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CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

PART ONE:

THE VISION

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

PART TWO:

THE REALITY BEYOND THE VISION

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

PART THREE: THE FALSE LIGHT

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

PART FOUR: THE LIGHT FROM THE NORTH

ONE

TWO

PART ONE THE VISION

‘Ecstasy or vision begins when thought ceases, to our consciousness, to proceed from ourselves. It differs from dreaming, because the subject is awake. It differs from hallucinations, because there is no organic disturbance: it is, or claims to be, a temporary enhancement, not a partial disintegration, of the mental faculties. Lastly, it differs from poetical inspiration, because the imagination is passive. That perfectly sane people often experience such visions there is no manner of doubt.’

W. R. INGE

Dean of St Paul’s 1911–1934

Christian Mysticism

ONE

‘The apparent suddenness of the mystical revelation is quite normal; Plato in his undoubtedly genuine Seventh Letter speaks of the “leaping spark” by which divine inspiration flashes on him.’

W. R. INGE

Dean of St Paul’s 1911–1934

Mysticism in Religion

I

The vision began at a quarter to six; around me the room was suffused with light, not the pellucid light of a fine midsummer morning but the dim light of a wet dawn in May. I was sitting on the edge of my bed when without warning the gold lettering on the cover of the Bible began to glow.

I stood up as the bedside table deepened in hue, and the next moment the floorboards pulsed with light while in the corner the taps of the basin coruscated like silver in the sun. Backing around the edge of the bed I pressed my back against the wall before any further alteration of consciousness occurred. Firm contact with a solid object lessens the instinctive fear which must always accompany such a radical transcendence of time and space.

However after the initial fear comes the equally instinctive acceptance. I had closed my eyes to lessen the terror of disorientation but now I forced myself to open them. The cell was still glittering, but as I watched the glitter faded to a shimmer until the scene resembled a view seen through the wrong end of a telescope, and I could perceive my body, remote and abandoned, pressed against the wall by the bed as if impaled there by invisible nails. I looked aside – I could see my body turning its head – and immediately the darkness, moving from right to left, began to erase the telescopic view. My eyes closed, again warding off the fear of disorientation, and this time when I reopened them I found I was once more moving in a normal world.

I was myself, inhabiting my body as usual and walking along a path through a wood of beech trees. Insofar as I was conscious of any emotion I was aware of being at ease with my verdant tranquil surroundings, although I felt irritated by the persistent call of a wood-pigeon. However eventually the pigeon fell silent and as the path began to slope downhill I glanced to my left at the chapel in the dell below.

The chapel was small but exquisite in its classical symmetry; I was reminded of the work of Inigo Jones. In the dull green light of the surrounding woods the yellow stone glowed a dark gold, a voluptuous contrast to the grey medieval ruins which lay behind it. The ruins were in part hidden by ivy, but as I moved closer I could see the slits in the wall of the tower.

Reaching the floor of the dell I faced the chapel, now only fifty yards away across the sward, and it was then that I noticed the suitcase. Standing at the edge of the trees it was sprinkled with labels, the largest being a triangle of red, blue and black design; I was too far away to read the lettering. Afterwards I remembered that I had regarded this suitcase without either curiosity or surprise. Certainly I never slackened my pace as I headed for the chapel, and I believe I knew even then that the suitcase was a mere image on the retina of my mind, a symbol which at that point I had no interest in interpreting.

Hurrying up the steps of the porch I lifted the latch, pushed the righthand half of the double-doors wide open and paused to survey the interior beyond.

There was no transept. A central aisle stretched to the altar at the east end. The altar-table was stark in its austerity, the only adornment consisting of a plain wooden cross, but again I felt neither surprise nor curiosity. Evidently I was as accustomed to this sight as I was accustomed to the fact that the nave was only three-quarters full of pews. Walking across the empty space which separated the doors from the back pew I could smell the lilies which were blooming in a vase beneath the brass memorial plaque on my right. I gave them no more than a brief glance but when I looked back at the altar I saw that the light had changed.

The sun was penetrating the window which was set high in the wall to the left of the altar, and as the ray began to slant densely upon the cross I stopped dead. Unless I stood south of the Equator I was witnessing the impossible, for the sun could never shine from the north. I stared at the light until my eyes began to burn. Then sinking to my knees I covered my face with my hands, and as the vision at last dissolved, the knowledge was branded upon my mind that I had to abandon the work which suited me so well and begin my life anew in the world I had no wish to rejoin.

II

Opening my eyes I found myself back in my cell. I was no longer pressing against the wall but kneeling by the bed. Sweat prickled my forehead. My hands were trembling. There were also other physical manifestations which I prefer not to describe. Indeed I felt quite unfit to begin my daily work but so profound was my state of shock that I automatically embarked on my morning routine, and minutes later I was leaving my cell.

Perhaps I have erred in starting this narrative with an account of my vision. Perhaps I should instead have offered some essential biographical details, for the repeated mention of the word ‘cell’ has almost certainly conveyed the impression that I am an inmate of one of His Majesty’s prisons. Let me now correct this mistake. For the past seventeen years I have been a member of the Anglican brotherhood of monks known as the Fordite Order of St Benedict and St Bernard. I may still be judged eccentric, anti-social and possibly (after this account of my vision) deranged. But I am not a criminal.

In order that such an abnormal experience can be put in its proper context and judged fairly, I must attempt a thumbnail sketch of my past so let me state at once that in many ways my life has been exceedingly normal. I was brought up in a quiet respectable home, educated at various appropriate establishments and ordained as a clergyman of the Church of England not long after my twenty-third birthday. I then married a young woman who possessed what in my young day was described as ‘allure’ and which a later generation, debased by the War – the First War, as I suppose we must now call it – described as ‘It’. For some years after my marriage I worked as a chaplain to the Naval base at Starmouth, and later I volunteered for duty at sea with the result that much of my ministry was spent away from home. In fact I was absent when my wife died in 1912. For another seven years I continued my career in the Navy, but I judge it unnecessary to recount my war experiences. Suffice it to say that after the Battle of Jutland I never felt quite the same about the sea again.

Accordingly in 1919 I left the Navy and became the chaplain at Starmouth prison. The advantage of this change was that I was able to see more of my children, now adolescent, but the disadvantage was that I became aligned with an authority empowered to administer capital and corporal punishment, two practices which are entirely contrary to my conception of the Christian way to treat human beings. However I endured this harrowing ministry as best as I could until finally in 1923 the hour of my liberation dawned: with both my children launched on their adult lives I was able to retire to the Cambridgeshire village of Grantchester, where the Fordites had a house, and embark on my career as a monk. I had known the Abbot, James Reid, since my undergraduate days at the University two miles away, and although I had lost touch with him some years earlier it never occurred to me not to seek his help when I was at last free to join the Order.

I shall gloss over the disastrous beginning of my new life and simply state that after three months at Grantchester I was transferred to the Fordites’ farm at Ruydale, a remote corner of the North Yorkshire moors where the monks lived more in the austere style of Cistercians than Benedictines. Here I embarked on a successful cenobitic career which reached its apex in 1937 when I was transferred back to Grantchester to succeed James Reid as Abbot.

This brief autobiographical recital – remarkable more for what I have omitted than for what I have deigned to reveal – is all I intend to disclose at present about my past. No further disclosures are needed, I think, to show that my ministry has always demanded a strong constitution, absolute sanity and considerable reserves of spiritual strength. In short, although I write as a monk who has visions I am neither an hysteric nor a schizophrenic. I am a normal man with abnormal aspects – and having abnormal aspects, as Abbot James had assured me when I was a troubled young ordinand, was what being normal was all about.

‘But beware of those glamorous powers, Jon!’ he had urged after we had discussed my gifts as a psychic. ‘Beware of those powers which come from God but which can so easily be purloined by the Devil!’ This had proved a prophetic warning. For the next twenty years, while I remained in the world, my life was one long struggle to achieve the correct balance between the psychic and the spiritual so that I could develop properly as a priest, but it was a struggle I failed to win. There was little development. I did become a competent priest in the limited sense that the world judged my ministry to be effective, but my spiritual progress suffered from inadequate guidance and an undisciplined psyche. As Father Darcy told me later, I was like a brilliant child who had learnt the alphabet but had never been trained to read and write. However this situation changed when I became a monk, and it changed because for the first time I found the man who had the spiritual range and the sheer brute force of personality required to train me.

I have reached the subject of Father Darcy. Father Darcy is relevant to my vision because he made me the man I am today. I must describe him, but how does one describe a brilliant Christian monster? Father Darcy was unlike any other monk I have ever met. No doubt he was also unlike any monk St Benedict and St Bernard ever envisioned. Both intensely worldly and intensely spiritual (a rare and often bizarre combination) this modern cenobitic dictator was not only devout, gifted and wise but brutal, ruthless and power-mad.

As soon as he became the Abbot-General in 1910 he embarked on the task of waking up each of the four houses which had been slumbering on their comfortable endowments for decades. Having dusted down each monk he reorganized the finances and courted not only both Archbishops but the entire episcopal bench of the House of Lords in an effort to increase the Order’s worldly importance. As a private organization it was not directly connected to the Church of England, even though since its birth in the 1840s it had received the somewhat condescending blessings of successive Archbishops of Canterbury, but Father Darcy’s diplomatic ventures ensured that he and his abbots were treated with a new respect by the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Meanwhile the spiritual tone of the Order had been markedly raised, and by the time I became a monk in 1923 the Fordites were well known for the guidance and counselling given to those who sought their help. The restored tradition of Benedictine scholarship was also being noticed with approval.

