I’ve only seen my father four times since then. Our meetings have always been awkward and have left me feeling unhappy. I haven’t seen him for two years now, and I don’t want to.
I stayed with Mum for six months after Dad left. Then she made friends with an Australian working near where we lived. Soon he came to stay with us. I was nearly ten by that time and reacted badly. I went through a patch of throwing tantrums and stealing things—money from Mum’s purse, even shoplifting in the end. I was never caught, but Mum found out and we had a row of our own that was a mini-version of her rows with Dad.
After that I deliberately made myself as unpleasant as I could, finding ways to annoy them both and smashing things accidentally on purpose, and especially spoiling any occasion when they were enjoying themselves. I won’t go into details. Maybe I do feel a bit guilty and ashamed of this.
It was during one of these upsets that Grandad suggested I go and live with him for a while to give us all a chance to sort ourselves out. Three months later, Mum announced she was going to Australia with Bill, her friend, to live, and said I could go with them if I wanted. I said no, and she didn’t try to persuade me. I still think she was pleased and didn’t want to change my mind. Grandad said he was happy to have me go on living with him. And that was that. Mum went and I haven’t seen her since. For a time, she wrote every month. Now less and less often. I stopped writing to her ages ago.
End of story. Except that I haven’t said what it is I feel guilty about not doing. I feel guilty that I didn’t ask for my supper before Dad got in on the night of the Big Row. If I had, I would have been sitting at the table when he came in. They would have had their row, but he would never have pulled the cloth off the table with me sitting there. And if he hadn’t done that, they would never have fought as they did, between themselves and over me, which is the most demeaning, painful thing that has ever happened to me in my life. And if they hadn’t fought like that, they would probably have stayed together.
What I mean, I suppose, is that somehow I feel responsible for their breakup. That’s ridiculous, I know. But, it seems to me, that’s the truth about guilt. It’s irrational, ridiculous, a terrible waste of yourself, like a kind of sickness. It’s a contamination. We should discover how to get rid of it, as we would if it were an evil disease.
I’ve only a few minutes of my hour-and-a-half left. I didn’t intend going on so long about this one event in my life. Usually, I try not to tell people what happened. It embarrasses me. And compared with what some kids have had to put up with it isn’t anything, so who cares?
I guess I should also confess that I’ve done pretty much the sort of things everybody else seems to do. I’ve told lies, all of them pathetic. I’ve hated people and wished that ghastly things would happen to them. I’ve felt superior to some people and secretly envied others. I had a sexy pash on a friend when I was about fourteen, then decided I preferred girls, lusted after various ones, who just thinking about would make me masturbate in desperation at not being able to have them, till a girl called Melissa did a sort of routine job on me one evening when I think she couldn’t find anybody better to make out with.
But I don’t feel any guilt about these things. They seem so pitifully ordinary. I think what a lot of people call guilt is just fear of the consequences when they’ve done something they shouldn’t. They’re guilty in the sense that they did it. But they don’t feel remorse. Which is what I think guilt really means: remorse that you’ve done something, whether it’s ‘officially’ wrong or not. Remorse means regret for doing it and being determined not to do it again. Not because of what other people might think, but because you feel what you’ve done has diminished you in your own eyes, made you feel less and worse than you want to be.
So I guess my worst confession—my only confession really—is that I feel less than I want to be. Not some of the time, but most of the time. And I regret that. Want to do something about it.
End of time.
†
NIK’S NOTEBOOK:
Notes on the crucifiction
Background
1) There was nothing unusual about crucifiction. It was used for almost a thousand years, first by the Phoenicians, then by the Romans. It was abolished by the Emperor Constantine, first ‘Christian’ emperor of Rome (there’s a laugh!) in AD 337.
2) The Romans were the real experts. They improved the method until they could cause the maximum of pain, and could regulate the time it took for the victim to die—shorter or longer.
3) After the defeat of the Spartacus rebellion in 71 BC, six and a half thousand crosses lined the Appian Way from Cappadocia to Rome, each bearing a rebel.
4) So wearing a cross round your neck to show you are a Christian, or just as a nice piece of jewellery, is like wearing a gallows or a guillotine or an electric chair or, more likely these days, a hypodermic needle. You’re wearing an instrument of torture and death.
How was it done?
5) Christ’s cross was T shaped (called crux commissa), not like the one usually shown in churches and paintings.
6) After his interrogation he did not carry all the cross to the rubbish tip of Golgotha, but only the cross-piece (patibulum) made of cypress wood, weighing 75–125 lb. Carrying this for approx. 750 m. through narrow, crowded streets from Pontius Pilate’s praetorium, where he was tried, to the execution site on Golgotha was torture. He was also flogged at the same time, just to make life more fun for him.
7) The nails used to pin him to the cross were not driven through his palms, but through his wrists. The palms would not have supported the weight of the body. The nails would have torn the hands in two down through the fingers. 20 cm. nails with blunt ends were hammered into the wrist through the gap between the wrist-bones. This was extremely painful. When going through, the nails impaled the median nerve. This caused the thumb to bend across the hand so strongly that it cut into the flesh of the palm, causing worse pain still.
