The Wounds of God

by Penelope Wilcock

  Have you ever been given one of those horrid joke presents, a big, inviting, exciting box, which when you open it contains only another box, and inside that another box, right down to the last one which has nothing at all inside? That’s how my schooldays were. Day led onto day, a meaningless, hollow emptiness, the promise of learning no more than academic exercises wrapped around nothing.

  I can see my headmistress’ face now, the permed waves of grey hair rising from the domed forehead above those eyes that so remarkably resembled a dead cod, and the sort of embossed Crimplene armour she wore under her academic gown.

  I learned very little. I have no idea where the Straits of Gibraltar are, and not until last weekend did I learn the square root of 900. But the day I opened the last package in the sequence and found it was an empty joke, I mean the day I pulled up the drawbridge of my soul forever, and never learned another thing from those teachers (though I was at the school two years more) was the day I got my English exam result. I was not good at many things at school, but I was good at English and I knew I was. I tried my best in the exam, and I hoped I’d done well. When the results were given out, I got 54 per cent, which just scraped a pass. I can remember it now, sitting in the classroom; the wooden desks with their graffiti, the high Victorian windows, and the teacher explaining to me that she had given me no marks at all for the content of my exam. She had given me marks for my punctuation and for my spelling, but that was all, because the content was, she felt, immoral. She had thought, she said, when she began to read it, that it was going to be a love story, but it turned out to be about God.

  It seems funny (odd, I mean, not amusing) to think how that hurt me, then; how the shutters of my soul closed for good against the school that day. I know now what that poor, starved woman cannot have known, that not only my essay but the whole of life is a love story, about a tender and passionate God.

  So my life was lived in the evenings and at weekends, and the greater part of my education was not geography or mathematics, but the wisdom my mother taught me, wrapped up in stories her great-grandmother Melissa had taught her.

  Here are some of those stories.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Who’s the Fool Now?

  Stories and songs are for wet days and evenings, and for camping. You could offer me a mansion with central heating and every luxury; top quality stereo systems, colour televisions and ensuite bathrooms, and I would not exchange it for my memories of campfires under the stars.

  I remember my little sisters, Mary and Beth and Cecily, dancing to the music of Irish jigs piped on a recorder, their silhouetted shapes leaping and turning in the firelight. I remember Mary’s eager smile as she stretched up towards the flying sparks that floated high in the smoke. Fire-fairies, she said they were. I remember their breathless voices as they sang ‘Father Abraham had many sons…’, hopping and jumping the actions to the song.

  Round the fire, sitting on the big stones that ringed it, were friends and family. Mother and Daddy, Grandma, my uncle and auntie, Grandad sitting in his camp chair with a pink towel draped over his head to stop the midges biting him. Familiar and commonplace in the daylight, as the dusk fell and night drew on they became folk tale figures, mythological beings from another age. The kindly light of the fireglow hid the irrelevances of whether Grandma’s anorak was blue or white, or Auntie’s trousers were fashionable, and revealed different things: the kindness of Grandad’s face, and the serene wisdom of Grandma’s. Daddy’s face with its long beard looked like an Old Testament story all by itself. People think you can see more by electric light, but you can’t. You see different things, that’s all. You can see to read or do your homework or bake a cake by electric light, but you see people more truly by candlelight and firelight. ‘Technology is man-made, and has no soul,’ my mother used to say.

  ‘You’re a pyromaniac!’ Daddy would say to her. ‘Candles, bonfires, campfires, fires on the hearth at home. Why can’t we have central heating like everybody else?’

  ‘Everybody else? Who’s that?’ Mother would reply. ‘If there really is a faceless grey “they” mumbling, “There’s safety in numbers,” what is that worth to me? I need fire and earth and wind and waves as much as I need food. I’d go mad living in this wired-up, bricked-up, fenced-in concrete street if I didn’t dose myself with fire and weather and earth and sea. My soul would get pale and thin. I don’t want a pale, thin soul.’

  ‘Okay.’ Daddy knew when to give in. ‘No central heating.’