It will be obvious from this description that Father Darcy had the charism of leadership but in fact he possessed all the major charisms and these gifts from God were buttressed and enhanced by a perfectly trained, immaculately disciplined psychic power which he had dedicated entirely to God’s service. He was a formidable priest, a formidable monk, a formidable man. But he was not likeable. However Father Darcy cared nothing for being liked. He would have considered such a desire petty and self-centred, indicative of a disturbed psyche which required a spiritual spring-cleaning. Father Darcy cared only about being respected by those outside the Order and obeyed by those within; such respect and obedience were necessary in order that he might work more efficiently for God, and Father Darcy, like all successful dictators, put a high value on efficiency.

My habit of calling him Father Darcy is new. Only people outside the Order call us monks by our surnames preceded by the title ‘Father’, if the monk be a priest, or ‘Brother’, if the monk be a layman. For the last thirty years Father Darcy had been addressed by his monks as ‘Father Abbot-General’ but after his death a month ago it had become necessary to adopt another designation in order to distinguish him from his successor, and to me ‘Father Cuthbert’ had merely conjured up a picture of a cosy old confessor unable to say boo to a goose. In accordance with the constitution of the Order which decreed that all monks were equal in death, he had been referred to throughout the burial service as ‘Cuthbert’ but whenever this word had been uttered something akin to a shudder of horror had rippled through the congregation as if Father Darcy were still alive to be enraged by the familiarity.

All the abbots attended the funeral. Cyril came from Starwater Abbey, where the Fordites ran a public school; Aidan, my former superior, came from Ruydale, and I came from Grantchester. Francis Ingram, Father Darcy’s right-hand man, organized the funeral and offered us all a lavish hospitality at the Order’s London headquarters, but he did not conduct the service. That task fell to Aidan as the senior surviving abbot.

‘It’s hard to believe the old boy’s gone,’ said Francis Ingram afterwards as he helped himself to a very large glass of port from the decanter which was normally reserved for visiting bishops. ‘What a wonderful capacity he had for making us all shit bricks! It’s going to be uncommonly dull without him.’

Monks are, of course, supposed to refrain from using coarse language but sometimes the effort of keeping one’s speech free of casual blasphemy is so intense that a lapse into vulgarity is seen as the only alternative to committing a sin. It is a notorious fact of monastic life that without the softening influence of women men tend to sink into coarse speech and even coarser humour; when I returned to Grantchester in 1937 as Abbot I found a community so lax that their conversation during the weekly recreation hour recalled not the cloister but the barracks of the Naval ratings at Starmouth.

My promotion in 1937 was unorthodox, not only because monks who follow the Benedictine Rule are supposed to remain in the same community for life but because the monks themselves normally elect an abbot from among their own number. However Father Darcy had decided I could be of more use to the Order at Grantchester than at Ruydale, and Father Darcy had no hesitation in riding rough-shod over tradition when the welfare of the Order was at stake.

‘Many congratulations!’ said Francis Ingram when I arrived at the London headquarters to be briefed for my new post. ‘I couldn’t be more pleased!’ Of course we both knew he was furious that I was to be an abbot while he remained a mere prior, but we both knew too that we had no choice but to go through the motions of displaying brotherly love. Monks are indeed supposed to regard all men with brotherly love, but since most monks are sinners not saints such exemplary Christian charity tends to resemble Utopia, a dream much admired but perpetually unattainable.

It was not until the April of 1940 when Father Darcy died that Francis and I saw our meticulously manifested brotherly love exposed as the fraud which it was. I have no intention of describing Father Darcy’s unedifying last hours in detail; such a description would be better confined to the pages – preferably the uncut pages – of a garish Victorian novel. Suffice it to say that for two days he knew he was dying and resolved to enjoy what little life remained to him by keeping us all on tenterhooks about the succession.

It is laid down in the constitution of the Order that although abbots are in normal circumstances to be elected, the Abbot-General must choose his own successor. The reasoning which lies behind this most undemocratic rule is that only the Abbot-General is in a position to judge which man might follow most ably in his footsteps, and the correct procedure is that his written choice should be committed to a sealed envelope which is only to be opened after his death. This move has the advantage of circumventing any last-minute dubious oral declarations and also, supposedly, removing from a dying Abbot-General any obligation to deal with worldly matters when his thoughts ought to be directed elsewhere. However Father Darcy could not bear to think he would be unable to witness our expressions when the appointment was announced, and eventually he succumbed to the temptation to embark on an illicit dénouement.

There were four of us present at his bedside, the three abbots and Francis Ingram.

‘Of course you’re all wondering how I’ve chosen my successor,’ said the old tyrant, revelling in his power, ‘so I’ll tell you: I’ve done it by process of elimination. You’re a good man, Aidan, but after so many years in a Yorkshire backwater you’d never survive in London. And you’re a good man too, Cyril – no one could run that school better than you – but the Order’s not a school and besides, like Aidan, you’re too old, too set in your ways.’

He paused to enjoy the emotions of his audience. Aidan was looking relieved; he would indeed have hated to leave Ruydale. Cyril was inscrutable but I was aware of his aura of desolation and I knew Father Darcy would be aware of it too. Meanwhile Francis was so white with tension that his face had assumed a greenish cast. That pleased Father Darcy. Aidan had been a disappointment, Cyril had been a pleasure and Francis had been a delight. That left me. Father Darcy looked at me and I looked at him and our minds locked. I tried to blot out his psychic invasion by silently reciting the Lord’s Prayer but when I broke down halfway through he smiled. He was a terrible old man but he did so enjoy being alive, and in the knowledge that his enjoyment could only be fleeting I resolved to be charitable; I smiled back.

Immediately he was furious. I was supposed to be writhing on the rack with Francis, not radiating charity, and as I sensed his anger I realized that in his extreme physical sickness his psychic control was slipping and his spiritual strength was severely impaired.

He said to me: ‘And now, I suppose, you’ve no doubt whatsoever that you’ll step into my shoes! Proud arrogant Jonathan – too proud to admit his burning curiosity about the succession and too arrogant to believe I could ever seriously consider another candidate for the post! But I did consider it. I considered Francis very seriously indeed.’ He sighed, his rheumy old eyes glittering with ecstasy as he recalled the next step in his process of elimination. ‘How hard it was to choose between the two of you!’ he whispered. ‘Francis has the first-class brain and the skill of the born administrator, but Jonathan has … well, we all know what Jonathan has, don’t we? Jonathan has the Powers – those Glamorous Powers, as poor old James used to call them – and they made Jonathan the most exciting novice I’ever encountered, so gifted yet so undisciplined, yes, you have all those gifts which Francis lacks, Jonathan, but it’s those gifts which make you vulnerable as you continue to wage your lifelong battle against your pride and your arrogance. Francis may be less gifted but that makes him less vulnerable, and besides,’ he added to Cyril and Aidan, ‘Francis has the breeding. Jonathan’s just the product of a schoolmaster’s mésalliance with a parlourmaid. He’d serve cheap port and young claret to all the important visitors, and that wouldn’t do, wouldn’t do at all – we must maintain the right style here, we’re a great Order, the greatest Order in the Church of England, and the Abbot-General must live in the manner of the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth. So all things considered,’ said the old despot, battling on towards the climax of his dénouement, ‘and following the process of elimination to its inevitable conclusion, I really think that the next Abbot-General should be a man who can distinguish vintage claret from a French peasant’s “vin ordinaire”.’

He had lived long enough to see the expressions on our faces. Sinking blissfully into a coma he drifted on towards death until an hour later, to my rage and horror, the Abbot-General of the Fordite monks became none other than my enemy Francis Ingram.

It would have been hard to imagine a superior less capable of dealing with my vision.

III

My antipathy to Francis was undoubtedly the main reason why I did not confide in him as soon as I had received my vision, but possibly I would have been almost as hesitant to confide in Cyril or Aidan. For twenty-four hours after the vision I was in shock. I believed I had received a call from God to leave the Order, and this belief at first triggered a purely emotional response: I felt an elated gratitude that God should have revealed His will to me in such a miraculous manner, and as I offered up my thanks with as much humility as I could muster I could only pray that I would be granted the grace to respond wholeheartedly to my new call.

However eventually this earthquake of emotion subsided and my intellect awoke. Reason tried to walk hand in hand with revelation and the result was disturbing. My first cold clear thought was that the vision was connected with my failure to become Abbot-General; it could be argued that since the Order, personified by Father Darcy, had rejected me I was now rejecting the Order, a rejection which, because it had been suppressed by my conscious mind, had manifested itself in a psychic disturbance.

This most unsavoury possibility suggested that I might have fallen into a state of spiritual debility, and as soon as I started to worry about my spiritual health I remembered that I was due to make my weekly confession on the morrow.

