Aelred's Sin (37 page)

Abbaye de St Bernard

12 December 1964

Dear Aelred,

I have not heard from you for weeks. Father Abbot wrote for Christmas and mentioned that he found you so mature. He thought you were benefiting enormously from the analysis. He mentioned your profession. Congratulations and greetings in Christ. But I am worried you have not written. I hope all is well. This will also be my wishes for Christmas. I hope that Christ will be reborn in you and bring you to that clarity of thought you seek so earnestly. Do write soon.

Your dear friend

Benedict

12 January 1965

Oh Benedict,

Life has been so awful. I am sorry I did not write before Christmas, or write about my profession, a beautiful ceremony, but I felt flat. I think I wanted it
to transform me and it hasn’t. The singing and the liturgy were beautiful, but I wonder for how long it will continue to mean something for me.

I have a lot to say but find it so hard to express it all. I don’t know how to start to tell you what has been happening. It is so sad, so terrible, so - so that I can’t imagine how my life has become like this. Father Abbot does not know half of what goes on in me or in his monastery. Yes, I am doing fine. Yes, I am mature. I wanted to make my profession, so of course I behaved myself as much as I could, but I wonder what I am doing. But I will go along with the analysis till, as I hope I will, I feel better and can make a clearer decision.

It is Edward. I feel so terrible for him. I have deserted him. That is how it seems to him. Of course we are kept apart. We have to be very careful in our meetings. I am getting help but I don’t feel that he is. He needs help too and I don’t know how to help.

Such terrible things happen sometimes that I feel so distressed. I feel so heartbroken. I wish you were here. This will hurt you, but what can I do? I don’t feel it would be proper to talk to Dr Graveson about it. Though I might. Then he will sound so calm and dismiss it as immaturity. Immaturity is very hurtful, I can tell you. If it is immaturity.

One of the things I do with Dr Graveson when I have run out of dreams, is interpret pictures which he gives me or to paint pictures. Yes, I have paints and I just paint whatever comes into my head. I can’t really paint like an artist, but that does not matter. Then we interpret what I paint. It brings up a lot of things.
Now, Edward is quite a good artist. He was very good at school, so I thought, why does he not do the same? He wants to talk to me. He wants to show his love for me sexually. It is so strange: that was the last thing in his mind at the beginning, and now it is foremost. I wish he could have analysis too, but Father Justin says the monastery can’t afford it and Edward would have to be nearer to making his profession, and that is not certain as yet.

I feel so drawn to him, yet I can’t let myself respond. This is terrible. Sometimes when I enter the library and no one is there, Edward is there and he is standing there naked, looking at me. This happens at night or in the early morning. It happens when we are alone in the dormitory. It distresses me so much that I can’t even speak to him about it. But now I have: I have told him it must stop. We can’t carry on like this and I asked him to do some drawings about his feelings. Oh, Benedict, this will hurt you, but who else can I tell? He drew the most beautiful sketches of two men. They were of him and me making love, doing those things which we did in the barn. He says that he cannot draw us as chaste. I cry when I think of his pain, when I think of how there is not a world for us to live in and love each other like this. For if there were I would choose it. I think so. But I will not make any decisions now.

Since the pictures, which reminded me of Ted, but above all of that night when we existed in another world in the barn, since then, I talk to Edward regularly now; I must. I must take the risk. I have elected with him that dangerous chastity which we
had. I must give him this. I must give myself this, and I have reintroduced him to Aelred of Rievaulx and the theology of spiritual friendship. We find it hard but we are keeping our vows, or those vows I must keep. Please don’t be jealous. This is real charity. I think Edward will leave. He talks like this. I try. I don’t know what will happen. In a way the monastery, the community, cannot help when this kind of thing occurs. Either you’re in or you’re out. It’s sad.

I wonder what the world is like?

All my love,

Aelred.

St Bernard

14 February 1966

Dear Aelred,

Please be careful with your vocation. If Edward decides to leave, you must know that you have done all you can to help. But you must take care of your own commitment, your vows. For psychological reasons you found your profession flat, but nevertheless there is a reality and meaning to those vows and they must be taken seriously. I know you know this. I trust you. I am not jealous but I fear for that dangerous chastity. I feel that when I return to the abbey and we are together again it will not be a dangerous chastity but an achieved one. We will have achieved it.

You ask about the world. The world is a hard place. I go into the city here and I see things which make a
life of virtue difficult, many temptations, many occasions for sin, but some people are called to live in the world, and endanger themselves. Please, my love.

Your dear friend,

Benedict.

