The Final Retreat

by Stephen Hough

  But anyway I’m here, and I’m keeping a journal during these long, silent days. Days of Mass, meditation, examination of conscience... ‘write it all down as you sit with the Scriptures. Whatever comes to mind. Don’t sanitize or edit. Just let the Holy Spirit work with you like clay.’ You said this to me yesterday, Father, but do you think it’s wise? Do you realize how sticky clay can be? You’re an innocent man, I presume, and considerably younger than me. Have you had your 40th birthday yet? I think you’re too earnest, too naive to be guiding souls; your hair is too lustrous, your cassock too tell-tale-tidy — the saints have frayed, faded sleeves. And your eyes are too bright, too impatient, too quick to look away, not from me but from yourself.

  I doubt you will, but if you ever happen to read these notes in the future I have some advice for you. It will be too late for me, but it may help the next soul who comes to you for direction. Allow time, Father. Time... and space. Sometimes (most times) it’s better to say nothing. Hear what people are not saying. Allow room for their silence when they have more to say than they can bear. And watch that smile. A smile can bring comfort but it can also create a barrier with someone who is in despair. To help a soul like me you have to see yourself as worse than me — and you don’t. You think you’re holy. Not a saint yet, of course, you are bright enough to know that that would be an instant disqualification for a Christian. Saints think they are sinners, but real saints don’t think about themselves at all. Aiming for holiness is the surest way to miss it. You think that if you are obedient to your superiors and if you avoid transgression then... clink: the gate of Heaven will swing open on its golden hinge.

  Oh I know I’m being mean and possibly even unfair. I realize that you are a cathedral of holiness next to my pockmarked, concrete tower-block, but your doors are bolted and the bell-tower is silent. I know you’re doing what you’ve been told to do — the will of God, following your vocation, obeying the Church — but you’re trapped inside the system as if sealed inside a tomb. And it stinks. ‘Lazarus, come forth!’ I plan to unwrap some of my own bandages this week. I’ve got a lot of time on my hands.

  5 Memorare

  ______________________

  Then this morning, another wet, dismal morning, Father Neville brought it up. ‘Father, are you having any problems with holy purity?’

  ‘Er... what do you mean, Father?’

  ‘I mean are you living the virtue of chastity as befits a priest of the Church?’ His voice had risen a little. It had taken on a hue of petulance. I really didn’t think it was his business to ask me about this, but then I realized it was precisely his business. That’s what a director of a retreat is meant to do, to lead the retreatant in self-examination and thus to lead him closer to God. And ‘having problems with holy purity’ is precisely why I am here.

  His voice normalized and he continued, looking at my face but not my eyes.

  ‘A priest who does not live this virtue has fallen at the first post. Nothing he does is of any value if he fails in chastity. God never allows us to be tempted beyond our strength so it should be impossible to conceive that a priest would commit a mortal sin in this area.’ His hands italicized the words with vehemence. ‘He may occasionally give in to the beginnings of lustful thoughts but his habitual state should be to reject them as he would step away from a viper.’ He had warmed to the subject and his eyes were shining. ‘You must do everything in your power to avoid occasions of sin, any situation where you know you will be tempted. Special care must be taken with the internet and with television... and of course with any unavoidable encounters with women. Be on full alert. The moment you are aware of any giving in to temptation, snuff it out like a candle. Then pray to Our Lady for strength. She is your safest recourse in this area. Do you recite the Memorare?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t, Father... anymore.’ I was simultaneously annoyed and shaken because I had not yet admitted to having problems with sexual matters. Had he guessed? Did every priest have problems in this area so he felt it safe to go on the premeditated attack? And women! The stereotype. The temptress Eve with her golden tresses drawing Adam and the entire human race into sin and condemnation.