My confessor was Timothy, the oldest monk in the house, a devout man of eighty-two who possessed an innocent happiness which made him much loved in the community. After my installation as Abbot I had picked him to be my confessor not merely because he was the senior monk but because I knew he would never demand to know more than I was prepared to reveal. This statement may sound distressingly cynical, but I had been brought to Grantchester to bring a lax community to order and since in the circumstances it would have been inadvisable for me to display weakness to anyone, even the holiest of confessors, I had decided that the temptation to set down in the confessional the burden of my isolation should be resisted.

As I now contemplated my duty to set down the burden represented by my vision I knew that the most sensible solution was to circumvent Timothy by journeying to London to lay the problem before my superior. But still I balked at facing Francis. Could I make confession without mentioning the vision? Possibly. It was the easiest solution. But easy solutions so often came from the Devil. I decided to pray for guidance but as soon as I sank to my knees I remembered my mentor and knew what I should do. Father Darcy would have warned me against spiritual arrogance, and with profound reluctance I resigned myself to being at least partially frank with my confessor.

IV

‘… and this powerful light shone through the north window. As the light increased in brilliance I knelt down, covering my face with my hands, and at that moment I knew –’ I broke off.

Timothy waited, creased old face enrapt, faded eyes moist with excitement.

‘– I knew the vision was ending,’ I said abruptly. ‘Opening my eyes I found myself back in my cell.’

Timothy looked disappointed but he said in a hushed voice, much as a layman might have murmured after some peculiarly rewarding visit to the cinema: ‘That was beautiful, Father. Beautiful.’

Mastering my guilt that I had failed to be honest with him I forced myself to say: ‘It’s hard to venture an opinion, I know, but I was wondering if there could be some connection between the vision and the death of Father Abbot-General last month.’

Since he knew nothing of Father Darcy’s deathbed drama I fully expected a nonplussed reaction, but to my surprise Timothy behaved as if I had shown a brilliant intuitive insight. ‘That hadn’t occurred to me, Father,’ he confessed, ‘but yes, that makes perfect sense. Father Abbot-General – Father Cuthbert, as I suppose we must now call him – was so good to you always, taking such a special interest in your spiritual welfare, and therefore it’s only natural that you should have been severely affected by his death. But now God’s sent you this vision to help you overcome your bereavement and continue with renewed faith along your spiritual way.’

‘Ah.’ I was still wondering how I could best extricate myself from this morass of deception when Timothy again surprised me, this time by embarking on an interpretation which was both intriguing and complex.

‘The chapel was a symbol, Father,’ he said. ‘It represents your life in the Order, while the mysterious bag beneath the trees represents your past life in the world, packed up and left behind. And your journey through the chapel was an allegory. You opened the door; that represents your admittance to the Order as a postulant. You crossed the bleak empty space where there were no pews; that signifies those difficult early months when you began your monastic life here in Grantchester.’ Timothy, of course, could remember me clearly as a troubled postulant; one of the most difficult aspects of my return to Grantchester had been that there were other monks less charitable than Timothy who took a dim view of being ruled by a man whom they could remember only as a cenobitic disaster. ‘But you crossed the empty space,’ Timothy was saying tranquilly, ‘and you reached the pews; they represent our house in Yorkshire where you found contentment at last, and the lilies placed beneath the memorial tablet symbolize the flowering of your vocation. Your walk down the central aisle must represent your progress as you rose to become Master of Novices, and the bright light at the end must symbolize the bolt from the blue – your call to be the Abbot here at Grantchester. But of course the light was also the light of God, sanctifying your vision, blessing your present work and reassuring you that even without Father Cuthbert’s guidance you’ll be granted the grace to serve God devoutly in the future.’ And Timothy crossed himself with reverence.

It was a plausible theory. The only trouble was I had no doubt it was quite wrong.

V

Having revealed my most urgent problem in this disgracefully inadequate fashion, I then embarked on the task of confessing my sins. ‘Number one: anger,’ I said briskly. My confessions to Timothy often tended to resemble a list dictated by a businessman to his secretary. ‘I was too severe with Augustine when he fell asleep in choir again, and I was also too severe with Denys for raiding the larder after the night office. I should have been more patient, more forgiving.’

‘It’s very difficult for an abbot when he doesn’t receive the proper support from all members of his community,’ said Timothy. He was such a good, kind old man, not only in sympathizing with me but in refraining to add that our community had more than its fair share of drones like Augustine and Denys. My predecessor Abbot James had suffered from a chronic inability to say no with the result that he had admitted to the Order men who should never have become professed. The majority of these had departed when they discovered that the monastic life was far from being the sinecure of their dreams, but a hard core had lingered on to become increasingly useless, and it was this hard core which was currently, in my disturbed state, driving me to distraction.

Having mentally ticked ‘anger’ off my list I confessed to the sin of sloth. ‘I find my work a great effort at the moment,’ I said, ‘and I’m often tempted to remain in my cell – not to pray but to be idle.’

‘Your life’s very difficult at present,’ said Timothy, gentleness unremitting. ‘You have to deal with the young men who knock on our door in the hope that they can evade military service by becoming monks, and then – worse still – you have to deal with our promising young monks who feel called to return to the world to fight.’

‘I admit I was upset to lose Barnabas, but I must accept the loss, mustn’t I? If a monk wishes to leave the Order,’ I said, ‘and if his superior decides the wish is in response to a genuine call, that superior has no right either to stop him or to feel depressed afterwards.’

‘True, Father, but what a strain the superior has to endure! It’s not surprising that you should be feeling a little dejected and weary at present, particularly in view of Father Cuthbert’s recent death, and in consequence you must now be careful not to drive yourself too hard. You have a religious duty to conserve your energy, Father. Otherwise if you continue to exhaust yourself you may make some unwise decisions.’

I recognized the presence of the Spirit. I was being told my vision needed further meditation and that I was on no account to make a hasty move. Feeling greatly relieved I crossed ‘sloth’ off my list and rattled off a number of minor sins before declaring my confession to be complete, but unfortunately this declaration represented yet another evasion for my two most disturbing errors of the past week had been omitted from my list. The first error consisted of my uncharitable behaviour during a disastrous quarrel with my son Martin, and the second error consisted of my unmentionable response to the unwelcome attentions of a certain Mrs Ashworth.

VI

After making this far from satisfactory confession to Timothy I retired to the chapel to complete my confession before God. Later as I knelt praying I became aware of Martin’s unhappiness, a darkness soaked in pain, and as I realized he was thinking of me I withdrew to my cell to write to him.

‘My dear Martin,’ I began after a prolonged hesitation, ‘I trust that by now you’ve received the letter which I wrote immediately after our quarrel last Thursday. Now that four days have elapsed I can see what a muddled inadequate letter it was, full of what I wanted (your forgiveness for my lack of compassion) and not enough about your own needs which are so much more important than mine. Let me repeat how ashamed I am that I responded so poorly to the compliment you paid me when you took me into your confidence, and let me now beg you to reply to this letter even if this means you must tell me how angry and hurt you were by my lack of understanding. I know you wouldn’t want me to “talk religion” to you, but of course you’re very much in my thoughts at present and I pray daily that we may soon be reconciled. I remain as always your devoted father, J.D.’

Having delivered myself of this attempt to demonstrate my repentance I was for some hours diverted from my private thoughts by community matters, but late that night I again sat down at the table in my cell and embarked on the difficult task of writing to Mrs Ashworth.

‘My dear Lyle,’ I began after three false starts. I had been accustomed to address her by her first name ever since I had once counselled her in an emergency, but now I found the informality grated on me. ‘Thank you so much for bringing the cake last Thursday afternoon. In these days of increasing shortages it was very well received in the refectory.

‘Now a word about your worries. Is it possible, do you think, that your present melancholy is associated in some way with Michael’s birth? I seem to remember that you suffered a similar lowering of the spirits after Charley was born in 1938, and indeed I believe such post-natal difficulties are not uncommon. Do go to your doctor and ask if there’s anything he can do to improve your physical health. The mind and the body are so closely linked that any physical impairment, however small, can have a draining effect on one’s psyche.

‘I’m afraid it’s useless to ask me to heal you, as if I were a magician who could wave a magic wand and achieve a miracle. The charism of healing is one which for various reasons I avoid exercising except occasionally during my work as a spiritual counsellor, and as you know, I never counsel women except in emergencies. This is not because I wish to be uncharitable but because a difference in sex raises certain difficulties, as any modern psychiatrist will tell you, and these difficulties often create more problems than they solve. May I urge you again to consult Dame Veronica at the convent in Dunton? I know your aversion to nuns, but let me repeat that Dame Veronica is the best kind of counsellor, mature, sympathetic, intuitive and wise, and I’m sure she would listen with understanding to your problems.

‘Meanwhile please never doubt that I shall be praying regularly for you, for Charles and for the children in the hope that God will bless you and keep you safe in these difficult times which at present engulf us all.’

Having thus extricated myself (or so I hoped) from Mrs Ashworth’s far from welcome attentions I then wasted several minutes trying to decide how I should sign the letter. The Fordites, though following a Benedictine way of life, are Anglo-Catholics anxious to draw a firm line between themselves and their Roman brethren so the use of the traditional title ‘Dom’ is not encouraged. Usually I avoided any pretentious signature involving the word ‘Abbot’ and a string of initials which represented the name of the Order, but sometimes it was politic to be formal and I had a strong inclination to be formal now. However the danger of a formal signature was that Lyle Ashworth might consider it as evidence that I was rejecting her, and I was most anxious that in her disturbed state I should do nothing which might upset her further. An informal signature, on the other hand, might well be even more dangerous; if I had been writing to her husband I would have signed myself JON DARROW without a second thought, but I could not help feeling that a woman like Lyle might find an abbreviated Christian name delectably intimate.

