Mystical Paths. Susan Howatch

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СКАЧАТЬ looking forward intensely to my life at the Starbridge Theological College. He said more than once how much vicarious pleasure he would receive from my career as an ordinand.

      I went to the Theological College. It was awful. It seemed to have very little to do with religion – religion as I understood it from my personal experience. I was reprimanded for using terms like the Light and the Dark and told I was flirting with Gnosticism. ‘What about St John?’ I said. ‘He talks of the Light and the Dark,’ but I was told tartly that I was Nicholas Darrow, not St John the Evangelist, and that it was the sin of pride to think I could flirt with the Gnostic heresy and get away with it. In vain I told my tutor that the Light and the Dark were code-names which I used to describe a reality which for me was as true as any reality acknowledged by a logical positivist. My tutor said I should beware of mysticism as mystics so often got into trouble with the Church.

      The Church was exalted as a sort of idol. Enormous emphasis was put on teaching what was liturgically correct. Church history was taught in stupefying detail. A heavy-handed, outdated biblical theology still ruled the roost, the academic successor of the neo-orthodox thunderings of Karl Barth. Radical theology was ignored – and this was 1966, three years after John Robinson’s Church-shattering blockbuster Honest to God! But the College refused to admit any shattering had taken place; the idol was not allowed to be chipped or cracked – or even renovated. Robinson was dismissed as ‘misguided’ and ‘no theologian’. There was certainly a case for propounding criticisms such as these, but I thought Robinson’s ideas, misguided or not, should at least have been debated. And I didn’t like this rampant ecclesiastical idolatry. What’s the Church anyway? Just a man-made institution. It’s God and Christ and the Holy Spirit that are important. I’m not saying we don’t need a man-made institution to deal with worldly matters. Obviously we do. And I’m not saying (in defiance of Anglo-Catholic ideology) that the Church has no numinous value and that holy traditions are unimportant. Obviously it has and they are. All I’m saying is that setting the Church up on a pedestal and worshipping it is wrong.

      I also took a dim view of the way the College staff played down mysticism as they converted theology into just another academic subject such as history or English literature. Theology ought to be alive, vivid, related to real life, not a system debated by intellectuals. Did the mystic Julian of Norwich have a theology degree? Of course she didn’t. But she knew God. She had ‘gnosis’, special knowledge. She saw visions and she KNEW. But if she’d been unfortunate enough to attend that Theological College in the 1960s, the only vision she would have had would have been a vision of the bliss which marked the end of term.

      Of course I couldn’t tell my father what a travesty the College was. Having run the place so successfully in the ‘forties he would have been deeply upset to know how far it had gone downhill. I learnt to keep quiet at College too because I didn’t want anyone thinking I was ‘unsuitable’ and trying to boot me out. One ordinand did say: ‘I think we should have courses on pastoral work and discuss things like sex,’ but he didn’t last long. Sex was the great unmentionable among the College staff because no one had the guts to discuss ethical issues realistically. As I mooched around, bored out of my mind, I wondered how the Church could survive the twentieth century when one of its most famous training-grounds had been so wholly smothered by the dead hand of an irrelevant past.

      My boredom eventually produced the inevitable result: my interest in sex, damped down by the Debbie débâcle, began to revive.

      I may have given the impression that I was formidably promiscuous but in fact by the standards of the mid –’sixties I was almost staid. My habit of going steady with one girl at a time – and usually only seeing her once a week – was my way of paying lip-service to my father’s belief that men should try to be more than mindless animals, so before the affair with Debbie I had changed girlfriends no more than once a year. However now, goaded on by the mind-blowing boredom of College life, I traded them in every six months. Doreen was a waitress at The Copper Kettle, Angie was a salesgirl at Boots and Tracy, like Debbie, was a little dolly-bird typist.

      Naturally I went to great lengths to cover up this behaviour which was so very unacceptable for a would-be priest. Knowing my father would be wondering if I’d picked a successor to Debbie, I created a smokescreen by running a platonic romance in tandem with my sex exploits; this meant that I took a nice girl home and introduced her to my father so that he could see how virginal she was and deduce how well I was behaving. I need hardly add that I didn’t take home girls called Doreen, Angie and Tracy. I took home girls called Celia, Lavinia and Rosalind, girls I met from time to time at the tedious upper-class parties that for some reason people expected me to enjoy.

      At the beginning of 1968, the year of the Christian Aysgarth affair, the year I was due to be ordained, I was sleeping with Tracy and taking home Rosalind. ‘Sleeping with Tracy’ meant a quick swill at the Adam and Eve in Starbridge’s Chasuble Lane, a quick binge at Burgy’s on the Market Place and a quick retreat to her bed-sit which, like Debbie’s, was down at Langley Bottom by the railway station. (It was actually quite difficult to find working-class girls with bed-sits; they tended to live at home with Mum unless there were family problems.)

      On the other hand, ‘taking home Rosalind’ meant a leisurely stroll through Starrington from her house to the Manor, a leisurely listen to my Beethoven records and a leisurely call on my father in his cottage by the chapel. Sometimes we would dine at Starbridge at The Quill Pen in Wheat Street and attend a performance at the Starbridge Playhouse. Hands were held. A goodnight peck on the cheek became part of the routine. There was the occasional friendly letter. It was all light years away from the world where I bucketed around the bed-sits of Langley Bottom.

      This may sound to some people as if I had my private life in perfect order, but as an ordinand to whom religion was not just a dead letter but a vital part of life, I knew the apparent order masked a dangerous chaos. I found it spiritually exhausting to lead a double life, and this knowledge that I was becoming increasingly debilitated made me realise how far off-course I was. In other words, I knew that what I was doing was not only objectively wrong, violating a moral code which I planned to devote my life to upholding, but subjectively wrong in that it was preventing me from being integrated, dividing me from my true self. Why then, it may be asked by the moral stalwarts and the sexually pure, didn’t I pull myself together and abandon this disgraceful behaviour which was so utterly unworthy of an ordinand?

      Why indeed.

      But I think at least two of the great saints of the Church would have sympathised with me. ‘For the good that I would I do not,’ St Paul wrote, ‘but the evil which I would not, that I do.’ ‘Lord, give me chastity!’ St Augustine had pleaded to God. ‘But not just yet.’ I bet those two knew all about how tempting it is to use sex to escape from one’s problems, and of course they would have understood that ordinands aren’t supermen, automatically sanctified by their calling. Ordinands are only human; I knew I wasn’t the only student at that College who scooted around on the quiet in his spare time, and if the moral stalwarts and the sexually pure are now flinging up their hands in horror and gasping: ‘Surely not!’ may I remind them that this was the 1960s when the Church was being shaken to its foundations by the permissive society.

      If the Church had become the idol of the scared traditionalist die-hards who ran the Theological College, then sex without doubt had become the idol of the secular world which existed beyond the walls of the Cathedral Close. The Theological College staff thought they could avoid one form of idolatry by turning to embrace another, but they were wrong. You don’t beat idolatry by holding fast to idols. You beat idolatry by holding fast to God, but that’s easier said than done.

      I lived my double life for over a year. Then in 1968 my nerve finally snapped and I asked Rosalind to marry me.

      There were several reasons propelling me towards this proposal. The first, obviously, was that I could stand the strain of a double СКАЧАТЬ