  Another memorare flashed into my mind, my mother in her tight headscarf, fingering her rosary beads, a worried look on her face, saying that very prayer every day. Remember, oh most gracious (gracious, the ‘a’ rising high in supplication) Virgin Mary... never was it known... we fly unto thee... to thee do we cry... sinful and sorrowful... despise not our petitions... in thy clemency. It was high baroque. High theatre. High camp. Bernini or Caravaggio in words. In fact, seen in this light I began to feel more comfortable with this coloratura prayer’s plush, sensual harmonies, its decorative ornamentation tickling the ribs of the tune’s skeleton. I no longer saw my mother’s anxious Irish face but an Italian stud, tempestuous, incorrigible, wild with passion, mired in sin, capturing then breaking the hearts of every woman and man who crossed his path from puberty to senility, from testicle’s descent to prostate’s removal.

  The Italians make the rules, the Irish keep them... as the quip goes. At home and abroad Hibernian spirituality has got it wrong. Catholicism is for the extravagant and for the fallen. It only thrives in the south, under the hot sun, wine and oil spilt on the tablecloth, a slap on the backside of a feisty waitress, wolf-whistles in the town square. Not in the rain and the dripping cold of Craigbourne with Father Neville’s pinched lips and ramrod spine and white-chested, flat-nippled prudery. Not Guinness’s black and white certainties but the tongue-teasing complexity of a fine Amarone. Thoughts of Bernini and Caravaggio lifted my spirits.

  He was still talking. ‘Pay particular attention to this area, Father Joseph. Not only your own soul but the souls of those under your care rely on your efforts here. Mortification. Crucify the flesh. And Our Lady. As I’ve mentioned, she will be your ally in the battle for purity.’ Well, I love the gentle Jewish girl from Nazareth, and I love the strong Jewish woman at Calvary, but heaven preserve me from the worried headscarves and furrowed brows of the Irish women of my youth.

  Shifting a little on his hard chair Father Neville asked, ‘Are there any women in your life, your housekeeper, a parishioner perhaps, who could be an occasion of sin for you?’

  ‘No, Father Neville.’ I paused and looked him straight in the eye. ‘I’m gay.’ He winced, whether at the very idea of homosexuality (‘He who lived with the vice of sodomy suffers more in Hell than others for this is the greatest sin’ — thank you, St Bernadine of Siena!) or at my easy use of the playful, modern, accepting three-letter word. The awkward moment passed and he smiled again.

  ‘God bless you, Father Joseph.’ He stood up. ‘We’ll meet again tomorrow morning.’

  6 Altar Boys

  ______________________

  ‘When did you first realize that you had same-sex attraction?’ asked Father Neville today. Where do I start? Out of the mists of infancy, as each year passed, my preference for boys gradually became clearer and stronger. Classmates at primary school, the teenager who delivered the newspapers, my swimming instructor, television personalities, film stars, the young gardener at the large house on the main road, summer sweat, shirt peeled off, wheelbarrow biceps... shall I go on? It’s simple: with self-consciousness came the consciousness of same-sex attraction.

  Patrick, my fellow altar boy, was my first serious crush. I was nine and he was ten when we began to serve Saturday morning Mass together. He was tall for his age, strong, sporty, confident, clever. I used to stand behind him in the sacristy after Mass, close so I could smell his body and look up at the nape of his neck. I wanted to take care of him, to protect him. Couldn’t we make a home somewhere, a place where we would always be together? At church it was our job to put away all the utensils from the service, linens, books, candles, cruets, paten, chalice. It was cool inside the sacristy and I loved the mingle of his smell with the smell of the polish and the incense. I could have stayed there for hours. No lingering after Mass for
him though. He couldn’t wait to get out of there, tearing off his surplice and flinging open the back door, out into the hot morning, flies buzzing in the sun, grass long and shining, day’s youth sprung underfoot. ‘Let’s go and play football, Joe,’ he’d say, racing ahead with one shoelace undone, his hair like tumbled hay. I would chase after him and admire his grace as he loped along, the rudder of his shirt flapping loose.

  I loved him, even if I didn’t understand the word, even if I couldn’t name it. I wrote his name over and over again in my exercise book and always with a blush of pleasure. I would then scratch it out in case anyone saw, or rip out the page and tear it into a hundred pieces, but a day or so later I’d write it all over again. We were inseparable and when his family moved away I felt devastated, with an emptiness inside but also something sickly, like an open wound.

