The Final Retreat

by Stephen Hough

  11 Altrincham again

  ______________________

  After about six months with the Oblates I knew I had to leave. It was not just the episode with Jason, although that unsettled me; in such a small community it was intolerable to have something like that unacknowledged yet present in every unavoidable encounter. After our Broadway moment our friendship cooled. He would always sit apart from me at meals or recreation and he would make sure we were never on the same roster to serve Mass. When I passed him in the corridors he would look away with a tight smile, quickening his step. Actually I don’t think he was gay — he ended up getting married and moving back to the Philippines. No, it wasn’t to avoid the ‘occasions of sin’ that led him to avoid me but rather his wounded sense of pride and shame. The macho image he had formed of himself had been shattered in the soar of a show tune. Like many men from cultures where a man’s manliness is central to his identity, the perceived effeminacy of same-sex intimacy was repellent to him. Our kiss had taken the wind out of the sails of his self-esteem in one fabulous puff. An anonymous one-night stand was one thing, a condom flushed down the toilet, forgotten or denied in the haze of too many beers, but a sober daylight kiss with someone whom you then saw constantly in a setting of avowed celibacy was a perpetual humiliation.

  But aside from the episode with Jason I began to hate the small, stuffy world of Immaculate Heart, the rigidity of everything, the military organization, the unwavering belief that everything was exactly as God wanted: ‘The rule of the Oblates of Christ is not to be changed. It represents the perfect will of God for those called into its community.’ And then the idolization of Father Mario sickened me. Once a week in the recreation room we would have to watch a video of his sermon from the previous Sunday. We were encouraged to take notes, to select one point he made and use it for our daily meditation the following week. Our own living Saint from Naples, his photo in every room, his name on everyone’s lips, even his mother’s photo in the dining room, always with a freshly-cut rose (her favourite flower) in a vase under the image. Humans love leaders, strong leaders, and soon we make them into kings, and then the kings start believing in their divine right to be kings. ‘The Father’, we were meant to call him. ‘Call no one on earth your father. You have one Father in Heaven.’ Wise words from a wise Man.

  I dragged my heels for a few more months but at the end of my first year in Chicago I returned to England, to train as a secular priest for the diocese of Altrincham.

  12 Bubble burst

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  I was destined to be a priest from the moment the doctor cut my umbilical cord and exclaimed to my mother, ‘It’s a beautiful baby boy.’ Seeing a pink penis halfway down the slimy torso meant that, for her, I was already consecrated to the Lord. She would do everything in her power from that moment on to make my path to priesthood smooth, and inevitable. In front of the statue of St Joseph, paint peeling off the yellowing lily he held in his right hand, a candle was lit each early morning before the 7:30 Mass. ‘Make my son a priest; give him a vocation to the holy priesthood,’ my mother would plead, as the match scratched a bright flame from the blackened sandpaper and set alight the waxy wick.

  I was born into a bubble of religion. Life’s instruction manual was a battered prayerbook. Days were punctuated with signs of the cross, splashes of holy water, kissing of Miraculous Medals, the rattle of rosaries and the noontime recitation of the Angelus as the clock-hands met at the top of the dial. I learned early on that if I behaved well I would be rewarded with a caress, a smile; if not, there would be a palpable withholding of affection and occasionally a sharp slap. When I grew older every aspect of my behaviour was scrutinized, then praised or punished by the standard of the saints. A careless genuflection would receive a cold, disappointed look; a head bowed low in prayer after Holy Communion a satisfied smile. I knew I could make my mother happy with certain words and certain actions, and that made me happy, an habitual if neurotic chain of cause and effect.

  By the time I was a teenager the hints were heavy: ‘Why don’t you go on this retreat? We could catch the evening Mass in town. So many souls remain in Purgatory because there is no one to pray for them. Did you read that biography of Maximilian Kolbe I gave you? What are you giving up for Lent? Have you been to Confession this month? Do you want to talk to Fr Murphy? The visiting priest at St Monica’s is a Benedictine; they know how to pray, the Benedictines.’ How could I not become a priest? Everything in our house was related to the Church, from the holy water stoop by the front door (‘Bless This House’) to Our Lady in a huge frame in our living room, her foot pushed against the head of a writhing serpent as she watched television with us.

