by David Lodge
“I did my best to adapt. I took courses in Hawaiian culture, I even learned a bit of the language, but I soon got bored, bored and depressed. There’s so little left that’s authentic. The history of Hawaii is the history of loss.”
“Paradise lost?” I said.
“Paradise stolen. Paradise raped. Paradise infected. Paradise owned, developed, packaged, Paradise sold.
“So, anyway, I thought of going back to school to escape the boredom, finishing my doctorate, but you know, I felt too old, too much time had passed, I just couldn’t see myself becoming a student again, sucking up to professors, and there was nobody here in my field worth sucking up to anyway. I wanted a job. I wanted to earn some money of my own, not to be dependent on Lewis for everything. Maybe I had a premonition. One day I saw this ad for a part-time counsellor at the Center for Student Development at UH. I wasn’t really qualified, I had no clinical training, but they were quite impressed by my paper qualifications, and I could cite a lot of experience on the mainland with, like, self-help therapy workshops and T-groups, in the women’s movement, and anyway the University wasn’t paying much so they couldn’t be choosy. So I got the job, and learned it as I went along. I pity the poor kids I counselled in my first year, it was the blind leading the blind.”
I asked her what kind of problems she had to deal with.
“Oh, the usual ones: love, death, money. Pluse race – that’s more local. They say this is a multi-racial society, a melting-pot. Don’t you believe it. More coffee?”
I declined, and said that I would have to be going.
“Oh, but you can’t go yet!” she cried. “I’ve told you my life-story. Now it’s your turn.” She said it lightly, but she wasn’t entirely joking. And it was a fair point. It was precisely because I feared I might be expected to repay her fascinating disclosures in kind that I had made a move to leave. I smiled feebly, and said mine was a very boring story.
“Where do you live in England?” she said.
“A place called Rummidge, it’s a big industrial city in the middle of the country. Very grey, very dirty, mostly very ugly. It’s about as different from Hawaii as anywhere on the face of the earth.”
“Do you have fog there?”
“Not very often. But the light is always hazy in summer, thick and soupy in the winter.”
“I used to have a raincoat called London Fog. I bought it for the name, it sounded romantic. It made me think of Charles Dickens and Sherlock Holmes.”
“There’s nothing romantic about Rummidge.”
“I never wore it here. Even though it rains all the time, it’s always too hot to wear a raincoat, so I gave it to the Goodwill. Is Rummidge your home town?”
“No, no. I’ve only been there a couple of years. I teach theology at a non-denominational college.”
“Theology?” She gave me a look I was used to receiving: it expressed in rapid and overlapping succession, surprise, curiosity and anticipated boredom. “Are you a minister?”
“I was once,” I said. “But not any more.” I stood up to leave. “Thank you so much for inviting me. It’s been a most enjoyable evening, but I really must go. I have a lot to do tomorrow.”
“Sure,” she said, with a shrug and a smile. If she felt rebuffed, she didn’t show it. We shook hands on her front porch, and she sent her best wishes to Daddy, “if he can bear to hear from me.”
I drove rather recklessly back down the steep twisting road, tyres squealing and headlights richocheting off the roadsigns, venting my irritation with myself. I felt I had behaved clumsily and churlishly. I still feel that. I should have repaid her confidence. I should have told her the whole story. Something like this:
I was born and brought up in South London, one of four children in a family of second-generation Irish immigrants. Our parents were lower-middle-class, just a notch above working-class. My father was a despatch clerk in a road-haulage firm. My mother worked for many years as a school dinner-lady. It was their children who lifted them above their peers. We were all bright, academic kids, who passed public examinations with flying colours. We went to state-aided Catholic grammar schools or convent schools. My elder brother went to University, my sisters to Teachers’ Training Colleges. There was always a vague expectation in the family that I might become a priest. I was a rather pious boy – an altar-boy, a regular server at early-morning mass, a collector of indulgences and performer of novenas. I was also a bit of a swot. At the age of fifteen, I decided I had a vocation. I think, now, that it was a way of coping with the problems of adolescence. I was troubled by the things that were happening to my body, and the thoughts that were straying into my mind. I was very worried about sin, about how easily you could commit it, and what the consequences would be if you died in a state of it. That’s what Catholic education does for you – did for you in my day, anyway. Basically I was paralysed with fear of hell and ignorance of sex. There was the usual smutty talk in the playground and behind the bicycle sheds, but I was never included. It was as if the other boys sensed I was marked out for a celibate life, or perhaps they were afraid I would tell on them. Anyway, I couldn’t spontaneously break into the little huddles where dirty jokes and dirty magazines were sniggered over, and perhaps some knowledge was passed on amid the smut. I couldn’t talk to my parents: they never mentioned the subject of sex. I was too shy to ask my elder brother, and anyway he was away at University at the crucial time. I was astonishingly ignorant, and afraid. I suppose I thought that by committing myself to the priesthood, I would solve all my problems at a stroke: sex, education, career, and eternal salvation. As long as I fixed my aim on becoming a priest I couldn’t, as they say, “go wrong.” According to my lights, it was a perfectly logical decision.