  Our camping holiday was an important part of our dose of the elements. We used to go to a place in the Yorkshire hills, sheltered by tall, whispering trees, beside a shallow stream where brown trout swam among the stones under the dappling of sunlight shining through leaves.

  Sometimes the sun shone and we lay out on the grass reading comics and books, eating peaches and French bread and chocolate. Sometimes it rained and we lay in bed at night listening to the drumming of raindrops on the canvas, careful to let nothing touch the edge of the tent. On rainy days we warmed ourselves up with mugs of tea and chips from the chip shop, and watched, as the clouds cleared, the beauty of the wet hills holding the transparent, washed loveliness of the light like cupped hands holding the eucharist.

  You don’t see rainfall in a town. Oh, you can see that it’s raining and you can get wet all right, but there is not the space to see the mist of rain blowing, the approach of rainfall across a valley, the majestic breadth of the sky with its gathering fleet of clouds. In the town, it is sunny or it is not. It is cold or it is warm. The gold of autumn and the silver of the rain has no meaning. Where I live now, I have a view from the front of my house of a large rendered wall painted grey, its flat surface relieved by an extractor fan, a flat blue door and a small window. From the back I can see a clutter of washing lines, sheds and greenhouses. But I remember the holidays of my girlhood by the stream and under the stars, and I still do as Mother did and take regular doses of fire and water, earth and air, to stop my soul getting pale and thin.

  Daddy always said there was not much difference between camping and staying at home for us, because we girls slept on mattresses on the floor at home, too. Five of us children in a two-bedroomed house made mattresses a practical option. On winter nights we pushed them close together and kept each other warm. So camping had no sense of hardship or roughing it for us. Grandad brought his Tilley lamp and his calor gas camping stove, and Mother had her campfire in the evening.

  We sat beside the fire one evening at camp, Mother and I. Daddy was putting the three little ones to bed, telling them the story of how the sky fell on Chicken Licken, and Therese had gone with Grandma and Grandad to buy some milk. It must have been early on in the week, because I don’t think Uncle and Auntie were there that night.

  ‘You haven’t told me a story about Father Peregrine and the monks for ages,’ I said. It was a clear, warm night and we had spent the early part of the evening gathering brushwood and fallen branches from among the trees, for the fire which was going beautifully now.

  ‘I haven’t, have I? All right then. Let me think a moment.’

  You remember Brother Thomas? Remember how, when Father Peregrine had been beaten and crippled, his hands maimed and broken, he struggled so hard to keep his fear and horror and grief hidden inside, and almost did; but it was Brother Thomas who plucked up the courage to put his arms round him and gave him the jog he needed to spill his grief, his misery and despair? Brother Thomas never forgot it either. He kept the memory in the tender, mysterious place at the very centre of his soul, and he had never spoken about it, because none of us can speak easily about the things that lodge in the very heart of us like that. He admired and respected his abbot for his justice and his natural authority and he loved him for the gentleness and mercy that was in him too. But at the very core of his love was the memory of Father Peregrine sobbing out his despair—‘Oh God, how shall I bear the loss of my hands?’—as Brother Thomas held him in his arms.

  Well this
story concerns Brother Thomas, although most people called him Tom. Even Father Peregrine did in the occasional unguarded moment. Brother Tom was, as you remember, a vital and hearty young man, who hugged life in a mighty embrace and was given more to laughter than to tears. He had a deep appreciation of wine, women, song and good food, and he found the life of a monk very, very hard—at times intolerably hard. None the less, he loved the Lord Jesus to the bottom of his soul and was determined enough to follow his calling. But he did wonder, at times, if God should ever ask of him that he be removed elsewhere, to serve over the sea, or in another monastery, whether he could bear to leave his abbot, because although it was God who called him to the monastic life, it was Father Peregrine who kept him at it, or that was the way Brother Tom saw it. Then again, as he told himself, God’s will was for him to serve in this monastery here, so maybe loving his superior was part of loving God, although… but here Brother Tom’s brain wearied of the complications of the issue: he loved his abbot, and he understood his vulnerability as well as his strength. Truly, the two of them had been through some harrowing times together. In the course of Brother Tom’s novitiate there had been an unfortunate incident with a young lady, which is a story all of its own, and had it not been for the way Father Peregrine dealt with Brother Tom and pleaded for him with the ancients of the community, Tom would have been turned out for good. Indeed, love his abbot though he might, Brother Tom caused him more trouble than all the others put together. He was on more than one occasion in disgrace for raiding the larder under cover of night, and his irrepressible streak of mischief combined with Brother Francis’ inventive sense of humour caused chaos and disapproval again and again.

