Some Extracts -
My mother told me that when she was a girl she wanted to be a Catholic priest but could not because of her gender. Then she decided there was nothing she wanted to be more than the mother of a priest. Mary, the mother of God, was her model. She saw her fulfilment in the next best thing, mothering a son that became a priest, an alter-Christ teaching and leading in rituals. It was thus totally impossible for me to tell her I had a secret that if made public would bar me from the priesthood just as much as her girlhood had barred her. If only the Catholic Church had allowed her to become a priest - and still to marry and conceive us! It would have solved part of my dilemma - and the dilemmas of a thousand Irish sons.
According to the Fathers of the Church since the Fall women were the temptress. Thus for them the very concept of the priestess was anathema. Women who in the first days of the Church had headed local congregations became barred from the ministry. Thus was the priesthood denied to my mother who so much wanted it.
So my mother charged me to fulfil her dreams, become a priest, bring Christ to the pagan, dedicate myself to my Lord like some apprentice knight in Camelot. I mock gently. Her dreams did charge me, did help lift me, did help set my ambitions high.
Of course there were also other reasons why I should pick a career that I thought would be asexual. I was not the ideal candidate for parenting. My gender identity was so confused that I had no motivation to pursue a sexually active life. Instead an ethereal celibate priestly life seemed to be my destiny.
If I were to be a priest, I had to choose what kind of priest. I decided early against the diocesan parish clergy although I served them as an altar-boy in cassock and surplice, sometimes swinging a metal boat full of burning incense, sometimes holding tall candles and speculating on how the melted wax would fall. I was not attracted to the lives of those who constantly called for funds for parish complexes of presbyteries, schools, halls and churches. I dreamed that the priesthood would be my dedication as a knight of God, dedicated not to building an institution but to a deeper, more radical, service of the God of Love.
...
In my early teens my proud parents invited a Jesuit recruiter to our family home. He sat in the settee that hid the carpet I had burnt, and told me the Jesuits would welcome me if I completed my sixth form with good results. But a year before I was due to go to them, my parents showed me an advertisement offering a free holiday . It read "Come to Highcliffe Castle in the New Forest on the Hampshire coast and discover if God intends you for the priesthood."
My parents thought it would help reinforce my ambition and persuaded me to go. I felt I had no need for it for I was keen on the Jesuits - but I agreed to go. When I arrived I was amazed to find it was a gothic fantasia. Its entrance was a vast arched entry portal some sixty feet high. A statue of a rampant stag stood on the highest point of its roof. It's turrets were set above cliffs that faced the Needle Rocks of the Isle of Wight. Males of my age, then fairly boring to me, greeted me. I should have been warned that I was entering a very different world.
In the chapel behind this arch, I found an American presiding, a Father Gamm, sitting in a chair behind altar rails beneath a enthroned statue of a Queen Mary, Mother of God. He was not the spiritual leader I expected. He was the original high pressure salesman. I was firm that I wanted to be a Jesuit. I told him I planned to go to them after I finished at Grammar school so he set out to undermine the resolve of this inexperienced youth.
He told me the Claretians were a sort of easy going Jesuits. I could get to all the intellectual heights the Jesuits would lead me to - and save some years in doing it. There was no need to get my A-Levels, a necessity for university entrance in England, for I would be sent to a Roman university. I could therefore start straight away. Why did I think God had got me to this Holiday-Retreat he asked. Wasn't God telling me something? Let rip kid. God wants you NOW.
I demurred slightly. I went home but he had got me. The romance of it all appealed, my parents were keen to see me on safe territory and encouraged me. I thought if my God wanted me now I was ready. I deserted my A level studies. Two weeks later I was driving up a narrow steep lane to Backwell House, the Claretian Noviciate, on top of the Mendip hills in Somerset. It was surrounded by woods with beeches guarding the house and its high walled gardens beneath the open farmlands of the summit plain. The house was large, painted white, with dark oak panelled walls inside.
...I was slung a black cassock and sash. I was very slim waisted then and others laughingly said it looked like a girl's dress on me. The androgyny appealed to me.
...I mock myself now, but I learnt much then that is still very precious to me. I frolicked in prayer. How could God be fearsome if he or she were my loving parent who instantly forgives the returning child? I plunged in, floated in God's ocean, and with all my natural arrogance and presumption of youth, felt myself suspended in the vast open spaces of self-surrender and contemplation. I remember wondering how I could seem to be in the place named by the mystics as the soul's natural home that could only be attained after much struggle. I saw it then as a natural state, a gift, a place that lovers can attain if both wish it to be so.