  My ordination was the happiest day of my life because it was the happiest day of my mother’s life, her ultimate approval. I had passed the final test. A man wearing a freshly-pressed black cassock with a brilliant-white starched slit at his throat stood before her as she knelt for a blessing. It was a momentous moment for me too — the look of reverential awe on her face, the instant authority I had in the community despite being a young man whose only experience of the wider world was a trip to Lourdes in his teens and a year in the novitiate in Illinois.

  So how did I get from that first Mass — newly-ordained hands wet with oil, mother’s cheeks wet with tears — to my first prostitute? I don’t want to write about it. I don’t want to map that journey in my memory. Before and after is easier: that was me, this is me; but the transition is a blurred dream I don’t wish to recall or interpret. Those years of outward observance, faith seemingly unfluttered, doctrines confidently preached — was it all a fake, a shell? After my mother’s death the shell finally fell away, but how could it have happened so quickly?

  When I first left the Oblates of Christ and began training for the diocesan priesthood I certainly let things become laxer. I still prayed but in a loose, carefree kind of way. Nevertheless I was happy and content as a seminarian and then as a priest. But the years passed and my lukewarm life began to feel dreary and tasteless. The outer novelty of it wore off and it felt as if I were perpetually stuck at a dinner party with people who bored me. No escape, conversation dry and pointless to left and right.

  Then, during the three years of my mother’s dementia, I began experimenting. The occasional half-glances at soft porn websites became a daily habit, and then the porn got harder and the glances got longer. A good twenty bookmarks were saved on my browser and I could spend hours clicking from one orgasm to another. When I first began to open my eyes and my heart to sex it was as if a light had flooded a dark room, as if a shot of brandy had been added to a flavourless cup of coffee. And now, five years after my mother’s death, I find myself living inside a womb of perpetual desire. I am fuelled by sexual stimulation, utterly consumed by lust, devoured, ravished by it. Any second of the day or night I’m ready.

  How does a building with fine, healthy beams allow its first worm to make a home there, one hole burrowing deep to decay? Was Jason in Illinois my first worm? Or was the gradual easing of observance the warp which led to the complete collapse of the structure of my spiritual life? Was my eventual immersion in sex a way to hide from my faltering faith (swimming underwater to avoid facing the doubts, muting them, choking them), or have my sexual excesses themselves destroyed my faith, eroding its foundations as a coastline recedes with the surge of the tide and the swimmer fails to return to shore?

  But now, jaded and tired, sex is more like an injection of heroin into a collapsed vein. I know that the constant plunge from the heights of pleasure to the barren path below is false and ephemeral, but I’ve become addicted to my stimulated life. It’s occasionally ecstatic and occasionally despairing but mostly it’s just quietly disappointing, quietly lonely, quietly weary. I have no regrets. I even have a touch of whimsy. But I know that I’m moving in a slow trickle toward oblivion... or worse.

  The monastic rule, even in an adapted, secular form, is a brace over weakened joints, or per
haps more like a metal rod inside a wounded leg. If I’d been able to walk that demanding path, asking no questions, observant, obedient, my destination (Heaven) would be assured — or so the spiritual directors assure us. The traditional Catholic devotional method in its simple rigidity has been honed over centuries of saints. It sidesteps human nature by imposing a framework that is beyond it. It seeks to replace it with an unmoving, unyielding, indestructible titanium plate hidden under the flesh. But in too many cases the frame supports a decomposing limb, all gore and gangrene. We must fall down to be fully human... and then get up again. Too often the canonized saints appear to have walked on stilts.

