I’ve seen people leave the box with tears of joy. Others have left enraged, like the man who had stolen a large sum of money from his employer. I insisted he would have to pay it back as soon as he was able. He stormed out, carrying his sins with him. Such is the sacrament. Without a firm purpose of amendment the words of Absolution are meaningless. Sacraments are not magic; they do not conjure rabbits out of hats. They do not make new planets from scratch. They help heal the brokenness of our own already-existing world and remind us to cherish the beauty of our planet... and of our rabbits. The Communion wafer couldn’t be changed into a gold coin, the Communion wine couldn’t become a quiver of mercury, but they both become our flesh and blood as we digest them. And the ritual itself awakens the memory of a foundational meal of total self-giving: ‘Do this in memory of me.’ The ‘this’ is complete self-donation, not a conjuring trick.
The priest doesn’t change the state of anyone’s soul as much as he facilitates a change of heart. ‘Go, your sins are forgiven’ is, I think, a declaration of something which has already happened, not its cause. And ‘Go’ is the important word: get on your journey, and let go. It is a similar case with Baptism. When I pour water over the baby’s head it’s more for my benefit and the parents’ benefit and the community’s benefit than for the infant’s. It reminds those of us who are witnessing the ceremony that God already loves this child as he loves every child he created. If God has chosen this baby to be his own then how can we reject it? Baptism celebrates the embrace by God (already given nine months earlier) of yet another newly-born beloved son or daughter in whom he is well pleased.
43 The line
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I remember a summer weekend in London when I was helping out a priest friend. During a long aimless walk on a hot Saturday evening I came across The Line, a sleazy-looking gay club which spilled thudding music out of a half-open door. I was curious so I stepped inside and passed down a staircase from the balmy semi-darkness of the street to the air-conditioned murk below. Everything was streaked with flashing lights, illuminations revealing in jerks of manic brilliance the walls of thin, flaking black paint. I felt the traction of sticky spilt drinks on the floor as I made an awkward path towards the bar. Boy dancers wearing tight shorts strutted or stood around, their dazed eyes scouring the room for clients, hoping for that ten pound note to be tucked into their elasticized waistbands, the scratch of stiff paper against the shaved pubic hair followed by an entitled brush against the bulge. I was happy just to watch, cradling a bottle of beer in the shadows.
Why was it so dark? ‘Men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil,’ says the Gospel. I’m not sure that that really applied here. Darkness in The Line was facilitation, or a mask — the pretence of beauty unseen in the shadows. In harsh supermarket light the dry skin would show its blotches, the acne its deeper crevices and scars, the scared eyes their fear and weariness. Here the gloom gave everyone easy fantasies.
Of course I arrived too early. These places come to life in the small, dead hours, a pulsating space under cities when most people are asleep. I only stayed until 11:30 as I had a Mass to celebrate the next morning. Strange to think of my congregation tucked up in warm duvets and chaste embraces as I stood alongside the bar, my one beer becoming ever flatter and warmer, its metallic label picked at and peeling off. When I would be standing at the altar at eight o’clock the next morning those yet to arrive at The Line would be staggering home, T-shirts sweat-damp which had begun the evening stretched clean and white over gym-toned bodies. Men flopping dizzily on to strange beds with teeth unbrushed — room spinning, underwear a spewed, moist tangle on the floor, all dark behind the shameless morning curtains. The cycle, the treadmill: washing-wearing-dirtying-washing; arousal-orgasm-disgust-arousal — sperm’s lemming-like swim before reincarnation.
I left and took the music with me. What had been throbbing out of speakers now filled my head as I climbed the stairs back up to London’s streets. Rhythm’s fake heartbeat: all is well, all is healthy, blood in the veins, colour in the cheeks. I took the Tube back to Kilburn and knew I would be tired and depressed at Mass eight hours later, but when morning arrived (6:50 alarm, a cup of strong tea, early sun on the small lawn, chirping, merry birds) its freshness, which I had expected to be an accusation of innocence scorned, was like a kind smile from a saner world. I would read the liturgical texts word for word without feeling or faith but something calm, a fragile peace, fell over me. My spiritual life was a bush hacked to the ground with blunt shears, but under the mashed branches, in the undergrowth, sap was flowing.
44 The Jews got it right
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You can’t undo a Jew. Regardless of the level of observance or belief you cannot be removed from the planet which is your Jewishness. There’s wisdom in this. Yes, the Law requires hundreds of behavioural observances of deed and diet and dress, but all within the context of being already accepted, chosen, loved... safe. Christianity soon replaced this with mental assent to creeds and dogmas. I wrote something about this earlier this week — what does it mean to believe or to be ‘saved’? Grace was meant to complete the Law (creating a universal Judaism — all were chosen) but this grace came to require either Catholic absence of sin (and the cult of saints who alone, whether at death or after Purgatory, could enter Heaven), or the Protestant’s ‘faith alone’, on which Luther built his mighty fortress and which required one Big Assent, after which all was well. Both of these Christian paths have loose stones to trip us up. Am I holy (sinless) enough? Did I believe (assent) enough? Never enough. God with the measuring rod. God with the account book. God separating the sheep from the goats. But sheep cannot not be sheep; and you can’t undo a Jew.