I continued to hesitate as I reflected on my name. Before entering the Order I had chosen to be Jon but abbreviated names were not permitted to novices so I found I had become Jonathan. Yet so strong was my antipathy to this name that later, as I approached my final vows, I had requested permission to assume the name John – the cenobitic tradition of choosing a new name to mark the beginning of a new life was popular though not compulsory among the Fordites – and I had been greatly disappointed when this request had been refused. I suspected Father Darcy had decided that any pampering, no matter how mild, would have been bad for me. It was not until some years later when I became Ruydale’s Master of Novices that I was able to take advantage of the fact that shortened names were not forbidden in private among the officers, and a select group of my friends was then invited to use the abbreviation.

As time went on I also dropped the name Jonathan when introducing myself to those outside the Order who sought my spiritual direction, and now I had reached the point where I considered the name part of a formal ‘persona’, like the title Abbot, which had been grafted on to my true identity as a priest. I thought of Lyle Ashworth again, and the more I thought of her the more convinced I became that this was a case where Jon the priest should disappear behind Jonathan the Abbot, even though I had no wish to upset her by appearing too formal. I sighed. Then shifting uneasily in my chair I at last terminated this most troublesome epistolary exercise by omitting the trappings of my title but nevertheless signing myself austerely JONATHAN DARROW.

VII

Neither Lyle nor Martin replied to my letters but when Dame Veronica wrote to say that Lyle had visited her I realized with relief that my counsel had not been ineffective. However I continued to hear nothing from Martin and soon my anguish, blunting my psyche, was casting a stifling hand over my life of prayer.

By this time I had exhaustively analysed my vision and reached an impasse. I still believed I had received a communication from God but I knew that any superior would have been justifiably sceptical while Francis Ingram would have been downright contemptuous. It is the policy of the religious orders of both the Roman and the Anglican Churches to treat any so-called vision from God as a delusion until proved otherwise, and although I was a genuine psychic this fact was now a disadvantage. A ‘normal’ man who had a vision out of the blue would have been more convincing to the authorities than a psychic who might be subconsciously manipulating his gift to reflect the hidden desires of his own ego.

I wrote yet again to Martin and this time, when he failed to reply, I felt so bitter that I knew I had to have help. I could no longer disguise from myself the fact that I was in an emotional and spiritual muddle and suddenly I longed for Aidan, the Abbot of Ruydale, who had looked after me with such wily spiritual dexterity in the past. As soon as I recognized this longing I knew I had to see him face to face; I was beyond mere epistolary counselling, but no Fordite monk, not even an abbot, can leave his cloister without the permission of his superior, and that brought me face to face again with Francis Ingram.

Pulling myself together I fixed my mind on how comforting it would be to confide in Aidan, and embarked on the letter I could no longer avoid.

‘My dear Father,’ I wrote, and paused. I was thinking how peculiarly repellent it was to be obliged to address an exact contemporary as ‘Father’ and absolutely repellent it was to be obliged to address Francis as a superior. However such thoughts were unprofitable. Remembering Aidan again I made a new effort to concentrate. ‘Forgive me for troubling you,’ I continued rapidly, ‘but I wonder if you’d be kind enough to grant me leave to make a brief visit to Ruydale. I’m currently worried about my son, and since Aidan’s met him I feel his advice would be useful. Of course I wouldn’t dream of bothering you with what I’m sure you would rank as a very minor matter, but if you could possibly sanction a couple of days’ absence I’d be most grateful.’ I concluded with the appropriate formula of blessings and signed myself JONATHAN.

He replied by return of post. My heart sank as I saw his flamboyant handwriting on the envelope, and I knew in a moment of foreknowledge that my request had been refused. Tearing open the letter I read:

‘My dear Jonathan, Thank you so much for your courteous and considerate letter. But I wonder if – out of sheer goodness of heart, of course – you’re being just a little too courteous and a little too considerate? If you have the kind of problem which would drive you to abandon your brethren and travel nearly two hundred miles to seek help, I suggest you journey not to Ruydale but to London to see me. I shall expect you next week on Monday, the seventeenth of June. Assuring you, my dear Jonathan, of my regular and earnest prayers …’

I crumpled the letter into a ball and sat looking at it. Then gradually as my anger triggered the gunfire of memory the present receded and I began to journey through the past to my first meeting with Francis Ingram.

VIII

I first saw Francis when we were freshmen at Cambridge. He was leading a greyhound on a leash and smoking a Turkish cigarette. He was also slightly drunk. During that far-off decade which concluded the nineteenth century Francis looked like a degenerate in a Beardsley drawing and talked like a character in a Wilde play. In response to my fascinated inquiry the college porter told me that this exotic incarnation of the spirit of the age was the younger son of the Marquis of Hindhead. The porter spoke reverently. Even in those early days of our Varsity career Francis was acclaimed as ‘a character’.

I wanted to be ‘a character’ myself, but I was up at Cambridge on a scholarship, my allowance was meagre and I knew none of the right people. Francis, I heard, gave smart little luncheon parties in his rooms and offered his guests caviar and champagne. Barely able to afford even the occasional pint of ale I nursed my jealousy in solitude and spent the whole of my first term wondering how I could ‘get on’.

‘If you get on as you should,’ my mother had said to me long ago, ‘then no one will look down on you because I was once in service.’

I was just thinking in despair that I was doomed to remain a social outcast in that bewitching but cruelly privileged environment when Francis noticed me. I heard him say to the porter as I drew back out of sight on the stairs: ‘Who’s that excessively tall article who looks like a bespectacled lamp-post and wears those perfectly ghastly cheap suits?’ And later he said to me with a benign condescension: ‘The porter mentioned that you told his fortune better than any old fraud in a fair-ground, and it occurred to me that you might be rather amusing.’

I received an invitation to his next smart little luncheon-party and put myself severely in debt by buying a new suit. The fortune-telling was a success. More invitations followed. Soon I became an object of curiosity, then of respect and finally of fascination; I had discovered that by devoting my psychic gifts to the furtherance of my ambition the closed doors were opening and I had become ‘a character’ at last.

‘Darrow’s the most amazing chap,’ said Francis to his latest ‘chère amie’. ‘He reads palms, stops watches without touching them and makes the table waltz around the room during a seance – and now he’s taken to healing! He makes his hands tingle, strokes you in the right place and the next moment you’re resurrected from the dead! He’s got this droll idea that he should be a clergyman but personally I think he was born to be a Harley Street quack – he’d soon have all society beating a path to his door.’

By that time we were in our final year and I was more ambitious than ever. It was true that I was reading theology out of a genuine interest to learn what the best minds of the past had thought about the God I already considered I knew intimately, but I was also possessed by the desire to ‘get on’ in the Church and I saw an ecclesiastical career as my best chance of self-aggrandisement; I used to dream of an episcopal palace, a seat in the House of Lords and invitations to Windsor Castle. Naturally I had enough sense to keep these worldly thoughts to myself, but an ambitious man exudes an unmistakable aura and no doubt those responsible for my moral welfare were concerned about me. Various members of the divinity faculty endeavoured to give me the necessary spiritual direction, but I was uninterested in being directed because I was fully confident that I could direct myself. I felt I could communicate with God merely by flicking the right switches in my psyche, but it was a regrettable fact that my interest in God faded as my self-esteem, fuelled by my social success, burgeoned to intoxicating new dimensions.

‘How divinely wonderful to see you – I’m in desperate need of a magic healer!’ said Francis’ new ‘chère amie’ when I arrived to ‘dine and sleep’ one weekend at her very grand country house. A widowed twenty-year-old, she had already acquired a ‘fin de siècle’ desire to celebrate her new freedom with as much energy as discretion permitted. ‘Dear Mr Darrow, I have this simply too, too tiresome pain in this simply too, too awkward place …’

I was punting idly with the lady on the Cam two days later when Francis approached me in another punt with two henchmen and tried to ram me. I managed to deflect the full force of the assault but when he tried to use the punting pole as a bayonet I lost my temper. Abandoning the lady, who was feigning hysterics and enjoying herself immensely, I leapt aboard Francis’ punt and tried to wrest the pole from him with the result that we both plunged into the river.

‘You charlatan!’ he yelled at me as we emerged dripping on the bank. ‘You common swinish rotter! You ought to be castrated like Peter Abelard and then burnt at the stake for bloody sorcery!’

I told him it was hardly my fault if he was too effete to satisfy the opposite sex, and after that it took five men to separate us. I remember being startled by his pugnacity. Perhaps it was then that I first realized there was very much more to Francis Ingram than was allowed to meet the eye.

In the end his henchmen dragged him away and I was left to laugh at the incident, but I only laughed because at that moment my psychic faculty was dormant and I never foresaw the future. A month later the lady, who had been telling everyone I had miraculously cured her abdominal pain, became violently ill, and in hospital it was discovered that her appendix had ruptured. She died twenty-four hours later.

