Aelred's Sin

by Lawrence Scott

  That others loved God and were loved by him did not make one jealous. On the contrary, one rejoiced at this bounteous gift of an all giving lover.

  ‘You let him touch you, kiss you? You kiss and touch him in ways, particularly in ways, we have made such an effort to refrain from, to abstain from for our ideals of chastity, that dangerous chastity, which did not allow us to go beyond the stolen kiss of a light touch of the lips, a holding of the hands, the seduction of the eyes?’ Benedict thirsted with unquenchable jealousy. He could not get enough of jealousy to drink.

  Benedict could not look at Aelred without wanting to tear out his eyes.

  That Aelred had let all this happen so suddenly with another, and that he, Benedict, was in part an instrument in creating their meeting and initiating their confessions of openness wrung out of the usually composed Benedict a hate and disgust. ‘I should’ve seen it all more plainly. I knew something was on fire here. I should’ve put it out.’ It made him want to fling this boy, for he thought of him as a boy again, from his hands, off his chest, to tear his fingers from his face, to lift him bodily with a strength he never thought he possessed, and throw him out of the library, out of Ashton Park, so that he would never see him again. He never again wished to have his peace and his ideals disturbed and destroyed in this way. ‘Don’t touch me.’ Then immediately he regretted that rebuff and let the boy cling again to him.

  Eventually, all that he could say to Aelred were the repeated questions: ‘How could you say all that you have said? How could you betray us? How could you betray me? How could you do all you’ve done, how? Done with another? And how could you sin so? Touch, kiss, touch.’ Benedict saw all his effort crumbling. Still he held him and let the boy hold on to him.

  His journey to Ashton Park, which he had never fully told to Aelred, came back with a frightening clarity. It was as if Aelred had lit a huge fire in the middle of the cloister and it was slowly burning its way through all the secrets of the souls which struggled with the meaning of love in their secluded lives.

  Benedict had once loved a girl called Claire, and they had been engaged and planned to marry in a year or two when they could afford it. It was as simple as that, and as usual as that, as many young couples at the time. That was how love was. They would go for walks on the downs. In the early evening when it had grown dark, they would go for a drink in the pub. They held hands and they kissed and they petted each other, as the parish priest called it, advising against heavy petting. They talked of wanting children when they were married. He used to read her poetry. When he was away teaching, they exchanged love letters, saying more in their written words than when they spoke to each other. And then the letters stopped. Her letters stopped. She stopped replying without any reason, without a final letter. He learnt later from a friend who lived near her that she had eloped with a divorced man and had eventually married him.

  All his desire, all his love, all his hope for a life with Claire had become a room with a small corner of pain which he did not let anyone into. He did not allow anyone into that small room of pain.

  Then he had come on a retreat to Ashton Park. Suddenly, he felt that he had a vocation to join the monks. He felt that he could embark upon a future and a present without a past, without that past of pain. Slowly, he felt that he had almost forgotten what it was like to live in that small room, and for years he had not opened that door.

  When Aelred entered the monastery, a door was opened into that room of pain, and he found himself thinking of the young novice as he had thought of Claire. His youth and his androgynous looks allowed him to imagine Claire and have fantasies he had not allowed himself. These were the fantasies which drew him to Aelred at that first feast-day celebration, had stopped him on the staircase to look at his legs and lifted his habit in the Lady Chapel to feel his warm body and to confess to him his love. Suddenly, the room of pain was opened up and here was a second chance for human love. He thought they had managed it, so that they could have that human love and still manage their ideal of chastity, that dangerous chastity, as they liked to call it.

  But now the supreme trick of love had been played upon him, because he had rationalised his desire, his illicit desire, as the unfulfilled desire which had been denied him with Claire. At first it had been that, but then this boy, this young man, this androgynous creature, had opened in him feelings he never knew existed, so that he wanted him precisely because he was a young man. He loved him as a young man, not as a woman, not as Claire, but as Aelred, his bonnie lad.

