Father Neil's Monkeyshines

by Boyd, Neil;

  “Interesting,” he said. “I think one more brushstroke would have crowded the canvas.”

  This conversation was a clue to his personality. Everything about him was restrained. He was not wishy-washy, as Father D thought, but economical in comment, simple and specific like a Chinese watercolor. Or, like Jesus in his parables and teachings.

  One Sunday, the congregation was streaming out of the church when a tall nun approached him at the door. For a moment, watching from behind, I took her for Mother Stephen, the crusty superior of the convent.

  Jonathan suddenly embraced the nun, swept her off her feet, and kissed her. “My daughter,” he said to me over her shoulder.

  Father D out of earshot, looked as if his pocket had been picked. When I put him in the picture, he said irritably, “Why does he do such things? Can’t he see people do not appreciate it?”

  It was hard to explain. There are some children who seem to be as old and wise as old men. There are some men, Jonathan was one of them, who have the spontaneity and innocence of a child. He attributed no evil to anyone and failed to see why anyone would want to attribute evil to him.

  At supper, he mentioned why his daughter had come to mass that morning. It was the fifth anniversary of his wife’s death.

  “God rest her.”

  Father Duddleswell reacted so warmly, that for the first time Jonathan felt free to speak about his wife, the wonderful times they’d had and how much he missed her.

  Father D was delighted to hear that the eldest of his three daughters had converted with him and become a nun.

  The second daughter was married to an Anglican clergyman. She kept writing to him, telling him what a terrible mistake he’d made.

  I asked him if his third daughter had become a Catholic or remained an Anglican.

  “Oh, Rebecca,” he said, “she’s still an atheist.”

  Father D made a face as if to say at least we celibates are spared that.

  “You have my deepest sympathy,” he said.

  Jonathan reacted with his usual innocence. “I think she’s the happiest and best balanced of my three. Working for Oxfam may have something to do with it.”

  Father Duddleswell was completely thrown. He saw this as another example of Jonathan’s woolly-headedness For him, there was no greater tragedy than not believing in God.

  “Rebecca is sincere in her convictions,” Jonathan said. “What more can a father ask?”

  Father Duddleswell stole a glance in my direction.

  “She came,” he said, “to these convictions, I suppose, after a lot of prayer and penance.”

  Jonathan did not seem to detect the sarcasm.

  “Exactly so,” he said. “Her unbelief is as devout as my belief, and it costs her more dearly.”

  I asked him how.

  He said it made her fight for humanity all the more admirable, without any hope of lasting reward.

  Seeing that he was not carrying Father D with him, he added, with a twinkle: “In any case, even if she did believe in God, I couldn’t love her more than I do.”

  After the meal, I invited Jonathan to stroll with me in the park. It was a fine summer’s evening. I apologized for Father D’s negative attitude to Rebecca, but he said, “I do admire a man of such deep convictions.”

  “It must be boring for him, all the same, Jonathan, always being right.”

  He conceded that he did seem to want to do all the batting and bowling.

  “The fielding and umpiring, too,” I said. “Mind you, in spite of appearances, he’s really as soft as butter in a heat wave.”

  Jonathan was in a nostalgic mood. He wanted to talk about Madeline, his wife, and I was in listening mood.

  She had made his work possible. She was always the first to listen to every one of his sermons. She played the organ for the services, answered the door and the telephone, and kept the books.

  “Every night,” he said, “I sleep with her picture under my pillow.”

  I was so touched by this last confidence, I told him I envied him.

  “Thank you so much, Neil. The great sorrow of my life is that I may have hastened her death.”

  I asked him to explain.

  Both his and Madeline’s father had been bishops.

  I laughed at the thought of having two bishops in the family.

  Madeline had wanted him to be a bishop, too, not for social reasons but because he had served a long apprenticeship and, in her view, would serve the church well.

  She was set to have her wish. For some time, he had been vicar of a flourishing parish in Birmingham. He was a canon and had four curates and a large active congregation.

  Then Madeline fell gravely ill. That, ironically, was when he had been sounded out about a bishopric.

  For a couple of years, he had considered becoming a Catholic. He had wanted for her sake to put things off but this offer forced him to think and pray much harder. Until his mind was made up.

  It was the toughest decision of his life, softened only by his wife’s Christian acceptance of it.

  “Two weeks after she died, Neil, I gave up my parish and I offered myself for the priesthood in the Catholic Church.”

  These disclosures raised him still higher in my estimation. Five years ago, he was a canon in charge of a thriving parish and on the verge of becoming a bishop. Yet here he was a junior curate in St. Jude’s, living in one room far from all he loved and cherished.

  It was a small incident that made me aware of the extent of his self-sacrifice. His beautiful twenty-five-year-old atheist daughter Rebecca came from Oxford to visit him. She brought with her a Dalmatian. It snarled at Jonathan, then went mad over him. This was his dog. When he came to St. Jude’s, he even had to leave his dog behind.

  Try as he would, Father D could not relax with Jonathan around. One evening, he burst into my study complaining that he’d been crossed again. Jonathan was refusing to accept mass stipends. The money was nearly always small, about five shillings, but it helped some priests make ends meet. Jonathan said he needed the money far less than some poor widows who were offering it.