  13 Father’s death

  ______________________

  My father died on his honeymoon. My mother never spoke to me about it except in the vaguest terms, but when she died I came across some letters and newspaper clippings which she had kept, hidden at the back of a drawer. I discovered that I owed my existence to a 12-hour window. On the second day of their intended week-long stay in Rome my father stepped out in front of a bus, in front of her eyes. The tragedy was reported in the local Italian newspapers and also in the UK press. There was an official letter from the Roman police, another letter of condolence from the traumatized driver, another from the bus company, and then a long, rather enigmatic letter from a priest whom they had known in Manchester and who was in Rome at the time, teaching at the Venerable English College.

  Monsignor Thomas Crabbe was an old man when I tracked him down after my mother died. He was living in a nursing home in Prestatyn and was confused about everything, but as I talked to him about this terrible event my intuition that my father’s death might have been suicide was strengthened. One night of lovemaking, an abortive breakfast stroll, and then my mother’s lifetime of mental distress. I had always imagined that for her the idea of sex had been a necessary evil, that physical intimacy was a distasteful distraction from things of the spirit, that she really belonged in a convent, but as Msgr Crabbe talked about her he became animated:

  ‘Your mother... lively, pretty. Yes, she... laughing always laughing. Very happy woman.’ He was laughing himself at the memory. ‘And with your father. Lovebirds... so romantic. They were always... holding, always holding hands. At Communion too.’

  This portrait of my mother was as much of a shock to me as the possibility of my father’s suicide had been. Occasionally at Christmas after one sherry too many she could get giggly and silly, but that she was a pretty woman with strong romantic impulses who was remembered for her laughter and easy physical intimacy by a priest half a century later — it didn’t seem plausible. My recall is of someone pale and serious, making the sign of the cross, gazing towards the picture of the Virgin with a pained expression on her face as if weighed down by the sins of the world. She was always so sober, so fragile, so frightened, so quick to quench my high spirits, to tamp down my immature enthusiasms, to bring down to earth the crazy kites of my childish fantasies. Everything with her was diluted, as if merriment and joy would be used up if we indulged in them too often. She lived on the penultimate page of life’s ration book.

  I couldn’t get a direct answer from confused Msgr Crabbe about my father except general comments about him being a ‘quiet, thoughtful man’, so I tried to trick the truth out of him: ‘How soon did my mother recover after the suicide? Was there a problem with the funeral because my father took his own life?’ Eventually (it took an hour of gentle pestering) he told me what he knew. Of course there could be no proof, but my mother had described to him how, as she stood smiling at her husband that morning on the curb waiting to cross the road, she saw something in his eyes as he looked back at her — blind panic, horror, fear, infinite sadness. He looked away then looked back, parted his lips, trembling, as if to say something or to cry out but then, with perfect timing, ran out into the path of an oncoming bus. Death was instantaneous but messy, blood splattered everywhere, an arm partly separated from his torso. She saw it happen, the bang and squelch, the chaos of the traffic, the screams of the passengers, the driver’s agonized stare, the surface of the road like a butcher’s block.

  She never recovered. She lived her whole life as if a virtual vehicle were coming at her from the side, about to crash and pulp her to brains and liver and onions. She never went abroad again. She hid behind a headscarf, her resentment towards God suppressed into religious practice, a reflex of love/hate/fear propelling a life stuffed with Masses and rosary beads. She found consolation not in Catholicism but in its caricature — a joyless, pathological religious observance. Then nine months after my father was smeared on the streets of Rome I was smeared across the sheets of an Altrincham hospital — my arrival a bloody reminder of his bloody departure. I was the flesh of my father salvaged from the accident. His ejaculation, all that was still alive of him, had been sleeplessly at work inside her, creating a new life.

