The Final Retreat Read online

  Joseph Flynn is a middle-aged Catholic priest who finds himself at his bishop’s behest, on an eight-day silent retreat. The fusty, stale environment has little to offer but a desk, pen and paper, and ample time to make use of them. Filling page after page, he delves into his past, the loss of his vocation, his uncontrollable craving for sex, and the events which are destroying his life.

  Celebrated concert pianist and composer Stephen Hough unflinchingly explores these disturbing contradictions in this passionate and sophisticated novel.

  THE FINAL RETREAT

  _____________________________

  A NOVEL

  STEPHEN HOUGH

  The Final Retreat

  _____________________________

  A novel

  For Colin (1926-1982)

  a different kind of father

  PROLOGUE

  Manchester Telegraph

  17 th December 2010

  The body of 29-year-old Fr Chiwetel Okafor was discovered yesterday morning hanging from an electrical wire in his bedroom. A note in his handwriting was found and it is presumed that he committed suicide. There is no suspicion of foul play.

  Born in Lagos, Nigeria, he had been a supply priest for the Roman Catholic diocese of Altrincham since August 2008. He is survived by his parents and two younger sisters.

  I had to do this. I’m so sorry for

  everything. Please forgive me.

  God forgive me.

  Chiwetel

  From: Rev. Luke Tremont

  To: Bishop Bernard Smith

  Subject:

  Date: 28 October 2010 2:17 PM

  _____________________________

  Feast Of SS Simon and Jude

  Your Grace,

  I had a phone call earlier today from Fr Joseph Flynn of Sacred Heart Church, Sale. He asked to see you on a matter of extreme urgency. You have a cancellation on Monday at 4 pm so I’ve taken the liberty of giving him that appointment.

  In Jesus, Mary and Joseph,

  Fr Luke

  Secretary to the Bishop of Altrincham

  From: Bishop Bernard Smith

  To : Rev. Joseph Flynn

  Subject:

  Date: 1 November 2010 8:56 pm

  _____________________________

  Solemnity Of All Saints

  Dear Fr Joseph,

  Thank you for visiting me this afternoon and for explaining your situation. As I said then, you now have to put your life completely into the hands of God, trusting Him to guide you along what seems like an impossible path.

  I have spoken to Craigbourne and they can indeed find a place for you on their eight-day silent retreat beginning on the 8th, a week from today. I’m very pleased that you’ve agreed to do this at such short notice because I think it will help you to focus on the things that matter and to see more clearly what the next steps should be. An Individually Guided Retreat is a very free affair. Your spiritual director will visit you each morning and suggest points for reflection and meditation that day, and after that you’re on your own. You should spend the day in silence, allowing the Holy Spirit to speak to you. Don’t read too much but do go for some nice long walks in Craigbourne’s lovely grounds. Let the emptiness fill you and cleanse you. God is there.

  One thing I would encourage you to do whilst you’re there is to keep a notebook jotting down thoughts as they come to you. This can be a good way to focus your mind on how your relationship with God has changed over the years. Treat it almost like an autobiography. Go deep into the beginnings of your vocation, what made you want to follow the call to the priesthood in the first place, and what keeps you a priest now.

  God is closer to us than we are to ourselves. He is on your side — and so am I. Whatever happens with this blackmail business I am here to support you in prayer and with my friendship.

  In Christ,

  +Bernard

  THE NOTEBOOKS

  1 Arrival

  ______________________

  God, I’m dreading this week.

  I drove here yesterday in the rain, south on the motorway then finally turning off into one of Cheshire’s dripping village lanes. The loneliness of a priest is not only experienced when he’s at home, when his rooms creak in familiar silence, when lack of companionship reduces him to an eccentric conversation with himself; no, on drives like this, past houses aglow with families, blazing hearths on early evenings, banter and argument within, toys tripped over on worn rugs, cogs in domestic wheels turning with ease behind the semi-privacy of partly-drawn curtains — this is when the ache gnaws.

