I phoned. He answered. We spoke for just seconds and made an appointment for the following evening. Instantly I began to tremble in anticipation and I wondered how I would manage to wait for twenty-four hours. It became the whole focus of my mind, When he opened his door I saw that he was quite handsome and I was nervous as I undressed down to my underpants and lay down on my stomach on the bed. It was all fairly innocent and he was not especially competent. He remained dressed in baggy sweatpants and a hoodie throughout and eventually asked if I’d like to remove my underwear. I did so as he turned me over and then the massage turned more sensual as he touched my genitals and the kneading strokes became longer and more teasing. It didn’t take much for me to have an orgasm and he reached for a conveniently nearby roll of toilet paper to clean me up.
It would be hard to call it having sex as his involvement was so completely detached, without the slightest hint that he might have been interested or excited. He might just as well have been wiping a saucepan clean in the sink as removing semen from my stomach. His jerking me off was more like milking a cow than making love: an udder was full, it needed someone to empty it. My physical relief was palpable but inside I felt empty and downcast. He had performed a service for me but it felt like I was the one being used, tossed into the toilet bowl like the soggy tissue paper he was holding in his hands.
It was a few weeks before I decided to try another one. This guy was much more skilful and when I began to get aroused he offered some extra services for extra cash. As he took off his clothes and then lay on top of me I could tell that my initial curiosity could easily turn into an addiction. Nothing had ever excited me like this. Everything else in my life seemed drab in comparison. Soon it became a routine: a visit to see my declining mother, then intimacy in a bedsit with a young man. ‘Do you offer any extra services?’ I would ask, with increasing boldness. Eventually I only used websites where extra was not extra. I always carried a condom in my trousers. Left pocket. Next to my rosary.
21 My late mother
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Alzheimer’s got her early. Mother drooling in the armchair at the nursing home, always mumbling. Fidgeting and mumbling. The transition from a sharp mind to a shattered memory was quick and cruel. For her. For me.
Mumbling then a screech, a demented canary’s cry. She was as thin as a canary by this point. Her features had sharpened, her cheeks sunken, her nose a blade-beak between vacant, hollow eyes. She would gape passively past everything with plasticine eyes and then suddenly a wild stare would spring out of her head, and a cackle — a jack-in-the-box of fearsome, malevolent energy.
The fire in the kitchen (she had been making cheese on toast) was the final straw, when I realized that she could no longer live on her own, that she needed to be taken care of in a specialized environment. It was a terrible day when I drove her to the nursing home. I told her it was just for a couple of weeks, like a holiday; a small hotel in the country, I said. I think both of us knew that the other knew that the other knew... but she didn’t kick up a fuss. We drove up to the front and I took out her little tartan suitcase from the boot.
Had she not been pregnant with me when my father died I think she would have become a nun in the aftermath of that tragedy. Now, in her own declining years, she was to live in a home run by nuns. Perhaps she could make-believe she was finally a member of a religious order. She seemed to improve in her first months there, she was more relaxed and, ironically, less religiously obsessed. A steep change from my earlier memories of her when everything was surrounded with prayers — note, I don’t say prayer. The piling up of ejaculations (yes, that’s what they were called in more innocent times), short phrases spoken under the breath: ‘Jesus mercy, Mary help’, ‘Into your hands I commend my spirit’, ‘Oh Sacred Heart, I trust in thee’. A simple, unregulated way to pray until the Church added indulgences to the practice and anxious souls like my mother found themselves tallying up the numbers. If simply saying ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph’ gained an indulgence of a hundred days applicable to the Holy Souls in Purgatory then saying it five times... well, you get my drift. It was impossible not to become entangled in a web of scrupulosity, and I don’t think there was a minute in the day when she was not filling her spiritual basket with such trinkets.
