To my dismay, I found a new obstacle. This term I was sent out to study with a young tutor at one of the men’s colleges. My tutorial partner was Charlotte, an immensely gifted girl who had her own troubles. Her mother had died during our first year and Charlotte had become anorexic. Even though she seemed over the worst, she was still thin and wary of food. We had often eyed each other knowingly, wryly acknowledging that we were both struggling, so it was good to be spending more time together. Charlotte wanted to be a novelist. ‘She can really write,’ Dorothy Bednarowska had told me, and she had already introduced Charlotte to a literary agent. But Charlotte found the academic study of literature difficult. Her work was brilliant and original but, ‘Studying literature so critically and technically is bad for my writing,’ she told me. Fearing that it would cramp her own style, she refused to study the novel at all. As was customary at Oxford, we had to read our essays aloud to our tutor during the weekly tutorial, and Charlotte was obviously perplexed, even repelled by mine. ‘Idon’t know how you churn out all this stuff,’ she had said to me once. ‘It’s beautiful in a way. Your essays are like Gothic cathedrals, with all the right scholars and theories slotted together and built into a massive structure of conformity.’ I wasn’t sure that I liked the sound of that. I enjoyed reading the literary criticism that Charlotte hated. I found it fun to weigh one scholar against another and make a pattern of my own out of other people’s thoughts. But I was uneasily aware that not much of myself was going into my work, and that what I was presenting, week after week, was other people’s ideas rather than my own.
That would not be allowed this term, however. Our new tutor was a rather affected but reputedly very clever young don at one of the more modern colleges. We sat in his bright, book-lined room overlooking the forecourt, watching some students teasing the goldfish in the moat. Dr Brentwood Smyth sprawled elegantly in a large leather armchair, leaping up occasionally to consult a text. ‘You got a Violet Vaughan Morgan prize, didn’t you?’ he asked me. ‘Impressive. You must be very good at exams.’ I could tell that he did not think much of this accomplishment. He seemed more interested in Charlotte, whose original, thoughtful response to his questions clearly intrigued him.
‘Oh, don’t let’s have a fixed time!’ he cried impatiently when I asked him when we should come for tutorials. ‘That’s the trouble with the women’s colleges! They’re organized like high schools. Just ring me up when your essay is done.’
‘What should we write about?’ I asked him.
‘Oh, anything you like! I’m not going to set you one of those dreary exam questions. I’m sure you get quite enough of those at St Anne’s. No. Just write me something on one poem. Take “Frost at Midnight”. Coleridge. Don’t read any literary criticism. Just live with the poem for a week and then tell me what it means to you. Not to anybody else. When you’re ready, give me a call.’
This was music to Charlotte’s ears, but worrying for me. I could see that it was a good idea and, indeed in later years when I came to teach literature myself, I would often set my students a similar task. But the problem back then was that I just couldn’t do it. I needed to escape into other people’s books and minds because, when left entirely to my own devices, I found that I had nothing to say. It wasn’t exactly that the poem did not speak to me. It was clearly an extraordinary work. I could have made it the basis for a fascinating essay on the English Romantic movement. But what did the poem say to me? That was what Dr Brentwood Smyth wanted to know and I didn’t know what I was going to tell him. I found myself thinking of some other lines by Coleridge, written in a period of deep depression, when he looked out at the evening sky ‘with its peculiar tint of yellow-green’, at the thin clouds, the moon and the stars:
I see them all so excellently fair,
I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!
I should have been pierced by the poem, and then have leapt out to meet it. I used to be like that. I remembered how deeply poetry had touched me while I was at school. But yet again, as with my relations with people, there was only deadness, nothingness. I was now impervious even to the literature that I thought I had loved.
An initiation is supposed to make you self-reliant, but mine had made me dependent. As I struggled to fill the requisite number of pages for my essay, I had to face the grim fact that I no longer had ideas of my own. Indeed, I had been carefully trained not to have them. There had been a moment early in the Postulantship, when I had heard a warning bell. We were doing a little course in Apologetics, which explained the rational grounds for faith. I was set an essay: ‘Assess the historical evidence for the Resurrection.’ I had read the requisite textbooks, could see what was required, and duly produced a discussion of the events of the first Easter Sunday that made Jesus’ rising from the tomb as uncontroversial and unproblematic historically as the Battle of Waterloo. This was nonsense, of course, but that did not seem to matter in Apologetics.
