Things My Father Never Told Me

How old was I? Eleven or twelve? I can't recall. What I do remember is that I did something that brought my father to tears - the only time in my whole life I saw him cry.

What I did was not very terrible, and I meant no harm. I'd gone to the National Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths, then in Somerset House on the Strand, to look up my family's history. A bit precocious, you may say. But it was so easy in those days. You simply turned up there and pulled the relevant registers off the shelves. My mother was German-born, so Somerset House was no help as far as her own family was concerned. Anyway, it was my father's side of the family I wanted to explore to see what I could find out about my surname.

I looked up my father's birth date. To my surprise he had no entry. Someone else called Sadgrove was listed as having been born that day, but not with Christian names I recognised. I should have drawn the obvious conclusion and kept quiet about what I'd seen, but things aren't always obvious to a boy of that age, and I was not gifted with tact. I went home and blurted it all out to my father. I was dismayed at his reaction. He took a while to tell me the story of how he had changed his given name by deed poll on reaching adulthood. It wasn't the name in itself, rather the memories it conjured up of how he had been relentlessly bullied as a youngster. Whenever he heard himself called by name, it brought back the vilification, cruelty and scorn he'd been subject to in school days - this was how he put it. He didn't go into details. Then he turned away and wept. And I stood there silent and numb, helpless before these sluice-gates of memory and emotion that I'd unwittingly opened up. It was a defining experience of my life.

I revisit that scene often, reliving the pain of unintended disclosure. I've thought about it on this Fathers' Day. I don't mean my own discomfort that afternoon, for it was nothing compared to my father's terrible grief. What I glimpsed for the first time was how abuse - which bullying always is - has effects on victims that last a lifetime. My father had climbed clear of his childhood, had worked hard, made a success of his life, married and had children. And now, without intending to, I'd uncovered what had lain undisturbed for decades. I was shaken by the capacity of historic wounds to haunt, and hurt, an adult man so many years later. And by my own part in it, even though I was the occasion not the cause. How could I begin to understand? I'm not sure I understand it even now more than half a century later.

As I look back to my own childhood on this Fathers' Day, my memories are of how happy it was. My father played a big part in that. He enjoyed the company of children - I saw later on in life how good he was as a grandparent to my own children. As a three year old he was taking me for walks among the silver birch trees of Petts Wood, teaching me to ride my tricycle and pointing out the Southern Electric "green trains" that ran beneath a bridge we had to cross on the way while I peered down between the girders. We played together in the sand pit in the garden. He built a layout for my Hornby clockwork "O" gauge model railway. One Christmas when I was seven, my parents gave me an 18 inch pavement bike. It had only one brake which failed at the top of Muswell Hill. I can feel even now the terror of wheels beneath me sliding out of control and gathering speed. The steep hill plunged down before me like a cliff. "Steer into those trees!" my father yelled, and I could hear the panic in his voice; "steer left and into those trees!" I did, and have always believed that he saved my life that day.

Perhaps I'm right to regard that visit to Somerset House as marking the end of childhood, or at any rate as representing an important rite of passage. For it showed me for the first time that my father was a vulnerable human being who had had a troubled past. It wasn't that up to then our relationship had been unalloyed bliss. Mine had been a middle-class upbringing like most others with its ups and downs, the good times and the not so good, the fallings-out and reconciliations that make up normal family life. But never had the raw humanity of either of my parents been exposed in the way it was that day. I saw a wound that I guessed would never fully heal. And I was not ready for it, not yet.

Psychoanalytic theory teaches us how important the moment is when we realise that our parents are flawed human beings like us. It's a real threshold in our growing up, a necessary step towards adulthood to recognise that for all that they have given us, they are not the omnipotent, infallible beings we believed them to be in our infancy. You would have to ask my own children at what point my own brokenness and fallibility became clear to them, when they learned that I could never be the perfect father, though I could still aspire (and hope) to be the "good-enough parent" they would always need me to be. I knew that I did not love my father any the less for what I had found out, indeed, I believed I would respect him for being candid with me about it. I also knew that he would not love me any the less for discovering it. How did I know? Because, I think, the foundations had been laid by a good-enough father that could bear the burden of what subsequently came to light. And when in adolescence, family relationships became more complicated, the memory of that event proved stabilising and strangely reassuring.

