From London to Dublin
I was awoken by strange sounds and shuffles from the kitchen, which I discovered was directly beneath my bedroom. I vaguely remembered hearing someone turning on a tap and filling a kettle full of water. I glanced at my watch. It was almost a quarter to eight. So what? I thought, as I turned over, and drifted back into semi-slumberland. Some time later I was half conscious of the kitchen door opening. Someone was taking the lid off a dustbin in the yard beneath my window. It must have been the housekeeper, because I heard Father Callum shouting to her from inside.
‘I’m just taking James a cup of tea!’
It took between five and ten seconds before the full implication of his words burst into my consciousness with devastating effect. Before you could say ‘Jack’, never mind ‘Robinson’, I was out of my bed confronting the object that threatened to humiliate me if I didn’t move fast. Half a tumbler full of neat malt whisky stood on my bedside table, innocently unaware of the embarrassing predicament that it had put me in. Something simply had to be done to save face. I knew I couldn’t possibly drink it first thing in the morning without disastrous consequences to my constitution. In a flash I picked up the glass and rushed over to the door, but it was too late to make it to the bathroom. I could hear Father Callum; he was almost at the top of the stairs. If necessity is the mother of invention then impending humiliation is the father of inspirational genius. At least, it was for me that morning. In less than one shake of a lamb’s tail I was back in bed, looking half asleep as Father Callum tapped on the door and came in to place a cup of tea on my bedside table.
‘Well now,’ he said, ‘could you eat a hearty breakfast? Eggs and bacon, and all the trimmings?’
‘Indeed I could,’ I said enthusiastically as I sat up in bed.
‘Good man,’ he replied, picking up the empty tumbler and examining it with approval. ‘I always say that a man who can eat a hearty breakfast is a man who can hold his drink.’
I smiled modestly as if I’d just been complimented by the village elder for passing the prescribed test of my manhood. He opened the curtains for me, and nearly knocked a large gangly geranium off the chest of drawers in the process.
‘Confound it!’ he said, as he managed to prevent the pot from falling to the ground.
‘I see you’ve been watering it for me,’ he remarked, as he looked at the liquid that had collected in the saucer beneath the pot!
‘Yes,’ I said hurriedly. ‘I’m a keen gardener.’
‘Well, let’s hope you’ve got green fingers. It’s not flowered for over eighteen months.’ He opened the door. ‘Breakfast will be ready in about fifteen minutes.’
The door closed. I could breathe again. Let’s hope I’ve not done any permanent damage, I thought. But after all, if the average Scotsman can drink more than five gallons of whisky a year, a ‘wee dram’ would hardly do an oversized geranium any harm, at least once in its lifetime.
‘I’ve got to go to Castlebay to get a few provisions for you,’ said Father Callum as soon as we had finished breakfast. ‘And a couple of canisters of propane gas for you to take over to the island. I’ll be back in an hour or two. Meanwhile, perhaps you’d like to read these – they are six autobiographical essays that Peter wrote, charting his own spiritual odyssey. They were never intended for publication or anything like that; I think he must have written them when I asked him to give six talks to religious sisters, so that he would have some written material as a point of reference, but I really don’t know.’ (I later discovered that Peter had written them at the request of his spiritual director, who wanted to understand what had led him to choose to live the life of a hermit in the Outer Isles). As soon as Father Callum left, I sat down to read the first typescript, which was entitled:
FROM LONDON TO DUBLIN
Towards the end of my first year at teacher training college, I went with my fellow students at Strawberry Hill to a moral leadership course in London. It was run by a group of priests from various congregations. Before splitting us up into groups, the priest in charge explained that Jesus was the embodiment of all true virtue. If we wanted to imitate him we must first study him and his exemplary dealings with others. In order to do this we were taught how to meditate, or to ‘contemplate’ as the priest called the exercise, in which we had to picture Gospel scenes using our imagination wherever possible to home in on the exemplary behavior of Jesus. Then the members of the groups would discuss the virtues that they had discovered and list them in order of priority so that by the end of the course we had produced a sort of league table of all the most important virtues.
‘Now,’ said the priest at the end of the course, ‘if you want to become a Christ-like person you must try to acquire the virtues that we have discovered together.’
As a sort of afterthought he said, ‘Oh, any questions or queries?’
The priest didn’t really expect a question. In those days people didn’t question much anyway, and Father had run many of these courses. The formula had been well tried; the outcome was predictable, even if the participants thought otherwise. So Father was obviously a little surprised when one of the students stood up. The priest looked slightly apprehensive, but only slightly – after all, this would most likely be a vote of thanks. But it wasn’t.
