Extracts from

Part Three - Wednesday. The Sexual God.

It is strange looking back from my life now to that distant time when I was leaving the clerical caste of the church. It is as if I am recalling a previous lifetime. I now can hardly imagine how that person was really me. At that time I remember fearing that in leaving the Catholic ministry I was throwing away a status that I could have used for good. But at that time, my more romantic side thought that this was worldly thinking, that if I was meant to live as a beggar, that would be where I could be most effective. I had learnt that it is the low, the child, the despised that the voice of Wisdom often chooses as her oracle.

I never saw Jackie as a temptation to desert my pledge to serve God - on the contrary, her love and presence was for me a divine gift and an enrichment. I had made a vow of celibacy which I saw as my pledge never to break my marriage with the God - and in response it seemed I had been sent Jackie by this same God so I could learn about life, love and children. I believed I could accept this gift without breaking my link to God. Instead I delighted and rejoiced in receiving such a gift and thanked my God for her.

Looking back on this time, I see that my own path, my own liberation, required the demolition of my patriarchal status and the dismemberment of my old self with all the fears that boosted it. I had no conceit that this was the path for all. It was simply my own path, my own calling.

As for losing my status in the patriarchy. Well I had been trying to lose it since it were given me. I had no wish to be part of any elite. In the eyes of the Church and my parents I had fallen from it by giving in to sex and breaking my vow of celibacy. But for me my fall was off stony pinnacles of pride and stolen power down onto a fertile plain.

I found that I had "fallen" to a place that seemed inordinately rich and complex, a virtual rain forest of possibilities. Hand in hand with my human lover, with Jackie , my divinely given companion, I had to find my way. Instincts were the main guide.. Blind trust led me. There were many things to learn. I thought of sex as a celebration of life, as a divine gift in its own right - but my knowledge then was entirely of intellect without a shred of experience to back it and very little instinct.

And Jackie turned out to be a revelation to me. The one who brought me other dreams. Those of children, of real poverty, complete trust in providence, of being part of a sacred nature that needed no supernature to be holy.

One of the first lessons she had to teach me was about sexuality. She found my lack of sexuality perplexing. She thought, she later owned, that the Catholic Church had done a very good job in making me sexually inhibited. She set out to educate me so we could better share in the delights of creation!

This really threw me at first! I can remember thinking "What on earth shall I do?" ! My reaction was not from prudery. In theory I thought human love and sexuality divinely ordained and wonderful. But that was in theory. OK for prayer and contemplation. But in practice - how should I react? I loved Jackie . Yes. But I did not feel any passion. I was almost stupidly angelic in my lack of co-ordination between soul and body!

What was going on in me? I had no comparative way of judging. All I could think was that if I loved her, then I should be free in self giving, that this was the divine way of acting. My ambition should be, was, to make her happy. I wanted to give myself to her. But at first I felt the engine of my car simply had no fuel in it.

.... I lifted with her happiness. It was a bond, a rod, a maypole around which we danced. Jackie wanted a child. I never thought to have a chance at creating. For me it was a wonder that I could take part in this, incarnate our love as another human, our love lifting us, making us one with the creator.

Looking back, reflecting, an element was missing from my loving that perhaps men experience. I do not think I saw Jackie quite as men normally see women. Jackie was the sister, the teacher, the sharer of life and dreams, the lover. She gave me great richness. Opened me to the magic of engendering children. She also taught me much about myself. It was wonderful to give her joy. But I think I felt increasingly in bonding with her that there was a commonness between us, not that she was the alien other that gave me a completion - not the feeling that I have since experienced as a woman in exploring heterosexual love.

In loving her for the remaining period I survived in the male role, I learnt much that was new to me about my genitals and thus something about malekind. I found the penis, never attractive to me, was capable of much delicacy. It is of a man yet moves independently of his will. Instead it stands between the couple, a bridging organ, that can be controlled and enjoyed by either partner, that can give ecstasy to one, both or neither. No wonder the Hindus and many other religions have exalted it as an emblem of divine creative power. It took me thou' a long time to realise this. I thought it was just the males that had exalted it. Now I see that it is the organ that both genders jointly control and therefore of great importance to women too.