But when she entered the nursing home a lot of this began to melt away. The nuns grew to love her and she found a peace of soul I don’t think she’d ever had before. Then eventually the inevitable happened. She ceased to tread the water of mere memory loss and began to sink underneath the waters of dementia, her personality floating away, drifting out to sea. I visited three or four times a week and would sit with her for hours just holding her hand, helpless, waiting for a smile of recognition, something I could hold on to. Then one morning I got a call from one of the nuns to tell me that she was unconscious. I couldn’t help wonder what she meant by ‘unconscious’. Had my mother not been so for the best part of a year now, unaware of people, events, herself? I knew this might be the end so I rushed over to give her the Last Rites.
I looked down at that heap of bones and it filled me with horror. We’d been too claustrophobically close throughout my life for us to have any healthy love for each other, but now a new horror surfaced. I was terrified at the sheer joy I was feeling. I was actually bubbling over with jubilation at the impending freedom, not hers but mine. I had done everything in my life for her approval and I almost certainly became a priest to receive her final, supreme endorsement. I write this now with bitterness. Not so much because I became a priest but because I allowed such blackmail to shape my life. And my resentment at her years of control over me meant that I couldn’t be the sort of support for her at the end of her life that I should have been. She represented oppression for me. Everything had had conditions and had been done under a kind of moral duress. I looked at this dying woman hoping (God forgive me!) that she wouldn’t recover.
I anointed her and sat staring at her vacant face. A helpless baby in a nursery, a helpless woman in a nursing home. Life’s mad circle. A beginning and an end in slobber and slime, and, in between, the noontide slobber and slime of food and soap and snot and sex. Life’s span a trash can into which leftovers are scraped. She died the next day, and after her funeral I put her few possessions — some books and photos and clothes and the tartan suitcase — into two black bin bags. Now all that is left are these words, these bitter memories... until my own powers fail.
22 Infantilism
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There were times during the years my mother was in the nursing home when I felt as if I never spoke to an adult. With her it was all baby talk and nonsense, then in the schools I visited: ‘Good morning, boys and girls.’ ‘Good morning, Father.’ And in church the daily Mass: ‘The Lord be with you — And also with you — And also with you — And also with you.’ The liturgy’s ping-pong greeting. Then the sermons I preach every Sunday but which I don’t believe. ‘God is telling us that...’ No, he isn’t! ‘God cares about every one of you ...’ No, he doesn’t! Endless childish excuses and fairy tales. Futile babble. Only in an escort’s bedroom do I feel grown up and alive, apron strings finally slashed loose, the straw of blather burnt away by the fire of body’s blush and follicles’ rising. ‘Adults Only’ on my computer screen takes on a whole new meaning in my kindergarten life.
Yet adults? Grown-ups? We who are mere ants crawling on a planet the size of an ant’s toenail. Our clever thoughts, our fragile emotions a mere nose-hair of importance in the Milky Way. ‘And also with you... and also with you’, the naivety of the exchange. Yet isn’t it that basic human connection which I seek every time I get into my car and drive to a rent boy’s bedsit? And also with you, next to you, inside you. My ‘maturity’ drives me to solitude but it is the children, the young at heart, who are having all the fun. They are having a huge party to which I refuse the invitation, And whilst they shriek with delight I sit alone in silence, time sucked away, body dried up, libido a
n increasingly irrelevant page fading and crumbling with each turn.
23 Loneliness
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I feel terribly lonely a lot of the time but I’m ashamed and embarrassed to admit it. It suggests that no one wants to spend time with me, that I am a social failure. People talk about the loneliness of a priest, as if those who are not married are necessarily lonely. Sex has little to do with it, companionship more, but the worst is the sudden change from full church to empty house. That hurts the most. Closing the main doors after the Sunday evening Mass and watching families pile into cars. Locking those big doors, those silly, heavy, medieval doors with their giant latch like something out of Alice in Wonderland. Then tidying up. The hymn books, the Mass sheets, the newsletters, candles, cruets, linens, chalices, patens... liturgy’s theatre, its doll’s house, its playpen, its sandpit. And then the switching off of lights. If I had one big master switch it would be less sad, but there are six small brown buttons at Sacred Heart, each one blinking out a set of lights, six ghostly antiphonal choirs reduced to silence.