There was also some old customs of dubious wisdom taught to us by Father Angel. He provided me privately with a scourge, a short length of rope with which to whip myself so I could bring a stubborn fallen body into line. I never convincingly succeeded in using it. My Lover God seemed to laugh at me and ask what on earth was I doing to my sacred body? No matter that I was told such body punishing discipline went back to the Christian hermits of 4th century Egypt that founded Christian monasticism and even came to Scotland, I soon discarded it in the conviction that such customs had no function in my life. My Irish mother had taught me that my body was sacred so I could not see my flesh as an obstacle.
We were also given diamond shaped grids with spikes protruding inwards...
We were carefully guarded to make sure that we were not corrupted by the Catholic laity. Only a few vetted students were allowed to go outside the front to meet them after Holy Mass. The presumably more vulnerable students, such as myself, were only allowed to roam on the other private side of the mansion, in the woods and over the lawns, right down to one inch from the sea-washed sands. When my brother Tony also joined to test his own 'vocation' (much to my delight - we were always close), he too was excluded from this danger zone.
Every year the Provincial, the head of the Order in England, came to review the house and the state of the community. At one such visitation we were solemnly warned from the altar steps that the beach was a spiritual minefield and that expulsion from the order awaited any of us who stepped onto the beach. We could gawk at its denizens from above and be safe from heavenly lightning bolts. But one footprint in the sand and we were a goner. So ruled Father Emaldia, who, as our Provincial, was in charge of the six or so Claretian houses in England. He was a white-haired stocky Basque akin to our novice master.
But when he retired, under another regime, we were allowed onto the sands and even to swim. When this happened the bathing girls were joined by laughing young men in black cassocks who would drag these medieval clothes off over their heads to reveal their bathing trunks...
... The hot house atmosphere in the seminary was intense. We had to take turns to wake the community of about forty. We raced from door to door, calling out a Latin jingle to which the inmates had to sleepily respond in Latin. Our days were tightly organised around the recitation of the Divine Office at various times, with the rituals of the Holy Mass in the mornings and Benediction in the afternoons, with readings during breakfast, lunch and supper, with study periods and lectures - and half hour breaks every 3 hours or so when we could talk - with a longer evening break when we could watch TV. Outside these breaks we had to maintain silence.
When we knelt in the early morning chill in the chapel beneath the great throned statue of Mary, we would keep our ears half cocked to catch the noise of any car. When we heard one, then we would quickly look around to see if anyone were missing. For this was how expulsions would happen. Rumours would afterwards spread. Had the Superior expelled him for being gay? Had he rendezvoused with a girl on the weekly bike-rides? Had he stepped upon the beach?
We were taught that we had achieved perfection in prayer if we could hold ourselves in undivided attention, transfixed, before the wondrous ineffable Godhead. We learnt that the free use of imagination was a tool of childhood now to be disregarded for it was normally the mutterings of the lower self. I tried to do this - but found my imagination hard to conquer. My "lower" self kept on protesting at being so barred from the sacred. I remember sometimes succeeding in holding myself in this angelicly pure focus. I did not then know that trammelling imagination like this was a form of voluntary handicapping. It was like carrying out a conversation with one's wrist padlocked to an ankle!
...If any strangers to Catholicism had entered our chapel, the dominating statue of the enthroned Mary would have convinced them that they were in the presence of a religion with a Goddess. ..
Mary was a Goddess for us in practice but not in theory. We prayed to her many times a day, believing that because of her influence with her Son, she was the best way to obtain His help. She embodied a human mother's powers but she could persuade the God. I did not know it then, but a man who had lived in the same village as us, a Gerald Gardner, had a very different way of approaching the Goddess. He would one day be famous for teaching many through his books to honour her in rituals used by modern witchcraft or Wicca
Witches I knew were said to work magic to effect change. Christians instead prayed, hoping for a response from a supernatural God. The Church had claimed that witches had achieved their ends by an alliance with the devil - but I then knew little of what witches did or of the claim by modern witches they were but working with natural forces. I thought the belief in demon allied witches was a piece of medieval stupidity.
But I have learnt that in the first centuries of the Christian churches, the debate over magic versus prayer waged fiercely. The Magi said to have visited the baby Jesus were well known for their magical skills - the very word "magic" comes from them. They were not disliked in the New Testament because of this but rather respected.
