The Breath of Peace (16 page)

‘Peaceful?' The abbot's gaze challenged his. ‘Well, it is until you arrive.'

And then John saw the extent to which that hurt, and he felt sorry for having said it, and even in feeling sorry he recognized another manifestation of the inevitable turbulence of trying to interact with William. The abbot sighed. ‘Sometimes I rue the day I ever laid eyes on you,' he said. ‘You find your way to trouble with the effortless ease of a lifetime's practice. Yes, you can stay. There is no doubt in my mind I shall be cursing myself for having said so, but yes. You can stay but, so help me God, if you hurt the vocation of one of the sons of this house, I don't know what I'll do, but you'll regret it! William, hear this: you are not – repeat,
not
– to discuss your home life and your marriage with the brothers. Do you promise me?'

‘Yes. For sure. And I'm sorry, I… Conradus always caught me off guard. He's so comfortable to be with, and so kind. Why can't I be like that?'

‘I don't know. Scary-eye malady, I guess. So, anyway, you were saying – you and Madeleine have been fighting? That's not amazing. She fights with everyone, so do you. I did warn you, but you wouldn't listen – you were in love. She's not an easy woman.'

He saw a flash of annoyance in William's eye that he thought was an improvement on the misery it replaced.

‘I'm sorry,' John said penitently, ‘I invited you to tell me about the struggles you've been having and all I'm doing is scolding you and saying “What did you expect? I told you so.” That's not good medicine, is it? All right; let's start again. Do you argue over anything in particular, or is it just the arguing itself?'

‘I think…' William hesitated. ‘I think, at least in part – for me – what does my head in is the memories.'

John frowned. ‘Memories? Of what?'

‘Oh, John, I am plagued by memories, scourged by memories – I am
infested
by memories. They invade my dreams, they climb all over me, they…' His voice tailed away and he shook his head, helpless, defeated. ‘It's so paralysing. It…'

John waited, but nothing more was forthcoming.

‘Would you like to tell me about some of these memories?' he asked gently. William turned his face towards him momentarily and John, seeing the bleak, lurid light in his eyes and the hard set of his features, thought they were both looking at hell.

‘It's nothing I've not mentioned to you – just individual occasions from when I was a lad. Times when I was so frightened – I mean scared enough to soil myself – or times when violence escalated and the pain went beyond enduring… and the mockery and laughter, and… it shrivels me, puckers and burns the surface of my soul, burrows into me until I… John, I am not whole, I have no goodness in me… I have no sound judgment – I will always be rejected, because right at my soul's deep core is this writhing nest of adders. I look into me when I start awake from bad dreams some nights, and it's like a sheep with the blowfly – you lift back a flap of what you thought was simple fleece and there's a great craterous wound heaving with maggots devouring the poor beast alive.'

He sat for a while in silence, then he said: ‘I cannot begin to tell you how draining it is – how much energy it takes to try and keep staving it all off, holding it at bay, limiting as far as I can the havoc and ruin it makes in my every interaction.'

‘Then,' said John again, softly, ‘would you like to tell me of some of these memories that scourge your soul and wear you down until you are exhausted? Shall we see if it may bring some relief to speak them out? I am your friend, but I am an abbot too, and Christ's priest. In telling me, you can allow what tortures the inside of you to seep out into the wounded side of Jesus.'

‘
Jesus?
The last thing I want to do is sully
Jesus
with the defilement that poisons and taunts and drains the life out of me!'

‘No – and you will not. Where his wounds touch your wounds you will be made clean again. I will not push you to it, but I think it may help to tell me of these memories if you can bear to.'