18 June 1966

Dear Benedict,

Edward left Ashton Park this morning. It is a day of terrible sadness for me. I think he has made the right decision; that is the only consolation. I feel desolate for myself and I am so fearful of the world for him; and part of me has left following him into the city. We have arranged to meet when I go to see Dr Graveson. He will try to look for a job in Bristol, so that he can live there and we can continue to meet. I know you will say this is so dangerous, but I must. I see no alternative. I have never seen anyone suffer such mental anguish in trying to contain his feelings for me, and trying with all sincerity to make a decision about his vocation. He was so good. He does not want me to leave and yet I know nothing would give him more joy than for me to join him. That which can give the most joy can give the most guilt and he says that he would feel so guilty if I left. He would feel responsible. Of course he would not be. I have talked to Dr Graveson and I know I must make the final decision about my vows quite apart from Edward. Yet I can’t get him out of my mind and all he has to face in the world.

Yes, I do wonder about the world that I left so young and did not know. I wish you were here and I wished you could have been here to talk to Edward. Anyway, that is the end of a chapter. Things are more peaceful in a way because I found it so difficult helping Edward in the last two months.

I am sorry I did not write, but that is the reason, as you will understand.

Dr Graveson thinks I can start coming to him only once a month, which of course is good, but also horrible as it will affect how much I see Edward and how much I write to you. I won’t be able to write to Edward from here.

Pray for me. I have such doubts.

Love,

Aelred

19 St John’s Way

Bristol 8

Somerset

9 September 1967

My dearest Benedict,

I’m writing right away because there is so much to say, and when I start to think it all out, I can’t put it down, so I must just start writing to you and hope that what I say is what is in my heart, and will be clear
to you.

I know that somewhere I have hurt you, and for that I’m sorry, though I know I can’t erase it. And I know that is so, because for you, as it is for me, it is a moral question. It is almost metaphysical, the difference between us. Yet we were one, the love we had, questing after an ideal so perfect. That’s it! I came to see it not as my ideal, but as one given to me, which masked my true nature. That ideal was what lay before me since I was very small, and now, without it, I’m like a duck out of water - or is it a fish - I never get English expressions accurately. Perhaps they’re both awkward, out of the swim. I am.

I keep wanting the routine of the bell and the office, my meals and my brothers around me, and you. I miss you. And like last night, when Edward came back from his job. God, it sounds so strange. We both said that we missed the community. It is so strange, me in this room with Edward, he going out to a job, me still here, waiting to know if I’m going to be able to study or if I will have to return to Les Deux Isles. That, of course, is another question. My return. As you know, there is a part of myself that must return. There is unfinished business. How else could it be? I left so young, not knowing anything. But Dr Graveson says I must continue with him for at least another year. You know he was disappointed by my decision to leave Ashton Park. He had wanted me to work towards an integration which was within the monastic life. Now I think he’s scared of the enlarged dimensions within which I must integrate. He doesn’t really accept Edward as a part of my real
life. He sees it all as a fantasy which will diminish in time. He’s not censorious, but neither is he approving. I’ve had this series of dreams in which a small black boy is climbing in through my bedroom window in my childhood home at Malgretoute and when I wake up I am terrified - in the dream, and also literally. He says it is my dark self, which I am fearful of confronting. I tell him that it was a childhood fear of mine, and that I lived in a country with black people whom I was taught to fear, not to love. Had he not heard of the slave trade, the plantation society? A tropical collective unconscious. I was talking as if I were an expert. Yet, I was so conscious of how little I know. So much I need to return to, in order to understand. He cut short the session. He dismisses this. A huge chunk of my life dismissed by one of the most brilliant men in the psychoanalytical world. Can you imagine it? I’ve told him about Jordan too! Because I still see him, talk to him, and of course I feel I have betrayed him, by leaving his grave untended, by leaving his portrait unvisited, and I may never walk again in Ashton Park where he was killed. Murdered. I know you think all this sounds fanciful, but there are these disjunctions in my life which I must yoke together if I am to survive.

Aelred’s sin, I call it.

Near here, near the port, there is a cemetery and there are other graves. I visit there and think of him. I have found the names of many others, many, many, so many without names. Buried at the end of a journey. So many buried at sea on that fatal triangle.
I go off at a tangent, and I really want to talk to you. I will this letter to get through the abbot’s censor.

Yes, it is a moral question, and I hope that in time we will respect each other in this, in order to regain some of the old belief and love. It is not, as I’ve said before, that I could not continue to love you, but that I could not continue to pretend to be living as one who has taken the vow of chastity. Your ordination was a sign of a final separation.

I know that at the moment the church does not recognise anything which my love for Edward represents. It is indeed the love that has no name, the love that must not be spoken. For me it has a name. It is brotherly love. It is my need for a brother. Some need a sister, a wife, a mother, a father, and I need my brother. My friend. I admit that I myself don’t fully understand it. I am not clear about any of it. I was certain enough to know that I had to leave Ashton Park to be with Edward and that I do want to express my love physically and sexually in a full way. That was not possible for either of us at Ashton Park. It was never possible for me as a young boy to conceive of my love for Ted as really legitimate. It was a sin. I call it Aelred’s sin.

I hope you will be able to come and see us. We both need to talk to you.

I will write again soon and I hope to hear from you.

My love,

Aelred (I still use the name, for how long? I don’t know)