But while the Gospel account of the Magi was being written, others were using the word "magician" quite differently. In the Second Century while the gospels were being written, some Jewish writers reported with some disdain that Jesus was a "magician" who had learnt his great skills in Egypt. A document written before 220 alleged that Jesus was accused of being a sorcerer in his own lifetime.
"There is a tradition (in a Barraitha): They hanged Yeshu on the Sabbath of the Passover. But for forty days before that a herald went in front of him (crying), "Yeshu is to be stoned because he practiced sorcery...
... Seven years after the Emperor Constantine made the Catholic version of Christianity an official religion in 312AD, magic was banned from the Roman Empire by state edict. P 654 G . Then, in 367AD the "first great persecution of the Christian Era" was ordered with death prescribed for all who practised magic. "Large numbers of people were put to death ... and a veritable panic swept through the Eastern world." (MM XIV foot)
... To my great surprise seminary life also provided me, for the first time in my life, with safe opportunities to express my most secret dream. Every year we had festival days when we were allowed to dress up, let down our hair and have mad evening parties. Many of us would not have survived without these days. The feastdays of St George and of St Patrick were marked with crazy games outdoors in daytime and wild fancy dress parties down in the cellars in the evenings. After the solemn Holy Mass celebrating the great and sensible exploits of these saints, killing dragons and driving snakes out and the like, we would have treasure hunts for silly prizes in the woods, play four-a-side soccer on the tennis pitch, have table tennis tournaments and other games.
In the evening when fancy dress was permitted I would let lose the fantasy that still plagued me. I would dress up as a girl, carefully, realistically. I relaxed, changed and was female on such days, much to the surprise of fellow students and supervisory priests, who would sometimes cross dress but in such a way that lampooned women. I sometimes caught their startled stare when suddenly I seemed to them more naturally female than they thought possible.
I would extend the time I wore a dress as long as possible since I loved to be able to express openly my female self. After the festivities, I would walk in the woods at night alone and ridiculously happy as a young woman, singing to my creator and the trees. Later I would even sleep in the dress. Only morning prayers made me resume my devote garb of a black cassock and black sash with a white Roman plastic collar around my neck. At such times I would thank God for the pleasure of the night before and then bury my impossible and strange fantasy.
The seminary environment gave me the support I needed to maintain the status quo. Outside I would have been challenged in my sexuality and would have been driven quicker to resolve my gender. Inside the seminary I never saw the males around me as possible sexual partners for no one, not even I, saw me as a woman in reality. Rather I left such dreams to the realm of dreams and blindly, asexually, drove towards my target of the priesthood because I saw this as the path I had been given. I was not unhappy. I did not crave sexual freedom or sexual partners. I strove for inward conquests.
...After six years we were finally liberated from the castle. I went for my final year of theology to the Jesuitical bastions of Heythrop College in Oxfordshire. My early dream of studying with the Jesuits thus came true. I spent much time with their witty intelligent unassuming tutors and in the library of their great country hall. Women, nuns, came to study with us. I rode a vast wide hunter horse through the fields and lanes, got a driving license, helped rewire the college and gained a master's degree in Theology from a Roman university - a degree at that time denied to Catholic women. My gender remained suppressed.
I then achieved my long term goal. Around Easter in 1967 I happily went to be ordained a priest in my family's parish church in Folkestone, accompanied by friends from the college, admired by the women who remembered how I, as a teenager, prayed after school for hours in the church. The Bishop came down especially to ordain me. He was for me not much more than the official witness at the Ordination. I was dedicating myself in an intensely personal act, receiving powers and responsibilities from my Lover, witnessed by the community. The Bishop would not have seen my ordination in quite the same light. For him I was dedicating myself also to serving an institution set up to preserve and preach the gospel as I was directed by Bishops or the Order.
Lying prostrate before the altar during after my vigil and during the ordination, I dedicated myself to my Lover. It was also for me my knighting when I became pledged to fight for Him. When the Chalice was put into my hands I wondered at the marvel of being able to handle the blood of my Lover, the bread, the flesh of my Lover. I shared my Lover with all in communion, united in a oneness that encompassed for me matter and spirit, all creation
Afterwards my Mother, glowing with pride, gave me a gold coated chalice, the gold coming from her rings. I too now had spiritual elite status and found it odd and uncomfortable. I did not see my ordination as my becoming a mediator between humans and God but it seemed presumed by many that was whom I had become. My church work would also include witnessing forgiveness in the confessional - not forgive but witness - for I believed sins were forgiven, forgotten, as soon as a human came in love to his God. Again many seemed to presume that if I refused to forgive sins they were somehow retained. It was "Father, can we do this, Father can we do that" and it was into the confessional to assure a thousand scrupulous people that masturbation was no sin.