I once wrote a book* that explored stories in Genesis and Exodus about sons who were "lost" for various reasons. Abel, for example, who was murdered by his brother, and Ishmael who was banished to the desert by his father; and Isaac who was nearly offered up as a sacrifice, and Joseph who was exiled to Egypt out of envy, and others. Among the characters who populate these stories are all-too-many broken, wayward, self-serving fathers who paint an unlovely picture of humanity at its most compromised. Immersing myself in those texts got me thinking hard about my own personal history as a father to one man and a son to another. (You'll forgive the non-inclusive language, but biblical masculinities were central to the theme of the book.) The controlling narrative throughout was the parable of the Prodigal Son. Pondering that marvellous story made me ask the questions, in what ways have I been the prodigal "lost" son needing to be welcomed home and forgiven, and how in turn could I be that loving father towards my own children?

On Fathers' Day, I want to give thanks for and honour the memory of my father to whom I owe the gift of being alive, and to whose "good-enough" parenting in the critical years of childhood my adult self owes so much. As for the father I have been in turn for more than forty years now, I pay tribute to my four children whose capacity for understanding and forgiveness is one of the miracles of family life. That loving father in the parable is the inspiration for all of us who are lucky enough to be fathers. And all of us in every relationship in which others look to us for protection, kindness and care. For he shows us what God must be like, the Father who loves his creation and every living thing, who longs to welcome us home; and who when we make the journey back from our far country comes running to meet us.

********
The image at the top of this blog is a medieval wall-painting in a church in Budapest that shows God the loving Father listening to his Son's prayer of agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. Fathers' Day seemed a good occasion on which to share it.

*Lost Sons: God's long search for humanity, SPCK 2012.

On Reading "The Diary of a Country Priest"

I've just finished reading this remarkable book. I've been deeply struck by it. I imagined I'd read it before, decades ago, but I now don't think I can have done.

For instance, I'd long imagined it was the real diary of a real country priest living in nineteenth century France. In fact it's a novel by the twentieth century writer Georges Bernanos who died seventy years ago this year. Its imagined depiction of parish life in the north of France between the wars won him the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française. In 1950 it was named one of the twelve best novels in French published between 1900 and 1950.

I guess the reason it's so famous is the sheer vividness with which the author enters into the life of an impoverished catholic priest. You would have to have been a fervent believer to have written it. Not so much for the passages of theological and philosophical speculation about, say, heaven and hell, or social hierarchy in the countryside, or the nature of sin, but for the light Bernanos shines on the everyday dealings of a priest with his parishioners, his parish and his fellow clergy. And for the inspired guesswork (or maybe I mean detective work?) with which he tries to get inside the mind and soul of a character you speculate he has become intensely fond of. Does the novel represent a vocation Bernanos might once have had? 

What I love about the book is its sense of parish. Early on, the country priest muses on the importance of loving your parish. Just three months today since my appointment to this parish. This morning I prayed hard for my parish, my poor parish, my first and perhaps my last. My parish! The words can't even be spoken without a kind of soaring love....I know that my parish is a reality, that we belong to each other for all eternity; it is not a mere administrative fiction but a living cell of the everlasting church. But if only the good God would open my eyes and unseal my ears so that I might behold the face of my parish and hear its voice....The look in its eyes would be the eyes of all Christianity, of all parishes - perhaps of the poor human race itself.

