Susan Howatch - Mystical Paths

He had been sailing with Perry Palmer. Perry kept a boat at Bosham, near Chichester, and they had formed the habit that summer of sailing every weekend. The catastrophe was caused by a freak wave which had flung Christian overboard; the theory was that he had hit his head and lost consciousness before he had even entered the water, for he had apparently made no attempt to swim for survival. The incident was reported in the national press not because it was an unusual sailing accident but because any event touching the life of Marina Markhampton was judged to be fodder for the gossip columns.

The story ran its course. Eventually the tragedy was allowed to fade from the public consciousness and the newspapers stopped photographing Marina and Katie weeping into black handkerchiefs.

The body was never found.

Life lurched on. I staggered from mess to mess until I was so unnerved that I did take a premature retirement from voluntary work after all. Then I promptly fell into that other mess when I performed the Bridey Murphy experiment on Debbie and couldn’t wake her from the trance. After that came the dead terms at Theological College culminating in the events of 1968 when I got engaged to Rosalind, found myself unable to stop bedding Tracy and sought help frantically but unsuccessfully from my formidable ‘Uncle’ Charles Ashworth, the Bishop of Starbridge. And finally, in that same spring of 1968, nearly three years after Christian’s death and five years after the Starbridge party where I had first met him, Marina arrived at Starrington Manor in a white Jaguar and asked to see me.

I was at home for the Easter vacation. That year Easter Sunday was not until the fourteenth of April, so even though March had finished there were still several days of Lent remaining. The Theological College at Starbridge aligned its terms with those of Oxford and Cambridge except in the summer; then the College slipped in a fourth term, but those who were due to be ordained on Trinity Sunday were allowed to skip this extra spell of labour and leave directly after ordination. I was heading for ordination and the third and final term of my second year.

On the morning of Marina’s arrival I was trying to follow the Bishop’s advice by praying for grace – the grace to be chaste while I waited for my trip to the altar – but praying in a conventional fashion (with words) didn’t seem to be getting me very far. Praying in words hardly ever did. Finally I decided to pray my way, which meant I lit a candle, sat cross-legged on the floor, stared into the flame, flipped the switch in my head and tuned in.

Sometimes when I prayed I began by reciting the mantra but usually it wasn’t necessary; other people might need a mantra in order to tune in, but I just flipped the switch. I tended to save the mantra for those times when I was overwrought and needed to calm myself down. Father Peters had originally taught me this technique after my mother died, and he favoured no one mantra but used various key phrases from the Bible. It was my father who always used the famous Orthodox prayer ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner’, and nowadays I followed his example. It’s pathetic that so many people turn to the East for meditative techniques nowadays, and one of the greatest failures of the Church in this century lies in the fact that the strong tradition of meditation in Christianity is so little known.

I never thought of reciting the mantra as praying, although it is. For me the real prayer came afterwards when the mantra had done its work and the conscious mind was relaxed, beyond words, in touch with the centre, soaking luxuriously in the Light. Father Peters had told me that if I was in an overstrained state I should stop after the recitation of the mantra had been completed because otherwise I ran the risk that dark forces in my unconscious mind might elbow aside the benign effects of the mantra and rise to the surface with unpleasant results. I was quite prepared to follow this advice but I couldn’t resist telling him that usually I didn’t need the mantra and could achieve the same effect just by flipping the switch in my head.

That was when Father Peters had warned me against Gnosticism which claimed, among other things, that only a spiritual élite with esoteric knowledge could attain salvation. He classed my act of flipping the switch as esoteric knowledge and said it was a psychic snare, fostered by the Devil, to make me think I was special. He said one must approach God through Christ; in this form of prayer saying a mantra which invoked Christ was the correct approach; with all my talk of the Light and the Dark I wasn’t sufficiently Christ-centred, but it was Christ in his humility who kept psychics like me on the rails, not Gnostic code-words, Gnostic élitism and that fatal Gnostic pride.

‘Well, of course as an Anglican-Benedictine monk he had to say that, no choice; he had to toe the orthodox line. But in my opinion I was quite sufficiently Christ-centred in my belief, and if God had given me a switch to flip in order to tune in to Him, why shouldn’t I flip it? And what was wrong with using code-words? Father Peters used code-words himself when he resorted to old-fashioned picture-language and talked of the Devil. One used code-words and symbols all the time when dealing with spiritual reality; it was the equivalent of the way scientists used mathematics to express the truths of physics. Flipping the switch given by God to tune in to the Light – to switch on the current of Ultimate Reality – to merge with the Ground of One’s Being – to touch the transcendent Creator who sustained the universe – whatever words one chose to describe the indescribable – was GOOD. And I knew that, I just knew; it was ‘gnosis’.

I did accept that when one was in a state of altered consciousness one had to be careful about warding off the dark forces in the unconscious mind, but I’d never found that a problem. Flipping the switch short-circuited them and the Light just blotted them out. I might suffer an attack by the Dark in other circumstances, but not when I was flipping the switch which Father Peters had so stuffily dismissed as a psychic snare.

‘Oh, bugger Father Peters!’ I said crossly to myself that morning as I lit the candle, stared into the flame and flipped the switch.

The candle went out.

I was so startled that I just stared open-mouthed at the smoking wick. Then I realised I’d left the window open and there was a draught. Closing the window I relit the candle, resumed my cross-legged position on the floor and switched on again, but now something had gone wrong with the switch. The Light was marred by a sort of cloud, or maybe it was mud – I mean, it was nothing I could see, but ‘cloud’ and ‘mud’ were the words which came closest to describing it. I felt as if I were driving a car with a dirty windscreen through thick fog.

Nasty. This psychic pollution meant I was overstrained and that in turn meant it was one of those occasions when I was unable to dispense with the mantra. I needed to have my conscious mind calmed by the constant repetition of words. Off I started. ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner …’ I kept that up with no problem for several minutes but then realised I was thinking of Tracy’s breasts. I kept on reciting – that’s very important with the mantra, one should never stop before the allotted time has finished – but I found myself wondering if I needed to do some special breathing exercises. In the end I broke off the mantra – bad practice but I was getting nowhere – and lay full length on the floor so that I could relax all my muscles in turn. My quest for a direct experience of God – a quest which should have resulted in the automatic elimination of all distracting images, even the sexual ones – looked now as if it might fail completely. I couldn’t understand it. The switch in my head never let me down unless I was in a bad state, the sort of state I had been in as the result of the witch-doctor mess, but at that moment I was normal and well-balanced.