Glamorous Powers (20 page)

‘No, Father. Not now.’

‘Ah, Jonathan, Jonathan –’ Francis heaved a massive sigh ‘– are you never to be cured of your intolerable arrogance?’ And as I stared at him he added casually: ‘Your new call is quite obviously genuine. You must leave the Order without delay.’

‘(The mystics) are convinced that their communion with God is an authentic experience … If a dozen honest men tell me that they have climbed the Matterhorn, it is reasonable to believe that the summit of that mountain is accessible, though I am not likely to get there myself.’

W. R. INGE
Dean of St Paul’s 1911–1934
Mysticism in Religion

At first Francis refused to discuss his judgement and when I begged stupefied for an explanation he merely ordered me back to bed in the infirmary. Then he relented. Motioning me to remain seated he said: ‘The turning-point was when I realized that I had to examine your original call to be a monk.’

‘Yes, but –’

‘Be quiet!’ snapped Francis, revealing his exhaustion. ‘If you want an explanation don’t irritate me with ill-judged interruptions!’

I said at once: ‘I’m very sorry. Please go on.’

Francis waited until he was calm before continuing: ‘The point about your original call was that it was indisputably genuine. As you yourself said at the start of this conversation: the gifts of the Spirit can be recognized by their fruits – or, as a layman would say, the proof of the pudding’s in the eating. You’ve become an outstanding monk, your skill as a spiritual director being acknowledged both inside and outside the Order. Clearly God called you to serve him in this way, and it seemed
to me that if only I could discover how he had called you to start being a monk I’d be able to discern whether he was now calling you to stop being a monk; I suspected that this new call, if it was valid, would be a negative reflection of the old.’

Francis paused, grappling again with his exhaustion, but I took care not to distract him and at last he said: ‘You had no vision calling you to be a monk, but contrary to what many laymen believe, calls from God aren’t normally manifested by psychic or supernatural phenomena. Much more common are the cases where a man is put in a psychological vice and God proceeds to tighten the screws. This is what happened to you. You had this tragic private life which went so disastrously wrong that you felt your only hope of survival was to serve God in the Order.

‘It seemed logical to assume that if God called you to enter the Order by imprisoning you in a psychological vice, his first step, on calling you to leave, would be to loosen the screws and set you free. Your call to the Order, as you yourself pointed out, had two aspects. First, you wanted to set down the burden of your guilt, purge yourself of sin and achieve the spiritual development which you were unable to achieve in the world. And second, you thought you could drive a bargain with God to keep your children safe. The first aspect drove you into the Order; the second aspect kept you there. No matter how hard the life was you couldn’t leave. You had to be a monk. No other option was open to you.

‘However when you achieved that spiritual development which you could never have achieved outside the cloister, the role of the Order in your life became redundant. You were now fit to serve God in the world, and all that remained for God to do was to remove the various psychological fetters which were chaining you to the cloister.

‘Father Darcy died, a death which liberated you from supervision by a mentor. You failed to become Abbot-General, a failure which represented the termination of any all-too-human ambition to reach the top of the Fordite tree. And finally, most
vital of all, your so-called bargain with God was shown during your quarrel with Martin to have been an illusion.

‘All these devastating blows rained down upon you within the space of a month, and while they were happening you were being goaded by the minor troubles, the recurring difficulty with your celibacy, the unfortunate birthday, the adverse effects of the War on your community and your work. It seems to me that you were being remorselessly manoeuvred into position to receive the knock-out blow with which Martin finally demolished your compulsion to remain in the Order.

‘However you were a good monk. Out of sheer conscientiousness you were going to fight this systematic destruction of your old call, and so even after the knock-out blow had been delivered the new call had to be spelt out in a way you couldn’t misunderstand: you were granted the vision.

‘Now –’ Francis sighed as if he still found my vision a heavy cross to bear ‘– it’s impossible to say for certain exactly what was going on during this strange experience of yours, and the difficulty is exacerbated because you and I represent two quite different religious types. I’m not a mystic; I can only discern God through reason and logic. As far as philosophy goes I have the greatest respect for Platonic Idealism, but it’s the respect of a man blind from birth for colours: when many good honest people tell me colours are beautiful I deem it reasonable to believe that this fact is true. Therefore as far as Neo-Platonic mysticism goes, I’m prepared to believe it’s a symbolic expression of experiences which the mystic can recognize, but to me it’s just a foreign language which I’ll never master.

‘I’m essentially a Pragmatist of the school of William James. I recognize the will to believe, acknowledge that it can have beneficial results and conclude that there’s a form of religious truth here based on my subjective experience. To put it crudely, I’m a Christian because Christianity works for me; it enables me to live my life in a happy, productive, spiritually satisfying way. Intellectually I can recognize the absolute objective truths which lie beyond the Platonic veil of your own philosophical approach to God, but experientially that approach isn’t mine.
All I can say is that it works for you and therefore it’s true for you. That’s a truth I can deduce by using rational powers of observation, but when I’m obliged to deduce the meaning of a vision, an experience not grounded in logic, I find my intellectual powers quickly become no more use than a broken sword. “Spiritual is most rational,” says that Cambridge Platonist Whichcote. Yes – but there comes a point in spiritual matters beyond which reason is unable to go.

‘So having stressed my limitations in this field, let me now venture a very tentative opinion on this vision of yours. I don’t think you saw the future. It strikes me as being much more like a dream than a concrete experience. I know the detail was very striking but detail can be striking in dreams too. Of course I’m not saying it
was
a dream, just that it was like a dream – not a glimpse of an actual happening and certainly not an allegory, which has always struck me as a contrived literary device requiring intellectual planning.