‘Yes, Sister, very nice.’ Mother Greta, the pale, delicate nun who was supervising our studies, smiled at me as she handed back my essay. ‘This is a very good piece of work.’
‘But, Mother,’ I suddenly found myself saying. ‘It isn’t true, is it?’
Mother Greta sighed, pushing her hand under her tightly-fitting cap and rubbing her forehead as if to erase unwelcome thoughts. ‘No, Sister,’ she said wearily. ‘It isn’t true. But please don’t tell the others.’
This did not mean that Mother Greta did not believe in the resurrection of Jesus, or that she had lost her faith. But she had studied at the prestigious Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and knew that the kind of essay I had written was no longer regarded as a respectable intellectual exercise. A careful study of the resurrection stories in the gospels, which consistently contradict each other, shows that these were not factual accounts that could ever satisfy a modern historian, but mythical attempts to describe the religious convictions of the early Christians, who had experienced the risen Jesus as a dynamic presence in their own lives and had made a similar spiritual passage from death to life. As I stared wordlessly back at Mother Greta I knew that, if it had been up to her, she would have scrapped this course in Apologetics and introduced us to a more fruitful study of the New Testament. But, like any nun, she was bound by the orders of her superiors. What I had written was not true, because the insights of faith are not amenable to rational or historical analysis. Even at this early stage, in a confused, incoherent way, I knew this, and Mother Greta knew that I knew it.
It was a sobering moment, and when I look back now on that scene in the Postulantship, with the autumn sun coming through the window, the older nun mentally tired and demoralized, while the postulant gazed at her blankly, both of us deliberately turning our minds away from the light, I wonder what on earth we all thought we were doing. I had been set a quite pointless task. For a week, while preparing my essay, writing it and learning how to dispose of the obvious problems with various mental sleights of hand, I had been doing something perverse. I had been telling an elaborate lie. I had deflected the natural healthy bias of my mind from a truth that was staring me in the face and forced it to deny what should have been as clear as day. Years later, while I was having my breakdown, I learned that Mother Greta had been very anxious indeed about the way we were being trained, had voiced her disapproval, and had been overruled. What had our superiors been about, and why did I not tear up that dishonest piece of work, or at least argue with Mother Greta? I had simply gone along with the whole unholy muddle.
But I was only eighteen years old and this had not been an isolated incident. On the very first day of our Postulantship, Mother Albert, our Mistress, explained that during the first years of our religious lives we would constantly be told things that seemed incredible or irrational. But they only seemed this way because we were lacking in spiritual maturity. We were learning to inhabit a different element from the rest of the world, to breathe another atmosphere. We were still fresh from ‘the world’ and its taints; we still thought and responded like secular people, but now we had to enter into God’s perspective. Had God not told Isaiah:
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
My ways are not your ways,
For as high as the heavens are above the earth
So are my thoughts above your thoughts, my ways above your ways.
So when we were tempted to question the ideas, principles and customs of the order, we must remember that as yet we were simply not in a position to understand. We were like babies, learning an entirely new language. One day, in the not too distant future, when we had developed spiritually, we would see all these matters quite differently. Until then, we just had to wait patiently, in what the mystics had called the cloud of unknowing, and all would be revealed. So my lying little essay on the Resurrection was part of this larger programme.
So was the fact that I had once, during my Postulantship, spent hours treadling a sewing machine that had no needle. To be fair, this was the result of a misunderstanding, but the underlying principle still applied. I was finding all needlework very difficult indeed, and had just put the good sewing machine in our community room out of action. Furious, Mother Albert told me to practise on an older machine in the adjoining room for half an hour a day. But it had no needle. My mistake was to point this out. Mother Albert had been meaning to replace that needle for some time, but it had completely slipped her mind. She was already angry with me, however, and I was not supposed to answer back in this way. ‘How dare you!’ she said, her voice cold with rage. ‘Don’t you know that a nun must never correct her superior in such a pert manner. “There’s no needle in that machine!”’ she cried, tossing her head in supposed imitation of my defensive manner. ‘You will go to that machine next door, Sister, and work on it every day, needle or no needle, until I give you permission to stop.’
