Mystical Paths

PART ONE
-

THE JOURNEY AROUND THE CIRCLE ·

‘Amidst the pressures and strains of life there is the longing of the self to realize

itself by escaping from the dominance of the environment. There are many cults

which offer such an escape, with an experience of a heightening of the faculties

and a realization of the self in greater power of its own or of something beyond

the self. But It is important to ask what is the reality which is experienced, and

what is the effect not only upon the sensations but upon the life and character of

the person who has had the experience. There is an old story of a man who was

had up for being drunk. The magistrate asked, "Why do you get drunk like

this?" and the man replied, "You see, your worship, it’s the shortest way out

of Manchester." Alcohol, drugs, the mystical techniques of various religions,

may be the shortest way out of Manchester ... But it matters very much where you

get to, and what you are like when you come back.’

MICHAEL RAMSEY

Archbishop of Canterbury 1961-1974

Canterbury Pilgrim

‘
God acts upon us inescapably through the people who touch

and influence our lives.’

CHRISTOPHER BRYANT

Member of the Society of St John the Evangelist 1935-1985

The River Within

ONE
·

‘More than in the past, the young are striking out into intellectual

independence and revolt against tradition.’

MICHAEL RAMSEY

Archbishop of Canterbury 1961-1974

Canterbury Pilgrim

I

I had just returned from an exorcism and was flinging some shirts into the washing machine when my colleague entered the kitchen. He was wearing his cassock and carrying a bottle of whisky. Beyond the window caked in city grime, sunlight blazed upon the battered dustbins in the back-yard.

‘How was the Gothic mansion haunted by the ravishing young ghost?’

Non-existent. The trouble was in a council house where the previous occupant had overdosed on heroin in the lavatory.’ ‘Ah well, that’s 1988 for you ... Drink?’

I declined but passed him a glass from the draining-board rack before I set the dials on the washing-machine. Meanwhile the electric kettle was coming to the boil. Absent-mindedly I reached for the teapot. ‘What’s new?’

‘Absolutely nothing. A drunk disrupted the lunch-time Eucharist, the Gay Christians demanded that we stock their literature on AIDS, and some neurotic female from the Movement for the Ordination of Women threatened to picket the church unless you sacked me – oh, and talking of neurotic women someone called Venetia telephoned twice to say she had to talk to you. She sounded like a nymphomaniac.’ He drank deeply from his whisky before adding: Now why should the name Venetia remind me of the 1960s?’

There was a silence broken only by the click of the kettle as it switched itself off. Then I said: ‘She was a friend of Christian Aysgarth’s.’

‘Ah yes,’ said my colleague, suddenly motionless. ‘The Christian Aysgarth affair. 1968. Crisis, chaos and the Devil on the loose.’

The phone rang. Moving to the extension, which hung on the wall by the dresser, I unhooked the receiver and said neutrally: ‘St Benet’s Rectory.’

‘Darling!’ It was Venetia. ‘I thought I’d never get past that crusty old curate you keep!’

‘He’s not my curate. He’s my colleague at the Healing Centre.’

‘Well, chain him up somewhere, I can’t bear misogynists. Now darling, I know you were terribly sweet and madly keen that I should visit you for a little professional chat, but —’

— you’ve got cold feet.’

‘Slightly shivery, yes. When I awoke this morning I began to wonder if a Healing Centre was really quite my scene, and —’

‘Nobody’s asking you to fall in love with it. Just think of it as a back-drop.
I
’
m
the scene.’

‘Oh yes, lovely, simply too thrilling — but I can’t bear that word "counselling" — quite ruined by the 1980s — all those wild-eyed social workers descending like vultures on disaster-victims —’

‘I’m neither wild-eyed, nor a social worker, nor a vulture, and I’m not going to counsel. I’m going to listen.’

‘Oh, but I shall make a mess of talking — I make a mess of everything — I shall wind up totally speechless —’

‘Fine. Then we can sit in silence and soak up the vibes.’

‘Soak up the vibes! Oh Nick, how that phrase takes me back! Do you know it’s twenty years now —
twenty years —
since you came to see me about Christian? That mysterious quest of yours! You never did tell me the whole story, did you?’

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’

‘No, don’t try and wriggle off the hook by quoting Wittgenstein! Look, let’s forget my visit to the Healing Centre — come and dine with me instead and tell me exactly what happened in 1968. I always found that official version curiously unsatisfactory.’

I realised it was time to take a firm line. ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘but I don’t dine out during the week and I’ve no intention of forgetting your promise to visit the Healing Centre. I’ll see you on Thursday at eleven as we arranged yesterday in Starbridge.’

