windows and most of the roofs had gone. Saint Thomas’s had been burnt to the ground (by vandals, I was told later). The gardens, once beautifully tended, were overrun with weeds. Faber’s Retreat had been smashed by a fallen tree, and the church was locked up.

As I wandered the ruins of Cotton, I remembered how I had walked its pathways and cloisters during the Easter retreat,
seeking God in fasting and silence and seclusion from the world. Now, decades on, it struck me that the desert places of spirituality are not to be found alone in religious houses where men and women shut themselves away to find God in self-denial and abstinence. The desert can lie at the very heart of a person’s life, amid the turmoil of worldly distractions.

Many who have turned away from religion to embrace agnosticism and atheism, as I had done, are perhaps as much in a state of desert spirituality, the ‘dark night of the soul’, as any contemplative. What we are escaping is not God at all, but the false representations, the ‘trash and tinsel’, as W. B. Yeats once put it, that pass for him. So, ‘hatred of God may bring the soul to God’. At Cotton that summer’s day I recognised the truth of that ‘darker knowledge’, and it eased the feelings of a former apostate’s remorse. Yet I sensed that for years my younger self, the seminary boy, had still to forgive me for having turned my back on the auspices that had saved his soul all those years ago from ruin. As I walked through the overgrown pathways of Cotton that seminary boy came to meet me: without reproach or condemnation on his part, and with a sense of healing reconciliation on mine.

The wounded is the wounding heart. richard crashaw, ‘The Flaming Heart’

The Pontiff in Winter

Hitler’s Pope

Breaking Faith

The Power to Harm

A Thief in the Night

Nature’s Imagination
(editor)

Consciousness and Human Identity
(editor)

Explanations
(editor)

Earth to Earth

Hitler’s Scientists

Powers of Darkness, Powers of Light

Coleridge: Poet and Revolutionary, 1772–1804

Seven Other Demons

The Spoiled Priest

Strange Gods

First published in Great Britain in 2006 by Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins
Publishers

77–85 Fulham Palace Road

London W6 8JB

www.4thestate.co.uk

Copyright © John Cornwell 2006

FIRST EDITION

The right of John Cornwell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition © JUNE 2010 ISBN: 978-0-007-28562-4

Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)
Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au

Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor
Toronto, ON, M4W 1A8, Canada
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca

New Zealand
HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.nz

United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
77-85 Fulham Palace Road
London, W6 8JB, UK
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk

United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com