  Father Peregrine had so often to plead for him and bail him out, to admonish him, listen to him, talk things through with him, pray for him and have him beaten, that he wondered from time to time if it wouldn’t have been better for Tom simply to call it a day, give up struggling against the grain to be Brother Thomas, and return to farming the land with the family who had grieved to give him up. It amazed them both when Brother Tom at last came to the end of his novitiate (which was twice as long as it should have been, because of the young lady) and the community agreed to receive him for life and he made his solemn vows. Father Peregrine, who did not trust Tom out of his sight for too long, gave him the job of being the abbot’s esquire, his own personal attendant. Brother Tom cleaned his house for him, waited on him at table, and did for him those tasks that his broken hands could not accomplish, for example, shaving him, buckling his belt, and fastening his sandals and tunic. Things went reasonably well for a while after he took his vows. The consideration that he was now a fully professed Benedictine monk had a sobering effect on Brother Tom, and he spent nearly six weeks after his solemn profession affecting an unnatural dignity that made Father Peregrine smile, and drew derision from Brother Francis who had made his own life vows three months previously and was now recovered from the awe and apprehension that went with it.

  It didn’t last. As inevitably as the flowering of bluebells in the spring came the temptations of the flesh that regularly assailed Brother Thomas. After a week of fasting and praying, and scourging himself mercilessly in the privacy of his cell, he stole the key to the cellar, sat down by the biggest cask of wine he could find and got blind drunk. Brother Cormac discovered him there, and attempted to remonstrate with him, unwisely as it turned out, for black gloom had descended on the miscreant by then and Brother Cormac got nothing but a bloody nose for his pains. Brother Andrew, Cormac’s superior in the kitchen, reported the matter to Father Peregrine in bristling indignation, and Father Peregrine, mortally weary of Tom’s misdemeanours and exasperated beyond measure, had them souse him with a bucket of cold water and lock him up in the abbey prisons to sober up overnight.

  Red-eyed, sneezing and penitent, Brother Thomas was brought to stand before the Community Chapter Meeting in the morning and receive his penance, which in these rare and unhappy circumstances was the standard one of a flogging.

  Father Peregrine hated to see a man flogged, and he was upset as well as angry with Brother Tom, so spoke with more heat than he might normally do as Brother Thomas knelt down before him: ‘Brother Thomas, you are a fool. You have the goodwill of this community and you spit on it. You have the trust of this community and you throw it away. You’re a fool, Brother, because goodwill does not last for ever. You betray our trust, you betray your vocation, you betray the good name of this house with your silly capers. You are a fool!’

  He glared at Brother Tom, and Tom humbly bent his aching head before his abbot’s wrath. Both of them felt sick at heart, because in each of them the love for the other hurt like a splinter, like a sharp thorn. Father Peregrine was angry with Tom because he loved him, because he wanted him to be true to his vocation, because he didn’t want to give the word to have him flogged. And Tom was ashamed and miserable because he’d failed again, because his abbot had spent so much time and kindness on him and he’d let him down once more.

  Brother Clement, chosen for the job because he worked in the scriptorium and library, and therefore had little to do with Brother Tom and was as impartial towards him as any of the brothers could be, stood with the scourge in his hand. Brother Tom unfastened his tunic and undershirt, and bent low as he knelt before them, exposing his back to be beaten. Peregrine sat in his stall, his eyes downcast, the slight frown of distress that he could not help belying the sternness of his face.