  14 Mornings

  ______________________

  A plastic alarm clock. By the bedside. Battery-operated. Yellowing case. Ticking. Not the plum-rounded sound of a wind-up clock but the relentless step of the second hand’s shuffling, synthetic circle. This leads me either to a troubling meditation on ‘every tick a second closer to death’ or it facilitates a comforting, New Age rumination on life’s universal pulse. Some mornings at Craigbourne I am able to relax into a holding pattern as the birdsong outside my window weaves an intricate cadenza over the rhythm of the ticking. But more often the two seem separate: I am inside, a prisoner counting the seconds of a life sentence; the birds are outside, flying free, singing, rejoicing. There have been many mystical references made to birdsong as a form of praising God — St Francis of Assisi and the composer Olivier Messiaen come to mind. But on the good mornings birds are my atheist buddies. Their repetitive cries speak of nothing but the air we breathe, and the dew shaken off their wings suggests a world beyond Baptism — ignorant of guilt, soaring above the breeze.

  The snooze button gets much use, left palm pulled out of my musky pyjamas to slap to silence the strident alarm. I am usually awake already, snuggled down between the thin sheets, hands drawing warmth (both in body and libido) from around my groin. Early Mass. Out of bed. Bare feet on the grit of the wooden floor. Padding over to the corner: yes, I will pee in the sink. The bathroom is at the end of a long, cold corridor and at this time is probably occupied. I unfold the flesh and take aim, swirling the yellow stream around the cracked porcelain bowl, catching and flushing down a hair which clings to the side. It lodges in the hole and winds itself around the latticework. I shake myself dry and then run the cold water, wiggling my forefinger to dislodge the hair.

  A first glance in the mirror. It is so small and hung so low and so badly-lit that my morning face does not look as horrific as I’m sure it really is. Not at Craigbourne are to be found those cruel modern bathrooms with theatrical dressing-room bulbs dotted around the periphery of the glass, exposing every vein and pore and spot and line. I’m happy with the deception. I’ve lost that false confidence with which we build up some image of ourselves, some hope that in the right light on the right day at the right time we might awaken some sexual desire in the right person. I’ve let myself go, in body and in spirit. A beautiful man or woman can still be beautiful in old age if they maintain an inner confidence and an erect posture. An upright spine and a bright eye will compensate for a forest of wrinkles in the later years. I pull yesterday’s clothes over my sack of flab and head over to the chapel to worship the God I don’t think I’ve ever known.

  15 Malaga

  ______________________

  I’ve been writing a lot on this retreat. ‘Keep a journal’, said the bishop. ‘Make notes.’ A mandate to remember — not a fog of vague thoughts, drifting mood-colours in the clouds, but grounded words scratched, bleeding on to paper. Re-member. To piece together the bits. To assemble once more the parts.

  An autobiography? I wouldn’t know how. There have not been enough major events of interest in my life. But I�
�ve always enjoyed the act of writing. I look forward to sitting at this desk every day (I spend many, many hours here), searching for words yet being sought by words too. Ideas as dialogue, an internal conversation of discovery. My pen becomes a knife carving letters into a tree’s bark, yet the words themselves come back at me like a scalpel cutting out a tumour — my soul’s strange cancer.

  So, here’s the blade. I’m at Craigbourne this week because I like sex. I like it a lot. I crave it. I spend money on it. Rent boys. ‘Rent’ isn’t right though, that’s like picking up a car from Hertz for the weekend. ‘Buy’ is wrong too because there’s no ownership except the hour which passes between you. ‘Pay’ is closer, but cold. Can you pay for an act so intimate that only someone working in a dna laboratory could separate the intermingled sweat and semen pasted across your chests and between your thighs? A donation? Ah, too quaint, like the clink of change tipped into an Red Cross box. A gift? That’s nicer but it suggests something spontaneous and extraneous which is not the case when you contact someone on a website and arrange to remove your clothes and his clothes and grind your bodies together until sated. No, there’s no adequate term to describe this meeting-point of my need and his need. I have money, he wants money. I have a desire, he has a body which can satisfy that desire. Are we not both benefiting? Is there not a perfect complementarity here? Leased for a while, with no middleman. Gentleman’s agreement: shake hands, shake dick.