  After a few miles, through the mist of condensation and the squeaking see-saw of the windscreen wipers, I saw the signpost for Craigbourne and turned sharp right into the long, tree-lined driveway. The path was pitted and puddled and the grounds unkempt, not in the way an old tweed suit has settled into confident shabbiness but with a weariness of spirit. This was a property where the gardener was out of his depth, had bitten off more than he could chew, had given up in exhaustion and handed the keys back to Nature in defeat.

  As I drove up to the front it was almost dark except for some lights coming from the windows of the chapel on the left wing of the house. I was late. I found a parking space round the side, took my bags out of the boot, then walked back quickly in the rain to the main door, pushing it open with a sodden shoe. We were all meant to have arrived in the early afternoon for a brief conference with the spiritual director and then to have begun the retreat proper with Vespers. But Vespers was obviously now well underway, judging by the sound of singing as I stepped inside the entrance hall. I lingered for a moment, listening to the out-of-tune voices in the distance. It seemed as if they were coming from a foreign land and that I was an alien landed on its shore. I longed just to go to my room and lie down but I didn’t know where to go or to which room I had been assigned, so I put down my bags next to a carved oak ottoman and walked reluctantly in the direction of the music.

  I don’t want to be here. I almost cancelled at the last moment but I know I have to go through with it. My bishop wants me here and I need to have him on my side. I’ve no idea how I can continue as a priest and if I don’t leave the priesthood of my own volition I may end up being defrocked anyway, sent to a monastery somewhere to live a life of penance and reform.

  ‘I rejoiced when I heard them say: Let us go to the house of the Lord.’ I sat down at the back and looked around the badly-lit chapel as the psalm was being chanted. It was an ugly, dreary space, small for a church but spacious considering that it had originally been a ballroom in a private residence. Craigbourne began its life as a grand country house, abandoned after the Second World War when servants were scarce but it was impossible to get along without them. It opened as a retreat centre in the early 1970s and was now something of a tribute to that era — the boxy furnishings in the sanctuary, a garish orange rug under the wooden altar which in turn was draped with a cream polyester cloth stencilled with the crude image of a dove and the word ‘Peace’ in floaty, grey lettering. There were also a few signs of a later conservatism. A lurid reproduction of the Polish Sister Faustina’s Divine Mercy image hung in a cheap gilt frame, the red stream from the heart of Christ almost fluorescent in its vivid downward flow. And next to it was her champion: John Paul II as a vigorous, newly-elected Pope, his handsome Slavic features now all faded in the pitted, bubbled photo.

  There was something really depressing about this room, once all a-rustle with silk and satin but now housing the tat of cheap statues and power-saving bulbs hanging from vulgar chandeliers. Catholics have terrible taste. They talk about the glories of Michelangelo and Palestrina and Dante but true Catholic style is nylon doilies and plastic rosaries and flickering electric candles. And don’t let
them reply that in this very simplicity flourish the pious sentiments of the poor and the uneducated, and that amongst all of this is true sanctity. Amongst all of this is true superstition. Plain and simple. Bad taste and bad theology. But who am I to talk? A plastic priest, a nylon hypocrite. There were no breviaries in the pew where I was sitting so I couldn’t join in. Instead I just sat there in the shadows, thinking, musing, dozing. How often have my closed eyes been a snooze rather than a prayer.

  Vespers ended and we all stood up to leave. Hello John, hello Bill, hello Frank. Priests’ fraternity. Thick as thieves. We moved to the dining room where soon the conversation petered out. We’d temporarily forgotten that we were meant to be silent on this retreat. Tongues reduced to murmuring then to silence as we took our seats. Bowls of thin soup arrived, too hot to taste, and white, gluey bread rolls. Cheap red wine from a screw-top bottle was poured into thick glass tumblers. It was now completely dark outside and still raining.

