The Anchoress of Shere, page 20
He hated Templeton and all his kind, but just as he wanted to control, so, too, he understood that, in the final analysis, he had to be subservient to the authority of Rome and its episcopal appointees, even if they were bibulous oafs such as Templeton. But Duval would not give in, even though the Church had failed him yet again. He had not failed; the Church had failed to understand his mission. The more the success of that mission seemed to fade, as near-victory slipped into defeat, the more destructive his soul became.
In his subconscious, probably, and certainly in the rambling confessions in his diary, Duval the erstwhile spiritual champion was becoming more and more Duval the destroyer. Perhaps something deep inside his psyche, well hidden, told him that he could never succeed in his mission, that he never really wanted to. His psychotic streak was enhanced by his paranoia. He was a gambler who was satisfying what he truly wanted, to appease his hatred and his lust for destruction without compassion.
He still had some compassion for “her,” and, for that matter, his dog. But everything else was like background music on the radio, the real world had become barely observed wallpaper in a room full of frenzied lunatics. He was only interested in his thoughts, desires, wishes and plans; other people mattered only in that they could be used for his own ends.
Duval was not completely psychotic, however. The sadist in him demanded his victims’ surrender, but not necessarily their annihilation. He could still control himself, despite the traumatic news from Templeton. He could still maintain his denial of the contradictions which permeated his existence: a vegetarian who killed people; a priest who imprisoned innocents; a theologian who could not love yet who preached Christ’s message of charity and hope; a man obsessed by compulsive cleanliness who forced his would-be disciples to live in their own squalor. He was stimulated only by the helpless, not by the strong. On the surface he showed courtesy and correctness, but these social graces were a superficial veneer over his demonic inner drive. Perhaps only a priest could juggle for so long with so many masks.
For Duval there was still the ideal of the anchoress. He had once loved his mother, but she had failed him, and he had come to love the Church instead. He had been passed over for promotion. As a keen Latin scholar he had wanted to work in the Vatican, but had been turned down, then he had failed as a military chaplain, and had finally ended up in a dead-end post in Guildford. The Church had rejected him even though he was convinced of the power of his spiritual views. In the end only God could know, and so Duval would submit only to Him. He liked to quote from St. Paul: “If you are led by the spirit, no law can touch you”; no law of Church or Caesar really mattered when it came to the search for absolute truth, so he would explore the only route to God available to mortals-holy, absolutely solitary contemplation. Duval had attempted to follow this path on numerous retreats in the most austere of monasteries, but he understood in the end that it was not his vocation. Nevertheless, the path was righteous, and this had led to his study of the extreme mystics of the Middle Ages.
After his sister’s death, he had cut himself off from his mother and grown to hate all women. The Virgin Mary was a respite, the temporary but vital exception to a total misogyny that would have toppled him into insanity. Then he reached out to one mystic, one holy anchoress, whom he had pursued for years in thought and writing, but for all his love for the historical Christine, she needed a physical embodiment. He sought living flesh to clothe the skeleton of Christine, which haunted his mind, but that flesh had rotted in his cellar. Only Marda now stood between him and total madness, only she could save him and his vision. She had become both Marda and Christine.
When he reached his house the thought of Marda calmed him. She was his now, but he could possess her only for six more months, at the very most. He would have to accelerate his special ministry for her. Yes, if she became totally acquiescent to his plans, he would leave the Church and maintain his life with her. He could just afford to retire, keep her and share their spiritual union, together until death. But what if she refused to understand that this would be a perfect future for her? He might be forced to let her starve herself to death. Duval dreaded the thought of losing her. He would, for her own good, make her believe. She would live then, with him, forever. Marda would be his lasting spiritual project, but he couldn’t contemplate another failure. No, he would make her believe, and he would complete his book. He gave himself three months.
The first thing he did was to make a pot of coffee and take it down to Marda’s cell. He desperately needed to be with her, the one living person who brought some meaning to his life.
Marda, who had learned that it was wise to be supportive, noticed at once that he was troubled. “What is it, Michael?” she asked solicitously. “Has someone died? Or has someone stolen your book-you told me you had only one copy?”
“No, Marda”-sometimes when he was angry he refused to address her directly; she felt good to be a person with a name rather than an animal in a living tomb-“I still have the manuscript. I haven’t finished it yet. There is much more we have to do until it is complete. No, it’s my bishop again.”
Marda had not heard him mention the bishop in such terms. That there was a chain of command, that there was somebody in charge of him, sent a fresh surge of hope rushing around her brain.
“What has he done, Michael?”
“He wants to send me away from here. From my work, from you.”
Marda realised that a sign of relief could be fatal. She listened intently as Duval explained the bishop’s plans for him.
“Do you have to go?” she said cautiously.
“No, I could resign and stay here with you. It depends on you.”
“How?”
“Well, your studies have gone well. You are a willing and able student. I like teaching you.”
“But what is all this learning for? Do you want me to become a nun in a convent?”
“No, I don’t want you ever to leave me.” He said this with an utter conviction that horrified Marda.
“Then what? Surely you don’t want to keep me locked up here for ever.”