On the advice of our parish priest, and of a Monsignor responsible for vocations in the diocese, I left school after taking my O-Levels, and went to a junior seminary, a kind of boarding-school attached to the seminary proper. The idea was to protect the young aspirant to the priesthood from dangerous secular influences and temptations, especially girls, and it worked pretty well. I went straight from the junior seminary to the senior seminary, and from the senior seminary to the English College in Rome – a reward for being top of my class in theology and philosophy. I was ordained in Rome, then sent to Oxford to do a doctorate in Divinity, living in a Jesuit house, working under a Jesuit supervisor, not having much to do with the life of the University at large. I was being groomed for an academic role in the Church, but normally I would have been sent to work as a curate in a parish for at least a few years after finishing my studies. It happened, however, that the distinguished theologian who had taught me at my old seminary suddenly upped and left in the wake of the row over Humanae Vitae, and shortly afterwards excommunicated himself by marrying a former nun, so there was a vacancy at St Ethelbert’s which they hastily plugged with me.
I was back where I had started, at Ethel’s (as we called our alma mater), and I stayed there for twelve years. Add those to my years of training and you will realize that I spent most of my adult life insulated from the realities and concerns of modern secular society. It was rather like the life of a mid-Victorian Oxford don: celibate, male-centred, high-minded, but not exactly ascetic. Most of my colleagues could order a decent wine, or discuss the merits of rival malt whiskys, when they got the chance. The building itself was a kind of imitation of an Oxbridge college, a dignified neo-Gothic edifice standing in a small park. Inside, the ambience was less impressive, halfway between a boarding-school and a hospital: tiled floors, gloss paint on the walls, lecture rooms named after the English martyrs, Aula More, Aula Fisher, etc. On Sunday mornings, the smell of roasting meat and boiling cabbage crept out of the kitchens and mingled in the corridors with the odour of incense from the college chapel.
Life was regular, ordered, repetitive. One rose early, did half an hour’s meditation, concelebrated mass in the chapel at eight, had breakfast (a meal the staff took separately from the students, and the
refore particularly relished) gave one’s lectures, seldom more than two a day, and met students individually for tutorials by arrangement. Lunch was a communal meal, and so was supper, but afternoon tea was served in the staff common-room. On reflection, we ate rather excessively, though the food was stodgy and unexciting. Afternoons were generally free. You could walk in the park, or catch up on your marking, or work on an article for a theogical journal. After supper we usually congregated in the staff common-room, and watched television, or retired to our rooms to read. (My colleagues favoured detective stories or biographies for recreational reading, but I indulged a taste for poetry that I had acquired from A-Level English. I often think I might have taught English in a Catholic secondary school if I hadn’t become a priest.) When somebody important, like the bishop, visited, we had drinks. Occasionally we treated ourselves to a discreet blowout at a local restaurant. It was a civilized, dignified, not unsatisfying existence. Students looked up to you. There was, after all, nowhere else for them to look. We were masters of our tiny, artificial kingdom.
Of course, we couldn’t entirely ignore the fact that vocations were declining, students dropping out more and more frequently, and ordained priests leaving the priesthood or the Church in ever-increasing numbers. When it was someone you knew personally, someone you had been trained with, or taught by, or whose work you had read and admired, it was always a shock. It was as if in the middle of a party, or an animated meeting, with everybody talking at the tops of their voices, the door suddenly slammed, and the gathering fell silent, and everybody turned to look at the door, and realized that one of their number had left the room and would not be returning. But after a little while, the conversational roar would resume, as if nothing had happened. Most of the defectors seemed to get married sooner or later, with or without the benefit of laicization, and those of us who remained attributed their departure to problems about sex. It was easier to blame sex than to think about the credibility of what we were teaching.