I have an address book. I have twenty, twenty-five people I could always phone and invite over for dinner if I wanted to. Some kind parishioners, some kind priests. But religion. We’d talk about religion and the liturgy and the parish pilgrimage to Walsingham and the Day of Prayer for Vocations and the youth group and the readers’ rota. Then this time of the year there’s the Nativity play. The incessant fuss about costumes and who will play Joseph or the Three Wise Men. ‘Do you remember when Lucy was the Virgin Mary and she knocked over the cow? Her face was a picture!’ ‘Have you ordered the Christmas tree? Best to get it early, just in case.’ ‘I think the fairy lights from last year have broken. We should get a new set. Morrisons have a special offer this weekend if you spend more than £20.’ ‘Another coffee?’ ‘Oh no, we really must be going. It’s getting late.’ A quick look at their watches with fake surprise. ‘Goodness, how time flies.’
On other evenings there are official visitors like the engaged couples who come for marriage preparation. I’m in my study. The doorbell rings. I answer it. It’s John and Mary. ‘Hello, welcome. Come in. Would you like a coffee?’ Love in their eyes. She’s keen. He’s a little embarrassed. Not thought much about religion. Shifts in his chair. Looks at the bookshelf. Children. Patience. Humour. Sacrament. Forgiveness. Tolerance. Condoms? No. Pills? No. Try natural methods. Billings. Ovulation. They smile at each other. I smile at them. Energy as he stands up. Sexy. He can’t wait to leave. Out the door. Goodbye. See you next week. Engine starts. Car revs. They drive off. I close the door and suddenly feel desperately sad.
It’s not so much that I want to be in their place, although such youthfulness and naturalness are cruelly attractive in my state of bitterness. No, I feel sad because it was a wasted opportunity. I wanted to help them in some way, to help them to see more clearly that marriage is a sacrament where they can meet Christ in every act of their nuptial life, in the bedroom of course but also in the kitchen and on holiday, in sickness and in health, Christ blessing them in the ordinary things over the ordinary years. My heart wells up as I sit there after they leave. The priest should be a channel of grace, a conduit flowing with blessings, a light sensor in every room. But I stiffen when faced with situations of flesh and blood. My heart closes with a reflex. I become a hardback book, riddled with theories as if with worms, a whole bookcase of hardback books, brittle and musty. I take the dirty coffee cups into the cold kitchen and rinse them under the cold tap, the squirt of detergent (too much) a translucent green gob on top of the brown stains.
But there is Christopher, my old friend from school, and his three lovely kids. I do enjoy going over to their house. He and Ann are gracious and fun. But still I feel I can’t be myself, even there. I can’t unbutton the black shirt under which weep incurable, unmentionable wounds. My religious autopilot works but I long to find that ease, that openness on which friendship thrives. Should I wait for people to reach out to me or do I need to reach out to them first? What does it mean to have a friend? Why does one person want to spend time with another? Do I have enough funny stories to keep the conversation afloat? Did I already tell that joke last time? They’re laughing. Is it still amusing or are they just being polite? Am I speaking too much? Am I speaking too little?
One way I avoid thinking about my loneliness is to visit the sick in hospital. I go three times a week. It gets around.
My parishioners are impressed. But I don’t go there to put on a show, rather to fill the isolated hours, to do something, to cover up something. To bargain with God. A wager, that’s it! To stack some chips on the mottled green felt, to pile them high enough so they hide me as I slump against the table, to push a few of them on to the fading squares as the croupier watches and waits: red or black, odd or even, safer bets even if God’s zero is always weighed in his favour. The wheel spins. The small white ball spits in the bouncing grooves. I walk away. I don’t care. The chips come and go and win and lose. They’re all scooped up when switched-on lights fake the dawn.