“No, of course not.”
They were both standing in the cell, a few feet apart, their eyes locked on one another.
“Then I don’t understand. May I ask: do you intend to leave the Church in order to get married? To me?”
Duval appeared shocked, but he managed a hollow laugh. “Good Lord, no. It’s quite simple what I want. I want to share my life with you, but on a spiritual level. I want you to become”-he had never really defined it so succinctly to himself, let alone to any of his guests-“to become, as it were, a modern anchoress…I will always teach you and spiritually support your seclusion. I intend to renovate a room upstairs that will be more comfortable. You would be secluded from the world, but it would have a small window, in the shape of a quatrefoil, looking on to the rear garden. You need some light, not this dungeon.”
He hesitated, uneasy at how this young girl could make him seem foolish. “But a period of penance,” he said with forced authority in his voice, “is good for the contemplative life. I want above all for you to desire this yourself. In the end I cannot force this vocation upon you.”
“So if I said no, you would let me go?” She knew she was risking all with this question.
Duval hesitated for a second. “No, I cannot let you leave me.”
“Even if I swear on all the religious meaning you have given me that I won’t tell anyone, the police, my family…”
“It’s not that I don’t trust you, although it would be hard to hide so many months’ absence.”
He looked uncomfortable as he tried to do something with his hands. He searched around in his jacket pocket for his pipe and started to fill it with tobacco. Marda sat on her bench, deflated.
“I cannot bear you to live without me,” he confessed. “Perhaps I should say I cannot bear to live without you.”
Marda wanted to contrast his comments about her spiritual renunciation and the hypocrisy of his wanting to possess people, but she said, “If you go to South America, can’t you free me then? You will be so far away and I’ll be grateful for all you have taught me. I’ve been cold and hungry and I did hate you at first, but I’ve learned so much. I’ve come to understand a great deal about life and intellectual ideas. If you go, will you let me go?”
Then a final stab at persuasion: “Perhaps I could come to South America?”
Duval looked at her, incredulous but half-pleased. “I don’t think the bishop has a female companion in mind. I haven’t decided anything yet. Perhaps you are right: if I do go to South America I can let you go then. Unless you decide you want to stay with me…I need to think, Marda. And so do you. I shall give you a small fustian kerchief to embroider. It will aid your reflections.”
He walked out and carefully locked the cell door.
Duval, sitting bolt upright in his cold bath, beat himself with a walking stick. His self-mortification was brief, but some of his anger and frustration were lifted. Deliberately not shaving after his bath, he threw on some old clothes and slouched on the wooden seat by his desk. He glared at his typewriter for a while before rolling in the first white page.
July 1333
Christine, crouching on her bench, stared at the pattern on the embroidery she was doing as part of her penance. It felt strange being enclosed again after the months of sunshine, greenery and people, but the smells and sounds of Guldenford, the bustle of a visit to the town, even the domestic clamour in Ashe Cottage, had been overwhelming.
She summoned her senses to commune again with nature, to commune again with her God by worshipping the sounds of His Creation. Before dawn she listened intently to the churring of a nightjar; the song thrush then began its beguilingly repetitive chorus. She anticipated eagerly the two entirely different songs of the wood warbler, and, although she could not see them, she knew that the wood pigeons and stock doves would squabble with the jackdaws. Her hearing was beginning to reach the intense levels of her previous enclosure, and she could almost sense the beating of tiny wings as butterflies perched on the ledge of her external grille. That summer the large tortoiseshell butterfly, with its tiger-like markings, and the peacock butterfly, with two blue-black eyes on its wings, would affirm the glory of the Creation and her place within it. As the light faded, the woodcocks’ duck-like call announced Vespers, and, at Compline, the tawny owls promised food to their hungry youngsters. When a moth fluttered on to her ledge, she knew that the long-eared brown bats, one of the most delicate of God’s creatures, would emerge from their roost in the church’s eaves to feed. To complete the cycle, the nightjar sang once more to announce that it would share its nocturnal nesting duties with its mate. All awaiting the miracle of another sunrise.
Nature would aid her contemplation, her insight into God; perhaps soon the calor, the heat of divine approval, would descend on her, and finally she would reach the canor, the ability to hear the sound of heaven, the musica spiritualis.
That was the future. As she listened to the Mass in the church of St. James, she took stock of her past life: the events that had led to her calling as an anchoress and the two years enclosed in the cell; the horrific news that her sister had been grossly abused at the hands of the same tormentor, her search for guidance and what she believed was the blessed sign from God; her escape in time to comfort poor Margaret and the birth of her nephew; her sister’s death; the harrowing trial and Sir Richard’s punishment; the blessed personal intercession of the Pope himself and, finally, her re-enclosure. Her short life had been very full, and now it was time for reflection, peace…
“Christine, are you ready for communion?”
The familiar voice startled her, but she responded quickly. “Aye, Father Peter,” she said resolutely. “I shall commune here forever. Enough venturin’ have I done for life. By the grace of God, I shall die within these sacred walls.”