‘My dear, how masterful! Why is it I always find you so utterly impossible to resist?’ said Venetia crossly, and hung up.

Turning my back on the phone I found that my colleague had made the tea for me. ‘That’s the only woman I’ve ever met,’ I said, sitting down opposite him at the kitchen table, ‘who can recognise a quotation from Wittgenstein.’

‘She sounds extremely dangerous. Do
^.
be careful, Nicholas.’

I smiled at him. Then I drank my tea, stared into space and mentally turned back the clock to 1968, that demonic year when I had become so obsessed by Christian Aysgarth.

II

For most of 1968 I was twenty-five; my twenty-sixth birthday fell on Christmas Eve. Buried in that first quarter-century of my life were the time-bombs which exploded in 1968 — or perhaps it would be more accurate, though less colourful, to write: weaving through those first twenty-five years were the paths which eventually converged to lead me into the Christian Aysgarth mystery. The first path followed my convoluted relationship with my father. The second path followed my disastrous career as a psychic. And the third path followed my friendship with Marina Markhampton. By 1968 all three paths were running side by side — in fact they had become a three-lane motorway where the words ‘TO HELL’ came up on all the signboards — but in the beginning hell was a long way off and Path Number One led through the idyllic landscape of my childhood.

I was brought up in the country near the city of Starbridge where my father worked at the Theological College in the Cathedral Close. When I was still in the nursery he had been appointed Principal, but he had not been required to live on the premises and I can remember watching him ride off on his bicycle to the station where he would take the train to Starbridge, twelve miles away. If the weather was wet my mother insisted on giving him a lift in the Rolls, but he preferred to be independent. Born in the last century he had never learnt to drive and he regarded travelling by Rolls-Royce as an inexcusable luxury for a priest. But then he became busier as the College Principal; soon the inexcusable luxury transformed itself into a time-saving necessity, and he stopped talking about the corrupting influence of the motor car.

I can just remember my mother’s old chauffeur, who died in 1946. The Rolls, which I can remember clearly, died or rather, was retired with honour – in
_1947.
Those were the days of the Labour Government when the rich had to tighten their belts, so my mother economised by replacing the Rolls with a Bentley and not replacing the chauffeur at all.

My mother worked. That was very unusual in those days for someone of her class. She ran the Home Farm which formed part of her estate at Starrington Magna, and every morning she would drive away to her office. I would stand on the doorstep of our manor house with Nanny and wave goodbye. Naturally I had no idea what a privileged childhood I was having, and naturally I took my doting parents and my beautiful home for granted. Nanny tried to bring me up sensibly but I soon mastered Nanny. By the time I was five I had evolved into a miniature tyrant.

This unpleasant phase of my development was brought to an end when I was nearly expelled from kindergarten for fighting over a boiled sweet. I remember it as the first time my father actively intervened in my life. Before that he had merely appeared at intervals and enfolded me in unqualified approval. But now the approval was withdrawn.

All he said was: ‘This won’t do, Nicholas,’ and when he lookedme straight in the eyes I suddenly realised that no, it wouldn’t do at all because nothing was more important than that he should remain pleased with me. This insight in turn enabled me to articulate a truth which it seemed I had always known but had never been able to put into words. I said: ‘You’re magic. You keep the bad things away,’ and as I spoke I knew that if he withdrew the protection of his magic anything might happen, anything, hobgoblins could haunt me, a witch could kidnap me, a monster could come down the nursery chimney and swallow me up. So I clutched the pectoral cross which my father always wore and I cried: ‘Save me from the Dark!’ – a plea bizarre enough to alarm my mother, but my father merely wrapped his mind around mine to keep me safe, patted me on the head and said: ‘The word you want isn’t "magic". It’s "psychic".’

I liked this word but my mother didn’t. She said sharply to my father: ‘Don’t put ideas into his head!’ but my father answered: ‘They’re already there.’

‘Nonsense!’ said my mother, and when she abruptly walked out of the room I realised that ‘psychic’ could be a dangerous word, risky, not acceptable by some people, definitely not a word to be used with no thought for the consequences.

I tried the word out on Nanny and received the firm response: ‘That’s not a nice word, dear, that’s peculiar and we don’t have peculiar things in this nursery.’

At kindergarten we were asked to write a sentence about our parents, and burning with curiosity to test my teacher I wrote: ‘Mummy is a farmer and Father is a sykick who saves me from the Dark.’ My teacher was appalled. In fact she was so disturbed that she even sent the composition to my mother, but my mother only commented briskly to me: ‘Silly woman! She might at least have taught you to spell "psychic" correctly before she had hysterics.’ And to my father she said: ‘I refuse to let Nicholas go peculiar. What’s all this rubbish about the Dark?’