‘Well, Father,’ said the young man, ‘I would like to thank you, and the other priests, for all that you have done to try to make this course a success. However, I can only speak for myself when I say that I have found the course very disappointing. You see, our dilemma is the same as that in which St Paul found himself. He could see how he ought to have behaved, but he didn’t have the inner power and strength to do it. Surely this is the 64,000- dollar question? Where do we go to, or rather to whom do we go, to receive the inner power and strength to make us into Christlike people? It is a question that this course doesn’t even attempt to answer.’
There was something a little too patronizing about the way the priest nodded his head as the young man spoke. Something a little too glib about the way he replied almost before the last syllable was out of the student’s mouth.
‘May I suggest firstly that you come to our follow-up course entitled “Tools of the Trade”,’ he said, ‘in which we attempt to show how to acquire the self-same virtues that we have been discerning in the life of Christ this weekend. And secondly, may I emphasize that the Grace of God will always be necessary if we are going to generate any authentic Christian virtue.’
The young man stood up again. He was obviously quite worked up, but was well able to speak for himself.
‘I followed the course “Tools of the Trade” last year, Father,’ he said. ‘This is why I am concerned about the whole approach used in these moral leadership courses. It only pays lip service to the action of God’s grace in the spiritual life, while placing all the practical emphasis on human man-made methods and techniques. I’m not a Scripture scholar or a theologian but I do have a doctorate in philosophy – Greek philosophy, to be more precise – and this enables me to see that these courses have as much, if not more, in common with a Greek moralism than with Christian mysticism, which is surely at the very heart of the Gospel. Forgive me for being so blunt, but these courses do not reflect the true spirit of the Gospels at all but rather the spirit of the Renaissance. Please can we have the Gospel in future, not a pagan moralism thinly disguised as Christianity.’
The young man spoke with such authority and confidence that the priest began to wilt visibly as he expanded and pressed home the point he was making. We were all disappointed when the bell for night prayer suddenly ended what was beginning to develop into a fascinating discussion. All, that is, save the priest, who had already realized that he had more than the usual raw and rebellious youth to deal with. All of us had been satisfied with the course that had just ended, at least until Julian – for that was the young student’s name – had given us all pause for thought. He had been able to verbalize for me, in such a clear and coherent way, vague misgivings that were only just beginning to be formed in the back of my mind.
Julian sat next to me on the coach journey back to college and I had a fascinating conversation with him. He explained to me how, when Europe was in her early teens, she had had a love affair with the classical world of Greece and Rome, which had inspired her to redesign every aspect of her life and culture after the ideal world that she thought she had discovered in the past. This new movement was called a ‘rebirth’ or a Renaissance. While the writers, poets and the artists of the day were being totally dominated by the influence of their classical Greek and Roman forebears, the thinkers, the intellectuals and the philosophers were influenced in the same way by Socrates, the Greek philosophical genius. ‘He became the undisputed “guru” of the new movement,’ Julian went on, ‘and his exemplary moral teaching was almost universally applauded and accepted. Go to any major European capital and to this day you’ll see his bust displayed many times over as the undisputed guru of the Renaissance. Although Socrates argued to the existence of God, he couldn’t argue, by reason alone, to a God who had any interest in man whatsoever. Man was alone, therefore, and so could better himself only by striving to acquire all the salient virtues by his own unaided human endeavor. This means of making oneself into a paragon of virtue came to be called “Stoicism”.
‘So you see, the great credo of the Renaissance was not “I believe in God”, but “I believe in Man”, and in how he can change himself, and the world he lives in, by his own efforts alone. It was primarily to counteract his incredible influence that Christians began to present Jesus as their Socrates, an even greater philosopher, whose moral teaching was even loftier than his Greek counterpart. They were so successful that to this day many still misinterpret and misrepresent Jesus and the message he came to bring. He is not primarily a moral philosopher who has come to detail the way in which we are to love God and our neighbor, but rather a mystic who has come to give us the power to do it.’
I had never looked at the Gospel in that way before. Julian’s clear and incisive reasoning was already leading me into my first real conversion experience. It was a conversion to the religion that I had been brought up and educated in, but which I had never really fully understood before.
‘Yes, I see what you mean, Julian,’ I said. ‘But what is the next practical step for me to take? I do genuinely want to imitate Jesus Christ, but how?’
Julian’s answer came without any hesitation.
‘By imitating what Jesus himself did to enable his weak human nature to be progressively infiltrated by the mystical life and love of his Father. Once filled by the same life that animated him, then genuine Christ-like behavior follows as a matter of course.’
I lay awake for hours that night thinking over everything Julian had said. When I finally got up, my mind was made up. If I was really serious about imitating Jesus, I simply had to have an environment in which to open myself to the self-same spiritual energy that was the principle of all he said and did. Only in this way could I really follow him. I saw clearly that morning, more clearly than I had ever seen before, that ‘prayer’ was merely the word used by Christian tradition to describe the way a person sets about exposing him or herself to the self-same spirit that progressively penetrated the heart and mind of Jesus Christ. This is why prayer was so important in the life of Jesus himself, and in the lives of all those who have successfully followed him throughout the ages. This is why they all sought out solitude with such regularity. This is why they all had such a desperate need for an environment in which to be alone to receive the spiritual energy that had animated him.