  2 Craigbourne

  ______________________

  Craigbourne was built by the wealthy Manchester merchant Sir Roger Castleton and donated by his grandson to the diocese of Altrincham in the 1960s. The cotton mills of Lancashire had paid for its bricks, and the strident screams of the shuttles which had shunted so efficiently and lucratively for Sir Roger were a chilling contrast to this building’s majestic, tranquil repose on the outermost skirts of one of Cheshire’s quainter parishes. The factories’ stone floors thick with dust and spittle. Threadbare clothes on broken backs. Weary faces lined with grime. Filthy ears shot to deafness. Sweat. Stress. Short, cramped lives. And yet here, a few safe, oblivious miles away, Craigbourne’s mahogany banisters, resting atop a line of portly, gouty spindles, curled up like two thick eyebrows from the wide entrance hall to the airy bedrooms above, their polished wooden floors cushioned with Persian rugs under soft-sinking feather beds. ‘Remember man that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.’ Every day was Lent at the mill; no day passed at Craigbourne in those high-noon years without a five-course dinner.

  I suppose in its time, the late Victorian apex of expansion (‘wider still and wider’, whether girth, dado or Empire), it had had a certain eccentric style. But it needed the bustle of servants and the commanding presence of the patriarch, with his mutton-chop whiskers and his drooping gold watch-chain, to reach its true theatrical potential. Since its acquisition by the diocese of Altrincham Craigbourne has combined the look of an Ikea showroom — badly assembled flatpack furniture with fake brass handles slightly askew and often loose — with the ugliest leftovers from an antique shop’s clearance sale. Every room here contains a mishmash of styles, all of them hideous: lamps which shed no light and are chipped at the base; thin, too-short curtains which don’t quite meet in the middle; sagging, foam-filled sofas; a teak Weimar upright piano; a nest or two of formica coffee tables. And mirrors. So many mirrors at Craigbourne. In every room large carbuncular frames sprayed with thick gold paint surround modern, Windex-clear glass, reflective eyes amplifying the ghastliness within, every piece of doss-house furniture appearing twice, with a scowl.

  The bedrooms today — there are about twenty-five in plasterboard divisions carved out of the original layout — are at least clean and simple. One narrow, single (of course) bed; a bedside table with a light and (of course) a Bible; a rickety wardrobe on the opposite wall next to a sink with just enough space on its rim for a credit-card-size cake of soap; there too a plastic beaker, for drinking, toothbrush or perhaps even teeth; and finally a desk near the window at which I’m writing these notes. No personal computers are allowed but this is a good idea on a silent retreat when days are meant to be spent in meditation. Even a sleeping hard-drive, needing only the twitch of a mouse to awaken it to a billion windows, would be death to contemplation.

  It’s been raining pretty much constantly since I arrived yesterday so I’ve decided just to stay in my room and fill these pages — I brought a stack of notebooks along with me. At home, except for the odd poem jotted down on the back of a parish newsletter, I usually write at the computer. But typing makes me stiff and conventional and I’m finding here that handwriting is liberating. The flow on the page becomes the flow of memory and ideas — yes, it’s that way round, craft before art. Not dissimilar to the spiritual life itself: start to act out your faith and you will strengthen your faith... until, like me, you lose your faith.

  3 Father Neville

  ______________________

  So every morning at 9:30 sharp (how terribly sharp) a firm knock at the door of my room. Not a knock when flesh muffles the impact, but a knock with the bone of the joint, aimed as carefully as a cue against a billiard ball. A man wearing an immaculate cassock walks in.

  Father Neville is remarkably thin. Utterly sexless. Scrubbed to the bone. Shaved to the skin. Short hair parted with razor-blade precision, a clean pink line from forehead to crown. He sits down in a hard chair after entering my room, never leaning back (small mortifications are the best kind) but with his spine as rigid and unyielding as the back of the chair in which he sits. Always a smile, but from teeth not eyes. Utterly joyless but with a kind of earnest energy, a slap on the back for one who actually needs an arm for support. He has an unspoken impatience at my torpor — I can see it in the jerk of his neck, as if he wanted to throttle me to sanctity.