‘I believe that many years ago you read about this chapel in a book, perhaps even saw photographs of it, and that the memory was retained by your subconscious mind. During the psychic earthquake you experienced in May, this memory was regurgitated and used as a medium for conveying the word of God. Now, I’m perfectly prepared to concede that one day you may actually come across this chapel – one must always allow in life for the one truly extraordinary coincidence – but I don’t think it will have anything to do with your new call. To me, the pragmatist, the only thing of importance in your vision is the light at the end which imprinted the word of God on your mind; nothing else is relevant.

‘When this call to leave the Order was imprinted on your mind, God completed, in my opinion, the necessary sequence of events: you were called to enter the Order, you achieved the required spiritual development, the psychological compulsion to remain was then destroyed and you were called to leave. In short, the whole sequence is all of a piece; the two calls are mirror-images of each other, and if your first call was genuine then this second call must be genuine too.’

As Francis sank into an exhausted silence I had the chance to speak, but now the words refused to come. Emotion mingled with my own exhaustion. I had to shield my eyes with my hand.

‘You need food, drink and a great deal more rest,’ said Francis abruptly, rousing himself. ‘Go back to bed and we’ll talk again tomorrow.’

But I was immobilized. I felt so old, so tired, so utterly overwhelmed not only by my recent battle but by the enormity of my unknown future that I even whispered: ‘I don’t want to leave the Order any more,’ as if I were a spoilt child begging to be excused from the ordeal of being sent away from home to boarding school.

‘Who cares what you want?’ said Francis brutally. ‘It’s what God wants that’s important. Stop snivelling and pull yourself together!’

I forgot the shame of my uncontrolled emotion. I exclaimed startled: ‘You sound just like the old man!’ and I added in disbelief: ‘You’re even beginning to look like him!’

‘I suppose you’ll be claiming next that you’ve seen his ghost – oh, for heaven’s sake, Jonathan, go back to bed before you get up to any more convoluted psychic antics!’ said Francis, and striding out of the room in a paroxysm of exasperation he banged the door violently behind him.

‘I must apologize for that graceless exit,’ said Francis when we met in his office the next morning. ‘As you no doubt realized I temporarily succumbed to jealousy. I’ve never had a vision from God, nor, I dare say, am I ever likely to have one.’

I hardly needed to point out to him that God can communicate with man in numerous other ways. Nor did I need to tell him that the mystics are united in distrusting psychic experiences and usually treat them as either irrelevant or seriously misleading. The truth is that although psychic powers are a gift from God, like the power to express oneself through art, they are not
by themselves any guarantee of either holiness or religious genius. In fact psychics, like artists, are usually conspicuously less than holy, subject as they are to any passing demonic force which can exploit their characteristically inflated pride and self-centredness.

However if the psychic powers can be harnessed by rigorous discipline and put to work in the service of God they can be used to supplement the charismatic power, that gift of the Spirit which God may bestow on anyone, psychic or otherwise. Francis knew very well that he was not excluded from hearing calls from God or from wielding charismatic power merely because he had no psychic gifts, but I sensed his statement represented more than a simple confession of jealousy. In an oblique way he was admitting an old anxiety about his spiritual limitations, an old dread that he might not live up to Father Darcy’s high hopes for him, perhaps even a lifelong insecurity that he would be overlooked or judged second-rate unless he exerted his flair for calling attention to himself, and suddenly I recognized the isolation of the man of power who yearns for an equal in whom he can freely confide.

Making every effort to express sympathy without condescension I said: ‘I’m sure your own call to enter the Order was in its own way just as powerful an experience as any vision granted to a psychic’

‘Possibly. But nevertheless I can’t help feeling that to receive a vision of a beautiful chapel must be a more profound spiritual experience than to wake up hung-over in a strange bed one morning with the thought: if I don’t become a monk I’ll be dead within six months. The trouble with pragmatism,’ said Francis dryly before I could comment, ‘is that it has absolutely no glamour. How I’ve always envied you those “glamorous powers”, Jonathan! When we were up at Cambridge, how
I
always longed to tell fortunes, conduct seances and hypnotize pretty girls into fulfilling my wildest dreams! And now, forty years later, I see to my shame and dismay that very little has changed. The envy’s still there and it’s there because I’m still hopelessly addicted to glamour. The old man did try to cure
me, of course, but that was a case of the blind leading the blind – he was too addicted to glamour himself, the old rascal, to conduct the necessary purging effectively.’

‘I’m surprised he even tried.’

‘His efforts were certainly half-hearted. But at the end he said: “I should have sent you too to Ruydale instead of keeping you here like a pet poodle cocooned in vintage claret, visiting archbishops and vulgar chandeliers!” He knew he’d been too soft with me, but poor old boy, he was lonely at the end when all his favourite brothers started dying off, and he did suffer considerable pain from his arthritis. I could quite understand why he needed an amusing pet poodle to keep him company.’

‘What an unjust description!’

‘You think so? I wonder. I’ve got a weakness for luxury and a mind like a cash-box – how on earth have I ended up as a spiritual leader? And how on earth am I going to manage in future without my arch-rival stimulating me to do my spiritual best with the very limited talent at my disposal?’

I said briskly: ‘I’ll tell you exactly how you’ll manage: you’ll use the energy you’ve always wasted on our rivalry to rise to new heights in exercising the charism of leadership. The old man foresaw the exact dimensions of that charism, of course. He didn’t choose a pet poodle to be the kind of leader the Order has to have. He chose the managing director with the financial brain, the organizing skills and the spiritual education which he himself had personally supervised. How obvious it all seems to me now! In fact I feel amazed that I could ever have resented his decision.’