I knew that because I had temporarily removed the pain she had refrained from seeking medical advice until it was too late, and as the enormity of the catastrophe overwhelmed me I perceived for the first time the danger in which I stood. Contrary to what I had supposed my psychic powers made me not strong and impregnable but weak and vulnerable, a prey to any passing demonic force. I had used my powers to serve myself and the result had been tragedy. I now realized I had to use my powers to serve God, not merely in order to be a good man but in order to survive as a sane rational being, and as I finally recognized a genuine call to the priesthood I stumbled through the meadows which separated Cambridge from Grantchester and knocked on the door of the Fordite monks.

IX

At that stage of my life I had no thought of being a monk. I was merely desperate to obtain absolution from someone who, unlike the stern authorities at Laud’s College, might hear my confession with compassion, and if anyone had told me that one day I would myself enter the Order I would have laughed in scorn.

It would be edifying to record that my spiritual problems were solved once I came under the Abbot of Grantchester’s direction, but although James Reid was the holiest of men he was quite the wrong director for me. I liked him because he was fascinated by my psychic gifts and this, I regret to say, enhanced my pride by making me feel special. The result was that I fell into the habit of using my powers to manipulate him until we had both fooled ourselves into believing that we had achieved a successful ‘rapport’. In retrospect the truth seems obvious: I was still so spiritually immature that I could only tolerate a director who cocooned me in indulgence, and beyond my genuine desire to devote my life to God’s service, my psyche was as disruptive and undisciplined as ever. The years of my troubled priesthood had begun.

I saw no more of Francis after we came down from Cambridge, and for a time I was so absorbed by my preparations for ordination that I never thought of him, but five years later when I was a married Naval chaplain I heard the astonishing news that he had entered the Order. He began his monastic career at the Starwater house, some forty miles from where I worked at the Naval base in Starmouth, but I had lost touch with the Fordites by that time and I saw no reason why I should ever meet Francis again.

However word of his progress continued to reach me as he rose with lightning speed to the office of Bursar, no mean post in a place like Starwater Abbey where there was a large school to run and complex accounts to be kept. He was still at Starwater when I myself entered the Order in 1923, but as my career was unfolding at Ruydale we never met. Nor did we correspond. He represented a past which I could remember only with shame, and I suspected that I represented a similar burden of guilt to him. But then in 1930 he was transferred to the London headquarters in order to assist its ailing Bursar, and in a flash of foreknowledge I knew that our lives were drawing together again after completing some enigmatic circle in time.

Our reunion came sooner than I had anticipated. I underwent a period of crisis which I have no intention of describing so I shall only record that it concerned the house-cat, Whitby, and nearly terminated my career as a monk; Father Darcy had to be summoned to Yorkshire to set me back on the spiritual rails. I recovered from my crisis, but six months later Father Darcy decided to reassure himself that I had fully surmounted the disaster which was now known as ‘The Whitby Affair’, and I was summoned to London for an inspection.

The summons was most unusual. No one ever visited London from Ruydale except Aidan, who was obliged to travel there once a year for the Abbots’ Conference, and although I was apprehensive at the prospect of being inspected by Father Darcy I was also flattered that I was to receive special attention. However when I arrived in London in a state of wary but not unpleasant anticipation it was a rude shock when I found myself welcomed not by the Guest-Master but by the new Bursar, Francis Ingram.

‘So you’re still as lean as a lamp-post!’ he exclaimed. ‘But what happened to those owlish spectacles?’

‘My sight improved with age. What happened to the greyhound?’

‘He died of a surfeit of champagne.’

We laughed, shaking hands as if we were the oldest of friends, but I was unnerved by his aura of hostility. It lay like a ball of ice beneath the warmth of his welcome; to my psychic eye it was unmistakable, and immediately I heard myself say: ‘Perhaps we should agree to draw a veil over the past.’

‘Should we? Personally I think it’s more honest to face one’s disasters and chalk the whole lot up to experience. After all,’ said Francis, suddenly fusing his middle-aged self with the undergraduate of long ago, ‘Wilde did say that experience was the name men give to their mistakes.’

I said with as much good humour as I could muster: ‘Still quoting Wilde? I’m surprised our superior permits it!’

‘Then perhaps now’s the moment to make it clear to you that I’m the favourite with a licence to be entertaining,’ said Francis at once, and as he smiled, making a joke of the response, I recognized the demon jealousy and knew our old rivalry was about to be revived in a new form.

I said abruptly: ‘You’ve told him about the past?’

‘How could I avoid it? As soon as the rumour reached London that you’d got up to something thoroughly nasty with a cat I said: “That reminds me of my salad-days.” And then before I knew where I was –’

‘He’d prised the whole story out of you.’

‘But didn’t he know most of it anyway?’

‘I admit I told him about the Cambridge catastrophe, but I never mentioned you by name! And now, of course, he’s decided it would be amusing as well as edifying to batter us into brotherly love – he’s summoned me here not just to put my soul under the microscope but to purge us of our ancient antipathy!’

This deduction proved to be all too correct. Every evening after supper Father Darcy would summon us to his room and order a debate on a subject of theological interest. The debates lasted an hour and were thoroughly exhausting as Francis and I struggled to keep our tempers and maintain an acceptable level of fraternal harmony. Afterwards Father Darcy would pronounce the winner, dispatch Francis and embark on a fresh examination of my spiritual health. By the end of the week I was so worn out that I could hardly drag myself back to Yorkshire.

Before my departure I said in private to Francis: ‘I hope the old man doesn’t intend to make a habit of this. All I want is a quiet life at Ruydale.’

‘Dear old chap!’ said Francis. ‘You don’t seriously expect me to believe that, do you? After a few years of living on the Yorkshire moors a man of your ambition would feel like Napoleon marooned on St Helena!’

‘I don’t think that’s funny, Francis.’

‘I’m hardly delirious with amusement myself.’

‘Obviously you see me as a rival, but I assure you –’

‘Don’t bother. I’m not in the mood for hypocrisy.’

‘What’s this – a nursery tantrum? I’ve never seen such an unedifying exhibition of jealousy in all my life!’

‘And I’ve never seen such a plausible performance of a holy man devoid of ambition, but my dear Jonathan, just answer me this: has it never occurred to you that for a holy man devoid of ambition you seem to be carving out a quite remarkably successful career?’

I turned my back on him and walked away.

X

It is a relief to record that this disgraceful scene was not repeated; no doubt Francis was afterwards as ashamed of our hostile exchange as I was, and when we met again he even took the initiative in apologizing for the incident.

I paid six more visits to London before I was transferred to Grantchester, and each time Father Darcy pitted us against each other in debate, dragged our antipathy into the open and, in a metaphorical sense, rubbed our noses in the mess to discourage us from further antagonism. I was reminded of how one house-trains a cat. In the end Francis and I were so chastened by this remorseless spiritual purging that we almost became friends, but I never felt I knew him well. My psychic faculty, blunted by the antipathy which we both learnt to master but not erase, was dead in his presence. I received no insights which would have offered me the key to his character, nor could I perceive the texture of his spiritual life. Our debates had revealed his powerful intellect, but I came to the conclusion that although he was intellectually able he was spiritually limited and that this fact lay at the root of his jealousy. He was quite intelligent enough to know his limitations, more than intelligent enough to conceal them whenever possible and certainly human enough to resent a man who displayed the gifts he secretly coveted but knew he would never attain. He was also, I soon realized, deeply envious of the effortless psychic understanding which existed between Father Darcy and myself, and when I realized how much he depended on our mentor’s approbation I found myself driven to question the propriety of their relationship.

Father-son relationships are as forbidden in the cloister as the notorious ‘particular friendships’ which prurient laymen find so titillating, but I thought that Father Darcy, in characteristic fashion, might be riding roughshod over the rules in order to give Francis some form of psychological security which could prove beneficial to his character. I was not jealous. I had no desire whatsoever that Father Darcy should treat me as a son; I had a tough enough time surviving his attentions as a spiritual director. But I did wonder if Father Darcy were taking an unwise risk, and I wondered too, as time passed, if he were using Francis to gratify some immaculately concealed emotional need.

I knew I was of intense interest to Father Darcy but the interest was essentially detached; I was just the parlourmaid’s son who had presented him with the challenge of a monastic lifetime but who could nonetheless be kept at arm’s length in Yorkshire. But Francis was the man from his own class with whom he could feel at ease, the man who had to be transferred to London not merely to supervise the Order’s financial affairs but to keep the Abbot-General company in his old age. Such a situation was all very comfortable for Father Darcy, but was it good for Francis? I often considered this question but could never answer it with any degree of confidence. Perhaps Francis needed this special attention in order to make the most of those limited spiritual gifts. It was possible. With Father Darcy any bizarre monastic situation was possible – as I realized all too clearly when he lay on his deathbed and declared that his successor must be a man who could tell vintage claret from Vin ordinaire’.

Francis took care to say to me afterwards: ‘I’d like to think that despite the old man’s appalling final antics we can somehow contrive to be friends.’

‘Of course. Why not?’ I said equably before retreating to my cell to seethe with rage.

‘I fear I shall still worry in the future about you and Francis,’ confessed Aidan to me after the funeral, but I only answered with all my most fatal arrogance: ‘I can’t imagine any difficulty arising which can’t be easily resolved.’