I found that an arresting passage, given our current preoccupations about the future of the parish system in the Church of England. The words seem chosen carefully. Bernanos could have said congregation or the faithful or the baptised. And maybe he's making all sorts of assumptions about his parish population (what Anglicans used to call "the charitable assumption" that presumes faith and principled motive on the part of those who seek the offices of the church). But I don't think he elides parish and the faithful. There's such a strong sense of sacred geography in the Diary, what Andrew Rumsey in his fine recent study Parish - an Anglican Theology of Place recognises as deeply embedded in our native traditions of public ministry.

Reading it, I was frequently reminded of a book I read in the 1980s while I was a parish priest in a rural market town. It's by Alan Ecclestone, A Staircase to Silence. A priest formed in the gritty realities of urban ministry, his remarkable books, all written in retirement, were the fruit of a rich lifelong experience of “parish” in just such worlds that Bernanos’ curé inhabited. It's not too much to say that Staircase turned round my entire attitude to parish ministry with the idea of which - I freely acknowledge - I was struggling at the time. His book is a study of another Frenchman and older contemporary of Bernanos, the poet and man of letters Charles Péguy. A chapter I recall being much influenced by was one entitled Mes Vieilles Paroisses Francaises. I need to read it again (was it there that I read about how, on a French parish festival, Péguy playfully imagined that Joan of Arc or Theresa of Lisieux had only just left the party a moment ago?). Péguy was writing about the corn fields of the Beauce across which you see the distant spires of Chartres Cathedral - but his spirit pervades Bernanos' world too. New bishops and incumbents could not do better than read all these books (Bernanos, Rumsey and Ecclestone) and ponder them at a time when the Church of England is putting every egg in the basket of growing congregations through project-based evangelism and at risk of starving traditional parochial ministry of sorely-needed funds in the process.

Back to the Diary. The central section focuses on a long and difficult pastoral encounter the priest has with an influential female parishioner. You feel for him as he tries to uncover the truth of her complex life, the courage it takes to "speak truth to power" in circumstances such as this. Most of us in public ministry have been there at one time or another. In the end, after what feels like a Herculean feat of theological and spiritual candour, he gets to an unexpected place of resolution. Here's how the diarist records the outcome. "Be at peace" I told her. And she had knelt to receive this peace. Oh miracle - thus to be able to give what we ourselves do not possess, sweet miracle of our empty hands! Hope which was shrivelling in my heart flowered again in hers; the spirit of prayer which I thought lost in me for ever, was given back to her by God and  - who can tell - perhaps in my name! Poor as I am, an insignificant little priest, looking upon this woman only yesterday so far my superior in age, birth, fortune, intellect, I still knew - yes I knew - what fatherhood means.

That remarkable passage, almost worthy of Dostoyesvsky, shows, I think, profound insight into the paradoxes of public ministry. But how many of us clergy are capable of scrutinising our ministry and ourselves with that degree of honesty? How many of us have sufficient self-knowledge even to understand the questions with which we need to interrogate ourselves? Bernanos writes elsewhere in the book, When writing of oneself one should show no mercy. Yet why at the first attempt to discover one's own truth does all inner strength seem to melt away in floods of self-pity and tenderness and rising tears? Diarists and bloggers, beware of being too kind to ourselves! Not to agonise in front of others necessarily, but to "tell all the truth", as far as we ever can, at least in private before God and ourselves. And even in a more public register, we need surely to be constant seekers after truth, even if we often have to "tell it slant".

I've often spoken to at ordinands' retreats on the importance of self-knowledge and self-awareness in any public role. I've found Bernanos to be a powerful impetus to try to practise better what I have been preaching for so long. Perhaps it's about the recovery of the joy and openness of our childhood, the kind of rapturous vision captured in William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Thomas Traherne's Centuries of Meditations. Bernanos says: God has entrusted the Church to keep [the soul of childhood] alive, to safeguard our candour and freshness... Joy is the gift of the Church, whatever joy is possible for this sad world to share... What would it profit you even to create life itself, when you have lost all sense of what life really is?” There have been times in my own ministry as a priest when I've needed to try to recapture what relentless public exposure had corroded. Bernanos understood that.