  A couple of weeks before they left he was over at my house and we were playing at being priests. We got some old curtain material from the bottom of my mother’s wardrobe and rigged it up to look like two chasubles. Then we set up an altar in my bedroom with a missal, two candles and a crucifix. After processing into the room in solemn silence we began our fake liturgy. Then it happened. At one point he moved next to me, very close. I could feel his breath against my face. Then he kissed my cheek. It was as if a bolt of electricity had struck me, my childish fingers pushed into a live socket. The whole religious world we had created in my bedroom melted away like wax. It seemed like a silly, childish game, a mirage replaced in a flash by the reality of flesh. I turned to him and our lips met, two boys in taffeta drapery fumblingly experiencing the dawn of physical intimacy. And then, just seconds later, that new world itself melted away as we both woke up to the discomfort of the situation. We had glimpsed adulthood and we were not ready for it, slamming the door closed as if to contain a raging furnace. We were kids again. We blushed, now out of embarrassment rather than desire.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ Patrick said, hurriedly removing the fake vestments and flinging them on to the bed. ‘I’ll see you around, Joe... ’

  He ran down the stairs and out the front door, his footsteps clattering down the path. I heard the gate open and then heard it bang shut. I stood for a moment in silence in my bedroom, still draped in the curtain material, feeling desperately lonely. Then I blew out the candles and slowly started to put away the liturgical decorations. His guilty, dirty departure was devastating for me. He was my best friend and I feared I’d lost him for ever. We’d promised to write after he moved away but he never replied to my long, slightly feverish letters. In fact, I never saw or heard from him again after that fumbled kiss in front of the makeshift altar.

  7 Masturbation

  ______________________

  Patrick was the overture but then I discovered masturbation, that solo aria with, for a Catholic boy, its inexorable crescendo of guilt. My youthful conscience was me, and it condemned me. An ingrowing toenail of moral failure. It started one bath time — it was winter. The air in the freezing room was a thick mist. The too-hot water was scalding my body. My hands, their fingers mottled into Braille-like lumps, were swishing underneath. I stretched out, full-length, hair wet with suds, neck red, chin flushed. Then hands smoothed across chest, under arms, down legs, brushed against... away. Then again. A dusting past. Away (briefer this time) then a firm swish, left knee raised, water splashing up the side of the tub, shoulders shrugged back into the bubbles, then another brush. But stopping now. And holding. A swollen pink buoy on the surface of the water. Then quickly away. A stretch. Then slowly back. Knee down. Then hand across the foam then touching then holding. Then holding tighter. And now rubbing a few times, then away, into the soapy froth, a foot raised to the cold tap’s still-cold metal, its big toe inserted into the limescale hole.

  The ceiling, looking up at the ceiling. Where was I? A stranger in my house; everything familiar but changed (down and up, down). What the hell was I feeling? (Held.) A glow like nothing I’d ever felt (and up), a motion as natural as the heart beating. I was sweating even though by now the water was lukewarm and the bubbles almost gone. (Down.) The condensation on the ceramic wall-tiles was trickling down. (Up.) Yellow streetlights outside shining through the frosted window. Inside (down-up-down-up) the towel hanging unevenly from the radiator (down) and then... then... then the towel falling then the condensation a river then the light outside exploding then some strange liquid gushing heart pounding throbbing head flushed flustered guilt gusting. My head was out of the shell. I had come of age. I had burst into adulthood. But then a strange lurch backwards: I was an infant again. Abandoned on a doorstep one minute then in the next breath as if suffocated with cloying motherly protection. A re-attached umbilical cord. The disturbing contradictions of puberty’s wrestle, both clinging and repelling in the same placenta-licking embrace. I was a chicken wriggling out of an egg, a wallaby leaving the pouch; my foreskin covering then exposing an unbearably sensitive, ecstatic penis.