Less than two months later I received my summons to London and I travelled there in the knowledge that I was deep in difficulties which were incapable of an easy resolution. Moreover after years of rivalry Francis now had me where he wanted me: in a position which was utterly subject to his will.

It was a bitter pill to swallow.

XI

Journeying beyond the walls of one’s cloister was always a disturbing experience – I shall never forget my first journey from Ruydale to London when I encountered the amazingly exposed legs of two flappers on the train – and now I found myself more disturbed than ever. But this time I barely noticed the female passengers. I was too busy reading The Times. It seemed the French had collapsed; Pétain had ordered a cessation of the fighting and was in touch with the Nazi command. For weeks the countries of Europe had been falling to the Nazis and now after the collapse of Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium it appeared that France too had been conquered. Without the French we would be quite alone. More than fifteen hundred years of Christian culture hung by a thread and the Devil’s breath was hot upon our necks.

I found myself thinking that the chaos in the world mirrored the chaos in my psyche. I saw my career as a monk hanging by a thread, and as I forced myself to acknowledge that my vision could have been a delusion I was aware of the demonic menace which always had the power to annihilate me. A second later I was trying to recover my equilibrium by telling myself I should put my trust in God, but the trouble was, as I well knew, I was quite unable to put my trust in Francis Ingram.

Unless I wanted to be judged an apostate I could not leave the Order without his permission, and that meant my entire future rested on his ability to exercise the charism of the discernment of spirits, the gift from God which enabled a man to perceive whether a situation was divinely or diabolically inspired. Francis, as I had long since decided, was spiritually limited. This did not mean he was incapable of exercising the charism of discernment, for with God’s grace even the most unlikely people can display charismatic powers, but it did mean that I had ample opportunity to worry about how far he was capable of placing himself in God’s hands so that he might act as a channel for the Holy Spirit. Francis was a clever, cunning, efficient, ambitious, jealous, charming and outwardly devout monk. But was he a good one? I found I could derive no reassurance from reflecting that Father Darcy would hardly have willed the Order to a monk who was merely a first-class administrator. Sickness had undermined Father Darcy’s powers at the end of his life, and it was more than possible that in a moment of weakness he had given way to the temptation to leave the Order not to the best monk he ever trained but to the best son he never had.

These lowering thoughts occupied me throughout my journey on the underground railway from Liverpool Street Station to Marble Arch. Then I pulled myself together as best I could, gathered up a few scattered shreds of faith and trudged north through the brilliant June sunshine to the townhouse which had once belonged to the Order’s founder, Mr Horatio Ford.

XII

‘My dear Jonathan, how wan you look!’ said Francis in his most theatrical voice as I entered the room where he conducted his daily business. ‘But then the news in this morning’s Times is enough to make anyone blanche. I confess I’m seriously tempted to buy a wireless in order to hear Mr Churchill’s broadcast tonight – only the thought of Father Darcy turning in his grave deters me.’

‘If Father Darcy were alive he would already have discovered what kind of wireless the Archbishop keeps at Lambeth Palace and he’d be busy ordering a better one from Harrods!’

We laughed. The interview seemed to have begun in a promising spirit of amity, but I was acutely aware that the amity was no more than skin-deep.

When I had first met Francis in his gilded youth I had been reminded of that famous acid description of Julius Caesar: ‘He was every man’s woman and every woman’s man.’ But despite this appearance of ambivalence he had paid carnal attention only to the opposite sex and it was not until years later, when I became enamoured with modern psychological theories, that I suspected he was a homosexual who had indulged in heterosexual affairs to conceal his true inclinations not only from the world but from himself. Later still, when I had become far more cautious in applying modern psychology to complex characters, I became less confident of this facile diagnosis and wondered if the effete airs of Francis’ youth had merely been part of a mask he had assumed in order to draw attention to himself; I even wondered if the mask had been his way of damping down strong heterosexual inclinations which he believed might disrupt his life disastrously. But whatever the truth was about his sexuality the fact remained that in his maturity no one could have called him effete. He was a tall man, though not as tall as I was, and the passing years, stripping aside the air of decadence, had substituted a flamboyant air of distinction. He had fine dark eyes, expressive dark eyebrows and a remarkable head of silver hair which he wore longer than a monk should, no doubt out of vanity. I was surprised Father Darcy had permitted it. The Fordites may have dispensed with the medieval custom of the tonsure, but they are still expected to keep their hair decently short.

As I entered the room and we embarked on our friendly opening remarks he moved gracefully around the corner of his large handsome desk to meet me. The room too was large and handsome, littered with the antiques old Ford had left behind, and, as Father Darcy had once boasted smugly: ‘More than a match for any of the Archbishop’s private chambers at Lambeth.’ Father Darcy had been dangerously bold in his belief that to attract worldly respect the Order should present a worldly façade, and personally I deplored such a policy. The Abbot-General’s office in which I now stood was in the enclosed part of the house which meant that no one outside the Order ever saw it, but nevertheless it was furnished as lavishly as the Abbot-General’s parlour where important visitors were received. There was even, I regret to record, a peculiarly gross chandelier hanging from the centre of the ceiling.

After we had laughed with studied heartiness at the thought of Father Darcy ordering the latest wireless from Harrods, we moved swiftly through the formula of cenobitic greeting like actors in a well-rehearsed play. As Francis paused by the desk I knelt, touched his abbot’s ring with my lips and then rose to shake his hand. A moment later we were both seated facing each other across his desk.

‘I’m sorry to hear you have a difficulty with your son,’ said Francis, idly picking up my letter in which I had requested his permission to visit Yorkshire. ‘What’s the trouble?’

‘As it happens I’ve now decided that Martin isn’t my main worry at present.’ I had to will myself to add: ‘My major difficulty lies elsewhere.’

Francis, who had been rereading the letter, at once glanced up. ‘Oh?’ he said. ‘And what, may I ask, is your major difficulty?’

I said: ‘I want to leave the Order,’ and at that moment the die was cast.

TWO

‘When Tertullian, who was not a mystic, says that most men apprehend God by means of visions, we realize how natural it seemed to the ancients to believe that these experiences were a genuine and by no means unusual revelation.’

W. R. INGE

Dean of St Paul’s 1911–1934

Mysticism in Religion

I

I had expected a theatrical reaction but none came. Not a muscle moved in Francis’ face; his fine eyes were unreadable. Finally he dropped the letter on his desk, donned a pair of spectacles and produced from a drawer a clean sheet of foolscap. Then after dipping his pen in the ink he wrote at the top of the page: ‘JONATHAN DARROW: 17th June, 1940,’ and said casually: ‘I assume that when you say you want to leave the Order this isn’t a mere whim that’s tickled your fancy?’

‘I’m sorry, I expressed myself badly. What I want is of course quite irrelevant. But I believe this is what God wants.’

Francis underlined his heading and asked: ‘When were you first aware of this call?’

‘May the seventeenth.’

Francis raised an eyebrow, ostentatiously examined his desk-calendar and allowed a pregnant pause to develop. But eventually all he said was: ‘How did you become aware of the call?’

‘I had a vision.’

A second pause ensued and was allowed to reach a far more advanced stage of pregnancy. Francis took off his spectacles, dangled them between his thumb and forefinger and glanced at the chandelier as if each crystal had demanded a careful inspection. Then replacing his glasses he pushed them down to the tip of his nose and looked at me over the frames. Francis had a whole series of such mannerisms; I always found them excessively irritating.

‘You had a vision.’

‘Yes.’

‘You had a vision of profound importance on the seventeenth of May and yet it’s only now that you deign to confide in your superior?’

‘I felt I needed time for reflection.’

‘How arrogant! You have what can only be described as a disruptive experience which must inevitably have affected your spiritual life, and yet you coolly decide you’re in a position to reflect on the experience at leisure!’

I said at once: ‘I was in error. I’m sorry.’

‘So you should be.’ Pushing back his glasses to the bridge of his nose he wrote: ‘Reflects for a month but now admits the arrogance of his failure to confide in me immediately.’ On completing this sentence he added in his most acid voice: ‘And now I suppose you’ll tell me that you’ve failed to confide in your confessor! Incidentally, who is he?’

‘Timothy.’ Remembering that Francis had not yet visited the house at Grantchester I offered the most fundamental description I could devise. ‘He’s our senior monk, a very good, holy old man.’

‘Cosy for you,’ said Francis. ‘I’m only surprised Father Darcy sanctioned someone so pliable, but then I suppose he thought you couldn’t go too far astray so long as he was alive to keep an eye on you.’

I said nothing.

‘Very well,’ said Francis, writing the word ‘VISION’ on a fresh line, ‘You’d better tell me what happened,’ and I began my account of the abnormal in the most normal voice I could muster.

II

When I had finished Francis drew a line under his last note and stared in silence at the written page. ‘Is that all?’ he said abruptly at last. ‘There weren’t, for example, six naked women dancing merrily in the glade?’

‘Absolutely not!’

Unexpectedly Francis smiled. ‘I was only thinking that apart from the ending, which I admit is spectacular, it’s a dull sort of vision, isn’t it? No naked ladies, no heavenly choirs, no disembodied voices exhorting you to great spiritual feats.’

‘I’m sorry, I’ll try to have a more entertaining vision next time.’