For a long while no more words passed between them; and then, haltingly and full of shame, William named and described the things that had been done to him, and the hurt, the humiliation, the despair. John said nothing at all, he reacted in no way whatsoever; he just listened with his whole attention, and William felt himself wrapped, even as the miserable, sordid stories bled out of him, in an immensity of cleansing, sheltering, ministering, healing love. He did not weep, though there were moments when John almost did as he heard the bitterness and palpable suffering that had lacerated and warped the child who had grown into the man, twisting him out of shape until he had no concept of what it was to live simply and comfortably with another human being. ‘Even now,' William added, when the dismal, lightless, gruelling tale of his childhood was done, ‘I keep forgetting how to love. I don't really know. I can only put in place what I have learned here, and keep on making the deliberate choice to let Christ open me up, even if it hurts sometimes.'

‘I hardly know what to say to you,' John said into the silence littered with so much ugliness and cruelty and pain. ‘How did you survive?'

‘I joined the order of Augustinians,' William replied simply; ‘because I could see some kind of refuge there. And whether it was God's mercy or sheer accident that I made it to the age when I could do that, I cannot judge. From that point on, survival has been easy – well, most of the time. But I do sometimes wonder if survival is good enough. You know – if it is really worthwhile.'

The infirmarian in John did not like the sound of this. As words ceased, and the men sat together looking into the dying fire, John turned over in his mind the difficulty William presented him. He saw, as the abbot of a monastery, very clearly, that this man was, and probably always would be, a liability. His fractured inner world made a perfect fingerprint of chaos on all his relationships. Association with him set up a bridge between the community and the anarchic discord of William's soul. John wondered what to do, and wondering turned instinctively to urgent, unspoken prayer. In the silence that lengthened between them, the words of the beautiful Gospel drifted into his mind:
Quis ex vobis homo qui habet centum oves et si perdiderit unam ex illis nonne dimittit nonaginta novem in deserto et vadit ad illam quae perierat donec inveniat illam…
What man among you, if he have a hundred sheep and one goes missing, will not leave the ninety and nine alone on the hillside, and go in search of the one? As an abbot, as an infirmarian, as anyone who even halfway pretended to follow Christ, he did not see that he had any kind of alternative. The broken whisper echoed again in his mind:
Please don't send
me away
. But before he made the suggestion forming in his thoughts, he sought the heart of Christ, because he could see he was about to break all the rules again, and that with William as a travelling companion every way would lead inexorably to that same crossroads. He looked at his friend, and saw what the silence was doing to him. He saw defeat in the hard, tired lines of his face, the hopelessness of no solution that ever offered anything better than expediency.

‘William,' he said, ‘please remember how much you are loved. Madeleine loves you – and her interminable scolding is all part and parcel of her love, so you'll just have to live with that. I love you, and I am the abbot of this monastery, so you have to accept that in loving you I still must guard the boundaries. And others love you too; Tom – do you not remember his greeting yesterday? Michael. Theodore. Conradus. Possibly not Father Chad.' (William's face cracked into a grin as John said this last.) ‘Love is better than survival and, though it has been freely given, you have earned it too. Now… Christ also loves you – you know that – and the love of Christ is touched and found in the eucharist. When we take into our bodies the bread and wine of the eucharist, we invite the presence of his light and life right into our very guts. No evil can co-exist with the presence of the living Christ.
Christus victor est
. Where he comes, he brings light and peace. You go to Mass, where you are living now – yes?'

William nodded. ‘Aye. I do. And I would welcome the power of Christ into the gut of me, to put to death all that is evil in me – even if it killed me while he was doing it.'

‘My friend, what I am about to suggest is that I go to the chapel for the reserve sacrament, and give you eucharist, and anoint you for healing and exorcism and blessing. Would you like me to do that?'

John registered the curious and unsettling sensation in his own belly that came from being held in William's gaze once his attention was caught. Like the gaze of a fox or a cat slowly advancing on an unsuspecting prey, completely focused. Single and silent and entirely inescapable. Not a comfortable experience.

‘Exorcism and blessing?' William said eventually. ‘You think…?'

‘
No
,' said John decisively. ‘I don't think anything – except that some truly devilish things have been done to you, and the echo of them has lodged in your heart and soul and, from what you say, drives you half crazy at times. I know of no power on earth that can lift such horrors out of you again, but I am trusting that the power of heaven may be equal to the job. That's all.'