Yet it would be wrong to think that I did not get any pleasure from working as a Catholic priest. The anointing, the prayers said over me, the laying on of hands, all the rites of my Ordination, were very important to me. It did not take me long to find the parts of my work that I liked. I found that my skill in liturgy and ritual was a talent that I could put at the service of the community to celebrate the sacred moments of life. As I did this, I felt that all the years I had spent preparing were now worthwhile.
The Claretians, my religious order, did their best to ensure I had fitting accommodation for a priest while at university. They found me a room in a West End parish, at St. James just off Oxford Street, in its luxurious presbytery, or house of priests, of polished stairs and panelled walls where women, encased as Nuns, now much shrunk from my childhood days, scurried about like mice. They tried to be invisible, polished the banisters, made my bed, cooked my food, serviced me as a member of the priestly male elite.
The evening meal they served from the cellars was an elegant occasion. The parish priest would host us. He was a Monsignor, a rank below a bishop, a highly civilised man., Fine wines would be served as a slightly squeaky little lift in a corner of the room delivered fine rare meats, rich sauces, delicately cooked vegetables and deserts.
At mealtimes the nuns became our subterranean lift loaders, completely out of sight, working from the basement kitchen. Here for the first time and probably the last I experienced life formed by a very refined chauvinism in an exquisite British gentleman's club. After dinner, the monsignor would ritually whip out a vast red handkerchief, take snuff, and then invite us to his room to sit in vast armchairs listening to Mozart.
I have never had the opportunity to explore the world of the elite female clubs, or even luxurious convents, so I cannot reflect on how they might use male servants. But I am sure there are scarcely any equivalents. Our luxury demanded maintenance by an underclass. This consisted of celibate women dedicated to servicing celibate males, men reverenced because of their sacred powers. We were essentially very fat camels quite unfit to get through not just the eye of a needle but even the door of a poor person's home.
My luxury came with minimal charge. In return I assisted with the Sacraments on Sundays in priestly finery and skirts descended from Roman empire garb but now decorated with Flemish lace. I heard confessions for an hour on Saturdays in a small dark wooden box and never heard of a serious crime but did hear of a thousand inconsequential scruples. I preached for fifteen minutes on Sundays and celebrated the Holy Mass for half an hour on weekday mornings in the vast echoing spaces of our neo-gothic church.
The Holy Mass celebrated here was a distant echo of what it was in early Christian days. Then Christians preserved as part of their Judaic inheritance the symbolism of the meal that that bonded the people and their God. We were taught that at this sacred meal, God himself was really present. I had no problems with this for I had experienced my God as everywhere. I did have problems with the soulless lacy cobwebs with which canonical church lawyers had enshrouded this meal.
I had a story I told in sermons of how there was once a friend, a God, who so loved the beings he created that he came to visit them as one of them. He ate meals with the people he dearly loved - as we do with our friends. He was willing to give himself to us totally. He thus said with utter seriousness that the bread he was giving them was not just grain but his very flesh and the wine not just grape juice but his very blood.
For me these words embodied a rich human tradition of the sacred meal, a tradition well known to women who often minister it to the tired and hungry. When we invited God to our table, then I believed he was really and truly present in our material world, in the bread and in the wine and in each one of us. But Church lawyers had to coat this poetry of life in jargon. Pedantically they said the bread is no longer bread even though it seems to be bread. but really flesh carefully disguised so as to fool any scientific analysis. To make sure it did not seem like bread, they conspired with the ecclesiastical cooks to make sure it was pallid, tasteless and white - in other words, as far from Godlike as was possible.
So, feeling like this, what was I doing, preparing a meal dressed up in Roman Empire leftover clothing inside a sacred perimeter, separated from and elevated above other Christians, celebrating a sacred meal with tasteless bread on a table that no one else could reach? I was gradually getting to feel more and more strongly that this was not what any Goddess or God worth her salt would have had in mind for me when she accepted in love my dedication of myself as her priest.
(Note. I used the male pronoun for the deity at that time in public. I prefer now to use the female. But what is right for a divine person who is beyond gender? We need a new gender pronoun. May I suggest "om", the pronoun of respect among the Hindus?)