So I did, treadling away at the empty machine, telling myself that because I was acting under obedience, however pointless this exercise might seem to a profane eye, this was the best possible way of spending my time. It was God’s way. I had almost succeeded in quelling the objections that stubbornly erupted in my mind from time to time, when Mother Albert walked into the room two weeks later and stared at me as though I had lost my wits. But this time, when she cried in outraged astonishment, ‘What on earth do you think you are doing?’ I was ready for her.
‘Practising machining, Mother,’ I replied demurely.
‘But there’s no needle in that …’
Even as she spoke, I saw light dawning and realized that she had completely forgotten about the whole thing. She clapped her hand to the back of her head, and turned away abruptly, lips twitching with suppressed mirth. After recovering herself, she gave me a searing lecture on my pride and disobedience. No nun should ever correct her superior, as I had done that day, even if convinced that she was wrong. As far as I was concerned, my superior was right, because she stood in the place of God. It was my wretched intellectual pride that blocked my spiritual advancement, and I would make no progress as long as I refused to regard things from a supernatural point of view.
Yet could you behave like that indefinitely, without inflicting real and lasting damage on your mind? I remembered the moment, a year or so later, when I had realized that my mind no longer worked freely. It was the recreation hour in the Noviceship. We all sat around the long table in the community room with our needlework, Mother Walter, our Novice Mistress, presiding. That night we were talking about the liturgical changes that were being introduced by the Second Vatican Council: the mass was being said in English instead of Latin, for example, and that morning the children in the adjacent boarding school had played guitars to accompany a song they had composed themselves. Mother Walter had not enjoyed that song. She was devoted to the Gregorian chant and had taught us to love it too. Even though she once told me that I had a voice like a broken knife-grinder, I had to sing in the choir and, though I could never hit the higher notes and was ruefully aware of the tunelessness of my efforts, I was beginning to appreciate the spiritual quality of plainsong – the way the music circled meditatively around the words and drew attention to a phrase or obscure preposition that could easily have passed unnoticed, but which proved to have rich meaning. Now it looked as if the days of the chant were numbered and though Mother Walter would have cut out her tongue rather than criticize the Vatican, she was convinced that this would be an irreparable loss. ‘Of course the Council is inspired by the Holy Spirit,’ she was saying, ‘but it is hard to see how we can replace a musical tradition that goes back hundreds of years. Just think: St Bernard would have sung the same chant as we do. So would Thomas Aquinas and Francis of Assisi. And now we have to listen to those silly children playing guitars.’ For a moment, the measured calm of her voice faltered and her face darkened in a way we had learned to dread.
‘But, Mother,’ Sister Mary Jonathan, a novice who was a year ahead of me and who had been my ‘guardian angel’ when I had begun my novitiate, spoke up eagerly. ‘Surely the changes needn’t necessarily be a disaster? After all, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with playing a guitar at mass, is there?’
Mother frowned. ‘I should have thought,’ she replied coldly, ‘that this is a matter we need not discuss.’ We all bent our heads obediently over our needlework, distancing ourselves. The topic had been closed. No one would dream of taking it any further, against the expressed wish of our superior.
‘But some people,’ Sister Mary Jonathan continued, to my astonishment, ‘might go to church initially to enjoy the guitar because they like that kind of music. We’ve learned to love the chant, but lots of people can’t understand the Latin, and the music is so different from anything they are used to that they can’t make anything of it.’
Mother Walter laughed shortly. It came out as an angry bark. ‘Anyone who needs a guitar to get them to mass must have a pretty feeble faith!’ Her eyes had hardened and her lower lip protruded in a scowl. The tension in the room was almost palpable. Nobody ever answered back like that and the rest of us were sewing as though our lives depended upon it. But I found myself looking hopefully at Sister Mary Jonathan, willing her to go on. I used to be able to do that, I thought wonderingly. I used to like exploring different points of view, building up an argument step by step, sharpening an idea against somebody else’s mind. But I could no more do that now than run naked down the cloister. Not only would I never have dared to cross Mother Walter – and, indeed, I hastily reminded myself, Sister Mary Jonathan was breaking several rules at once – but I wouldn’t be able to think like that any more. I no longer had it in me. But Sister Mary Jonathan did.
