Mystical Paths. Susan Howatch
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forget my impression that something was far out of alignment in his psyche, and this dislocation, hinting at a personality being eroded by the Dark, made me unwilling to seek him out by attending Marina’s parties. Declaring that I was wholly preoccupied with swotting for my finals I refused every Coterie invitation that came my way.
However the Dark seemed to be waiting for me wherever I went in those days. It was certainly waiting for me when I blazed off to Africa to work for the Christian Trail Scheme which encouraged young people to bring the skills of the advanced countries to small rural villages in the Third World.
I was in such a bad state after I got in my mess with the witch-doctor that I had to be sent home. I thought I could handle the bastard by performing a simple exorcism, but I was far, far out of my depth. He put a curse on me. I began to feel ill. I knew the illness was psychosomatic and idiotic, but that made no difference. I wilted. Then I panicked. I flew home thinking the plane would crash. My father had been driven to Heathrow airport to meet me by Martin, who was in the midst of making a new series of his TV comedy ‘Down at the Surgery’, but I barely saw Martin. I just staggered into my father’s arms and stuck there, once more transformed into the little boy, temporarily autistic, who had screamed in terror until his father had turned up to put things right.
As soon as I was alone with my father I said: ‘I’m never leaving you again, I can’t live without you being nearby to save me,’ and I began to sob. Total regression. Pathetic. I’m almost too ashamed to admit it, but I was so frightened that I couldn’t sleep at the house and had to camp at his cottage. Apart from the bathroom and the kitchen there was only one room but I slept in a sleeping-bag on the hearth with the cat. Whitby the Fourth, all furry warmth, exuded comfort. Funny how well animals can relate to humans. I stroked and stroked that cat so often that it was a wonder all his fur didn’t fall out. My father talked to me, prayed with me, helped me to be calm. Eventually the nightmares stopped and I no longer felt the Dark was trying to press through the huge cracks in my psyche. The cracks healed up, welded together by the Light which exuded steadily from my father.
‘No demon can withstand the power of Christ,’ said my father, repeating the words he had used long ago, and what he meant was that no dissociated mind can withstand the integrating power of the Living God whose spark lies deep in the core of the unconscious mind and who can not only heal the shattered ego but unify the entire personality.
‘Maybe you should forget about doing further voluntary work and go to the Theological College this autumn,’ said my father when I was better. I think he believed I’d meet my Father Darcy at the Theological College, but at that point my pride staged a resurrection and I said no, that would mean the witchdoctor had won some sort of victory, and no one, least of all an old bugger of a witch-doctor, was going to deflect me from my chosen course.
But I didn’t go far away again. The Mission for Seamen, scene of my next attempt at voluntary work, was fifty miles away in the port of Starmouth, but I had a car which enabled me to bolt for home on my days off. After that job too ended in chaos I moved even closer to my father, but I didn’t start work at the Starbridge Mental Hospital until 1966. It was in the summer of 1965, when I was at the Mission for Seamen, that Christian drowned in the English Channel off the Isle of Wight.
He had been sailing with Perry Palmer. Perry kept a boat at Bosham, near Chichester, and they had formed the habit that summer of sailing every weekend. The catastrophe was caused by a freak wave which had flung Christian overboard; the theory was that he had hit his head and lost consciousness before he had even entered the water, for he had apparently made no attempt to swim for survival. The incident was reported in the national press not because it was an unusual sailing accident but because any event touching the life of Marina Markhampton was judged to be fodder for the gossip columns.
The story ran its course. Eventually the tragedy was allowed to fade from the public consciousness and the newspapers stopped photographing Marina and Katie weeping into black handkerchiefs.
The body was never found.
VII
Life lurched on. I staggered from mess to mess until I was so unnerved that I did take a premature retirement from voluntary work after all. Then I promptly fell into that other mess when I performed the Bridey Murphy experiment on Debbie and couldn’t wake her from the trance. After that came the dead terms at Theological College culminating in the events of 1968 when I got engaged to Rosalind, found myself unable to stop bedding Tracy and sought help frantically but unsuccessfully from my formidable ‘Uncle’ Charles Ashworth, the Bishop of Starbridge. And finally, in that same spring of 1968, nearly three years after Christian’s death and five years after the Starbridge party where I had first met him, Marina arrived at Starrington Manor in a white Jaguar and asked to see me.
I was at home for the Easter vacation. That year Easter Sunday was not until the fourteenth of April, so even though March had finished there were still several days of Lent remaining. The Theological College at Starbridge aligned its terms with those of Oxford and Cambridge except in the summer; then the College slipped in a fourth term, but those who were due to be ordained on Trinity Sunday were allowed to skip this extra spell of labour and leave directly after ordination. I was heading for ordination and the third and final term of my second year.
On the morning of Marina’s arrival I was trying to follow the Bishop’s advice by praying for grace – the grace to be chaste while I waited for my trip to the altar – but praying in a conventional fashion (with words) didn’t seem to be getting me very far. Praying in words hardly ever did. Finally I decided to pray my way, which meant I lit a candle, sat cross-legged on the floor, stared into the flame, flipped the switch in my head and tuned in.
Sometimes when I prayed I began by reciting the mantra but usually it wasn’t necessary; other people might need a mantra in order to tune in, but I just flipped the switch. I tended to save the mantra for those times when I was overwrought and needed to calm myself down. Father Peters had originally taught me this technique after my mother died, and he favoured no one mantra but used various key phrases from the Bible. It was my father who always used the famous Orthodox prayer ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner’, and nowadays I followed his example. It’s pathetic that so many people turn to the East for meditative techniques nowadays, and one of the greatest failures of the Church in this century lies in the fact that the strong tradition of meditation in Christianity is so little known.
I never thought of reciting the mantra as praying, although it is. For me the real prayer came afterwards when the mantra had done its work and the conscious mind was relaxed, beyond words, in touch with the centre, soaking luxuriously in the Light. Father Peters had told me that if I was in an overstrained state I should stop after the recitation of the mantra had been completed because otherwise I ran the risk that dark forces in my unconscious mind might elbow aside the benign effects of the mantra and rise to the surface with unpleasant results. I was quite prepared to follow this advice but I couldn’t resist telling him that usually I didn’t need the mantra and could achieve the same effect just by flipping the switch in my head.
That was when Father Peters had warned me against Gnosticism which claimed, among other things, that only a spiritual élite with esoteric knowledge could attain salvation. He classed my act of flipping the switch as esoteric knowledge and said it was a psychic snare, fostered by the Devil, to make me think I was special. He said one must approach God through Christ; in this form of prayer saying a mantra which invoked Christ was the correct approach; with all my talk of the Light and the Dark I wasn’t sufficiently Christ-centred, but it was Christ in his humility who kept psychics like me on the rails, not Gnostic code-words, Gnostic élitism and that fatal Gnostic pride.
‘Well, of course as an Anglican-Benedictine monk he had to say that, no choice; he had to toe the orthodox line. But in my opinion I was quite sufficiently Christ-centred in my belief, and if God had given me a switch to flip in order to tune in to Him, why shouldn’t I flip it? And what was wrong with using code-words? Father Peters used code-words himself when he resorted to old-fashioned picture-language and talked of the Devil. One used code-words and symbols all the time when dealing with spiritual reality; it was the equivalent