For me it certainly was not what Jesus Christ celebrated with his own friends. Therefore with the students, away from the confines of the parish, I celebrated the Sacred Meal, the Holy Mass, more as the family meal - with real bread, with friends at the table, with no marks of priestly rank. We all joined together in the dedication of the bread and wine. I left it to the dry barren ecclesiastical God to work out just who among us was the one with the supposedly magic powers that really made it happen.
The income the Claretians provided me with was even more embarrassing than the accommodation they arranged for me. It was the Holy Mass offerings collected by missionaries in Latin America from the rich and poor. I would be sent fifty or even a hundred offerings at a time. For these I was to say Holy Mass in the splendours of the adjoining church, remembering in my prayers my the nameless third world benefactors.
Now this was the Britain of the late 1960s, when ideas of social change and even revolution were popular. It was impossible to live in such a style and be one with the students and with radical priests such as the American priest Dan Berrigan, who spilt blood on American weapons in protest against the Vietnam war. It was a total contradiction to all my ideals of priestly life.
I plotted my next move down the social order on a path where down was up and somehow succeeded in persuading my superiors that I would be better off staying in an ordinary student's hall of residence, in a standard student's room, at Tennyson Hall, in a leafy square near Baker's Street Tube Station, where meals were unromantically served in a plain basement room and no nuns came to make my bed.
You might be wondering what was happening at this time with my gender identification problems? After they had dominated my thoughts during much of my childhood, I had managed to successfully bury them for most of my young adulthood. The tension was in fact now lifting off me. I had woman friends for the first time. Nothing sexual was happening. I was just pleased to know women with whom I could joke and chat. This was an enormous relief and a liberation in itself. I was also distracted from internal preoccupation's by a multitude of happenings. I had now left life inside institutions and was learning to survive and grow in the street.
...I had come to London to study wealth and poverty and I did not intend to do it just from text books. I soon found out about the Simon Community in Maldon Road in Kentish Town, a run-down area of north London,
This was a community inspired by an anarchists including Christians who did not believe in institutions. They lived in a couple of down-at-heel terrace houses, one each side of the road. Here people off the road, meths drinkers, drug addicts, no-hopers, were welcome. We ate soup and bread sitting on the arms of ancient faded armchairs and on wonky chairs as heroin addicts mainlined their maintenance dose, then spurted blood from a syringe into a waste paper basket. Volunteers collected van loads of outdated food from supermarkets and bakers. The community was partly made up by volunteers, some full time, others part-time. All alike, guests and full time volunteers, ate the same food, dressed in the same cast-offs, shared the same accommodation, had equal pay. The ideal was Christian in that it followed Christ's precept to love others as one loved God, without reserve and without undue worrying about tomorrow. But it was apart from any official church link.
If the guests from the road wanted, they could get away from London to a farm near Canterbury to dry out or simply to relax. An old ambulance had been contributed, and one wild volunteer, who kept a pet baby crocodile in a fish tank, loved to race this ambulance, siren screaming, up and down between Canterbury and London.
I became one of the organisers of the nightly soup run to the places where people slept out around London. This was the only time I smoked. Sharing a cigarette on old bomb sites, behind advertising hoardings, by warm air grates over heating systems beneath office blocks, became a ritual of companionship. I puffed, tried not to breath in for that would make me choke, to the great amusement of the people of the road. One of the places we stopped was under the arches near Waterloo Station. In those days, the late 1960s, it had not turned into the cardboard city for the refugees of our society that it came to be later, perhaps because England had was more humane and had fewer unemployed. I did not do a great deal. The full time volunteers did more.
Again my ill deserved, not wanted, status came to the fore. "Father Roberts" became talked about by those who saw in me that the Catholic church could have a human face. I thought the church as an institution had little part in what I was doing even while I acknowledged the church included many people who had taught me much of value - Berrigan, St Francis and Christian mystics. The church institution was becoming much more an obstacle to my further progress. I was in any case sure my idea of what it was to be a priest and a Christian would sooner or later, get me into real trouble for I knew finally the authorities would ask me to contribute to the strengthening of their institution.
The Simon Community used me as a sociologist. I helped organise a major survey of the ruined houses and yards of East London in order to help them prove just how big a need there was for help, so they had some ammunition in raising funds. I met behind hoardings, in wrecked buildings, the truly poor and often desperate street people. These included labourers, carpenters and other tradesmen, priests, lawyers, and other professionals who had fled from or been deserted by their former peers. That was in 1968. Since then things have got worse in London. There were then no where near as many children sleeping rough as I have seen more recently.