William still watched him, and John felt him stalling, examining the idea. The sense of hesitation John picked up allowed him to feel less stalked, and allowed him to meet William's gaze with more equanimity. It was William who looked away, muttering, ‘I thought you told me not to come to you for the eucharist. Because I broke my vows.'

‘Aye, I did. But what can I do? Here you are, plagued and tormented by the demons of the past – eaten alive like a sheep with the blowfly. What's a shepherd to do when such a sheep comes to him in distress? Turn his back? Anyway, you were not excommunicated, though heaven knows you should have been. I would not refuse you the eucharist. Not here, in privacy. Well? What do you say?'

William, still with his head turned aside, nodded mutely. ‘Thank you; yes,' he said, low and indistinct. And with no further ado Abbot John rose and went to fetch the reserve sacrament from the holy place at the back of the Lady Chapel altar.

‘This,' he said, as he brought one of the stools to the fireside to serve as a table and laid out the fair linen cloth, the silver cross and the bread and wine, ‘is the hope of humanity. This will heal you. This will make you clean. If you eat and drink this bread, this wine, discerning the body of Christ, it will be life to you. Remember what Augustine taught his catechumens? When they received the bread from the priest into their hands, and heard the words “the body of Christ”, they were to let their “Amen” be for “I am”. The holiness that is Christ's is catching. When it touches you, it spreads within you. It will purge all rottenness and decay. It will touch the sore places of your spirit. It will turn you again to life. Is this what you want? Is this what you ask of Christ? William?'

Straightening up from arranging the holy vessels on the stool and turning back questioningly to his friend, the intensity with which he found himself beheld almost frightened John.
Holy Moses!
he thought.
No wonder everyone at St Dunstan's was terrified of him!

‘Oh, God, it's what I want more than anything.' The painful craving of the hoarse whisper felt no more reassuring than the pale feral glare of William's eyes.

John nodded, kissed and donned the purple stole, then stepped quickly across the room to fetch his breviary from the shelves behind the table. He came back to William, balancing the big book on his arm, turning the leaves of it to find the psalm he wanted.

‘Will you repeat this after me, my brother, my friend?' Glancing up from the book John saw William's eyes flicker as he registered the word ‘brother'.

‘
Auditui meo dabis gaudium et lætitiam: et exsultabunt ossa humiliate
,' he read, and William obediently repeated the words. John traced his finger down the page, missing out a few verses to find the words he wanted: ‘
Ne projicias me a facie tua: et spiritum sanctum tuum ne auferas a me. Redde mihi lætitiam salutaris tui: et spiritu principali confirma me.
'

It was not hard for William to echo them back to him; every monk in Christendom knew those words from Psalm 51:
Make me to hear joy and gladness; that the bones which thou hast broken
may rejoice
…
Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me. Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free spirit.

As William repeated the seventeenth verse, ‘
Sacrificium Deo spiritus contribulatus: cor contritum et humiliatum, Deus, non despicies,
' John paused and looked up from the book at him. ‘Say it in your own mother tongue, William. Say it.'

‘The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit. A broken and contrite heart, oh God, wilt Thou not despise.
' William whispered the words, his eyes full of brimming tears now, hardly able to speak. He bent his head.

‘Do you believe that? Do you believe that word to us – to you?'

William hesitated. ‘I hope it is true. Oh God, I do hope it is true.'

‘Then shall we lift away some of the tarnish and accretions that time and life have gradually laid over the lamp of Christ in your soul? Shall we restore what you began with him?'

William raised his head, and it twisted John's heart with a sudden violence to encounter in his eyes the stubborn, brave child that had never grown up, never gone away, but inexplicably never quite given up either.

‘After me, then: Beloved Jesus,' said John; and obediently, William whispered the words: ‘My brother, my master, my friend… I have nothing to give thee but my troubled spirit… I love thee… I belong to thee… I put my trust in thee… Receive the sacrifice of this broken heart.'