He laughed. I was tempted to relax but sensed that he wanted to lure me off my guard. ‘Tell me,’ he was saying idly, ‘how often do you have these visions?’

‘On average about once every four years. A far more common experience is foreknowledge, a flash in the consciousness which lasts no more than a couple of seconds.’

‘How accurate are these flashes?’

‘There’s a high margin of error. But the correct predictions can be striking.’

‘But you admit you’re often wrong.’

‘Certainly. I believe the future is foreknown to God but not foreordained – or in other words, I believe there are many futures but the future which actually happens in finite time is one which can be shaped by the exercise of man’s free will. I think my failures occur when man steps in and alters the pattern.’

‘Quite. But I really must resist the temptation to be diverted,’ said Francis, ‘by an enthralling discussion of determinism and free will. Now if we may return to your visions –’ Francis sighed as if he found the word a heavy cross to bear ‘– do they always relate to the future?’

‘Not necessarily. They may represent the present or past seen from another angle. Or if they do relate to the future, the past may be present as well. It’s as if I’m moving in a dimension of reality which exists beyond time as we understand it.’

‘How do you classify this present vision as far as time’s concerned?’

‘I think I’ve seen the future. There was nothing of the past or present in it at all.’

‘And maybe nothing of the future either. But before we get bogged down in scepticism,’ said Francis, allowing me no chance to comment, ‘give me an example of a vision which was rather less enigmatic than this one. I feel I need some yardstick of comparison.’

After a pause I said: ‘In my last vision – not this present one, but a vision I had in 1937 – I found myself back in the prison where I worked before I entered the Order. I was walking down one of the main halls, but then I turned out of the past into an unfamiliar corridor and entered a large room which was certainly like no cell which exists in the prison service. About a dozen prisoners were confined there but they didn’t see me so I knew that in this particular dimension of reality I wasn’t physically present. At the same time I felt deeply involved; perhaps I was psychically present in my prayers. Then as I drew closer I realized the prisoners were grouped around a man who lay dying and that this dying man was being tended by a priest whom I recognized. It was Charles Ashworth, the Canon of Cambridge Cathedral and the Tutor in Theology at Laud’s. I act as his spiritual director. Then I felt the evil emanating from the walls and as I automatically began to recite the Lord’s Prayer the vision ended.’ I paused before adding: ‘Over the years I’ve become increasingly certain that I saw a scene in a future prisoner-of-war camp.’

‘Where’s Ashworth at the moment?’

‘Still safe in England. But he’s become an army chaplain.’ Before I could stop myself I was prejudicing my case by voicing the opinion I so much wanted to believe. ‘However there’s a good chance that the vision won’t come true; I think it may have been a psychic aberration brought on by the strain of my translation to Grantchester.’

Francis immediately pounced. ‘What makes you so sure that this latest vision isn’t a mere psychic aberration?’

I kept calm. ‘The light shining through the north window was the light of God. The knowledge imprinted on my consciousness formed a divine revelation. Unlike the Ashworth vision I felt no doubt afterwards, no confusion.’

Francis said sharply: ‘What did Timothy think?’

‘He saw the vision as an allegory, but he was handicapped by the fact that I concealed the revelation at the end.’ I recounted Timothy’s interpretation.

‘And do you dismiss this allegorical approach entirely?’

‘I’m sure I was in a real place – but I concede there may have been symbolism present. I don’t believe the suitcase existed on the same level of reality as the chapel. I suspect it represented travel, or possibly change.’

‘Tell me why you’re so convinced that you were moving in a landscape which actually existed.’

I said without hesitation: ‘The quality of the detail. It was unusually distinct. In the chapel I even smelt the scent of the lilies, and such an experience is most unusual in a vision. The sense of smell is nearly always dormant.’

Francis made a long note before extracting a fresh sheet of foolscap from his desk. Then he said: ‘After the vision had ended, what sort of state were you in?’

‘I was trembling and sweating. The amount of psychic energy required to generate a vision always produces a powerful physical reaction.’

‘Were you sexually excited?’

Silence. I was acutely aware that the longer I took to reply the more questionable my hesitation would seem but several seconds elapsed before I could say: ‘Yes, but that doesn’t mean anything.’

‘That’s not for you to decide.’ Francis wrote on his fresh sheet of foolscap: ‘Possible evidence of sexual trouble,’ before he glanced up in time to catch me reading his writing. ‘Jonathan, would you kindly desist from flaunting the perfect sight you’ve been fortunate enough to acquire in middle age and abstain from any attempt to decipher my notes? That’s an order.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘The correct response to an order from your superior,’ said Francis, ‘is: “Yes, Father.” And by the way, are you aware that since this interview commenced you haven’t once addressed me in an appropriate manner?’

‘I’m sorry, Father. Please forgive me.’

There was a pause. Having flexed the muscles of his new power and found them in good order Francis allowed himself a discreet sigh of satisfaction before he picked up his pen again. ‘Very well, let’s continue with the subject of sexual intimacy – or, to use the coarse abbreviation of the younger generation, “sex”. How many women are there in your life at present?’

‘There’s my daughter –’

‘Let’s leave Freud out of this, shall we?’

‘There’s the Abbess at Dunton. She’s a splendid old lady of seventy-eight whom I see when I pay the Abbot’s traditional call on the nuns once a year.’

‘And let’s leave out the old age pensioners too. Is there any woman under forty whom you’ve been seeing regularly?’

‘Only Mrs Charles Ashworth, the wife of the theologian I mentioned just now.’

‘Is she attractive?’

‘Not to me. In fact I rather dislike her. May I stress at this point that my vision has absolutely nothing to do with women and sex?’

‘Why are you getting so ruffled on the subject of women and sex?’

‘I’m not getting ruffled! I’m simply impatient because –’

‘When did you last see Mrs Ashworth?’

Silence.

‘Jonathan?’

‘I last saw Mrs Ashworth,’ I said, ‘on the sixteenth of May.’

‘The day before your vision.’

‘Yes.’ Now it was my turn to gaze up at the chandelier as if every crystal had demanded a meticulous inspection.

‘And apart from the visit of Mrs Ashworth,’ said Francis as the nib of his pen whispered across the page, ‘what else happened on the sixteenth of May?’

‘Nothing much. There were the usual minor irritations – Augustine, one of my drones, fell asleep in choir and another drone, Denys, had to be reprimanded for raiding the larder.’

‘Just another dreary monastic day – but outside in the world it wasn’t dreary at all, was it? It was painfully exciting. Chamberlain had just fallen, Churchill had taken over as Prime Minister, the British Army in France was heading for the ordeal of Dunkirk –’

‘In such circumstances it was a relief to be diverted by my drones.’

‘Your drones and Mrs Ashworth. Was she your only visitor that day?’

‘No.’ I hesitated before adding neutrally: ‘My son came to see me.’

‘Ah yes,’ said Francis. ‘Martin. Obviously now is the moment when you should tell me about your current difficulty with him.’

I glanced down at my hands and to my horror I saw their outline begin to blur. Willing my abbot’s ring to remain distinct I managed to say: ‘It was nothing. We had a disagreement but that’s irrelevant to the subject under discussion.’

‘That’s not for you to judge.’ As my vision cleared I saw him write ‘MARTIN’ and underline the name twice. ‘Has anything else happened to upset you lately – apart, of course, from Father Darcy’s death and your failure to become Abbot-General?’

By this time I had myself so tightly in control that I never even flinched. ‘No, Father.’

Francis removed his spectacles and to my profound relief I realized the interview was drawing to a close. ‘Well, Jonathan,’ he said dryly, ‘you’ve certainly given me food for thought. I trust you’ve made adequate arrangements for your prior to hold the fort in your absence?’

‘I did tell him that I’d almost certainly have to stay overnight –’

‘Overnight?’ Francis regarded me incredulously. ‘Did you really think this matter could be settled in a few hours?’

‘No, of course not, but I thought that after you’d cross-examined me you’d merely suggest various avenues of prayer and meditation before sending me back to Grantchester to reflect further on the problem.’

‘I see. That’s what you’d do, would you, if you were the Abbot-General?’

After a pause I said: ‘Yes, Father.’

‘But you’re not the Abbot-General, are you?’

‘No, Father.’

Francis pushed his telephone across the desk towards me. ‘Ring your prior and tell him you’re going to be away for a week.’

III

I had to cancel not only a number of counselling appointments but an important retreat for theological students. I felt sorry for my prior, burdened with the necessity of making numerous awkward telephone calls, but he brushed aside with admirable alacrity the apology I felt he deserved.

While I was speaking to Bernard Francis was engaged in writing a letter. ‘Take this to the infirmary,’ he said when he had finished. ‘The first thing to do with any monk who has visions is to give him a thorough medical examination. I’ve told Ambrose you’re a psychic so he won’t immediately jump to the conclusion that you’re off your head, but I’ve forbidden him to ask you about the contents of your vision and I forbid you to reveal them.’

‘Yes, Father.’

‘When Ambrose has finished his examination you’ll probably be in time to make an appearance in choir. I shall expect to see you in the chapel and also afterwards in the refectory. As for the afternoon, you must spend it in prayer. I suggest you meditate on the subject of truth and pray for the courage to be entirely honest with me during the ordeal which lies ahead for us both. Then at four o’clock you’ll return to this room and I shall inform you how I intend to proceed.’