  This was to enter a forbidden place. It was forbidden to think of himself in this way and forbidden for them to be that way together. Then he had found Aelred of Rievaulx’s works, which he passed on to Aelred. These texts would help them find a way.

  But now Aelred had broken all the boundaries and agreements and traditions, and was actually saying aloud to his novice master, to the young Edward and to himself, that he had a choice. He was making a choice to love Edward spiritually and physically. He was saying this. There was no mistake. But the madness of it was destroying him because it was breaking a mould which had been offered as if there were no other. He was saying that there was not just one, there was another mould, another way, without as yet knowing what it was, what shape it could have, what name.

  ‘How could you endanger so much?’ Benedict said angrily.

  ‘If you don’t understand me, I’m left all alone. Don’t push me away. Hold me, hold me,’ Aelred cried. These beseeching cries and kisses on Benedict’s neck slowly untied the hate and disgust which wrung his heart, and he found in himself the capacity, slowly but unmistakably, to love this boy for himself, unconditionally. He would not banish him from understanding and hope, but he would not betray his vows.

  This was the act for which Aelred would always remember Benedict.

  ‘You will have to take responsibility for the truth which you speak with such conviction at present,’ Benedict said, wiping the stains of tears from Aelred’s cheeks. ‘Remember your responsibility when you speak to the Abbot. You have already been rash with what you’ve said to Father Justin. Now is not the time for us to sort all this through. I understand your feelings for Edward. I understand his for you. Have I not myself wanted all this? Have I not wanted you in this way? I will pray for you to come through, to regain the aim of your ideal, the demands of our vocation. Pray that you can deepen these desires.’

  Aelred saw the Abbot that afternoon. Father Justin brought him a message that the Abbot would see him after None.

  Aelred felt that the effects of the tranquilliser were wearing off. The artificial suppressor of his anger dwindled in the hot afternoon, which rumbled with thunder and sudden flashes of lightning. He could feel that anger which he had discovered while waiting for his interview with Father Justin that morning rising again. It was taking hold of him, so that he wanted to tear apart the institutions, rearrange the past which held the untruth. He was so quickly realising so much that he was frightened by the extent of the ruins and how he was to rebuild himself. He felt that his self was running out of his hands like some river he could not stop. Where would the reservoir be? Where could he regain himself?

  He was not well enough to go to choir and he sat in the window seat of his cell, hoping the rain would break. Then he went and stood at the window of the common room, and looked out on to the fields and saw the monks beginning to go out to the afternoon’s work.

  The Abbot was to see him at two thirty. Edward passed him on his way to work. He came and stood close to him. At first he said nothing. Then he spoke gently. ‘For us, don’t ruin it for us.’ Aelred felt removed. He had taken a strength from Benedict which contact with Edward could make weak again.

  ‘No. And remember you have your meeting with Basil. Listen to him. He will tell you that this is a gift. This love is a gift. But it is also a fire. He will tell you that the rewards are sweet.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Go now. I need to be on my own, get my thoughts toge
ther.’ They held hands. Then Edward left the common room.

  He was now alone on his own mission. He was determined to hold on to everything. He wanted his love for Benedict, his love for Edward and this life he had given up so much for. He knew no other life, had never imagined anything any different since Ted and he had been so forcibly torn apart. How would all that be possible?

  Aelred let the heavy door knocker fall against the dark oak door and wished it were Aelred of Rievaulx he was entering to see. He heard the Abbot’s ‘Ave.’ He found himself at the end of the long room with the Abbot rising at his desk at the other end; behind him the life-size crucifix hung the length of the wall.

  ‘Come in, brother.’ Aelred walked to the desk and stood next to the leather upholstered chair opposite the Abbot. ‘Sit, brother.’

  This man was his father, his spiritual director, Christ on earth, God’s representative. It all seemed too much for Aelred to obey, and too much for this small man to carry, dwarfed by the crucified Jesus behind him.