‘The guitar might give God a chance,’ she countered brightly. ‘People might come to listen and then find something more …’
‘Really, Sister!’ Mother’s voice was thunderous. ‘I would have thought that you of all people would understand.’ Sister Mary Jonathan was very musical. ‘Do you think God needs a guitar,’ she uttered the word as though it were an obscenity, ‘to give him a chance?’
Sister was undeterred. ‘But surely Jesus would have used a guitar, if he’d been alive today?’
‘Nonsense, Sister! I’ve never heard such rubbish! He would have done no such thing!’
I had to bend my head quickly over the stocking that I was darning to hide an involuntary smile. I had a sudden mental picture of Jesus standing on a hill in Galilee, surrounded by his Jewish audience, singing plainsong. He looked pretty silly.
Mother Walter had spotted me. ‘I am glad that you find this amusing, Sister,’ she said with heavy sarcasm. ‘I find it extremely sad. Sister Mary Jonathan has committed a serious fault against obedience and against charity, by spoiling recreation for everybody!’
That had been the end of the matter; though, when Mother wasn’t looking, Sister Mary Jonathan had winked at me and pulled a face. With hindsight, that complicity had been prophetic. She had left the order shortly before I had. She had fallen in love with a young Jesuit, with whom she was studying at London University. Somehow she had held on to herself better than I had. I was quite sure that she would not find it difficult to tell anybody what she thought. My problem, as I wrestled with my highly unsatisfactory essay for Dr Brentwood Smyth, was that I had no thoughts of my own at all. Every time the frail shoots of a potentially subversive idea had broken ground, I had stamped on them so firmly that they tended not to come any more. True, at the very end of my religious life I had argued with Mother Praeterita, my Oxford superior, but the ideas I used against her had not been mine. I was simply parroting books and articles that I had read. It seemed that I could no longer operate as an intellectual free agent. You can probably abuse your mind and do it irrevocable harm, just as you can damage your body by feeding it the wrong kind of food, depriving it of exercise or forcing your limbs into a constricting straitjacket. My brain had been bound as tightly as the feet of a Chinese woman; I had read that when the bandages were taken off, the pain was excruciating. The restraints had been removed too late, and she would never walk normally again.
I knew that a good nun must be ready to give up everything and count the world well lost for God. But what had happened to God? My life had been turned upside down, but God should still be the same. It seemed that, without realizing it, I had indeed become like St Ignatius’s dead body or the old man’s stick. My heart and my mind both seemed numb and etiolated, but God seemed to have gone too. In the place that he had occupied in my mind, there was now a curious blank.
Or perhaps it was only now that I could admit to this God-shaped gap in my consciousness. One of the most painful failures of my convent life had been my inability to pray. Our whole existence had God as its pivot. The silence of our days had been designed to enable us to listen to him. But he had never spoken to me.
Every morning at six o’clock, we had knelt in the convent church for an hour of meditation, according to the method that St Ignatius had designed for his Jesuits in the Spiritual Exercises. This had been a highly structured discipline. As a preliminary step, we prepared the topic the night before. Each of us spent fifteen minutes selecting a passage from scripture or a devotional book, and making a note of the topics that we intended to consider in the morning. Ignatius’s meditation was based on a three-part programme: See, Judge and Act. First we all stood in silence for a few minutes, reciting to ourselves a prayer that reminded us that we were in the presence of God, and then we knelt down, took out our books and notes, and began with ‘See’. This meant that we had to use our imaginations to picture the gospel scene we had chosen, and even if the subject of our meditation was more abstract, we had to give it a local habitation and ‘place’ it in some concrete way. Ignatius had thought it very important that all the faculties be engaged, so that the whole man (Ignatius had a poor opinion of women) was brought into the divine ambience. This ‘composition of place’, as it was called, was also meant to ward off distraction. If you were busily picturing the road from Jericho to Jerusalem, evoking a sense of the Middle Eastern heat, looking at the sand dunes, listening to the braying donkeys and so forth, your imagination was less likely to stray to profane topics. At least, that was the theory.
