Leaving Alexandria

by Richard Holloway

  Auricular confession, confession to the ear or auriculam of a priest, as opposed to general confession, which is the kind of group act that takes place in public worship, is a controversial subject around which many legends have grown. Some have seen it as a device by which the priesthood has maintained control over a quiescent laity, and while there may be something in that, it strikes me as too conspiratorial a view, and one that does not fit my own experience from either side of the confessional. Private or auricular confession has never been compulsory in the Anglican Church, where the working principle has always been: all may; none must; some should. The some who should are those who are burdened with guilt for serious offences, for whom absolution can be a liberating and life-changing experience that enables them to put the past behind them and move on into the future.

  One of the most tragic things about us is that we commit irreversible acts with no power to undo them and no way to rewind to the moment before the event that may have stolen another’s joy and destroyed our own peace of mind. The remedy for the irreversibility of our actions is the ability to forgive them or be forgiven for them. The most terrible effect of bad conduct is its ability to steal the future by trapping us in a futile loop that endlessly rehearses what was done to us or what we have done to another. Confession can stop the constant replay of the past and allow the future to open before us again. That is the truth that lies at the heart of a practice that is capable of both abuse and trivialisation. The ecclesiastical monopoly of the process has been over for a long time, and the practice of it has been largely secularised by the psycho-therapeutic professions, which have taken over as the main ports at which the cargos of human despair are now unloaded. After that morning in the field at Caldarvan my practice of confession became unhealthy, because it locked me into the classic Christian trap of freighting sexual sins with a weight of shame that did not attach itself to other, arguably more serious ones. And that is an old song that is still being sung.

  All of which brings me back to that little blue prayer book. Not only did it contain a handy form for the rite of confession, it included lists of sins aimed at helping forgetful souls remember what they’d been up to. There are lots of stories about the childish misuse of these lists, including one about a ten-year-old girl who confessed to having neglected her diocese, having reached a section of a prayer book clearly aimed at peccant bishops. The Centenary Prayer Book contained a whole section on impurity, the word that began to flash accusingly at me after my encounter with Brenda. There it was in black and white: ‘Have you been impure in thought, word or . . .’ – the big one – ‘. . . deed?’ Yes to thought. Definitely. Thinking about what had happened in that field was how it all started. Another verb used was harboured, as though impure thoughts were pirate ships or smugglers’ vessels seeking somewhere to dock and land their illicit goods. That was another idea that convicted me. I knew I had harboured impure thoughts in my head. More than that: I had signalled to them and invited them to sail in and drop anchor in my mind, where they rolled in the swell of my imagination. No one ever told me how to prevent them from sailing in like that; no one told me where to find the coastguard vessels that would head them off before they could slip by my defences and drop anchor in my mind. And once they sailed in, I harboured them. There was more to come, much more. There was another word that accused me in the prayer book: had I entertained these thoughts? Movie fan that I was, that was a word I knew and rated highly. I loved to be entertained in the picture house, letting the show take me out of myself. I loved the trailers that promised future entertainments. I was definitely doing that here. I encouraged the little regatta to sail in and put on a show for me. I both harboured impure thoughts and entertained them, though it would have been more accurate to say they entertained me, by flooding my mind with an erotic cabaret. There was no doubt I had been flagrantly impure in thought. They caught me on that, repeatedly; and it was an unpleasant one to have to confess, because it made me feel furtive and secretive.

  But they never caught me on the next one. I was never impure in word, never. The one thing I didn’t do, couldn’t do, was talk about this stuff. To anyone. As far as I knew, I was the only person at Kelham, where I was surrounded by holy people whose minds were on higher things, who was bothered by any of this. So there was no way I was going to talk about sex to anyone, apart from my furtive whispers in Father Peter’s ear, which didn’t count as talk and which couldn’t ever be alluded to elsewhere because of the seal of the confessional. Sex was the secret that never became Word. Well, never the spoken Word. I did start trying to read about it. There was a good library in the Cottage and I spent a lot of time in there on my own, combing through novels for mentions of that which could not be said but might be read. What I found confirmed me in thinking that sex was as deadly as it was fascinating. Graham Greene made it sound inescapable – and desolating. It was a curse that drove people out of happiness, the way it had driven Adam and Eve from Eden. Even the doing of it, when it finally did get done in the books I read, was heavy with loss and pain. In his Afterword to Nabokov’s Lolita, Craig Raine describes the unavoidable duality of sex as ‘the imperative and the accusative, the sexually romantic and the sated regret’.25 My reading intensified my fascination with this ancient struggle in the human psyche, but I never spoke about it and was always uncomfortable when others alluded to it, however cryptically, such as the day a boy pointed out to me that the dictionary said friction was the rubbing of one body against another. I shivered with embarrassment, because that was the very thing I spent a lot of time thinking about. But my disgraceful secret was secure. I was never impure in word.