One last passage from the Diary. It concerns the prayer and spirituality, a matter of recurring concern in the book as we would expect. Again, the author writes with a keen sense of how paradoxical the spiritual life so often is. The usual notion of prayer is so absurd. How can those who know nothing about it, who pray little or not at all, dare speak so frivolously of prayer? A Carthusian, a Trappist will work for years to make of himself a man of prayer, and then any fool who comes along sets himself up as judge of this lifelong effort. If it were really what they suppose, a kind of chatter, the dialogue of a madman with his shadow, or even less—a vain and superstitious sort of petition to be given the good things of this world, how could innumerable people find until their dying day, I won't even say such great 'comfort'—since they put no faith in the solace of the senses—but sheer, robust, vigorous, abundant joy in prayer? Oh, of course—suggestion, say the scientists. Certainly they can never have known old monks, wise, shrewd, unerring in judgement, and yet aglow with passionate insight, so very tender in their humanity. What miracle enables these semi-lunatics, these prisoners of their own dreams, these sleepwalkers, apparently to enter more deeply each day into the pain of others? An odd sort of dream, an unusual opiate which, far from turning him back into himself and isolating him from his fellows, unites the individual with mankind in the spirit of universal charity!
 
If you haven't read the book, you won't know how it ends. No spoilers from me! But Bernanos gives us a profoundly moving and satisfying conclusion to the Diary. I won't say that it's a tidy ending - you wouldn't expect it to be from an author who understands better than many both the "mess" of the parish (his phrase, not mine) and the complexity of human life, not least his own. How could any ending be tidy? Having not long retired from a lifetime of public ministry as a priest, I know how untidy my laying aside that role was at the time, and even more in my subsequent memory of it. This is only one of many insights in The Diary of a Country Priest that I recognise from my own experience of ministry, that I dare to say we all recognise if we are sufficiently curious about God, humanity and our own selves to frame the questions he asks so bravely and follow them wherever they lead, however uncomfortable that may be. 

In the end, after a lot of pain and hardship, the Diary ends on a note of thankfulness. Tout est grâce is the conclusion, "everything is grace". That's the spirit that pervades the entire book. Despite everything, Bernanos' struggling, pain-ridden priest has emerged victorious. Which I think makes this marvellous book an inspiration for today's ministers, especially those travelling through dark times. "What will survive of us is love" says Philip Larkin in a famous poem. It could be the epigraph of this book. For everything is grace, and grace is everything.  

Mozart in Mono: on rediscovering a childhood LP

In my last blog I wrote about the loss of hearing in my left ear following a Christmas virus. I wish I could tell you it’s been restored. It hasn’t - it feels as lifeless as a withered arm. The doctor is reasonably sure that it’s just a matter of time. So I’m trying to get used to life in mono. Maybe it’s a bit like black-and-white photography. You sacrifice the colour in order to discover other riches in greyscale. I’m listening to music in a different kind of way. It’s more intentional, as they say, perhaps more aware of the shapes and textures than before.

I’m also aware that I’m cherishing what hearing I still have in my right ear. It makes every piece of music that much more precious, something I tried to put into words last time. And with a good set of headphones that give a full rich sound, my mind can even begin to imagine that all is as it used to be. By chance, since writing my last blog, I’ve found in a charity shop Oliver Sacks’ remarkable book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. In it he describes the experiences of people who have lost their hearing function in one ear. One person, a composer, found that what he could hear with his ‘bad’ ear was out of tune with his ‘good’ one, as I found myself when this all began. Sacks talks about how the human brain has the extraordinary ability to make up for the loss of function in one ear (or eye). It can’t heal it. But it can, so to speak, begin to reconstruct your sound (or sight) world, restore some sense of spatial awareness so that in time, the loss is partially compensated for.  