‘It’s his way of referring to malign psychic forces.’

‘Well, I won’t have it, it’s bad for him, it’ll give him nightmares.’

‘But my dear Anne, you can’t alter the way he sees and senses the world!’

A flash of intuition lit up my juvenile brain. ‘I’m psychic too,’ I said triumphantly. ‘I’m just like Father!’

‘Oh no, you’re not!’ said my mother, magnificently normal, superbly sane. ‘One Jon Darrow is all I can cope with. Two would finish me off altogether!’ Then before we could get upset she kissed him, hugged me and declared: ‘You’re Nicholas. You’re not "just like" anyone. You’re you, your special self.’ And to my father she concluded sternly:
‘
No replicas.
’

I asked what a replica was, and after he had given me the definition my father said: ‘But of course your mother’s quite right and you must become not my replica but the special person God’s designed you to be.’

‘Supposing God’s designed me to be exactly like you?’

‘Impossible!’ said my mother robustly. ‘That would be very boring for God – much more fun for him to create someone different. And Nicholas, while we’re talking of peculiar ideas, I think it would be very clever of you and much more grown up if you kept all psychic talk specially for your father, who understands such things. Other people don’t understand, you see, with the result that they become uncomfortable, and a true gentleman must always do everything he can to lessen the discomfort of others.’

I resolved to be a true gentleman.

And that was the beginning of my tortuous relationship with my father.

III

‘Beware of those glamorous powers!’ my father said to me years later before I went up to Cambridge. ‘Those psychic powers -which come from God but which can so easily be purloined by the Devil!’

This warning I wrote off as an exaggeration, a typically Victorian piece of melodramatic tub-thumping. More fool me.

Having noted the psychic affinity which formed the bedrock of my relationship with my father, I must now sketch my disastrous career as a psychic.

I followed in his footsteps by reading divinity up at Cambridge, but after my finals I decided not to proceed immediately to theological college to train for the priesthood. This decision arose out of a conversation I had with Christian and I shall describe it fully later, but at present it’s sufficient to say that at twenty-one I was tired of living in all-male ghettos and hankered to experience what I called ‘The Real World’. In consequence I wound up doing voluntary work in Africa, but within months I got in a mess with a witch-doctor and had to be flown home.

My father begged me to proceed without further delay to theological college, but I was determined to complete the two years I’d set aside for voluntary work; I felt the need to wipe out the failure by being a success. Accordingly I took a job at the Mission for Seamen, fifty miles from home on the South Coast, but again disaster struck: two sailors got in a fight over me and wrecked the canteen. In vain I protested to my supervisor that I wasn’t a homosexual and had given neither sailor encouragement. I was judged a disruptive influence and asked to leave.

Despite my father’s renewed pleadings I still refused to abandon my two-year plan but my third job also ended chaotically. I started work as an orderly at the Starbridge Mental Hospital, but before long a schizophrenic girl fell in love with me and slashed her wrists when I explained to her (kindly) that I was unavailable for a grand passion. She survived the slashing, but I was very upset, particularly when I realised the doctors were looking at me askance. Worse was to follow. Plates began to be smashed mysteriously in the empty kitchens at night, and when the senior psychiatrist asked with interest if I had ever been involved in the phenomenon popularly known as poltergeist activity, I decided it would be smart to resign before I was sacked.

At that stage I realised I had to do something drastic before my father expired with worry, so I headed for Starwater Abbey where I had been a pupil at the famous public school. Standing in the Starbridge diocese not far from my home at Starrington Magna, the Abbey was run by Anglican-Benedictine monks from the Fordite Order of St Benedict and St Bernard. My father had been a Fordite monk once, and as the result of his special knowledge of the Order he had arranged for Starwater’s resident expert on the paranormal to keep an eye on me during my schooldays. It was to this man that I now turned.

Father Peters recommended that I made a retreat at the Abbey while we tried to work out what was going wrong. As a tentative hypothesis he suggested I might be suffering from the cumulative stressful effect of my fiascos as a voluntary worker with the result that an awkward situation had been generated. There was certainly no doubt about the awkwardness of the situation. Plates which soar off shelves and smash themselves to pieces apparently unaided by a human hand are really very awkward indeed.

At last I said: ‘Could I have done it while sleep-walking?’ ‘I doubt it, Nicholas – the noise would have been terrific. You’d have woken up.’

Then it must have been one of the inmates, someone who wasn’t locked up. Surely I couldn’t have triggered poltergeist activity now that I’m past adolescence!’