  I had been guilty in thought, but not in word. Next there was deed, which was what all that harbouring and entertaining led to, a deed that stained my conscience as it stained my body. Shame had come into my world.

  A shame that started at sixteen

  And spread to everything.26

  It removed much of the joy I had known at Kelham during my first two years there. Outwardly things were the same. I went about my work and tried to say my prayers, but I was now carrying a secret burden. I knew I was a fraud. I was like the whited sepulchre excoriated by Jesus, which appeared beautiful outwardly, but within was full of dead men’s bones. There were a few days a month when I was at peace. Technically, I was then in a state of grace, because I had confessed my sins and scrubbed them off like mud stains from my football kit. I would approach confession with dread, while looking forward to the feeling of release, once it was all over, that would accompany me out of the little chapel up there in the gallery.

  I always began with the easy stuff: the gossip about others, the lack of charity, the unkind words spoken, the occasional moment of anger. Then, my voice getting hoarser and lower, I would record my secret shame, though not every incident. I usually grossed the incidents up, only to worry about the effect of my evasive circumlocutions. Would each act of impurity actually be forgiven if I lumped them together? Or was each act noted individually and kept on my record unshriven by God like unpaid taxes, because I had been too embarrassed to offer a precise accounting? I never did sort that one out, but since Father Peter never asked how many times? I assumed I was okay and would leave the confessional unburdened by shame – sometimes for a whole week. That was my record: in a state of grace for seven days, hoping the habit was finally kicked. Till the despicable little fleet sailed into the harbour of my mind again and the shameful ritual recommenced. In the brief advice he offered me in his coughy smoker’s voice at the end of my recitation of shame, Father Peter never alluded to this aspect of my confession, so I assumed his silence consented to the seriousness of my self-accusation. Peter Clarke was a kind man, but he was unable to find words to reduce or explain away my misery. As far as human anguish goes, it was at the lower end of the spectrum, but it was pain enough, and it left a shadow. I have often wished I had met someone then, maybe someone like the priest I became later, who could have told me to relax, th
at it was natural, just don’t turn it into a full-time occupation.

  Sadly, Christianity has been more intent on repressing and misrepresenting sex than on helping people manage it wisely. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the Church had said to the children of the earth: ‘We know you are going to be enthralled by the mystery of sexuality, which is hardly surprising since it is the energy of life itself. We know it will have the power to take you over for its own purposes, and we know you won’t always be able to resist it. Try at least to think about its possible consequences. Recognise that sex has the potential to hurt and devastate, as well as the capacity to thrill. Understand that it will get all tied up with your need for consolation and acceptance. And never forget the sheer fucking insanity of it all.’ Sadly that’s not how they put it, and their response has bedevilled Christianity’s relationship with humanity ever since. The tragic thing is that what they actually said was based on a wilful misreading of an ancient myth and a profound mistake about human origins. Bad enough in themselves – and causing centuries of anguish for many human souls – these mistakes also provide us with a classic example of religion’s difficulty in admitting that it has ever been profoundly mistaken about anything.

  There were two elements to the mistake the early fathers made about sex, one more excusable than the other. The less excusable mistake was their failure to understand the nature of myth, which is the narrative form of all religions. The power of myth lies in its ability to represent ourselves to ourselves. A myth is a story that expresses but does not explain a universal human experience. You only have to look at a cartoon of a naked couple gazing at the enticing fruit on a tree, while a serpent wraps itself seductively round their legs, to understand the message. The best myths have immediacy. We get them, see ourselves through them. They are mirrors. The early Church read the myth of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden as a historic event, and projected onto it a theological interpretation it was never meant to have. Not only did this primordial act of disobedience happen, everyone born since it occurred has inherited the guilt of the primal act. In Adam all have sinned. And here’s the kicker: sex is its mode of transmission! Henceforth, sex is not just a natural drive that can be misused; it is intrinsically disordered, wrong in itself. The main architect of this reading of the myth of the Fall was Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in North Africa in the fifth century, one of the geniuses of early Christianity. Augustine believed that had Adam and Eve never eaten of the tree, they would have propagated children without what he called concupiscence, the desire that is the engine of sexuality.

  Against this drive, which is in tension with the law of the mind, all chastity must fight . . . This urge, had it existed in Paradise . . . would . . . have never run beyond the bidding of the will . . . It would never have forced itself upon the mind with thoughts of inappropriate and impermissible delights. It would not have had to be held upon the leash by married moderation, or fought to a draw by ascetic labour. Rather, when once called for, it would have followed the will of the person with all the ease of a single-hearted act of obedience.27