It’s funny how the right book falls into your lap just when you need it. And in another strange way, as I browsed classical music recordings on the web, I came across an album cover that was so familiar that I exclaimed out loud, even though I hadn’t set eyes on it for fifty or more years. It’s Joseph Keilberth’s recording of two Mozart symphonies with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra. Actually I’m cheating slightly. The image I found on ebay (above) is of the 1960 stereo recording. Ours at home was the 1956 mono disc, but the scarlet Telefunken covers were identical. I think it may have been the first LP my parents owned. If it wasn’t that, then it was Beethoven’s Eroica or Schubert’s Winterreise. 

At the age of six or seven, I fell in love with the Mozart disc, especially the 39th. It’s still my favourite Mozart symphony. I think it was the slow introduction that seduced me. Those few portentous bars, full of rich brass and woodwind, seemed to presage something miraculous. E flat was a key that brought forth some of Mozart’s most wondrous music - think of The Magic Flute or the Gran Partita whose slow movement Salieri so envied according to the film Amadeus. The solemn rising violin scales of the symphony’s introduction, together with one of the sharpest and most sustained discords in all of 18th century music captivated me. And when the clouds finally parted and the sun broke through in some of the happiest music in the classical repertoire, it was a revelation. 

Today I’ve found the stereo version online, thanks to the ever-obliging Spotify. Listening to it for the first time in decades, I’m aware that it’s probably not among the greatest of Mozart recordings. The Bamberg play with tremendous conviction, but tuned as we are to the delicacy of authentic performances on period instruments, it now sounds a bit rough in places. Joseph Keilberth (1908-1968) was the Bamberg’s chief conductor at the time, but he was best known for his opera interpretations, especially Wagner. His Wagner performances were famous; poignantly he died in the middle of conducting Tristan und Isolde. I doubt if you can be a truly great Mozartian and a Wagnerian conductor, though in modern times many conductors have made a convincing showing of both. Some might say you can’t really love Wagner’s music if you love Mozart’s, but that’s a different question. It would be some years before I came to Wagner but when I did, the revelation was as unforgettable as my childhood discovery of Mozart.

But now that I’ve rediscovered it, I shall treasure this recording till I die. It represents so much that was joyous in my childhood: parents who loved me and encouraged me in everything that fascinated me, whether it was riding my tricycle and not long afterwards, my 18 inch pavement bike, my first Brownie camera, my Hornby ‘0’ gauge model railway (which would be worth a fortune nowadays), reading Alice, Pooh, the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales (I always preferred them to Andersen’s - they were darker and more complex and didn’t always have happy endings) and - I admit it - Enid Blyton. 

But before all these, my parents wanted me to love music as they did. My grandmother would sit me down at the piano and we would pick out Schubert melodies like Heidenröslein. It was probably thanks to her that Winterreise found its way into our home because it was she who told me about Schubert’s unhappy wanderer as we sat and listened. Piano lessons must have begun about then, though I was too lazy to practise very much (and regret it even today). I was not too young to have a go at Bach’s Notebook for Anna Magdalena, my introduction to the other great musical passion of my life. 

So many musical memories to be thankful for. I’ve written about some of them before on this blog. But today they have been rekindled afresh as a result of seeing that LP sleeve on the web and hearing once again that much-loved disc. I suppose that when we grow old, such glowing memories become all the more precious, of remembered childhood days and the people who loved us and our awakening to God’s wonderful world as it seemed to blossom all around us. 

And maybe too, early inklings of pain and mortality in the music I was learning to love? I don’t know. I hear them now clearly enough in the introduction to Mozart’s 39th. And in adulthood, it does make me feel for the many whose memories of childhood are far from happy, whose upbringing has been occluded by pain, abandonment, cruelty or illness. How innocent and protected, how secure and happy my early childhood was, and I never knew it at the time. There is so much to learn about the world and our own selves as we grow up. What matters is that we don’t unlearn what was important to us in childhood, that we don’t, as a psychoanalytic writer once put it, lose the capacity for flowering and instead find we are unripening, shrivelling to a bud. With my one good ear, I’m trying to reflect on that for a while too.