At university I also became deeply involved in trying to make the place more human. I became an elected representative of the Sociology students and, as such, I sat on staff committees where junior staff members would ask me to bring up their own very real complaints. I was perceived as somewhat immune to Professorial pressure, not scared as they were of bringing up issues, not subject to their fear of damaging their careers.
This was noted by authorities. The Sociology Professor passing me in the corridor one day snarled at me: "It is obvious that you are not thinking of a profession in sociology." He was quite right. I had no interest in a career in which I put orthodoxy first so as to gain an income and settle down. But I still learnt much from these studies. I specialised in white collar crime and industrial democracy - the first to better understand corporate workings, the second to better understand how to make the workplace more human.
...
At that time I was riding on a flood-tide of change. Paris was torn apart in 1968 when I was half way through my sociology studies by an idealistic uprising that threatened the French government. The LSE was locked up, forbidden to students, as they too demanded change. I thought we had every reason to do so and became part of the protest. Much of the teaching of under-graduates at LSE was mediocre. The staff often seemed much more concerned with advising governments, consulting business and working on their research with the help of post-graduates, than with teaching us. Many lectures were poorly prepared, luke-warm attended and a waste of time. The LSE was a major disappointment for me, even if it did have a fine library and some good lecturers, such as Robin Blackburn. It had not lived up to its reputation as a centre of biting social analysis, the whole reason why I chose to go there.
My course was part-taught at Bedford College, the former women's college of London University. Here under-graduate teaching was of a far higher standard than at LSE. Its buildings stood in the midst of Regent's Park half surrounded by a lake, a gentle site in the centre of London chosen for women and suiting both men and women. Since my time there, Thatcher's government sold it off to private foundations and American colleges who gave a premium price for such a setting.
We gave refuge at Bedford College to the locked-out Sociology students of LSE As ideas for change were debated, the Administration at Bedford opened a dialogue with us. I was deeply involved in successful efforts to win changes to teaching methods, assessment and to the administration of the college that had been refused at LSE. Many of our changes lifted the academic standard by improving teaching methods - and probably made life harder for us!
After this I was encouraged to run for President of the College. I was backed by the socialists and communists as well as by some of the Christians, an unusual support for a Catholic priest. I lost by just eight votes after some supporters clumsily handled questions at a student meeting and I did not feel it right to publicly criticise them. I afterwards thought my non-intervention was a mistake. But perhaps it was as well I lost. Other more interesting things were in store for me.
I was still trying to learn what it was to be a priest. In France some priests had joined trade unions and taken prominent roles in struggles for justice. Many refused to return to parish life when Bishops reacted to pressure from employers and ordered them back . They said they could not desert their brothers and sisters in the work-places.
I looked for any priests that could teach me how to dedicate myself. I was delighted to meet at LSE a Father Mario Borrelli who had lived on Naples's streets with the street urchins after his ordination. I later hitch-hiked to Naples and stayed a month with him but it was disappointingly in a quiet marbled cloister rather than a street-squat.
More inspirational was a trip to a gathering of shop-stewards in Sheffield where they were sharing ideas on how they could work on shop floors to bring to about changes in work-place attitudes and organisation so there would be more participation by all. It strengthened my belief that real social change would be achieved outside the timid academic world. With the uprising then happening in Paris, the atmosphere was charged, optimistic, near revolutionary. We dreamt real social change. The people I met showed research and analysis of high standards that mocked university elitism. They believed workers should have a real say in their factories - and that this would even make them more productive. They were working against those who pushed the values of the profit-centred market-place rather than co-operation and democracy. I felt market-place ideology was not suitable for cattle, let alone for humans. At that time I was optimistic that the shop stewards might bring about real change.
As for the Church institutions, I was coming to share some of the ideas expressed by Thomas Paine. In his book "The Age of Reason" (1795) he wrote: "I believe in one God and no more. I hope for happiness beyond this life... I do not believe in the Creed ... professed by any church I know. My own mind is my own church... (Islamic, Christian and Jewish religious institutions are) human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind and to monopolise power and profits.. every national church and religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God and communicated it to certain individuals .. . as if the way to God was not open to any man alive... the Word of God is the Creation we behold." I disagreed that the purpose of religious institutions was originally to "terrify and enslave" but agreed that Churches had tried to monopolise God - and had indeed historically used coercion and terror to this end.