This was so different to how the "Fathers" of the Church regarded their own male parts. When I looked into this I found to my surprise that their attitude towards women was shaped by their attitude to their penises! One of the greatest of them, St Augustine, believed that the pursuit of sanctity meant gaining complete control over his own body

. ... Jackie and I spent a magic week in a room on the Isle de Saint Louis in the middle of the Seine in Paris, on an island connected by a footbridge to the Cathedral of Notra Dame, a sacred hill within the water. We wondered, wandered, eat onion soup in Les Halles, watched artists in Montmarte. It was a dream, a blessing. Another trip was to the Lake District where we climbed to a pool half way down a mountain side twix two waterfalls, on the Milky Gill, where deep in a pool that floated between earth and cloud we could overlook the earth or flip back and laugh under the falling water, part of a cascade that ran from heaven to a fertile earth.

I wooed Jackie with all the grace of the Irish gab to persuade her that she was not taking me from my priesthood - which was her fear. I saw in her a dream - perhaps as men do. A wild woman lived in my dreams, a woman who dreamt her ideals and made them real. Jackie symbolised this person for me. As a separate person she was untouchable, untakeable. She was she and could not be me but she helped to teach me and I have much to thank her for. In the Irish epic called The Tain, Cuchulainn was sent to study the art of fighting with a woman, Scathach, the Shadowy One. Jackie was the shadowy teacher set on my own path.

But this dream about the wild woman was in part about me. The male self-image that I then held onto needed to travel, to find this wild woman that flitted through my dreams, to find the aspect that is often missing in a boy's upbringing. Perhaps all males need this, to stand strong on their own feet, erect, happily proud while touching and feeling the female earth beneath their feet, the female thighs embracing them and protecting their male bodies, feeding and inspiring their wild free creative mothering side. Here they would find Kali, the Hindu Goddess who said the word Om to create the universe. Later I would learn this that women need conversely to know their male side. In this balance lies the truly divine power of creation.

I had found in loving Jackie a secret that no one had taught me. It was that giving seed was also a sacrifice. The giving of sperm left me strengthless, empty yet full, in suspense, quiet, richly now barren while the work of fertility passed to another human. It as a giving that was a receiving of Jackie 's welcome, a bonding, perhaps a new life. I died a bit as the wheel turned. (This experience of emptiness, of weakness beside a stronger woman, is very scary to men who despise women.)

... Shortly after I took my university finals, Jackie and I planned to celebrate our marriage in the borrowed large home of a Ceylonese architect friend. A Catholic priest was to be our master of ceremonies. Many trainee priest friends were coming. An Anglican priest wrote us songs, another friend was to sing them, we had balloons with Snoopy pictures, and every guest, male or female, was greeted at the door with a bunch of flowers purchased in a dawn raid that morning on Covent Garden market.

Before the wedding celebration, we went to the registry office to officially but not sacredly wed. The sacred part would be that afternoon. We did not go to the registry office because we saw ourselves as needing the state's approval but because we saw ourselves as taking on a social obligation by deciding to have children - and we were thus announcing to society our intention. We did not see this as our wedding. That was to happen that afternoon among our friends.

Jackie found a silk yellow dress, long and simple, in a shop selling clothes from the East. Her parents had come over from Australia and insisted on providing the catering. They engaged a caterer that also did functions for Princess Anne. We told the company we wanted something simple. Rice salad and salmon was the simplest they could dream up. We said the cake should only have one tier. A man in dark suit and waistcoat arrived an hour before the ceremony carrying a brief case. He carefully took from this the cake dressings and placed them on the single tier cake. We asked if the waiters could be relaxed, mix in, be informal. We were told that their staff never fraternised! But on the day they were fine - and formal.

A Dominican priest who led anti-nuclear marches to Aldermaston, much loved by the many who got to know him, Father Simon Blake, came to officiate dressed as a fisherman in a blue sweater. He would have been excommunicated by a man in white in Rome for so flaunting the rules. Jackie and I would also be excommunicated. The sanction was automatic - but ineffective as the Pope did not know who was present (And Fr. Blake has since died so I can now safely make this public.)

I remember how Jackie coming down the staircase into the large room of the celebrations, wonderful in her dress, long hair dancing, eyes sparkling, the balloons and flowers everywhere...

Thus with a simple but wonderful ceremony we married and entered far deeper into the world of the sexual God. My title of bridegroom went back into the time when a cherished Goddess of the British Isle was called Bride. Her emblem was a white mare. As such she rode the skies as the sun. I was the groom of the Goddess, the Groom of Bride. And Jackie of course stood to me as the Goddess Bride. That night she was the ancient wonderful "night-mare" - a word that has reversed its meaning because of the Christian fear of sex.