  It was a one-off. ‘I’ll never do that again.’ Its power terrified me. I’d opened a box and I quickly closed it. But I knew where the box lay. I could go to look at it without danger, couldn’t I? I could touch the surface, confident that the key was in the lock, turned firmly to the right. I could even touch the key, turn it further to the right, play with the tassel hanging from the keyring. But in my bed, in my dreams, the box began to open up in front of me of its own accord. It spilled its contents on to my sheets. And eventually I began to open the box myself, to leave it unlocked, to carry it with me, to keep it always by my side.

  8 Jason

  ______________________

  Into my early teens masturbation fed then sated my sexual desires; its repetitive constancy became a muffled mantra in the Confessional. Often I thought I would choke when I spluttered out yet again the M word to the shadow of a priest hidden behind the curtain. I was on a constant knife-edge of guilt, but sex was something experienced alone, always alone — the solitary sin, the secret midnight raid of the fridge. Others did not enter my erogenous zone. There were crushes along the way but these were simply crushed. If you think you’re going to Hell if you fool around sexually with another person... well, that’s a bucket of iced water carried on your shoulders into every situation. It became a reflex: I’d see an attractive man, I’d instantly recall that this was a temptation from the Devil, I’d mumble a quick prayer, I’d finger my rosary beads, then... whoosh! A dousing. The powers of Hell thwarted. The Devil defeated. But it slowly turned sick, turned for me into the only thing I thought about: sex was sin was sex was hell was sex. The constant possibility of falling into such an abyss is to be constantly walking on the crumbling edge of a cliff. Such continence requires a forceful diversion of a natural human pipeline and can result in geysers gushing out of sight, out of control. There are some men who seem to manage it but I don’t know if such self-control is physiological or supernatural. So clear seems their vision and so all-encompassing their dedication and so strong their will that... and yet. Perhaps their geysers are simply further away. In my mid-teens things began to change. I started to think more seriously about the priesthood and I stopped jerking off. I reached 17, pimples not too bad after a year or two of gangle and gauche, then off to the seminary — or rather the novitiate.

  The Oblates of Christ is a small religious order founded in Naples in the early 19th century. It was languishing when Father Mario Tetrazzini, one of their few remaining priests and a friend of the then Archbishop of Illinois, went to Chicago in Lent 1978 to preach a Mission in a poor, inner-city parish. Certain healings took place during his eight-day stay, most remarkably a woman in a wheelchair who at the moment of Holy Communion on the first morning simply stood up and haltingly, but without help, walked up to the altar rail to receive the Host from Father Mario. There was understandably a tremendous buzz amongst those in the congregation. As the week progressed other miracles were reported and the queue outside his Confessional grew to hundreds of people. By the end of the week an in
tense fervour had taken root. The church was filled from morning to night, the Blessed Sacrament exposed, candles burning, tears flowing, vocations forming.

  In addition to working miracles Father Mario preached a strong, conservative message in his strong, Italian accent. He fulminated against abortion, homosexuality, contraception, secularism, lukewarmness, liturgical abuse, neglect of the Blessed Virgin, disobedience to the Pope, Modernism — bullet points in his fiery sermons going straight to the heart and ricocheting back to Rome where the recently-installed John Paul II was about to begin a spring-cleaning, sweeping away the mess left by his predecessor, the indecisive, melancholy Paul VI. John Paul was not a conventional conservative but he was happy to endorse whoever was loyal and obedient. Over the next years Father Mario became a cult-like figure, with hundreds of fervent young men joining the Order of which he was now Superior General. He came to Manchester to preach in 1981 and I went to hear him with my mother. She adored him; he was absolutely her sort of priest. He heard my Confession and I couldn’t deny the magnetism of his charisma. He was exhilarating, tough, uncompromising. Later that evening my mother came out with it: ‘I see that Father Mario has opened an English-speaking novitiate in Chicago.’ She didn’t need to say any more, and that summer I flew to the United States and joined the Oblates of Christ as a 19-year-old novice.