Christianity was never meant to suggest that ‘Now we have a better religion than Judaism’, but rather ‘Now everyone can be a Jew — all are invited to the party.’ That’s Gospel, Good News... nothing gooder. But soon Christians tried to stop the party. They went about throwing out the original guests (hosts). They made everyone play intricate party games, the esoteric rules of which no one quite understood, games invented in foreign places such as Athens or Rome. A Jew only needs to wake up and become conscious of being Jewish to be saved: ‘What is this air I breathe? Ah yes, the breath of God!’ To exist is to be cherished. Simple. The Law is merely an aid to focus, a way to be attentive to the foundational blessing, a reminder that we are loved into life, an encouragement to savour rather than gobble at the feast. The Church’s ‘new commandment’ of love became (too often) a path to being accepted rather than the joyful fruit of it. My mother’s rosary beads rattling like moneychangers’ coins in the Temple. Haven’t you heard the Good News? ‘Yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.’ Isaiah already knew it. Currency’s finished. Everything belongs to everyone. It is the air we breathe. Goats are extinct.
45 Feelings
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Following on from my musing this morning on the Jews and accepting our acceptance by the One who created us, my mind goes back to my novitiate year and the suspicion we were told to have of ‘feelings’, especially when related to the spiritual life. ‘You should not look for consolation in prayer. A sign that you are making progress is to experience darkness when meditating. All the saints went through this. It’s so that you will seek the God of consolations not the consolations of God.’ This was a recipe for neurosis for me because when I did feel a glow in the chapel, a sense of the love of God, my instant reaction was to step away from its midday sun and try to seek instead to enter into the Dark Night of the Soul with St John of the Cross as guide. To enjoy feeling close to God seemed like a failure in generosity towards God. Prayer which was distasteful was, I imagined, automatically more effective.
Of course this is screwed up but too often so is the traditional striving for holiness. Countless bitter, depressed celibates have cultivated this strange psychosis of the spirit to console them
selves in a desolation caused not by an affirming of the divine but by a denial of the human. After they have stripped the flesh (sometimes quite literally) of its feelings they then view the resulting desiccation as God’s will and as a sign of his favour. To be a spiritual skeleton, heart removed, hardened with self-control, is the way to sanctity; physical mortification is the prayer of the body, a sharing in the Passion of Christ.
This places us on a knife-edge of scruples because if we take pride or pleasure in mortifications we immediately undo any benefit they might bring us. But to choose suffering (suffering which chooses us is a different question) has to mean on some level that we do take pleasure in it — sadomasochism is always lurking inside monastery walls. The only sane response to pain is to reject it; such an instinct is written deep in our souls, in our bodies. A cut begins to heal as soon as the dagger is withdrawn. Deliberately to create pain for ourselves for its own sake (for God’s sake!) is to insult the Universe. And heirs to the throne do not need to crawl on their bloodied knees at the city gates.
Yet how do we take care of the flesh, embrace the flesh, without being smothered by the flesh?
46 Goong
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That boy from Laos. Goong. He had travelled far to study computer science at Manchester University. Poor, face of smiles, spotless, elegant, every gesture seeming as natural in its undulation as a river’s deft sway from verdant bank to forest’s secret hiding place. He bowed low in greeting and undressed me gently, every shirt button teased slowly from its hole with his long, slender fingers. He tugged on and then released my jeans’ stuck zipper, kneeling down with a chuckle to get a better angle on the metal teeth’s halting descent. He then stood up and took me into his thin arms with reverence, as if holding a sacred vessel. With the Western men I’d met there was always something rough or resentful or distracted or routine about the encounter. With Goong I felt connected to a culture where sexual expression was a natural part of being a human being, a sharing of pleasurable space. I felt within a minute (no more) that we could simply be together with no guilt, no past, no future, no ownership, just together in a room with enough oxygen for both of us. We didn’t need more. I didn’t even need sex.
Was it Buddhism? The harmony of existence. Not pushing inexorably towards eternity’s long stretch ahead (Heaven or Hell) but rather reincarnation’s phlegmatic, circular pull. A sphere with no markers, a universe of calm, unruffled energy. G. K. Chesterton wrote of the difference between Christianity and Buddhism as between the Cross and the Circle, one pointing with purpose upwards and outwards, the other a prison turned in on itself, a soulless, static globe. The Cross certainly inspired spectacular achievements (universities, hospitals, orphanages, masterpieces of art, inventions of science) but at that moment in Goong’s digs, as our planet groans and shudders from Christendom’s raping excavations and explorations, I felt supremely happy in the perfect circle of our intimacy. Not just happy, but blessed and cherished as we celebrated each other’s bodies without possessiveness. I would leave, he would leave, but for one hour of the giant Circle’s rotation we had had a feast. And we had smiled. I’ve seen grins and leers on rent boys’ faces but Goong’s smile was sacramental. It was, as with Moses face to face with the burning bush, a glow reflecting the Divine.