***
Duval stopped writing and rubbed both his hands over the stubble of his beard. Although Christine had inhabited his inner life for years, he could no longer see the face he had long imagined. Now he saw only Marda. Before, he had hoped to instruct Marda by example-Christine’s example-and by slow, methodical preparation. But Templeton, the Church, were stealing his time away, risking the corruption of his vision. He needed to write more directly for Marda, because his inspiration was not diminishing, it was changing.
The keys of his typewriter waited sullenly, mocking his determination to define his mission. A sudden rush of energy surged through him, and he started to jab at the keys.
Yet there was a paradox: only by participating in the divine do we become human. Christine-Marda-could not know it, but there was a God-shaped hole in her consciousness. All cultures in all time have created an archetype, an image of God, a model of how hapless humans should behave. All the philosophers in all of time have groped to shape the symbols, the replicas of the divine world. They searched for unity of purpose, whereas in the modern world we tend to see autonomy and independence as supreme values.
Man is teleological by nature: he must search for God to prove himself human, or more than human, with that greater sense of self. After an intense emotion of tragedy or pleasure, it is a common experience to feel that we have missed something greater that remains just beyond our grasp.
Those who think they have grasped it simply make their own God. They assume that He loves what we love and detests what we detest, but this endorses our prejudices instead of forcing us to transcend them. Personalising God can produce a fatalism, a facile belief that any and all disasters are the will of God. “It is the will of Allah,” say Muslims. We accept things that are normally unacceptable.
There is a mighty difference in making God like ourselves and then blaming Him for everything, and each one of us having the right to seek for ourselves the Godhead. For so long, the Catholic Church has discouraged the individual route to God because it threatened the very basis of its authority. Mysticism was rife in the immediate aftermath of Jesus, but then Christianity became fossilised. For a brief period in the Middle Ages, the Church allowed mysticism-what it called the individual path-to flourish. Some of the mystics, the solitary seekers after truth, were canonised; some were burnt as heretics. Soon the Church in Europe crushed all individualism with the power of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Yet in England, where the inquisitors of the Holy Office rarely ventured, mysticism was entrenched in the soul of the Mother Church. Only a few records survive of these enlightened ones: the unknown author of The Cloud of Unknowing, together with Richard Rolle, Walter Hinton and the saintly Julian of Norwich. The greatest of these visionaries discovered the insights to which the mystics of Islam and Judaism also alluded.
Although each great religion has produced magnificent visions which are culturally conditioned, each shares a similar concept of the true searcher being able to ascend to a vision of God; something that human adventurers who have honed their spiritual talent have always wanted to do. The mystical experience of God has characteristics that are common to all faiths in all times. These spiritual voyagers have sought a journey through the imagination, not through a process of scientific or logical reasoning.
Yet all established religions have feared these individual journeys, and so most mystics became outcasts…
Duval felt the silence of his study, the contrast with the frenzy inside his head. He thought of his pupil entombed below, the vessel of all his hopes. He believed in Marda, but could she really understand his mission? For her sake he hoped fervently that she could, because it would save her life. He had done his work, at a more rapid pace it was true, but in the end it was her role, her destiny, to understand. Yes, she could understand. He was simplifying two thousand years of the search for God into just a few pages…
Mysticism is still unpopular in Christianity; today the word is allied with charlatans, gurus and hippies. These self-indulgent cranks seek three things on their selfish path: to feel in control; to feel good about themselves; and to feel that there is a future. But for these misguided people, individualism comes first and last. They have abandoned searching-the ego is enough for them. And their chemical drugs.
Yet the themes of inner contemplation seen in yoga or Buddhism and the fashion for psychoanalysis all display a form of mysticism. It is no accident that both Freud and Jung turned instinctively to myths to explain and explore the inner world of the psyche. So today there is a need for an alternative to a purely scientific explanation of our existence. It may be the only way of preventing the destruction of this world-unless we hold fast to the notion that God will not allow His Creation to become a nuclear wasteland. Perhaps God Himself will bring His Armageddon in the last decades of this second millennium, as a prelude to His Second Coming. Time is short, Marda. I feel events pressing on us. These must be the End Times. I can almost smell the destruction of the world.
Yet the discipline of solitary contemplation can help the skilled and sensitive soul to return to the One, the primordial beginning of mankind, and the ability to create a constant state of God’s presence by tapping into the energy field which surrounds this Earth, God’s energy for God’s Earth. But such a journey to the centre of light and energy, and to the centre of the mind, can entail great personal risks because one soul may not be able to endure what it finds there. Madness is always nudging at our elbow.
I, myself, fight off madness every day, and I walk in the world. A world I often hate, despite God’s creatures, perhaps because of God’s creatures…
So defeat, despair and loneliness affect us all, but especially the solitary seekers. The mystical journey can be undertaken only with the guiding hand of a tutor, a sympathetic and patient expert, who can monitor the experience and guide the apprentice past and beyond the terrors, to give him or her strength when it is needed. Marda, let me be your true guide. But there are also false guides. Pseudo-science says the patient in psychoanalysis needs the guidance of a therapist, except that this is a selfish search for the ego inside, not God outside.