‘It’s unlikely, I agree, but not impossible. If you were to make a retreat we could try and solve the mystery by examining the entire situation in detail and reviewing your spiritual life –’

I switched off, knowing that the last thing I could face at that time was Father Peters playing a spiritual Sherlock Holmes. Any discussion of how I was unconsciously expending my energy by generating psychic phenomena might lead to a discussion of how I was consciously expending my energy in messing around with girls, and I wanted no one to know I had an active sex-life. Admitting to sexual intercourse would only lead to spiritual questions which I didn’t even like to think about.

Sex was a problem. As far as I could see it was now essential therapy, hiving off all the surplus energy so that I stopped smashing plates long-distance by mistake, but I knew any confessor would tell me there were other ways of calming an overstrained psyche, ways that didn’t involve exploiting women and crashing around like an animal. The trouble was that it was such a relief to crash around like an animal when my attempts to be a decent human being, ministering without pay to the underprivileged and the sick, regularly ended in humiliation.

But of course I could confess none of this to Father Peters. All I could do was confess to God in private my exploits as a crasher and pray for the grace to become effortlessly ascetic once I was ordained.

‘I’ll think about a retreat,’ I said. ‘I really will.’ And away I went to muddle on.

‘What happened?’ said my father when I returned home, but I suspected he already knew.

‘Oh, we had a good chat and I’m feeling much better.’ ‘Nicholas –’

‘No need for you to worry any more, I’m fine.’

Sometimes when my father demonstrated his intuition I thought he knew about my sex-life, but most of the time I was sure he didn’t. I was careful never to think about it in his presence, and every time I felt his mind prying into mine I mentally evicted him by thinking about cricket.

Back we come again to the relationship with my father, now clouded by my chaotic career as a psychic and muddied by his agonising anxiety.

Of course sex is a subject which children often find impossible to discuss with their parents, but in my case this wasn’t my father’s fault; certainly I don’t mean to imply that just because he was a priest he was incapable of speaking frankly on the subject.

‘Christianity has been much misunderstood on this matter,’ he had said to me at exactly the right moment in my adolescence, ‘but it has always claimed –’ Here centuries of clerical misogyny were swept aside – that sex is good and right.’ With the slightest of smiles he conveyed the impression of surveying numerous pleasurable memories. ‘It’s the
abuse
of sex, that gift from God, which Christianity condemns. That’s a manifestation of the Devil, who hates God’s generosity and longs to wreck it by converting a gift of joy into a trap of suffering.’

This made sense to me. I liked it when my father talked in old-fashioned picture-language of the Devil in order to convey the strength of the Dark, that psychic reality which I had recognised at such an early age. But then my father stopped talking about the reality of the Dark and began talking of the unreality of the sexual rules. It turned out that almost anything was an abuse of sex. In fact in a world which was overflowing with sexual possibilities — and which was soon to explode into a sexual supermarket — he insisted that for the unmarried only deprivation was on offer. With a marriage certificate tucked under one’s pillow one could have sex twenty-five hours a day and God would never bat an eyelid (provided that the sex was what my father called (wholesome’; I never failed to be amazed by his use of archaic language). But for the Christian it was either feast or famine where sex was concerned. No wonder the unchurched masses thought Christianity was peculiar on the subject.

‘I expect you’re thinking now that this is all idealism which has no relation to reality,’ said my father, reading my mind so accurately that I jumped, ‘but human beings must have ideals to look up to and examples to copy if they’re not to sink to a most unedifying level.’ (More fascinating archaic language. Unedifying! Ye gods!) ‘In this world no one’s perfect. But one can aim high and try to be good. To do so is a sign not only of maturity but of —’ My father made a vast verbal leap forward into the twentieth century — psychological integration. Religion is about integration, about successfully bringing the selfish ego into line with the centre of the personality where God exists, as a divine spark, in every human being. Religion is about helping man to live in harmony with his true self and become the person God’s designed him to be.’

We seemed to have wandered away from the subject of sex, but the next moment my father was saying: ‘Casual sex is just the gratification of the ego. The ego sits in the driving-seat of the personality, but unless it’s aligned with the true self it’ll steer an erratic and possibly disastrous course.’

‘Elm,’ I said. I thought it was about time I said something.

‘In addition, casual sex is the exploitation of another, and to exploit people is wrong ...’

Later I felt he had exaggerated this. Later, when I was no longer so innocent, I thought: what exploitation? The girls loved it. I loved it. No one got hurt. Where was the harm? Of course there would always be people who made a mess of their pleasures, I realised that. But I wasn’t one of those people.