  A hagiographic portrait of St Benedict hung above the fireplace to the right of Aelred. St Benedict was kneeling in the cave of Subiaco and the devil as an imp prodded his ankle with a tridon.

  Aelred tried to smile. This was his second main meeting. He had left frustrated after the last. The spiritual direction of the novices was left to the novice master. The Abbot was remote from the novices, closer to the senior monks. He was a figure of authority to the novices or, when he visited them at Sunday tea, a beneficent or daunting presence. It should not be like this, Aelred remembered thinking last time.

  ‘Father Justin says there’s been a problem.’ The Abbot spoke, tugging on his abbatial cross as usual, which hung from a gold chain about his neck.

  ‘No,’ Aelred said. He did not want this to be the starting point. He did not wish to allow the Abbot the pretence that they didn’t know exactly what had occurred. Why not start right in at the centre of the fire?

  ‘It’s a question of love, father.’ Aelred realised it was a spirit that had entered him that morning which spoke, but he could feel in himself the language of Benedict. He could feel the clarity of his mentor. He would take responsibility for this - though he also felt that what Benedict meant by responsibility was caution.

  ‘Indeed, brother. This is the symbol of that love which has saved us, and an example of that love which we must live: the love which Christ had, by which he died so that our sins might be forgiven and we might enter the kingdom of heaven.’ The Abbot turned to point to the life-size crucifix behind him - as if it needed any more of an introduction than the one it gave itself with its overpowering presence, Aelred thought irreverently, already impatient with the Abbot’s sermonising before he had even begun.

  Aelred looked at the crucifix, then again at the Abbot. ‘It’s the love of mothers and fathers, the love of brothers and sisters, the love of friends, the love that exists between us as brothers.’ He felt he was giving a sermon himself and that he should stop and let the Abbot continue his sermon. ‘It’s the love of home and country. All these loves which I have had to give up, deny myself, or so it seemed. Now I find that I want to claim them all back. I want all that human love and I also want my life here, and yes, that is a problem if you say so.’ He found that he could add that bit about the problem and not seem impertinent to the Abbot.

  He wished the Abbot did not remind him of his father. He remembered the rows he used to have with his father, about nothing, just about the strengths of their wills. That in itself made him want to resist his authority.

  ‘You have been asked to leave mother and father, brother and sister, and land, and come follow me: that is the call of Jesus to those who would be perfect.’

  Aelred did love the word ‘perfect’. The life of perfection fired him; the Little Flower, St Thérèse of Lisieux, doing each small act perfectly. He wished to be perfect. He wished to be an angel, as he used to say, of whom the monks at school reminded him. He still wanted perfection.

  ‘Carnal love has no place in our life, brother.’ The Abbot and his novice looked at each other. Aelred didn’t like the word carnal. It meant meat. It meant dog, because dog was canis and it sounded the same. He remembered seeing two dogs on the promenade near his primary school stuck together. It made him sick to look at, but it also fascinated him, and he found he got excited sexually. Carnal. The Abbot was referring to Father Justin’s rightly held suspicions, the ones he hadn’t wanted to voice to Edward, giving them the authority and reality, the meaning words confer on things. Aelred still saw the dogs backing, a word used on Les Deux Isles, one humped on the other. The Abbot was speaking about rooting out carnal lust.

  Then he heard the word buller, which was used on Les Deux Isles for what men did with each other. It was wrong to be a buller man. Carnal meant dogs and bulls, what he saw the cows doing in the fields, backing, bulling each other. Then he saw Edward, his white smooth body lying on the hay. He stroked his arms and legs in his imagination and entered his body, backing him, bulling him. That’s what they called it. But he was not an animal. This was pure. And, anyway, what animals did was good. It felt good. They had said that to each other, lying in each other’s arms, their kisses wet on their lips and cheeks. It was good. Edward entered him. That was good.

