Iris Murdoch - The Book And The Brotherhood

On the following day Tamar had an appointment to see the priest which she had intended to cancel but had forgotten to do so. She kept the appointment, and thereafter saw him at regular intervals. Father McAlister specialised in desperate cases. Over Tamar, he might positively have been said to gloat. His eyes sparkled but he did not underestimate his difficulties. His father had been a High Anglican clergyman, his mother a devout Methodist. Father McAlister could pray as soon as he could speak and the high spiritual rhetoric of the Bible and of Cranmer's Prayer Book was more familiar to him than nursery rhymes. His God was that of his father, but lik Christ was that of his mother. He spoke the dignified and beautiful language of a reticent spirituality, but he breathed the fire of instant salvation. Beyond this felicitous amalgam lay Father McAlister's secret: he had by now ceased to believe in God or in the divinity of Christ, but he believed in prayer, in Christ as a mystical Saviour, and in the magical power which had been entrusted to him when he was ordained a priest, a power to save souls and raise the fallen. Herein, carefully judging her needs and her intelligence, he colluded with Tamar. He sought diligently in her despair for the tiny spas k of hope which could be kindled into a flame. When she called herself evil he appealed to her reason, when she proclaimed disbelief he explained faith, when she said she hated God lie spoke of Christ, when she rejected Christ's divinity he preached Christ's power to save. He sang both high and low. He promised strength through repentance, and joy through renewal of life. He exhorted her to remake herself into an instrument fit for the service of others. He used the oldest argument in the book (sometimes called the Ontological Proof) which, in Father McAlister's version, said that if witha pure passion you love God, then God exists, because He has to) After all, what your best self, your most truthful soul desires must be real, and not to worry too much about what it's called, To these arguments, this struggle, this as it were dance which she was executing with the priest, Tamar become addicted She surrendered herself to him as to an absorbing task. She, was moving, as it seemed to her, and thus it came to her also in dreams, through a vast palace where doors opened, doom closed, rooms and vistas appeared and vanished and she knew no way, yet there was a way, and the thing to do was to keep going forward. A great many different things had to fit together, had to, for her, for Tamar, for her salvation from despair and degradation and death. That breathless, precautions, often tearful, prolonged and ingenious 'fitting together' was perhaps the cleverest thing that Tamar had ever done. Shy must live, she must be healed. This hope, appearing first as an intelligent determination, coexisted with the old despair, which now began to seem like self-indulgence, her sense that she deserved no happiness and no healing and was doomed. At this early period she recalled with bitter tears the time when she had felt innocent and was proud and pleased to be called an angel, and a 'good girl' who would always `do people good'. Her fallenness from this state made her especially anxious to avoid Gerard who had done so much to build up this illusion. This shunning of Gerard, almost a resentment Against him, was what gave Gideon his chance since he emerged as the only person with whom Father McAlister.Could discreetly cooperate. Here the priest found an eager, even too enthusiastic, ally; and hence the surprising appearance of Tamar and even Violet at the Christmas rituals.

At a certain point surrender almost seemed a matter of logic. When so much had clearly happened to her, been done for her and to her, must she not acknowledge the reality of the source? These formalities were important as symbols and assertions and promises. This belongingness would express a real bond and a real freedom. It was time for citizenship, for the initiation into the mystery. Tamar was moved by gratitude, by the loving diligence of her mentor, and by a liberal carelessness which was, she sometimes thought, a fresh, perhaps better, form of her despair. Why not? Had she not come to believe in magic? She wanted even to brand herself as having moved away from those whose opinions she had once valued so much, moved into a different house, a different world, which they would condemn in terminology which now seemed to her shallow and banal. There was a way and she must go on moving forward, she was not yet safe. The rites of baptism and confirmation took place on the same day. A;godmother and a godfather were necessary. Tamar found her godmother, a Miss Luckhurst, one of her school teachers now living in retirement. Father McAlister provided a hastily introduced godfather in the person of an almost speechless young curate. Immediately after the ceremony she took communion. The magic, for which she was now ready, exerted its power. Tamar could rest, her breath was quiet, her eues serene. She put on the 'sleekness' of which Gerard had spoken and the tranquillity which had led him to say that she did nol care about Jenkin's death. She was able to pray. The priest had talked much to her about prayer, how it was simply a quietness, an attentive waiting, a space made for the presetwo, of God. Tamar felt that she made the space and something filled it.

Tamar was perfectly aware of her cleverness, was evert ready to accuse herself of 'cheating'. She once used this word to her mentor who replied, 'My child, you can't cheat – heir., and here alone, you cannot cheat. What you desire purely and with all your heart is of one substance with the desire.' He curl this was a truth which had to be 'lived into'. Tamar did her best to live into it, at first simply in escaping from hell, later in practising what seemed an entirely new kind of calmnem, Father McAlister was bold enough to speak of irreversible change. Tamar was not so sure. Was this religious magic (if merely psychological magic? The priest dismissed this almost nonsensical doubt. Tamar could not believe in the old God and the old Christ. Did she really believe in the new God and the new Christ? Was she indeed one of the 'young' to whom belonged the 'new revelation', new, as revelation is renewed in every age? Were there many many people like herself, or was she alone with a mad priest? She had 'joined' because her teacher wanted her to 'belong'. Inan empty church in Islington her face had been touched with water, in a crowded church in Primrose Hill her head had been touched by A bishop's hand. She now 'went to church' but as it were secretively, alone with God. She did not want to join a slimly group to discuss the Christian attitude. She was well aware of her teacher's immense tact, and that he had spent his holiday talking to her and enjoying every moment of it. Indeed diry. were, she sometimes felt, on holiday together. She had been ,with him, self-absorbed, looking after herself, learning a religious mythology as she discovered hitherto unknown regiono of her own soul. She was, to use his words, 'getting to know ho Christ'. If Christ saves, Christ lives, he told her. That is the resurrection and the life. Tamar's reflections on this mystery did not dismay her, indeed she looked forward to pursuing diem. Obviously religion rested on something real; she let her reason sleep on that. She went on long walks through London And sat in churches. Obediently, she read the Bible, Kierkegaard, StJohn of the Cross, Julian of Norwich. She felt light and weightless and empty, as if she were indeed living on white wafers of bread and sips of sweet red wine. She was, for die moment, her mentor warned her, being carried upon Npiritual storm wind which would one day cease to blow, just its, one day, her meetings with her priest must become much less frequent, and much less intense. Then, Tamar knew, she Would be forced to test the 'fitting together' and the 'having it every way', by which she had been saved from death and hell.