How then did I remain for these years in the Catholic ministry? Basically because I sought to reform it from within. I saw its potential for good - I saw the charities it inspired. I had met its anarchists, its worker-priests, its liberation theologians who were also trying to survive within it. The church had been part of my world since childhood - and I wanted to help drive out its money-changers and make it more the sacred institution it should have been. I seemed well positioned to help do this. But my naiveté in these matters was not to last much longer.
.... My reputation as a priest at that time had one enormous personal consequence. One of the organisers at the Simon Community whom I had noticed and admired for her dedication, was interested in me, and we became friends. Soon we found we shared many anarchistic Christian ideals. I given her an open invitation to come around if she needed to get away. After we had been acquaintances for some months she took up my invitation. She was then burnt out by her work . She told me she was an ex-social worker who had found it impossible to treat people as "cases" and who had thus come to live full time with the Simon Community where "clients" and "workers" were not separated by clothes, food or housing. She had great mad ideas about Christ, that he had wanted us to identify with the poor, be poor, be with them, and fight for justice. We became soul-mates and our friendship changed my life.
Idealistic and deeply ignorant of myself, I felt I loved her and that this demanded of me self-surrender. This was what I had learnt from Christian mystics in my hot-house noviciate. I believed that, if I truly loved Jackie, I would not reserve anything from her. This was for me an intellectual decision for I was still little motivated sexually. I loved her: therefore I should give her all I could. I though God seemed to have brought us together to work together, serve him together, sleep together, be together, dream together. I thought that God was gently telling me that this did not contradict my dedication to him - despite my vow of celibacy.
For her part, she later told me, she found me sexually rather dead. I can remember her sitting on the bed, blouse undone, and looking quixotically at me for I was not reacting. I tried to do the right thing, to treat her gently, make her feel good, make her know I valued what she offered me. She was very tolerant as I stumbled between naiveté and ignorance. She put down my awkwardness and lack of drive to the influence on me of the Catholic church. At that time, this was even for me a plausible theory. When I told her of my very private fantasy about wanting to be a girl, I said what I then believed, that this was an entirely private illusion that could be kept entirely in its place. After this it was not mentioned.
She introduced me to the Catholic Worker movement in the States, where anarchistic Christians ran open houses, looked after the poor without any preaching at them. Outside these houses they took a thousand radical actions to show that they, as Christians, could not agree with killing and were pacifists.
We sat at the feet of R.D.Laing, the psychiatrist, listening spell bound as he related case-history after case-history and with brilliant analysis showed how people must be treated in the context of their closest friends and family. We went with her parents to Paris, staying idylically on Isle de Sainte Louis in the heart of Paris, saw the revolutionary slogans of the defeated left and ate snail. She then left to return to Australia via a left wing kibbutz in Israel to help open a house of hospitality in Melbourne similar to those of the Catholic Worker movement.
After she had left, I deeply missed her companionship. She was the first person I had met with whom I shared so much. She had not wanted to endanger my life as a priest by pursuing the relationship. She left me free, gave me ways to go forward that would not challenge my role as a priest. But I was not so concerned. We had not known each other long, but I started to pour out my soul in letters.
That Summer after she had left, eager to escape from suburban England and the suburban parish life that otherwise awaited me, I found myself a summer job in a Catholic parish in Bedford Stuyvescent, part of Brooklyn and in the largest of the American ghettos.
Wide open to new ideas, I soaked in New York where I was delighted at how easy it was to meet people who supported Castro and other critics of official policies. I came to appreciate the openness of New York life. I went to the Catholic worker hostel on the Lower East Side, sat on benches, talked with their workers working with down and outs. They were also symbolically fighting their industrial war machine by personal acts such as refusing to pay that part of their taxes spent on the military, hoping such acts would educate.
In Bedford Stuyvescent the streets were full of kids, hanging out, bouncing basket balls, roller skating, who laughed at my accent and said, in their American monotones, "Gee, Mister, you don't talk, you sing!" I sought out soulmates among the clergy and was introduced to priests that lived in rat-infested apartments in Brownsville, the worst part of the ghetto. Here emigrants from the Caribbean had settled in housing deserted by the Afro-Americans. Burnt out and part-demolished houses made it a cityscape of wartime.
One of these priests showed me the police with sniper rifles on the roofs of local primary schools. He told me the parents and students at these schools had demanded that African studies be taught to students whose ancestors came from Africa. Why should White kids learn European history and they not learn African? They came to school in mock leopard skins and with spears. The White teachers, frightened, went out on strike. Now the school was guarded with sniper rifles, all for fear of black primary school kids and their parents.