  ‘Father…’ Brother Clement hesitated. Brother Tom’s back was already a mass of purple welts where he had used the scourge savagely on himself in his battle against temptation.

  ‘Ah, no!’ said Peregrine, seeing it. ‘Let that be finished with, Brother. No, no, I’ve no stomach to lay wound upon wound. Let him be. Resume your place, Brother Thomas. For your penance you may eat only dry bread and water these three days, and that you must take on your knees in the refectory, set apart from the brethren.’

  It was on the third of these three days that Brother Tom came in to the abbot’s lodging to sweep the floor and generally tidy up, and found Father Peregrine seated at his table, thoughtfully gnawing his lip as he frowned at a letter he was holding in his hand. He glanced up briefly at Brother Tom, grunted a response to Tom’s pleasant ‘God give you good day, Father’, and went back to the perusal of his letter.

  Brother Tom, as he swept the room, watched out of the corner of his eye as his abbot laid the letter down at last, and sat deep in thought for a while, then picked it up again and looked at it once more. It was written in an elegant hand on the finest vellum.

  ‘The cunning devil!’ Peregrine announced suddenly. ‘Here, read this, Brother. ’Tis from Prior William of St Dunstan’s Priory. You know, the Augustinian house. He invites me, in terms of the most friendly courtesy, to take part in a conference—a debate—concerning the nature of God, whether his supreme manifestation be in justice or in mercy.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’ asked Tom, reaching out his hand for the document.

  ‘Only that he hates me like poison, and that St Dunstan’s Priory is three days’ ride to the southwest, and his conference begins in three days’ time. If Prior William bids us to conference he’s up to no good somewhere. It’s not like him to waste the substance of his house on hospitality if he can help it, and he doesn’t intend me to be there for sure. It means leaving on the instant and riding half the night to be there in time. Why this sudden interest in the mercy and justice of God in any case? It never troubled his mind before that I recall.

  ‘No… he’s up to something and he counts on my absence to work it. He’s a manipulator of minds and a good politician, but he’s no theologian. Whatever he’s cooking up, he wants me out of it because he knows I’ll have the better of him in theological debate.’

  He sat frowning in thought a while longer as Tom scanned the letter, then he exclaimed, ‘No, I don’t trust him! We’ll go. I want to know what he’s hatching.’

  Broth
er Tom looked up from the letter in surprise. ‘But Father, how are you going to—I mean, can you…?’

  ‘Sit on a horse without falling off? Yes? Well, we shall see, shan’t we? Find Father Chad and Brother Ambrose. Have three horses saddled, prepare for ten days’ absence. Make haste. Yes, you’re coming with me. I don’t trust you out of my sight, you drunken fool.’

  The preparations were quickly made. It was agreed that Father Chad, the prior, should travel with them, leaving Brother Ambrose, the wise old cellarer, who was also the sub-prior, to rule over the community in their absence.

  Brother Peter, who cared for the horses, considered Father Peregrine’s situation carefully.

  ‘You’ve been a good enough horseman, it’ll not matter about your hands, but can you grip with your thighs? These two years near enough you’ve been limping about on a crutch. Your muscles will be wasted. Not only that, but that stiff knee. I’m not sure…. Better not to arrive plastered in mud, I would imagine. How do you feel about being tied to your saddle? No, don’t answer that. I can see by the look in your eye how you feel about it. Would it not be for the best though, truly?’

  They did in the end strap him to his saddle as well as they could, and by noon they were on the road. They rode late into the night, that first night, slept under the stars in the lee of a hedge, and were on the road again before first light. The second night they begged food and lodging of a house of Poor Clares, who received them with warmth and kindness. They ate a hearty meal in the guest house there, and finished just in time to join the sisters for Compline. As they made their way to their beds, Brother Tom broke the Great Silence to whisper, ‘Shall I not attend to your hands before you go to your bed, Father? Brother Edward has given me some oil, and said I mustn’t forget to massage them every day. I neglected to do it yesterday. Will I not see to them tonight?’