24 Gay priests
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I have abused my vow of celibacy with a certain recklessness. I’m not proud of it but I’m tired and battered and I haven’t the energy to be ashamed. Yes, I’ve mined deep in the pit of sexual gratification, in recent years as often and as greedily as I could — fingers pressed to the bottom of the mud pool. But I’m not alone amongst priests. Many of my brethren ‘indulge’ a little. Some, once a year, take off for a fortnight in Ibiza or to a Greek island and lose their hearts to a Juan or a Nikos, amnesia under the sun or in the cool of the cheap hotel, forgiveness safely awaiting them in the Confessional before their budget flight home. It is enough. A fervent spurt from the tap then a new rubber seal until the following season; a deciduous relief; Easter’s yearly rising to new life; the fat candle extinguished but a book of matches waiting safely in the drawer.
And then there are those priests, seemingly pure, whose minds reek of the stale perfume of boy-obsession. The altar server’s floppy blond hair falling over his grubby surplice, his voice breaking, spots appearing, the down on lip and chin and cheek, the shirt hanging loose outside the roughed-up trousers, a faint smell of sweat and the mist of acrid breath: the beautiful need not bathe; those with a heavenly smile have no need of toothpaste. Never a finger laid, no touching, never a brush with flesh, but eyes... devouring deep-down. As if embracing into form the adolescent’s body with a sculptor’s virtual hands, or as a potter’s slop and spin caresses the slippery clay into a sphere. A longing gaze, or more often a surreptitious glance, roaming up and down, and there’s the flash of stomach, oh look away, then look back and up to the face and the lips (let me kiss away that speck of spittle) and then a peek inside the smooth curve of the neckline where three moles lead down towards the ridge of the spine and... stop!
These priests would have those books on their coffee tables, Housman or Firbank, a biography of Oscar Wilde or Bosie (‘both became Catholics, you know’) or the other sodomite converts, Brideshead’s slim-chested band of brothers. A taste for classical music too, and opera, always opera. Piles of CDs, the open mouths of Maria, Joan, Cecilia, Renée in tottering stacks of plastic cases, costumed from Meyerbeer to Puccini. Admittance to actual performances was expensive but friendships (nodding, winking) with cultured parishioners would often procure one free ticket. But even without the comps, for the price of my wank in Wythenshawe Father X could be sitting in ecstasy on a crimson velvet seat, perched up in the gods at the opera house, programme book crinkled with perspiring palms, just waiting, waiting for that high C to hit his diva G-spot.
25 Saved
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Believe! What? How?
Evangelicals talk about it with ease and with a flourish: a one-off decision to accept Christ as your ‘personal saviour’ (6:o6 pm on the 14th of September 1980) is a ticket without an expiration date to the banquet which never ends. You don’t eve
n have to hold on to the warranty because it’s kept safe on Heaven’s central database — although the niggling question always remains: did I really make the choice? Was the form filled out correctly? For strict Calvinists it’s even simpler. The moment the father’s sperm and the mother’s ovum unite and a human being is created it is predestined to eternal life... or not.
Catholics have a saner and more scriptural understanding of such soteriological matters. Every individual has a choice which remains active up to the moment of death. The only problem is that this choice can be negative as well as positive — and what are we choosing anyway? We can merely choose to avoid mortal sin, but is that enough? What about sins of omission? They’re literally limitless.
Monsignor Ronald Knox and Sir Arnold Lunn published a book-length discussion which included the hypothetical case of a man who died in an accident one Sunday when deliberately choosing a game of golf over Mass, which would be a mortal sin. Did he go straight to Hell? Knox, a good man, wriggled around the plain teaching as best he could and his apologetic squirming on the page suggested that he would have substituted himself for the golfer rather than allow the teaching to take effect — truly a Christ-like response. But to undo the curse of eternal damnation was surely the whole point of Christ’s coming to earth in the first place. If we are merely left with some obscure instructions for the lottery by which we might be able to avoid the curse, what is the good of that? Only the cancellation of the curse is Good News.
The Final Retreat Page 6