I felt I was still the knight, the priest, still bonded with my Lover, still on the same path. But my role was not to be part of a clerical elite, but to share, to empower, strengthen others, serve the priesthood of the whole community. Not dominate.

Now started a new adventure. Armed with two rucksacks, Jackie and I set out some days later from Brixton in South London. At the bus stop down near the traffic lights in the centre of town an old lady asked if we were going far. With glee we said "Only to Australia."

... Our first stop was in Heerlen in the southernmost part of The Netherlands where we had friends in a college that trained Catholic priests. We stayed with one of the teachers. Much to our surprise, the students and some teachers asked us if we would again ritually celebrate our marriage so they could be part of it - and would we please do so by co-celebrating the Holy Mass with us both behind the altar presiding as priest and priestess! We were amazed, delighted, grateful, at being asked to do such a wonderful thing.

Side by side Jackie and I stood behind the sacred altar on which was a chalice of wine and a plate of bread - all that was needed for the sacred meal. We felt bonded in the mystery, one flesh, one couple, bonded, in life and in priesthood. We were one with the circle of participants. We knew that we were presiding as a couple put together by a divine blessing. We were celebrating life while one with Jesus and all our ancestors and teachers. It went beyond the church in which we stood. I felt one with the whole creation - celebrating with this food the bonding of Deity and Creation, the wedding, of God and Universe. With the happiest of smiles we gladly celebrated.

I t had previously been something of a mystery to me how I would be able to use my priesthood now that I had been divested of patriarchal rank but this experience pointed the way. I had simply to trust in the path given to me. I felt I had stripped off the first layer down towards the gold of life. The dismemberment had commenced that I hoped would lead to my rebirth - but I had still very far to go and learn.

.... But my mother continued to try to save my soul. It seemed that to her I was guilty of bigamy and that my real wife was the Church.

The king hit was when I stumbled to the door at seven thirty one morning to find two short nuns standing there. "Good Morning", said the older one with the sunburnt wrinkled face. "I am Mother Teresa from Calcutta. I have come in the name of your mother. Please think of me as your mother".

I gaped. It was a double hit. She was Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the living saint. Why on earth was she here, at our door??? Wild speculation went through my mind. She might have come because we worked briefly with their order in Calcutta. Or maybe she had come because we had signed a petition saying their convent should be allowed to stay in Fitzroy because it did not attract undesirables, such "undesirables" being already in Fitzroy. But her words about my Mother did not fit these theories. And, thinking of her as my mother also just did not fit. Not that my Mother isn't a living saint; she just had seemed recently more like a living menace.

"Come in." I eventually managed to say. I escorted the two black ones down the corridor and sat them at the kitchen table.

"Would you want a cup of tea?"

"No thank you," Mother Teresa said, hands folded before her. "Our rule does not permit us to take refreshments on visits."

I abandoned them briefly to give Jackie the startling news. She bounded from bed. I threw on some more respectable clothes, grabbed baby Karina and went back to the kitchen. I dumped Karina in her lap - not dreaming she could be thinking that Karina was the forbidden fruit of a broken priestly vow.

Mother Teresa explained that my Mother had heard she was going to Australia for a Eucharistic Conference and had asked her to come to persuade me to do the right thing by the Church and Christ.

Well, we spent the next two hours explaining to her at our kitchen table that we felt we had a vocation to be together and that did not contradict my commitment to the priesthood. I told her that I felt called to both the priesthood and marriage and explained that in all this we had followed our conscience and been honest with the church. Meanwhile we were dying for our morning tea. We did not feel comfortable drinking when they were not.

Well, eventually it seemed they understood that we had married in good conscience. They gave Karina back and we processed out to the front garden. But on the way to the garden gate, Mother Teresa turned and said "I am very sorry but I must say that, in my opinion, you are sinning in pride. You have set your own opinion against that of Holy Mother the Church".

And then, leaving us stunned, they diminished down the street. I still have the wooden chair she sat in. I am keeping it to sell its splinters as relics of this living saint!

and within a year -----

....It seemed that I had no control over the changes that were happening in me. It was as if my attempt to become a normal sexually active male had back-fired on me, that it had triggered my psyche and my body to move as rapidly as possible in the opposite direction.

We were both now having to cope by taking tranquillisers. We had come together with a strong sense of being fated to be together, of having a sacred work to do together. Was all this about to fall apart? I did not know what the future might bring.