‘Yes, Father.’

He made a gesture of dismissal and at once I departed for the infirmary.

IV

I had first met Ambrose the Infirmarian in 1923 during the turbulent opening year of my monastic life; when Father Darcy had removed me from Grantchester I had spent the night at the London headquarters before being dispatched to Ruydale. After an indescribable scene in the punishment cell and another equally harrowing ordeal in which I had been obliged to kneel in a humiliated state in front of the Abbot-General’s table in the refectory while the brethren ate their supper, I had been dumped in the infirmary to be repaired and Ambrose had given me the welcome reassurance that the Christian spirit was not entirely absent in that rich repulsive house.

Later I had met him on my unorthodox visits to London after the Whitby affair. He had sought my company during the Saturday recreation hour, and I suspected he was interested in me because he had heard I possessed the charism of healing. He was in correspondence with Wilfred, the Infirmarian at Ruydale, a man who unlike Ambrose had had no formal medical training but who nonetheless possessed considerable gifts as a healer, and Wilfred had probably let slip a detail or two which had stimulated Ambrose’s curiosity. However since I was forbidden to discuss my ill-fated career as a healer this curiosity had remained unassuaged.

‘Good morning, Father!’ he said, meticulous in respecting my office even though before my final preferment he had been one of the brethren invited to call me Jon. ‘I heard you were visiting us today but I didn’t realize I was going to have the pleasure of talking to you.’ And when he had read Francis’ letter he said with an admirable serenity: ‘Do you normally enjoy good health?’

‘Very good health,’ I said, and at once wondered if I sounded too firm. Psychics are sensitive on the subject and never more so than when their powers are being critically examined.

Ambrose asked a number of mundane questions about my bowels, bladder, heart, eyes and teeth before enquiring if I were prone to suffer from headaches. Immediately I knew he was toying with the idea of a brain tumour.

‘I never have headaches,’ I said.

‘Never?’ said Ambrose mildly.

Realizing that I was sounding thoroughly implausible I changed course and admitted to the occasional headache.

‘Have you ever suffered from epilepsy?’

‘Absolutely not!’

‘Quite so, quite so,’ said Ambrose, very soothing. ‘But I’m sure you understand that the question has to be asked. I must say, it certainly sounds as if you’re unusually fit for a man of your age – and what age would that be exactly, Father, if you’ll forgive my asking?’

I was caught unprepared. To my surprise I found the question annoyed me, and my surprise was followed by an emotion which I can only describe as a rebellious embarrassment. I said abruptly: ‘One’s as old as one feels and I feel no more than forty-five.’

When Ambrose looked astonished I saw the stupidity of my evasion and regretted it. Flatly I said: ‘I’ve just had my sixtieth birthday.’

‘Congratulations! I trust the milestone didn’t go unmarked?’

‘No, my daughter wrote and my grandchildren sent cards.’

‘What about your son?’ said Ambrose, and at once I knew he had been briefed to make an inquiry about Martin.

‘He came to see me.’

‘How nice!’ Ambrose began to take my blood pressure. ‘What’s he doing nowadays? I suppose he’s too old to be called up.’ At that time compulsory enlistment only encompassed men up to the age of twenty-seven.

‘No doubt he’ll eventually be assigned to some non-combatant task. He’s a pacifist.’

‘I admire these young men for having the courage of their convictions,’ said Ambrose generously. I knew his favourite nephew was in the Air Force. ‘What terrible times we live in! I feel I know now exactly how St Augustine felt when he witnessed the civilized world collapsing and saw the barbarians at the gates of his city. Indeed sometimes,’ said Ambrose, listening to my chest with his stethoscope, ‘no matter how deep one’s faith it’s impossible not to feel depressed.’

We had reached the subject of depression. After Ambrose had completed his tour with the stethoscope, peered down my throat and congratulated me on having kept all my teeth, I said firmly: ‘Before you ask the question you’ve already framed in your mind, may I assure you that I’m not in the least depressed?’

Ambrose gave me a quizzical look. ‘I was actually going to ask if you’d been aware of overworking lately.’

I opened my mouth to say no but instead forced myself to admit: ‘Perhaps.’

‘Overwork can lead to exhaustion and then depression becomes a danger, even with people who aren’t normally depressed. Any trouble getting to sleep?’

‘Not usually.’

‘And getting up? I was wondering if, when this vision began, you were lying in bed and wishing you could stay there all day.’

After a pause I said: ‘I wasn’t lying in bed when the vision began. I was sitting on the edge.’

‘Ah. And what exactly happened? I’m not asking for details of the vision, I hasten to add, but merely for a description of the signs which preceded it.’

‘My visual perceptions altered. Colours became very bright.’

‘Did you at any time lose consciousness?’ said Ambrose, still surreptitiously clinging to the notion of epilepsy.

‘No. My visions are always one continuous experience, the abnormal consciousness flowing directly out of the normal consciousness and back again.’

‘Is it at any time an out-of-the-body experience?’

‘Yes, in the transitional period between the normal and the abnormal I can look down on my body from above.’

‘Well, that’s all very orthodox for a psychic, I suppose,’ said Ambrose, compensating for his obsession with epilepsy by accepting my descriptions calmly. ‘When did you start having these experiences?’

‘I’ve always been psychic in the sense of being able to receive flashes of foreknowledge. But the psychic energy required to generate the visions didn’t develop until I was fourteen.’

‘The age of puberty? By the way, that reminds me – I’d better examine you for possible prostate trouble.’

We had reached the subject of sex. I kept quiet and waited.

‘No sign of disease,’ said Ambrose presently. ‘Good. But I wonder if you have any more mundane problems in that area? For instance I had a man in here the other day who was plagued by early-morning erections. Of course nothing could be more common than an early-morning erection, but this man suffered such discomfort that he found he could only obtain relief by masturbating, and as he was a priest this put him in a difficult spiritual position.’

‘Self-abuse hardly results in an easy spiritual position for a layman either, Ambrose.’

We both laughed.

‘Of course a lot of monks would give their back teeth to have such problems,’ remarked Ambrose, washing his hands. ‘It’s curious, isn’t it, how a man likes his equipment to be in working order even though he’s taken a vow not to use it? I find that psychologically interesting.’

I made no comment.

‘I’m told that this vision of yours was accompanied by certain sexual manifestations,’ said Ambrose, forced by my silence to abandon his discreet approach. ‘I presume this means you had an erection.’

By this time I was getting dressed. Buckling the belt of my habit I said: ‘It’s unhelpful, Ambrose, to press the connection between the sexual force in the body and the psychic force in the mind. There may indeed be some sort of link, but exactly what that link is can only be a matter of speculation and in my opinion any sexual manifestations which occur are essentially irrelevant.’

‘They’re not indicative of sexual frustration?’

‘One of my most striking visions,’ I said, ‘occurred during my marriage when I was regularly enjoying my marital rights.’

‘Then I’d certainly agree sexual frustration couldn’t have been involved on that occasion, but what about this present incident? Has celibacy been uncomfortable for you lately?’

‘Certainly not, and personally I’d have taken a very sceptical view of that monk who could only solve his physical problem by masturbating! I hope you had the good sense to tell him to apply cold water more liberally and work harder.’

‘So with regard to your present vision –’

‘It had nothing to do with sex, Ambrose.’

‘But nevertheless it was accompanied by –’

‘Why are you laying such stress on this trivial physical phenomenon? Sexuality should be accepted without fuss, not turned into an object of morbid speculation!’

‘Yes, Father. Did you ejaculate?’

‘Ambrose, I know you’re asking these ridiculous questions with the best will in the world, but I really think –’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you –’

‘I’m not upset!’

‘– but I’m merely anxious to get everything quite clear in my mind. Now, if these sexual manifestations are irrelevant, am I right in thinking that the visions have nothing to do with any event, sexual or otherwise, which may be taking place in your life at the time?’

I willed myself to be calm and recalled my duty to be honest. ‘No, that’s not right,’ I said with reluctance. ‘There’s usually an event which seems to act as a trigger.’ I hesitated before adding: ‘In 1937 I had a vision about a young priest whom I’d just helped through a grave spiritual crisis. It seemed clear afterwards that this crisis, which had absorbed me deeply, had acted as a stimulant, triggering this psychic glimpse of one of his possible futures.’

‘And may I ask if you’ve identified the trigger of this latest vision?’

I said flatly: ‘There was no trigger. The vision came from God.’

We sat in silence for a moment. I sensed that Ambrose was anxious to signal not only his respect for me but his reverence for any gift from God, and because I was aware of his sympathy I managed to control my anger when he eventually asked: ‘Have you felt persecuted lately?’

‘No. And I haven’t been hearing voices either. I’m not a paranoid schizophrenic’

‘The most difficult patients, as any doctor will tell you,’ said Ambrose, smiling at me, ‘are always the ones who like to run their own interviews and dictate the results to their unfortunate physicians.’ He stood up before adding: ‘However I have to admit that in my opinion you’re physically very fit for a man of sixty, and I’m not surprised you feel no older than forty-five.’

At last I was able to relax. ‘Thank you, Ambrose!’ I said, smiling back at him, but after I had left the infirmary I realized he had ventured no opinion on my mental health at all.