  “There speaks a man of principle,” I said.

  “Nonsense,” said Father Duddleswell, “there speaks a man of independent means. Anyway, I put him in his place.”

  “You are very good at that,” I said, continuing to write a letter. “I hope he was contrite enough for your satisfaction.”

  He had spoken in sorrow not triumph.

  “All right, lad,” he said, “give us your three-pennyworth and be done with it.”

  I told him Jonathan was different from us and he should be allowed to be himself. Could we be sure we were absolutely right about everything?

  He seemed to accept these criticisms. He really was doing his best to avoid clashing with Jonathan.

  It was not easy in the 1950s, years of denominational strife.

  Jonathan did not fit the stereotype of a convert Anglican clergyman. By the standards of the day, he should have repented of his former errors, shown remorse for what Monsignor Knox, a famous convert to Catholicism, called “those sad irrecoverable years” of his Anglican ministry. Jonathan did no such thing.

  He spoke of the days when he was university chaplain, then in charge of a parish, as wonderful. While he was not belligerent about it, he made no apologies for the grandeur of the Established Church, its language and liturgy to which he had dedicated the best years of his life.

  He had become a Catholic for two reasons. He believed England’s break with Rome four centuries earlier was a tragedy. Second, having researched the role of the pope as supreme shepherd of the universal church it was dear to his heart.

  A couple of incidents occurred that caused Father Duddleswell, for all his good intentions, to lose patience.

  Jonathan was leading the rosary in chur
ch when he inadvertently slipped back into a lifelong habit of beginning the Lord’s Prayer with “Our Father, which are in heaven.” Father D was quick to correct him. He didn’t care for the “Which-Arters,” as he called them.

  Another time, he heard Jonathan reading the Gospel in an unfamiliar version. It was the King James’s. Jonathan explained that it was, in this instance, finer than the official Catholic translation.

  To Father Duddleswell this smacked of rebelliousness. To read a “Protestant” translation, however majestic, was an offense in itself.

  By now, he was convinced that Jonathan was what Monsignor Knox called “a semi-detached Catholic.” He honestly feared for the doctrinal purity of his parish, especially when he heard on the grapevine that Jonathan was in the local Anglican Church on Sunday evenings and joining in their prayers.

  “Perhaps he is wanting to convert back,” he said glumly.

  When I said this was unworthy of him, he apologized.

  By now, parishioners were beginning to see that Father D and the new curate did not always see eye to eye. Even their sermons differed.

  One Sunday, Jonathan told the congregation, “Jesus did not preach the Ten Commandments. He had no need. He preached love, and loving persons do not need to be told that they must not cheat, steal, kill, be unfaithful to their spouses, or cruel to their children. Jesus said, ‘Love one another and that is the fulfilment of all your obligations. Fail in love, and you fail in everything.’”

  The following week, Father Duddleswell monopolized the pulpit to preach at every mass on the central value of the Ten Commandments. The Catholic Church, he said, is like Pasteur. When this great scientist was faced with disease, he didn’t first think about a cure for it. No, he thought of how to prevent it. Many of us are saved from the disease of sin by thinking of the Big Ten.

  Jonathan brought things to a head when he happened to say at lunch, in that naive way he had, maybe the Catholic Church was less Christ-like than the Church of England in the matter of divorce.

  I prepared myself for an inevitable explosion.

  Unaware of the danger signs, Jonathan went on to say the Church of England forbade divorce and recognized its sinfulness. But it did not look on it as the unforgivable sin against the Holy Ghost. Nor did it penalize remarried divorcés by barring them from the sacraments for the rest of their lives.

  “The Church is a Mother,” he concluded, “surely she ought not to abandon her children like this but call them back to their family home.”

  Father Duddleswell had taken all this with his mouth open like a two-pound jam jar.

  “Are you saying, Father,” he fumed, “that the pope should have given Henry VIII a divorce so he could marry Anne Boleyn and any other wench he took a fancy to?”

  “I wasn’t thinking of—”

  “Next you’ll be telling us that our church’s stand on mixed marriages is not in tune with the Gospel.”

  Jonathan nodded slowly. “Perhaps so. Anglicans are baptized, are they not? They believe in Christ. Shouldn’t we take into consideration their wishes in their marriage and the upbringing of their children?”

  Father Duddleswell pushed his plate forward and jumped to his feet.

  “I will hear no more Protestantism in this house.”

  He left in a temper.

  Jonathan ran after him and, while not retracting his views, said he was sorry to have caused offense.

  No one could hold a grievance against him for long. However, Father D felt it was time to take a stand. One Friday morning, he called me into his study.

  “Will you be passing the post office?”

  I said I was pressed to say mass in the hospital but I could call in afterward.

  He handed me a letter addressed to Bishop O’Reilly. I asked if it was about Jonathan. He said yes and it was top secret. He was requesting His Lordship to remove him from St. Jude’s.

  I was torn between admiring Jonathan’s tolerance and sensitivity, and worrying about the effects of his freethinking.