I came across a demonstration of women with children and prams protesting about welfare payments. They were flying balloons and holding posters. A man on the outskirts of the demonstration was handing out leaflets. I asked him for one for I was curious to know about the protest. But I found his leaflet told me he was an off-duty policeman demanding the right to carry guns off duty. It said, look at this protest, see what we are up against. I looked at the children, the women joking between themselves, and was horrified at his blind fear and anger.
Wanting to learn all I could, I walked into the poster filled headquarters of the Black Panther Movement and discussed with them the gun culture of the USA. I quickly introduced myself as not an American white, and argued freely, friendly with perplexed militants about the non-gun culture of London. I could not get away from the parish so could not make a bus to Chicago. Thus I missed the riots at the Democratic Congress. This was a tumultuous time in the USA.
Finally, in order to learn more of the origins of the Latin American immigrants who now were living in the worse of the New York slums, I flew to Puerto Rico for two weeks of exploration paid for by my earnings from the parish. At first I wandered the Spanish built streets of the old town of San Juan and saw nothing of poverty. Then, from the highest point in the town, I saw the shacks of the barrios outside San Juan's fortified walls, between them and the sea. I found my way into it. Their narrow streets were mean and dirty. Pigs hunted along the sea edge. But it still seemed more pleasant a place than the slums of New York although many there were dreaming that if they could raise the fare to the USA that they might be able to make it good.
My position as a Claretian priest made it easier for me to afford this trip. I could stay in a pleasant and hospitable parish in a good part of town. Small green tree frogs chirruped all night outside the windows and a seahorse swam past my nose the moment I put my face underwater in the Caribbean. These were the more pleasant memories.
From there I went to Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic. Here little boys tooted for their sisters. There was a girl selling herself for every yard of pavement. Many were country kids that were saving to get to the golden city in the sky, to the ghettos of New York. I went up into the hills to see the land they were deserting. An American Peace Corp. worker took me around. He showed me rich fertile lands telling me that big American companies seeking cheap land for cash crops had driven people from their land. So here was the ultimate reason why the Caribbean people were filling the streets of New York.
I would have gone on to Cuba, to contrast what was happening there, but the United States had imposed an embargo and this stopped me. But I had learnt much from what I had seen in the ghettos, Puerto Rican barrios and the Dominican Republic.
About a year later in response to the pleas in my letters, Jackie returned from Australia. We visited the Lake District mountains together, discovered each other again. One night outside a pub under Mount Hevellyn we saw this mountain rear above us blocking out the stars. There was a path marked on our map to its summit. We decided to climb it in the dark to watch dawn from its summit. It was a very long steep scramble between rocky crags. Red sheep eyes glared in the torch light. It was windy and cold on the summit, our only shelter an umbrella that we ridiculously huddled down behind while we awaited the chilly arrival of the sun. When the sun rose through the clouds it was an anticlimax after the climb. We then wove our way down into a valley to come out near a white painted toy-like farm house. The farmer in wooden clogs was coming in from milking cows. With a sense of unreality I asked if it were possible to get a drink of milk.
...
One day, in deep cloud, we set out to climb a pass below Scafel Pike, England's tallest peak. This would lead us below its cliffs to the next valley and to a youth hostel. The fog was thick. Since the path itself was invisible, since from each cairn we could not see another cairn, the only way to move on was to presume the path did not bend. One of us would move ahead to the limit of visibility and shout if another cairn was visible. We did this for some time - then suddenly the fog lifted and we found to our surprise and horror that we were high on the cliffed walls staring down at our intended path a thousand feet below. From here we had to cross the summit if we were to complete our journey before night time. Grey wet boulders loomed ghostlike around us as we reached the top. Then came the tentative exploration of pathways in the mists, looking for the one that would take us down towards the hostel. The first cairns led into cloud seas that we feared masked cliffs. Eventually by blind instinct we found the right cairns. We did not know if we were safe until we came out below the clouds and saw the hostel far below.
This seemed an image of my journey through the Church. I had not known better than to climb its mountain to its barren peak. I did not seem to have a choice. Once there I found a beauty that was quite apart from the world below, in which the real dangers were hidden, where instincts were my only guide, where the wrong path would lead to me to a sudden fall into a very different world of death. But to stay there would mean stagnation and starvation. From this summit there was only one way forward for me, down.
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