We finished (he wouldn’t let me get off the bed until he had cleansed me with a warm, damp towel) and I paid him. He took the money with another gentle bow and smile. It would feed him and it would feed his family back in Laos. For once I couldn’t see the sin. His bedroom seemed filled with angels.
47 Mass
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As a priest my first job is to celebrate the Mass. We were told in seminary that everything else can be done by anyone else, but only a priest can change bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. When I was first ordained — fingers trembling as they held the wafer, petrified in case my intention to consecrate was weak or compromised or that I was in a state of sin which might invalidate the process — it was me and the wheat. The Host a pure circle between my thumb and forefinger, my hands a cradle for the miracle. Others were in attendance but my job was simply to do what I was doing, to allow grace to be transmitted to them from the sacred space. New theological ideas (in the Church and in me) changed the focus. The priest now stood alongside the congregation in a bigger circle, the circle of existence itself, in a cradle of limitless grace beyond sight and sense. The altar was like a circular table gently, graciously turned. We were at a banquet which was perpetually replenished, with no one left hungry.
I re-read the words of institution I’ve said at least ten thousand times. ‘He broke the bread, gave it to his disciples, and said: Take this, all of you, and eat it; this is my body which will be given up for you.’ But something else is going on here. Imagine the scene. this (breaking the bread) my body. It’s a mime — flesh torn apart. this (pouring some wine) my blood. It’s a mime — red liquid flowing. Not so much the change of one element to another but Jesus playing charades, representing the manner of his death in a theatrical tableau, do this in memory of me - enact the mime once more, let the snap of bread and drip of wine remind you of my death, my self-giving. At Emmaus the ‘crack’ of the bread at supper was enough to open the eyes of the disciples. They knew it was him with no need for words.
take, eat — chew, then defecate, take, drink — swallow, then urinate. Bread and wine become God, then God becomes shit and piss. Another circle of existence — the ultimate humiliation. But humus is Latin for earth, from which we come and to which we go. Don’t be afraid of dirt and decay and death. Life is a charade but it’s all we have and it’s all we need.
48 Addiction
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I suppose it’s an addiction — to sex, to danger, even to sleaze. I know what the homeless must feel sleeping with a mangy dog and a half-empty bottle of cheap booze next to their filthy blankets. The energy to reform is not there because we’ve become convinced that the addiction itself provides energy in its purest form. My addiction is not visible or obviously anti-social. I just need my regular fix, usually on Tuesdays, my day off. But if for some reason it doesn’t work out I become furious inside, like a child deprived of a favourite toy. On those occasions I could sweep my desk clear with rage. I could gnaw my knuckles to the bone in sheer frustration. I don’t answer the phone for at least a couple of hours before I need to get into my car. The answering machine takes the messages — the head-teacher wondering when he can talk to me about the next parents’ meeting, or the desperate voice of a mother wanting me to visit her sick child. Not on a Tuesday afternoon. Sorry, no way!
I’ve never actually had sex in my car but that metal box is the prelude and postlude to most of my carnal encounters. The drive to the boy, grasping the wheel, clutch catching the riding gears, smooth swoop round corners, traffic lights winking along my path to pleasure. And then afterwards, the contrast. Slumped in the grimy seat, the grind of return, the stopping and starting, the greasy windows, the dust-encrusted dashboard, the muddy mat under my feet, the belch of fumes with each slow acceleration. All in the same rectangular box.
The outbound journey is not without anxiety, though. Getting there on time, finding the address — my sat nav’s memory is a record of my orgasmic history. I am usually early and I sit in my parked car, the minutes passing, looking at the clock, surveying the path, checking the message again on my phone, imagining the first fumble, the first wet lip, my head soon to be buried in his dank groin, pig at a trough. Four minutes to go, keys out of ignition, hands moist, a shake of the knee, a fifth glance in the overtaking mirror, check my teeth, pop in a breath-mint, smooth down my hair, practise one more smile, swing legs out of the car, door gently closed, locked, keys pocketed. A quick look around (anonymity assured), then a nonchalant walk to the carefully memorized address.
But sometimes things do not go to plan, I’m there, I’ve parked, I find the front door, I press the bell...
and there’s no answer. Buzzing and buzzing, checking the address a dozen times, phoning again and again, the brick wall of voicemail, back to the car, returning home with a full tank of sperm. Nothing can describe the emptiness I feel, a rush followed by a crash. I can be lonely and desolate after an hour of passion (I often am), but the fall to the ground is more gentle. The body is relaxed and de-stressed and the perfume of the fantasy lingers. I can still chase it with my nose. But the no-show is a sort of redundancy without pay, a stock wiped clean off the market without dividend.
I try not to repeat an encounter, at least not for a number of months — variety is part of the thrill. And the unknown. A stranger’s body, his unique map of moles, the shape of his calves, the bend of his dick, the taste of his sweat. There are many disappointments, men who are unattractive or (yes, worse) not into it. To realize someone is simply going through the motions is a real turn-off. The best prostitutes are the ones who make you believe you’re the best punter they’ve ever had, who make you think that they are actually attracted to you, that somehow your paunch and greasy pate (that mountainous stomach and moist, follicle desert) are wildly sexy to this slender youth.
The Final Retreat Page 10