As our numbers dwindled, those of us who remained had to stretch ourselves further and further across the range of theological disciplines. I found myself having to teach biblical exegesis and ecclesiastical history, in neither of which I was properly qualified, as well as dogmatic theology, which was supposed to be my speciality. In the training I had received there was something called apologetics, which consisted in a tenacious defence of every article of Catholic orthodoxy against the criticism or rival claims of other churches, religions and philosophies, employing every available device of rhetoric, argument, and biblical citation. In the climate generated by the Second Vatican Council a more tolerant and ecumenical style of teaching developed, but Catholic seminaries in England – St Ethelbert’s anyway – remained theologically conservative. We were not encouraged by our episcopal masters to disturb the faith of the ever-dwindling number of recruits to the priesthood by exposing them to the full, cold blast of modern radical theology. The Anglicans were making all the running in that direction, and we derived a certain Schadenfreude from contemplating the rows and threatened schisms in the Church of England provoked by bishops and priests who denied the doctrine of the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, and even the divinity of Christ. I had a little joke which I used to make each year in my Introduction to Theology lectures, about the demythologizers having thrown the infant Jesus out with the bathwater, which always drew a resounding laugh. And there was a story about an Anglican vicar who had called his three daughters Faith, Hope and Doris, having read Tillich in between numbers two and three, that kept the staff room in fits for a week. Come to think of it, my abiding memory of Ethel’s is of overhearty laughter, in the lecture-rooms, in the common-rooms and the refectory. Honking guffaws, heaving shoulders, grinning teeth. Why do clerics laugh so much at the simplest jokes? To keep their spirits up? Like whistling in the dark?
Anyway, we played the theological game with a straight bat. We stonewalled against the difficult questions, or watched them fly past without offering a stroke. The easy ones we whacked to the boundary. And we were never out lbw, because we also acted as umpires. (I would have had to explain this metaphor to Yolande, of course.)
You don’t have to go very deep into the philosophy of religion to discover that it is impossible either to prove or to disprove the truth of any religious proposition. For rationalists, materialists, logical positivists, etc., that is a sufficient reason for dismissing the entire subject from serious consideration. But to believers a non-disprovable God is almost as good as a provable God, and self-evidently better than no God at all, since without God there is no encouraging answer to the perennial problems of evil, misfortune, and death. The circularity of theological discourse, which uses revelation to apprehend a God for whose existence there is no evidence outside revelation (pace Aquinas), does not trouble the believer, for belief itself is outside the theological game, it is the arena in which the theological game is played. It is a gift, the gift of faith, something you acquire or have thrust upon you, through baptism or on the road to Damascus. Whitehead said that God is not the great exception to all metaphysical principles to save them from collapse, but unfortunately, from a philosophical point of view, that is exactly what He is, and Whitehead never found a convincing argument to the contrary.
So everything depends upon belief. Grant the existence of a personal God, the Father, and the whole body of Catholic doctrine hangs together reasonably well. Grant that, and you can bat all day. Grant that, and you can afford to have a few mental reservations about the odd doctrine – the existence of Hell, say, or the Assumption of the Virgin Mary – without feeling insecure in your faith. And that was what I did, precisely – I took my belief for granted. I didn’t seriously question it, or closely examine it. It defined me. It explained why I was who I was, doing what I did, teaching theology to seminarians. I didn’t discover that my belief had gone until I left the seminary.
Stated so baldly, that sounds incredible. After all, I had what we called a “prayer life”, of sorts. In fact, I was rather more conscientious than most of my colleagues in doing the statutory half-hour’s meditation first thing in the morning. Whom did I think I was praying to? I can’t answer that question, except by saying that prayer was part of the taken-for-grantedness of my faith, connected by an unbroken continuum to the simple acceptance of religious ideas that began when my mother first pressed the palms and fingers of my infant hands together at bedtime, and taught me the “Hail Mary”. Undoubtedly it had something to do with my exclusively academic career within the Church. Lévi-Strauss says somewhere that “the student who chooses the teaching profession does not bid farewell to the world of childhood: on the contrary he is trying to remain within it.”
In the early 1980s, there was a rationalization of Catholic ecclesiastical education in England and Wales, as a result of which Ethel’s was closed down. Some of the staff were re-deployed to other academic institutions. But my bishop called me in for a chat and suggested that I might find it useful to get some experience of pastoral work for a while. I think the word must have got through to him that I was a rather uninspired and uninspiring teacher, unable to motivate the students for the ministry for which they were preparing. Well, it was true, though the syllabus was partly to blame. Because of the chance circumstance that had propelled me straight from the status of student to that of teacher, I knew little or nothing about the day-to-day life of an ordinary secular priest. I was like a staff officer who had never seen combat, sending young recruits out to fight a modern war with weapons and tactics handed down from the Middle Ages.
The bishop sent me to St Peter and Paul’s, at Saddle. It’s one of those rather amorphous places about twenty miles north-east of London, a village that has swollen to the size of a small town since the War. It has a working-class council estate and a middle-class executive estate and a light industrial estate and some horticulture, but most of the working population commute daily to London. There is an Anglican parish church with an Early English tower, a
redbrick neo-Gothic Methodist chapel, and a flimsy-looking Catholic church built out of breeze-block and coloured glass in reach-me-down Modern style. My parishioners were a typical cross-section of the English Catholic community: mostly second- or third-generation Irish, with pockets of more recent Italian immigrants, imported after the war to work in the horticultural nurseries, and a sprinkling of converts and pukka Old Catholics who could trace their ancestry back to the Penal Days.