8) The cross-piece, with the victim’s hands nailed to it, was then hoisted up and attached to the upright (stipes), which was already waiting, planted in the ground.
9) The victim’s knees were then bent upwards. The sole of one foot was pressed flat against the upright. A 20 cm. bluntended nail was hammered through the foot, between the second and third toe-bones (metatarsals). When the nail came out, the other leg was bent until the nail could be hammered through the second foot and on into the wood.
10) The victim was left to hang from the three nails. There was very little loss of blood, but the pain was unendurable.
11) To prolong the death struggle, the executioners could:
a) tie the arms with ropes, thus easing the weight on the wrists and reducing the pain;
b) a ‘saddle’ or seat could be fixed to the upright where the victim could rest on it, thus easing the strain on the feet, allowing the death to take up to three days.
12) To shorten the struggle they smashed the victim’s legs so that he could not push up on his feet and ease the strain on the wrists and arms.
13) The downward strain on the arms and shoulders and chest prevented the victim from breathing properly. He began to stifle, and the muscles therefore suffered agonizing cramp from lack of oxygen. If this was unrelieved, the victim suffocated in less than an hour.
14) But with his legs bent and his feet nailed, he could push up and relieve the pain in his chest. For a while he could breathe more easily. But the pain of his full weight resting on the nails in his feet was so fierce that he soon slumped down again.
15) The victim’s temperature rose rapidly and very high because of the pain and exertion. Sweat poured from his body. This caused excruciating thirst.
16) The victim went on alternately hanging down from his wrists and pushing up on his feet until he could take no more, gave up and died. In Christ’s case this took six hours.
17) Crucifiction is thought to be the cruellest form of torture and death known to the human race.
N
IK’S LETTERS:
Dear Julie: It’s afternoon Reading Time. I’m supposed to be reading a book by Simone Weil that Bro. K. gave me. She’s good. You ought to try her when you’re fit again. But I’m breaking the rules—sin, sin!—in order to write this because I want to post it when I go out later on.
I’m in my cell, looking over the park. It’s a lovely sunny evening. There’s a weird old woman standing on the other side of the pond feeding the ducks. She’s dressed in layers and layers of clothes that are all too big for her, and wrinkled woollen stockings and old football boots. And she’s singing. My window’s half open and I can just hear her. I think she’s singing Over the Rainbow.
My job this morning was helping Bro. K. paint the woodwork at the back of the house—kitchen window frames, back door, etc. While we worked, he talked to me about my Confession. I’ve noticed he usually tries to find a manual job to do while we talk. He says it makes it easier for people to say things that might be embarrassing if you’re sitting in chairs with nothing else to do but look at each other. I guess this is the monastic equivalent of the psychiatrist’s couch. Maybe shrinks ought to take their patients gardening while they bare their psyches. Weeding the garden while weeding their minds.
Anyway, Bro. K.’s technique helps me. Not that either of us did any psyche or soul-baring. I’m beginning to see that what matters is not how much is said, but what is said.
Kit quizzed me about my parents, and told me a bit about his own. (His dad was a shop assistant all his life and lived for his family—two sons and a daughter—and for his fishing— fishing—fanatical, apparently. His mum was a home help. Used to take Kit with her sometimes when he was little. He told some creasingly funny stories of things that had happened on these visits. His mum was also devoted to the church in what Kit called an ‘Oh my God!’ sort of way. He said it was from his mum that he caught the religious bug and learned not to take it too seriously.)
But what he really wanted to say to me was that he thinks that what happened with my parents caused me to lose my trust in people, especially people who get close to me. And not just my trust in other people, but in myself as well. Belief, he said, is partly to do with trust. For a start, you have to trust your inner instincts, your ‘inner faith’, that there’s more to life than meets the eye, if you’re going to decide for belief rather than against it. If you don’t even trust yourself, never mind others, you find it hard to ‘put your faith in’ anyone or anything. You tend to believe only in what you can know through your senses—what you can see, touch, taste, smell, hear. And even then you doubt, because so often your senses mislead you. Poison fruit can look beautiful and taste sweet but . . .
He didn’t make a song and dance out of saying this, just said it and then chatted on about something else. But I knew he was right. I didn’t realize till I wrote about it yesterday how hurt I still feel about the breakup. And that hurt does invade my life still. I guess everybody has a deep hurt inside them. Most people probably have much worse hurts than mine. But I guess, whatever your hurt is, you have to heal it somehow.
Kit has been giving me passages from the Gospels about the crucifiction to meditate on. I objected at first, but he told me to think of them simply as a story of what happened to an ordinary man, and to try and sort out what it meant and how it had happened and why, and what he did about his hurt. Simone Weil is interesting about this, though not easy. So my Silence times today have been spent trying to concentrate on that.