Next came ‘Judge’, when the intellect was brought into play. This was the point when you were supposed to reflect on the topics you had listed the night before. Finally you proceeded to ‘Act’ which, for Ignatius, was the real moment of prayer. As a result of your deliberations, you made an act of will, applying the lessons you had learned to the day that lay ahead. There had to be a specific resolution. It was no good vaguely vowing to live a better life from that day forward. You had to settle for something concrete: to try harder with your sewing, for example, or to make a special effort not to think uncharitable thoughts about a sister who irritated you beyond endurance. Prayer, Ignatius taught, was an act of will. It had nothing to do with pious thoughts or feelings; these were simply a preparation for the moment of decision. Ignatian spirituality was never an end in itself but was directed towards action and efficiency. He wanted his Jesuits to be effective in the world and their daily meditation ensured that their activities would proceed from God.
But this did not work for me. Every morning I resolved that this time I would crack it. This time there would be no distractions. I would kneel as intent upon God as my sisters, none of whom seemed to have my difficulties. I had never before had any problems of concentration. I had always been able to immerse myself in my studies for hours at a time. But to my intense distress, I found that I could not keep my mind on God for two minutes. The whole point of the careful preparation was to prevent this. It was acknowledged that at 6.00 a.m. we were likely to be less than fully alert and would need help in focusing our thoughts. But as soon as I sank to my knees, my mind either went off at a tangent or scuttled through a maze of pointless worries, fears or fantasies, or else I was engulfed by the torpor of physical malaise. Like most adolescents, I craved sleep and experienced the 5.30 a.m. call as a violent assault. I often felt queasy with hunger and fatigue, and clung dizzily to the pew in front of me. At 6.30, the clock in the cloister chimed and we could sit down. But this sweet relief gave way to another trial, as I battled against sleep, and was comforted to see that even some of the older nuns listed and slumped in such a way that it was clear that they had succumbed. The minutes crawled by until the sacristan appeared to light the candles on the altar as a welcome signal that mass was about to begin.
At breakfast, an hour later, we were supposed to examine our meditation, going through a ten-point questionnaire. Had I made myself fully conscious of the Presence of God? No. Had I made sufficient effort in the ‘composition of place’? No. Had all my senses been fully engaged? No. And so on. I didn’t need the fifteen minutes we were supposed to devote to this self-appraisal. I didn’t have to spend any time grading my performance on a scale of one to ten. I was just a Big Zero.
Meditation was only the first spiritual exercise of the day. Four times daily we chanted our version of the divine office in choir. Twice a day, for fifteen minutes, we examined our consciences, according to Ignatius’s five-point plan: this involved marking off one’s faults and achievements in a little book, and counting the number of times we had failed to perform the special task for this week (in Ignatian terminology this was called the ‘particular examen’): there was half an hour’s spiritual reading, a community exercise during which one of us read aloud and the rest continued our everlasting needlework; half an hour’s silent ‘adoration’ in the chapel in the early evening; and the private recitation of the rosary. Yet again, I flunked. Throughout my seven years, I hugged to myself the shameful secret that, unlike the other sisters, I could not pray. And, we were told, without prayer our religious lives were a complete sham. For several hours a day on every single day of the year, I had to confront and experience my abject failure. In other ways, my mind was capable and even gifted, but it seemed allergic to God. This disgrace festered corrosively at the very heart of my life and spilled over into everything, poisoning each activity. How could I possibly be a nun if, when it came right down to it, I seemed completely uninterested in God and God appeared quite indifferent to me?
I don’t know quite what I thought should be happening. Certainly I didn’t expect visions and voices. These, we were told, were only for the greatest saints and could be delusions, sent by the devil to make us proud. But all the books that I read about prayer spoke of moments of ‘consolation’ that punctuated the inevitable periods of dryness. Periodically God would comfort the soul, make it feel that he was near and enable it to experience the warmth of his presence and love. God would, as it were, woo the soul, offering this periodic breakthrough as a carrot, until the soul outgrew this need and could progress to the next stage of its journey. Gradually the soul would be drawn into the higher states of prayer, into further reaches of silence, and into a mysterious state that lay beyond the reach of thoughts and feeling.
