Susan Howatch - Mystical Paths

Father Peters recommended that I made a retreat at the Abbey while we tried to work out what was going wrong. As a tentative hypothesis he suggested I might be suffering from the cumulative stressful effect of my fiascos as a voluntary worker with the result that an awkward situation had been generated. There was certainly no doubt about the awkwardness of the situation. Plates which soar off shelves and smash themselves to pieces apparently unaided by a human hand are really very awkward indeed.

At last I said: ‘Could I have done it while sleep-walking?’

‘I doubt it, Nicholas – the noise would have been terrific. You’d have woken up.’

‘Then it must have been one of the inmates, someone who wasn’t locked up. Surely I couldn’t have triggered poltergeist activity now that I’m past adolescence!’

‘It’s unlikely, I agree, but not impossible. If you were to make a retreat we could try and solve the mystery by examining the entire situation in detail and reviewing your spiritual life –’

I switched off, knowing that the last thing I could face at that time was Father Peters playing a spiritual Sherlock Holmes. Any discussion of how I was unconsciously expending my energy by generating psychic phenomena might lead to a discussion of how I was consciously expending my energy in messing around with girls, and I wanted no one to know I had an active sex-life. Admitting to sexual intercourse would only lead to spiritual questions which I didn’t even like to think about.

Sex was a problem. As far as I could see it was now essential therapy, hiving off all the surplus energy so that I stopped smashing plates long-distance by mistake, but I knew any confessor would tell me there were other ways of calming an over-strained psyche, ways that didn’t involve exploiting women and crashing around like an animal. The trouble was that it was such a relief to crash around like an animal when my attempts to be a decent human being, ministering without pay to the underprivileged and the sick, regularly ended in humiliation.

But of course I could confess none of this to Father Peters. All I could do was confess to God in private my exploits as a crasher and pray for the grace to become effortlessly ascetic once I was ordained.

‘I’ll think about a retreat,’ I said. ‘I really will.’ And away I went to muddle on.

‘What happened?’ said my father when I returned home, but I suspected he already knew.

‘Oh, we had a good chat and I’m feeling much better.’

‘Nicholas –’

‘No need for you to worry any more, I’m fine.’

Sometimes when my father demonstrated his intuition I thought he knew about my sex-life, but most of the time I was sure he didn’t. I was careful never to think about it in his presence, and every time I felt his mind prying into mine I mentally evicted him by thinking about cricket.

Back we come again to the relationship with my father, now clouded by my chaotic career as a psychic and muddied by his agonising anxiety.

Of course sex is a subject which children often find impossible to discuss with their parents, but in my case this wasn’t my father’s fault; certainly I don’t mean to imply that just because he was a priest he was incapable of speaking frankly on the subject.

‘Christianity has been much misunderstood on this matter,’ he had said to me at exactly the right moment in my adolescence, ‘but it has always claimed –’ Here centuries of clerical misogyny were swept aside ‘– that sex is good and right.’ With the slightest of smiles he conveyed the impression of surveying numerous pleasurable memories. ‘It’s the abuse of sex, that gift from God, which Christianity condemns. That’s a manifestation of the Devil, who hates God’s generosity and longs to wreck it by converting a gift of joy into a trap of suffering.’

This made sense to me. I liked it when my father talked in old-fashioned picture-language of the Devil in order to convey the strength of the Dark, that psychic reality which I had recognised at such an early age. But then my father stopped talking about the reality of the Dark and began talking of the unreality of the sexual rules. It turned out that almost anything was an abuse of sex. In fact in a world which was overflowing with sexual possibilities – and which was soon to explode into a sexual supermarket – he insisted that for the unmarried only deprivation was on offer. With a marriage certificate tucked under one’s pillow one could have sex twenty-five hours a day and God would never bat an eyelid (provided that the sex was what my father called ‘wholesome’; I never failed to be amazed by his use of archaic language). But for the Christian it was either feast or famine where sex was concerned. No wonder the unchurched masses thought Christianity was peculiar on the subject.

‘I expect you’re thinking now that this is all idealism which has no relation to reality,’ said my father, reading my mind so accurately that I jumped, ‘but human beings must have ideals to look up to and examples to copy if they’re not to sink to a most unedifying level.’ (More fascinating archaic language. Unedifying! Ye gods!) ‘In this world no one’s perfect. But one can aim high and try to be good. To do so is a sign not only of maturity but of –’ My father made a vast verbal leap forward into the twentieth century ‘-psychological integration. Religion is about integration, about successfully bringing the selfish ego into line with the centre of the personality where God exists, as a divine spark, in every human being. Religion is about helping man to live in harmony with his true self and become the person God’s designed him to be.’

We seemed to have wandered away from the subject of sex, but the next moment my father was saying: ‘Casual sex is just the gratification of the ego. The ego sits in the driving-seat of the personality, but unless it’s aligned with the true self it’ll steer an erratic and possibly disastrous course.’

‘Hm,’ I said. I thought it was about time I said something.

‘In addition, casual sex is the exploitation of another, and to exploit people is wrong …’

Later I felt he had exaggerated this. Later, when I was no longer so innocent, I thought: what exploitation? The girls loved it. I loved it. No one got hurt. Where was the harm? Of course there would always be people who made a mess of their pleasures, I realised that. But I wasn’t one of those people.

After the disaster at the mental hospital I yielded to my father’s pleas to bring my voluntary service to a premature end. By that time I had whiled away twenty months of the two years I had allotted myself, and I was due to begin my training at theological college that autumn, the autumn of 1966. The summer stretched before me, and telling my father that I was going to embark on some serious theological reading I loafed around listening to my records and dipping into books on reincarnation.

It was then, quite without warning, that I got into a mess with a girl, but being me I didn’t get into the usual mess young men get into with girls. It was a psychic mess. Typical.

Back we come again to my disastrous career as a psychic. ‘Beware of those glamorous powers!’ my father had droned to me years earlier before I had gone up to Cambridge, and I had thought: yes, yes, quite so, of course I shall always be psychically well-behaved. But during my years as an undergraduate I had found it increasingly hard to resist a psychic flourish now and then. The girls loved it. I loved it. No one got hurt. Where was the harm?

In that summer of 1966 I found out. I was twenty-three years old and spending my Saturday nights with a little dolly-bird typist called Debbie who had a bed-sitting-room down in Langley Bottom, the working-class end of Starbridge. I’d met her in the Starbridge branch of Burgy’s, which I had discovered was the ideal place for picking up girls whom I couldn’t take home but couldn’t do without. Being currently intrigued by the research into reincarnation I hankered to reproduce the Bridey Murphy experiment, and with Debbie’s eager consent I hypnotised her in order to find out if she could recall a past life. She could. Greatly excited I took notes as she described her life as a medieval nun. Then the disaster happened: I was unable to bring her out of the trance.