  If the first element in this misreading of sexuality is hard to excuse, the second is forgivable, because it was based on ignorance of human origins and the unimaginably long processes of natural evolution. We know that sex could never have been the consequence of the fall of man from an original state of pre-sexual innocence, because sex existed long before humanity appeared on the scene, and it came along not because it was prompted by the serpent, but because it was the answer to a problem. In his book, The Language of the Genes, Steve Jones asks why sex appeared on the evolutionary scene. Some creatures manage with just females, so that every individual produces copies of herself. Why bother with males and introduce the inevitable struggle and strife they will bring to the equation of life? According to Jones, sex is:

  a way of producing individuals who contain genes from more than one line of descent, so that inherited information from different ancestors is brought together each generation. In an asexual creature everyone has one mother, one grandmother, one great-grandmother, and so on in an unbroken chain of direct descent from the ur-mother who began the lineage.28

  The reason why life is not female and therefore sexless has to do with the hazards of mutation. If a sexless organism had a harmful change to her DNA it would be handed on to all her descendants, none of whom would ever get rid of it, and the decay of the genetic message would set in as one generation succeeded another. However, in a sexual creature the new mutation can be purged as it passes to some descendants but not to others. Sex has a positive effect on evolution, because the new combinations of genes are better able to cope with the challenges of a changing environment. Creatures that give up males may save themselves some conflict in the short term, but only at the price of killing themselves off in the long run.

  Far from being the corruptor the early fathers said it was, sex is the mechanism that evolved in nature to pass life on as vigorously and effectively as it could. It is the sexless life that turns out to be a dead end. Sex is the imperative that drives life. At its primal level it is pre-moral and uninterested in its impact on those it uses to keep itself going. Nevertheless, though they were wrong in their understanding of the origins of sex, the early fathers were right in recognising the havoc it can play with humans who cannot restrain their own desires. The heart-breaking thing is that, because of its gross misunderstanding of the real nature of sex, Christianity has become a dangerous and untrustworthy guide on the subject. This is why sex continues to be a source of shame and abuse in Christian societies; and it is why it is forced to operate in the dark, with frequently tragic consequences.

  And it is why I brought back to Kelham for the Michaelmas term after that Caldarvan summer a new heaviness and a more pronounced duality. Good at compartmentalising, I do not think it showed. I went about my work as I had before. I prayed in chapel and continued to read books about the monastic life. I enjoyed playing right back in the Second Eleven football team, with occasional outings for the First Eleven. I was a cheerful presence about the place during the day. Then the night came, and it was different. The little flotilla would float into my mind and drop anchor. The show would begin. The term before, I’d started getting up at two in the morning to read the Cistercian Night Office in the Lady Chapel. This term I started getting up at two in the morning to go to a different place and do a different thing. I would creep down to the shower room, take off my pyjamas and lie on the cold concrete floor. And I would pray. Not the Night Office. This was a prayer of desperation, a prayer to God to expel the little fleet of impure images that insisted on sailing into my mind. Sometimes it worked.

  4

  THE SIDE DOOR

  I tried to make a run for it just before my eighteenth birthday. The signs of restlessness were there for the reading during my last year in the Cottage, little premonitions of departure that I tried to ignore. I had a significant break in front of me, anyway. Before moving from the Cottage to the House to start the four-year theology course that led to ordination, we all had to do two years of National Service, starting as soon as practicable after our eighteenth birthdays. Mine was in late November, so I was expected to complete a final Michaelmas term in the Cottage and head into the army after the Christmas vacation. My final year I’d been coasting. I’d already passed the School Certificate, so I was in a one-boy Sixth Form with no exams to face, but with lots of interesting reading to do.

  Things were in transition at home in the Vale as well. Admiral Mackenzie had died at the turn of the year and his estate was wound up. During the Easter vacation I had gone to Caldarvan not to work on the farm, but to help them get the contents of the house and estate ready for sale. On the day, the house was full of dealers as well as ordinary citizens chasing bargains, and I was surprised at how upset I was by their presence – not that I had spent much time in the house during the years I had worked for the Admiral. It was not a particularly grand house, but I had
always liked its comfortable elegance. History has largely abolished the minor gentry from the land and the delectable properties they cherished for centuries in our countryside; but only the coldest heart could be immune to the sadness of their passing. Though he had been kind to me, the Admiral’s people were not my people, and I had always felt intimidated by their accents and effortless assurance. Nevertheless, I recognised that a way of life that had carried important values was passing, and I was susceptible to the sorrow of endings.

  When I returned to Kelham after that Easter vacation, I wrote an essay on the sale of the estate for a new English tutor who had joined the Society, a priest who tried the life for a couple of years before joining the ranks of the leavers. We were both surprised by the essay. It turned out to be an act of mourning and a cry of protest at the passing of things. Though the Old Man had told us that nothing counted but lifetimes, I was starting to suspect that I would turn out to be one of life’s leavers, and I began to anticipate the sadness of partings. I had discovered the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. It was an unfortunate discovery on one level, because it prompted me to write reams of imitative poetry, heavy with alliteration and sodden with spirituality. That phase went. What endured was a debt to Hopkins for the way he prepared us for the passing of everything.

  Margaret, are you grieving

  Over Goldengrove unleaving?

  It is the blight man was born for,