Which reminds me to tell you that I’m really hooked on Silence. Can’t wait for the bell! And I’m gradually learning how to control my mind then. If I start by going straight to chapel and spend the first half hour there, working myself in, then I can go to my cell or the library or even into the park and keep myself concentrated. Like I was enclosed in a Silence capsule. A Silence Support Vessel—an SSV! I still get plenty of distractions, of course. In fact, I’m more often distracted than concentrated. But I’m slowly getting my mind organized towards concentration, rather than away from it.
Does this make sense? Which is another thing I’m discovering, by the way. That the usual way of explaining things doesn’t seem to work when you’re talking about what goes on in your mind when you’re in the SSV. The words don’t seem right. Inadequate, ridiculous. Banal was Kit’s word, when I tried to explain this to him. They don’t have enough meaning. Enough go. Enough energy.
During Silence, especially in chapel in the early morning, when it’s very beautiful with the rising sun streaming into the room from the end window, I don’t find myself thinking in words like these I’m writing now. I’d think of them as a distraction. They’d irritate me and I’d try and shut them up.
The words I think in when I’m in Silence come—I’m not sure how to put this—in ‘clusters’. More like they were objects than individual words. Or, maybe it’s better to say the words in the clusters seem to make an object, something three-dimensional, and mobile. They come out of the Silence and go into the Silence and are made of the Silence.
Does that make sense? I think it might to you because I think you must have experienced it. I’d not dare say it to anyone else because they’d think I was crackers. I did say it to Kit, though. As my Retreat director, I have to describe to him what I think is happening to me. He says what I’m describing is what he calls prayer. I haven’t agreed to this yet because I still think of prayer as being addressed to another person like myself only more powerful—a God. Kit says I’ve got to grow out of being crude.
After telling him this, Kit set me another writing job. He asked me to try and write down a ‘cluster’ so we could look at it and discuss it together. I didn’t think I could do this, because words on paper aren’t three-dimensional and don’t ‘make’ an object, do they? And apart from this, the clusters slip away as soon as my mind is distracted. Trying to write them down would certainly be a distraction. It’s almost as if Silence Thoughts are so elusive that they vanish the split second I take the eyes of my mind off them. Just a slight movement of my body, a blink even, and they’re gone.
Which is something else Kit is helping me think about: how I use my body during Meditation. He’s making me attend to my posture and position and the effect these have on my concentration and the thoughts that happen.
I start by sitting relaxed but squarely and upright. Not rigid or uncomfortable, but not slumped. When I’ve got myself settled and going—quiet inside and ready—I kneel, supporting myself with my forearms on the prayer bench in front of me. Upright but relaxed again. I keep my eyes closed, or look at the words of the text I’m meditating on. But I’m finding that when you’re concentrated, your eyes go blind even though you’re looking at something or even someone, which I now realize explains that funny absent stare I noticed when I first came here and Silence was rung. People who’ve learned the trick, like Kit, can kind of switch off from seeing what’s around them and switch on to seeing their interior Silence Thoughts in one go.
When my knees tire of kneeling, which is fairly soon compared with the experts, I either sit back on my haunches for a while or sit up in my seat again.
It’s when I’m kneeling upright that I’m finding the clusters appear. One came this evening so I made an effort to remember it so I could write it down later. It didn’t quite work. I lost the ‘essence’ of it—the energy of it. But maybe it’s a start, like learning how to make a photograph with a poor camera and doing your own processing when you’ve never done any before and don’t really know how. You’re bound to get a hopeless picture. And it is only a picture, not the real thing.
So here’s my badly shot, badly processed picture of today’s Cluster smuggled from the S S V!
This is how it happened. I was feeling tired by the time the 5.30 Silence started. I sat in chapel, not able to concentrate very well, my mind drifting. I tried kneeling, but wasn’t getting far, mostly just enjoying the quiet and the calm and the view of the park through the window. After a while I looked at my watch, be
cause I was feeling hungry and hoping that Evensong and supper weren’t too far off. But not as much time had passed as I expected, so I held my watch to my ear to make sure it was still going. It was. I tried giving myself up to Silence again, and after a minute or so, the Cluster came.
Tick-Tock
(or: Death as a Way of Life)
Clocks tick
regularly turning time is intensity
Earth time of experience
short or long in density
How time seems I am
for me
now fast
now slow
is not
clock-time never changes I am that
I have been
For me
yesterday is sometimes
further off than
last year Yet there is death
and sometimes death in time
ten years ago conspires
is more present but death
than last week is not me
Time is what I am
That which I
have been most Hell is time
not unending endings
that which clocks everlasting deaths
regularly ticking
tell
I must be What God is waits in time
for an end
Time is all God is in eternity
Now heaven
where else being timeless
can I live in these words
†
NIK’S NOTEBOOK:
Notes on the crucifiction
On Good Friday 1983 three people were nailed to wooden crosses in Manila as their way of celebrating the Crucifiction.
Manio Castro, aged 31, and Bob Velez, aged 41, remained on their crosses for five minutes after the nails had been hammered through their hands.
Luciana Reyes, aged 24, was nailed to her cross for the eighth year running in Bulcana province. 10,000 pilgrims and tourists watched.