After the disaster at the mental hospital I yielded to my father’s pleas to bring my voluntary service to a premature end. By that time I had whiled away twenty months of the two years I had allotted myself, and I was due to begin my training at theological college that autumn, the autumn of 1966. The summer stretched before me, and telling my father that I was going to embark on some serious theological reading I loafed around listening to my records and dipping into books on reincarnation.

It was then, quite without warning, that I got into a mess with a girl, but being me I didn’t get into the usual mess young men get into with girls. It was a psychic mess. Typical.

Back we come again to my disastrous career as a psychic. ‘Beware of those glamorous powers!’ my father had droned to me years earlier before I had gone up to Cambridge, and I had thought: yes, yes, quite so, of course I shall always be psychically well-behaved. But during my years as an undergraduate I had found it increasingly hard to resist a psychic flourish now and then. The girls loved it. I loved it. No one got hurt. Where was the harm?

In that summer of 1966 I found out. I was twenty-three years old and spending my Saturday nights with a little dolly-bird typist called Debbie who had a bed-sitting-room down in Langley Bottom, the working-class end of Starbridge. I’d met her in the Starbridge branch of Burgy’s, which I had discovered was the ideal place for picking up girls whom I couldn’t take home but couldn’t do without. Being currently intrigued by the research into reincarnation I hankered to reproduce the Bridey Murphy experiment, and with Debbie’s eager consent I hypnotised her in order to find out if she could recall a past life. She could. Greatly excited I took notes as she described her life as a medieval nun. Then the disaster happened: I was unable to bring her out of the trance.

By that time she had stopped talking and evolved into a zombie, eyes open, responsive to my commands but unable to communicate. I panicked, terrified by the thought that I had produced permanent mental impairment. Having manoeuvred her into my car I headed for the emergency department of Starbridge General Hospital, but then I suffered a second bout of panic. Supposing they thought she was traumatised as the result of a sexual assault? Supposing a scandal aborted my career as a priest before it had even begun? Bathed in the coldest of cold sweats I drove past the hospital and fled home with the zombie to my father.

He asked me only one question. It was: ‘What’s her name?’ and when I told him he took her hand in his and said: ‘Debbie, in the name of JESUS CHRIST I command you to return to your body and reclaim it.’ The cure was instant. There was no permanent mental impairment. But I never went to bed with her again. She wanted me to; she cried, she pleaded, but I couldn’t. I’d seen the Dark. I’d felt the Force. It had been shown to me very clearly how vulnerable my psychic powers made me to demonic infiltration, and in my revulsion Debbie now seemed fatally contaminated.

‘You used that child,’ said my father, hammering home the truth with a fury which failed to conceal his terror that I should be so vulnerable. ‘You exploited her in order to satisfy your curiosity about a psychological mystery which has been adopted by those who believe in the heretical doctrine of reincarnation. You’ve behaved absolutely disgracefully and I’m ashamed of you.’

Strong words. I hated myself. Worse still, the temporary withdrawal of his love made me more aware of my vulnerability than ever. I saw that even though I was now a grown man of twenty-three I still had to have his powerful psyche enfolding mine in order to keep the Dark at bay.

‘I shan’t comment on the sexual relationship which you’veobviously had with the girl,’ said my father. ‘You know exactly what I think of young men who are too selfish and immature to do anything with women but exploit them. Please don’t attend mass until you’ve made a full confession to Aelred Peters.’

This was the final horror. I couldn’t bear the thought of Father Peters knowing how I’d behaved.
‘
You
hear my confession,’ I begged my father, but he refused.

‘Confessing to Aelred would be a real penance,’ he said. ‘Confessing to me would be a soft option. Off you go to Starwater.’

Away I sloped to the Abbey, but cowardice overwhelmed me as soon as I crossed the threshold, and although I told Father Peters about the psychic disaster I was unable to speak of the sexual relationship. Fortunately Father Peters was so fascinated by Debbie’s story of life as a medieval nun that he quite forgot to ask me what I’d been doing in her bed-sitter, and after we had completed the travesty of my formal confession we settled down for a cosy psychic chat.

‘How could she have invented such a detailed description of an utterly alien way of life?’

‘Well, my theory is ...’ Father Peters expounded on his theory. He said that although we remembered everything that ever happened to us, only a small part of our memory was accessible to our conscious thoughts; Debbie had probably seen a film featuring a medieval nunnery and she could well have elided this memory with a theme from a novelette. So in fact it was not a former life which had been revealed, but the extraordinary depth of memory which lay buried deep in the subconscious mind.