  I must confess I took an instant dislike to him, my shepherd guide for those twenty tight-lipped minutes a day. Real saints are unaware that they are saints but Father Neville is a spiritual stockbroker carefully analyzing his investments: hours of prayer, visits to the Blessed Sacrament, Novenas, the Corporal Works of Mercy, the Spiritual Works of Mercy — all sturdy rungs on the ladder to holiness. And mortifications... oh, they deserve a new paragraph.

  Sitting straight in the chair is only the beginning. Sleeping on the floor, taking cold showers, food deprivation. I watched him at mealtimes taking the smallest portions. As if an invalid he would nibble on scraps held on the narrow prongs of his fork, or take a mere graze of sponge and custard to his mouth. Always butterless bread, always milkless tea. And always under his cassock next to his skinny ribcage (how uncurious sexually I was) there was the hair-shirt. I know about this because he told me: ‘A shortcut to intimacy with God, Father. Focuses the soul on prayer. All priests should wear one for at least an hour a day.’ I’m sure he never took his off. And then, alongside all of this, the scourge. The knotted cords lashed against the body to destroy the heat of the flesh through the heat of the flaying. ‘This must only be done under guidance from a spiritual director, Father,’ he said to me, hinting that the slouching, soporific priest sitting before him was not ready for such heroism. I shudder as I imagine the railroad gashes under his cassock, his own spiritual director urging him on to ever greater levels of pain and sacrifice ‘in imitation of our Lord and for the benefit of souls.’ I wince at the thought of the encrusted red welts weeping, waiting to be awakened into further flow.

  I don’t know how much he knows about me from my bishop (probably the minimum, ‘a priest facing challenges in his spiritual life’ perhaps, or ‘issues with the sixth commandment’) but it is clear that Father Neville has already snuffed out illicit passion in his own life with great success, as if kneeling next to a bathtub squashing flat the spiders which crawl up the side. His blind, ruthless confidence in his (the Church’s) views combined with a disdain for those who fall short of their demands is toxic: ‘Love the sinner, hate the sin’, as long as the sin is abandoned within his timetable and under his wise counsel. In fact it’s more ‘Love the sinner if he gives up the sin’, love as a reward for good behaviour, by which point the sinner will have become another prig, another prude.

  ‘A spoonful of honey attracts more flies than a barrel full of vinegar,’ said St Francis de Sales, but Father Neville adds vinegar to all his jars of honey. Every word he speaks tastes bitter to me. Although I’m sure he means to encourage he ends up bullying, and his rigidity makes it impossible for me to welcom
e even the inspiring things he might have to say. My spirit plunges down, empty, sucked dry, and from the bottom of the pit I look up in a breathless panic and see only that joyless smile and those clear, grey eyes: ‘Just have trust’, a last muffled phrase as the lid to the airless chamber snaps shut.

  Wristwatch always in view (strapped around a surprisingly fecund fuzz of hair) he leaves after exactly twenty minutes —punctuality is another mortification. Did I notice the slightest limp as he walked towards the door today? Did he want me to know that under the outward cheer he too was suffering a little for the salvation of souls, for the salvation of my soul?

  4 Lazarus

  ______________________

  ‘How is your prayer life?’ Did you like my answer, Father Neville? Ha, I’m no fool. I’ve read my Tanquerey, my Scaramelli. I know my Purgative Way from my Illuminative Way. I’ve splashed around in shallower waters too — Merton, Nouwen, Pennington, Keating. I know the lingo. I could write a book on prayer. I’ve spent years on my knees, eyes closed, heart reaching out for something (trying to pray is praying, they say), but I don’t think I’ve ever really prayed in my life. The practice of my faith has fallen away so easily in these past years, like cheap wrapping paper torn loose on an awkwardly-shaped gift. I convinced you, didn’t I, that I was here to intensify a spiritual life which already has prayer at its centre? Did the bishop not fill you in? I’ve been sent on this retreat because I’ve been a naughty boy. He is worried about me, my indiscretions, my depression, my addiction, my impending disgrace.