  “Why are you doing this, Father?”

  “So he does no more damage to the parish, lad.”

  “Damage? I don’t see he’s done any damage except to your ego.”

  He flinched. “There is nothing personal in this. In fact, he is one of decentest fellers I ever met but, in my considered view, he is a square peg and ’tis better for him and us if he leaves.”

  “Does that justify you writing to the bishop behind his back?”

  He shuddered as if I had kicked him in the shins.

  “I did forewarn him, of course.”

  I softened and said, “Must you?” and he said, “I must.”

  That Sunday evening, Jonathan did not appear at supper. After our meal, eaten in silence, Father Duddleswell and I went into church to pray.

  Unknown to us, a crowd had gathered. The only people I recognized were the Church of England vicar, Mr. Probble; his curate, the brilliant Mr. D’Arcy; and Jonathan. He was leading them in the Lord’s Prayer in the best Anglican tradition.

  I’d never seen Father Duddleswell so incensed. An entire congregation of “Which-Arters” had taken over his church for a prayer meeting, led by our own Father Jonathan Barr-Jones.

  Even I could not defend such willful insubordination.

  Father D groaned. “What sort of jilliwigs is that feller up to now?”

  He rushed up the center aisle, clapping his hands and calling out, “Stop it at once, if you please. This is the house of God.”

  Praying came to an abrupt halt. Mr. Probble stood up, smiling, and took Father Duddleswell’s hand.

  “May I be the first to congratulate you, Father.”

  Steam was rising from my senior’s glassy dome.

  “For what, may I ask?”

  “These ladies and gentlemen,” Mr. Probble said, “have been until now members of my flock. From today, they are seeking membership of yours.”

  It came out that Jonathan and Mr. D’Arcy had been jointly chairing a St. Luke’s study group on Sunday evenings. Those now assembled in our church had concluded that God was calling them to become Catholics.

  Mr. Probble said he had done his best, naturally, to dissuade them, but in the end he had advised them to follow their conscience.

  “Our loss, Father Duddleswell, is your gain.”

  He turned to his former parishioners and raised his right hand over them. “May God bless you and keep you and turn his face of kindness toward you. May he always bless you.”

  My parish priest and I were staggered by such generosity.

  There were thirty-three men and women wanting to be received into the Church, including an outstanding young clergyman, called Mr. Hardy. Their children brought the tally to seventy.

  Father Duddleswell thanked them for their decision with the many sacrifices it entailed and asked them to contact him individually in the days ahead.

  When the group left, Jonathan remained kneeling in prayer. I was pleased he had been vindicated at last.

  Father Duddleswell was having second thoughts about his letter to the bishop. He had requested the removal of a man who had brought more people into the Church in one fell swoop than he had in many years.

  I was in his study on Monday morning when he contacted Bishop O’Reilly on the phone. The bishop had not received any letter. Yes, they had been through his mail for the day and his private secretary had not come across it, so what was this all about?

  Father Duddleswell mouthed at me, “Are you sure you mailed that letter?”

  I couldn’t remember. I had no clear memory of even going near the post office. I shrugged.

  Father D played for time. He distracted the bishop by telling him that St. Jude’s was having a deluge of converts, all due to the new curate. The bishop said he had told him the new curate was going to do great thin
gs at St. Jude’s, wasn’t that so? And my parish priest said it was so and thanked His Lordship for his great foresight and beneficence.

  The bishop’s last words were, “Congratulate that grand priest, whatever his name is, for the good work he has done and I expect even better things from him in the future.”

  Father Duddleswell replaced the receiver. “Now, boy, about that letter. Me good standing with the bishop depends on it. If he reads it, he might demote me and make Jonathan parish priest here in my stead.”

  I went over in my mind everything I’d done last Friday. I remembered visiting the hospital where, after mass, there’d been an emergency. I was called to anoint a dying woman. I had no recollection of what I did with the letter.

  I went through my chest of drawers and all my dirty linen. I searched my room, my wastebasket, and the dustbins in the garden. I retraced my steps to the hospital, to the post office and back, in the forlorn hope that I had dropped it on the way and the still more forlorn hope that I would find it. Something would surely jog my memory.

  After three hours of racking my brain, I came up with nothing. Until … Yes, I remembered. I had mailed the letter, not at the post office but in the box at the end of the road. So there was no hope for Father D.

  But why had the letter not been delivered? Was it still in the box? Maybe under cover of night, I might come back and find a way of breaking into it.

  Then I worked it out: If I hadn’t posted the letter at the post office, it would not have had a stamp on it. That might explain why the bishop had not received it and why, with any luck, it would be returned to the presbytery for not being franked.

  I didn’t tell Father Duddleswell. I reckoned he had brought this on himself so he could wait until the letter came back. Serve him right.

  The next morning, it was lying on the front doormat. Father Duddleswell thanked God in a loud voice for my stupidity and the stinginess of the Royal Mail.

  I hurried to tell Jonathan the good news. He merely said, “How does this change anything? Surely, he will still have to follow his conscience and post it again?”

  Exactly a week later, Father D came to me ashen-faced.