There and then, I made my decision. I would leave the training college and become a religious. It seemed the logical thing to do. The Father Provincial readily accepted me and I was sent to the novitiate in Dublin that very September. However, he made it clear that I might never be ordained a priest because of the polio which had struck me down at the age of six. I couldn’t have cared less – I wanted to be a religious; to be more accurate, I wanted the space and time to open myself to the only life that I knew would enable me to imitate the Person I wanted to follow. The experience I had had on the moral leadership course and my conversation with Julian led me to choose one of the older Orders whose traditions pre-dated the Renaissance, so that I would be grounded in an authentic Christian spirituality, free from the influence of the pagan Stoicism that had already had such an influence on my Christian formation. I was still rather naive, for I had not yet realized that the spirituality of both the newer and the older Orders had all been deeply influenced by the Renaissance, and therefore by a humanism that owed as much if not more to Socrates, the philosopher of Athens, than to Jesus Christ, the prophet of Nazareth.
There were sixteen novices who stood up the first time the Novice Master came into the recreation room to address us. I’ll never forget his first words: ‘My dear novices, I am going to break you and remold you.’
In the subsequent weeks he explained how original sin had molded us all into moral monstrosities, and how with his help we would have to be broken and reset in the image and likeness of Jesus Christ. The Novice Master would help us to discern the particular faults and failings that distorted each of us, with a little help from the other novices, who were encouraged to discard what he called their ‘schoolboy scruples’ and inform him of the misdemeanors of the others. Prayer was primarily a time for what was called ‘contemplation’, in which we were taught to recreate Gospel scenes in our minds, and whenever possible with our imaginations too, so that we could study the man we had been called upon to follow. The feeling of déjà vu was confirmed when he explained that Christ was the King of all virtue, in whom alone we would find the virtues that we must learn to acquire for ourselves. As the vices of the ‘Old Man’ were removed, then the virtues of the ‘New Man’ would be put in their place.
Certain forms of mortification, like the discipline, the clamp and other ascetical practices, were suggested or even imposed to help the ‘Old Man’ die a little more quickly. Humiliation was the favorite device employed by the Novice Master, because it was in his opinion the quickest and straightest road to humility, the foundation of all the virtues. You may well say ‘Thank God that the old-fashioned approach is dead and buried!’, but it isn’t. Don’t be deceived. The pernicious humanism, the ‘man can make himself perfect’ mentality that is at its very heart still persists. The only difference today is that the methods have changed, as the latest pop-psychology is now the ‘panacea’ for achieving what the old methods failed to achieve.
In spite of the dreadful regime that I had to endure in the novitiate, I nevertheless persevered for eleven months before leaving, mainly because despite everything else we did have a minimum of three hours of silence and solitude each day. I used to love this, and used every minute of it for the prayer that I saw so clearly was the only way to allow the power of God in. I could not get over the fact that in the very place that should be its bastion, prayer was simply misunderstood, neglected or reduced to saying prayers. I went back to teacher training college to continue my studies, but I was a different person. Something strange had happened to me in the novitiate which was totally to change my life, but it took me years to realize the full significance of what had happened.
After eight months, the highly charged and emotional prayer that I was beginning to believe was a sign that I was about to reach the top of Mount Tabor suddenly disappeared, literally overnight. Nor did it return in the following months, though I did everything to retrieve what I had lost. I felt as if I had been abandoned in a spiritual desert from which there seemed no escape. I sought every sort of advice that was available to me, but I could find no one who could explain my sudden change of fortune. While I continued to study at Strawberry Hill I still felt drawn to prayer and regularly gave time in the evenings for the solitude that I desired, but I seemed to be getting nowhere, and although I still persevered, I simply didn’t know what to do. I began to search far and wide for someone to help me, but I searched in vain. I began to think that there was something wrong with me, and the thought occurred to me that it might be more fruitful to seek out the help of a psychiatrist rather than the help of a priest. Then Fate stepped in, and led me to the man who understood, not just me, but also the whole journey that my heart was already set upon.
It meant traveling to a distant country, to a mountain that had been made holy by centuries of hermits and monks who had claimed it as their spiritual home. I had heard about it before; I had read about it many times in spiritual books; but I had never dared to imagine, even in my wildest dreams, that one day I’d find myself a pilgrim on the sanctified slopes of Mount Athos.
Father Callum would be away for at least another hour and I simply couldn’t wait to read Peter’s next typescript …