That was the theory. But far from progressing to these more advanced states, I never left base-camp. Of course there were moments when I felt moved by the beauty of the music or uplifted by a rousing sermon, but in my view this did not count. It was simply an aesthetic response, something that even an atheist could experience at a concert or when she was exposed to skilful rhetoric. I never had what seemed to be an encounter with anything supernatural, with a being that existed outside myself. I never felt caught up in something greater, never felt personally transfigured by a presence that I encountered in the depths of my being. I never experienced Somebody Else. And how could I possibly hope to have such an encounter when my mind was unable to wait upon God? Prayer, we were always told, was simply a way of quieting the soul, enabling it to apprehend the divine. You had to gather up your dissipated faculties, bring them together and present yourself, whole and entire, to God, so that every single part of your mind and heart could honestly say with the prophet Samuel: ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’ But my mind, heart and faculties remained scattered. Try as I would, I could not re-collect them, so there was no way that God could get through to me.
I tried to discuss this with my superiors, of course. On several occasions, I explained that I never had any ‘consolation’ and could not keep my mind on my meditation. But they seemed frankly incredulous. ‘You’re always so extreme, Sister!’ Mother Frances, the Mistress of Scholastics, had said with irritation. ‘You’re always exaggerating. Everybody has consolation at some time or another. Are you seriously telling me that in all the six years of your religious life you have never once experienced consolation?’ I had nodded. She had looked baffled. ‘Well, I really don’t know what to say to you,’ she had said, clearly at a loss. ‘That’s most unusual. I don’t know how anybody could go on without some consolation. But I’m sure that things aren’t really as bad as you say,’ she had gone on briskly. ‘You probably just feel a bit down at the moment, that’s all, and being you, you have to make a major drama out of the whole business.’ This was not reassuring. I must be a particularly hard case, I thought miserably. As for my confession that I could never keep my mind on my prayers, this was also airily waved to one side. ‘Everybody has their off-days, Sister!’ Nobody would believe that I would love to have had some off-days, because it would have meant that some of my days were ‘on’.
So even in the convent, God had been conspicuous by his absence from my life. And that, I became convinced, must be my fault. My case seemed to be so peculiar that it could not be a mere failure of the system. If only I had tried a little harder, concentrated just that little bit more, or found more interesting topics for meditation. The quality of a nun’s commitment was reflected in the quality of her prayer. And how could I hope to sense God’s presence when I continually broke the silence, frequently had uncharitable thoughts, and, above all, constantly yearned for human affection, and wept when reprimanded? It was, of course, a vicious circle. The more empty my prayers, the more I sought consolation in mundane things and in people. Round and round. Then there were my secret doubts. Even though I tried to tiptoe gingerly around difficult articles of faith, I could not stop wondering whether the Virgin Mary really had been conceived without Original Sin and been taken up body and soul into heaven after her death. How did anybody know that Jesus was God? And was there even a God out there at all? Was that why I never encountered him in prayer? As I knelt in the chapel, watching my sisters kneeling quietly with their heads bowed contemplatively in their hands, I would sometimes wonder whether it wasn’t a bit like the Emperor’s New Clothes. Nobody ever experienced God but nobody dared to admit it. And then I would mentally shake myself. How could God reveal himself to a nun who harboured these shocking doubts?
And so came the morning when, just a few days after I had been dispensed from my vows, my alarm rang at six o’clock and instead of getting up and walking down the road to St Aloysius’s Church for early mass, I simply switched it off and went back to sleep. For seven years, each day had begun with prayer and Eucharist, but now there seemed no point in any of that. I would still go to mass on Sundays, of course, because this was obligatory, binding upon all Catholics. Leaving the Church as well as the convent was at present a step too far. But the very idea of kneeling silently in a darkened church – yet again – filled me with immense fatigue. I cannot do that any more, I told myself wearily that morning; I simply cannot do it. The accumulated failure had left me feeling not merely exhausted but also slightly sick.