  ‘God made this love and he saw it was good,’ Aelred said to the Abbot, mimicking Genesis. He felt like being provocative and saying, ‘And on the eighth day God made the love which men have for each other and he said this is good and he saw that it was good.’ But what he had said was provocative enough.

  The Abbot cut immediately to the quick of this exchange and said, ‘Brother, I will have to ask you to leave Ashton Park. What you are advocating is wrong on all counts within and without the monastery, and I cannot afford the scandal you will create among the innocent and impressionistic young novices.’

  Aelred suddenly felt a wild thought tear at his heart, and he stood up over the Abbot. Facing the life-size crucifix, he said, ‘You can’t make that decision. This is my decision, my vocation, my call from God to be here, to enter here, and no one comes between me and God.’ Then he sat down trembling, hardly knowing or hearing what he had said.

  The Abbot rose and then sat again and composed himself, putting his arms beneath his scapular. ‘I want you to go to your cell, brother, and quieten yourself, and return to see me tomorrow.’ He showed the novice to the door.

  Aelred left the Abbot’s room, desperate for the open air. When he entered the cloister, he felt the first signs that the skies were going to open, and the rain, which had been threatening for days, was going to fall at last. And just as suddenly as he thought that, he saw the fine drizzle making the walls of stone grey. There was a wild clap of thunder and then lightning and more thunder, and he thought of rain back home, drenching rain which made the hot pitch steam and smell of tar. Heavy drops of rain began to come down slowly, and then faster and thicker, until it was crashing around the abbey and splattering the floor of the cloister where it was open to the enclosed garden at the centre.

  Aelred walked into the rain, putting on his hood, and went through the gate at the end of the path that lead down to the drive with the poplars, leading to the open fields. He was running now, running, hooded, and wildly pulling up his habit above his knees so as not to trip and fall. He reached the fields where the large horse chestnuts and copper beeches grew. They gave him some shelter and he stood near the trunk of a copper beech, looking up into its branches black with the rain - more and more branches spreading black and no longer the red-purple they had been in late summer.

  There was no shelter from this rain. It crashed through the black branches and drenched him where he stood hooded, his habit getting more and more soaked. He heard nothing and saw nothing but the black rain crashing around him. Then there was more lightning, and Ashton Park, the Ashton Park he knew, was transformed. The electric sky lit up the fields with wild gashes of light. The thunder rumbled, and he thought of the Abbot pullin
g his heavy chair across the floor of his room. The sky seemed to want to rip itself open and give him a revelation. The woods, the interior of the woods, were suddenly shown to him, opening up hallucinated groves. Aelred made himself the trunk of the tree and, standing there, he thought of the real danger he was in of being killed by a stroke of lightning, of a tree falling on him. He left his black shelter for the open fields and the drenching rain.

  The storm seemed to be moving away from directly over Ashton Park, and Aelred could behold the wonder of a new creation over the valleys like a gigantic son et lumière specially put on for him alone: a private revelation, a storm, a flood. The oppression of the last few days drained out of him with the falling rain, loud in his ears like the rain of his childhood drumming on the galvanised roofs.

  As the thunder and lightning moved away into the distance, opening up horizons he could hardly imagine, horizons with new mountains and valleys and open flat plains, he became exhilarated by his visions. His anger turned to elation as he raised his face to the sky, which had cleared and was now a luminous blue as evening came early, the sun banished by the storm.

  The rain continued to fall as a fine drizzle as he strode through the long grass of the fields. He was now some distance from the abbey. His instinct still instructed him to avoid trees, the copse on the knoll, the spinney near the pond. He came to a field, where the grass was like a lawn, wet and newly cut. He realised it was the field where he had been yesterday during haymaking. He sat on the ground in the rain and looked back at the abbey rising out of the valley. Against the hill, on top of which were the graves, the stone abbey stood out in relief. A trick of light made the hill part of the encroaching darkness and allowed the abbey to stand out, pricked with orange lights coming on in the windows, glowing like embers.