Aelred's Sin (20 page)

‘Sorry.’

Benedict sat, turned towards him. Aelred bent down where he stood to pick up the old tome, the
Conferences
of
John
Cassian.
Benedict saw the title. ‘We won’t find him helpful, unless we forget all we’ve said and done, and pursue our vocation quite differently. He was against cliques, as he called them, but not altogether against feelings, passion, as Evagrius was.’

Aelred looked at the title. ‘Sorry, I don’t know what John Cassian says, or Evagrius. Is that how you pronounce his name. Who was he, anyway?’

‘He would have us resist this friendship.’

‘So, he’s different from Aelred of Rievaulx?’

‘Much earlier. Cassian, like Augustine, his contemporary, thought human bonds too fragile. Come over here - we can’t talk across the library.’ Aelred went and stood near
Benedict’s desk. Benedict took his hand from his side and held it. ‘These fathers of the church would advise us to resist human bonds.’

‘And Aelred would have us hold hands.’

‘Yes.’

‘Who do we follow?’

‘This is our struggle in our time. We’ve got to sort it out for ourselves. That’s what Aelred of Rievaulx did, I think. He was true to his experience, but he listened to the fathers also, and then created his own way, the
De
spirituali
amicitia,
Spiritual
Friendship
which I gave you. So Aelred of Rievaulx’s work is part of what we’ve got to look at and be helped by.’

‘Do you feel better after last night?’ They kept on holding hands, but Aelred had his ears pricked up for the sound of possible footsteps approaching the library. They should not be talking during study time.

‘Yes, I saw Basil before Matins. He was in the corridor outside the infirmary when I got up to ring the bells. He’s so good. He never refuses me. I confessed. I feel good about us.’

‘I saw him too, last night, as you asked me. I didn’t want to at first. But I did.’

‘I’m glad. See how I hold your hand.’

‘Yes,’ Aelred’s hand held more firmly and then caressed Benedict’s arm under the sleeve of his cassock, and then again held his hand. ‘Yes, Basil has made me think of you and what you want. I know you want it Aelred of Rievaulx’s way.’

‘I think that must be the way. We don’t deny how we feel. We don’t want to deny this passion. But it must find - what do the fathers say? Augustine, I think. It must find its
forma
et
meta
:
its formula, its method and its boundaries. I broke the boundaries last night. I made you break the boundaries. I mustn’t do that again. It’s dangerous, but it is the way we must proceed. Otherwise what is our chastity? But our love is real, too. In all that it is. It’s a dangerous chastity. Aelred of Rievaulx tells us that he wants us to be always afraid, never secure.’ While Benedict spoke he had risen, and he and Aelred had moved while holding hands into the alcove to the side of the window, beneath which was the desk at which Benedict worked. They stood in the alcove, hidden from the open library. ‘We can never be secure.’ He lowered Aelred’s hood and ran his hand up and down his soft smooth brown cheek, cupping his face in his hand. Smooth, he thought, like a a boy still, almost like a girl. ‘We must always be afraid.’

‘Yes, yes, I know.’

‘See what happens even as we talk, even as we’re afraid,’ and he put his face close to Aelred’s and placed his lips upon his. ‘See how one thing can lead to another.’ But then he withdrew as the younger monk opened his mouth. ‘No, that’s our boundary.’

Aelred could hardly breathe. ‘Yes, yes.’ He wanted to kiss more. He resisted. But there was no control over all his other feelings, no control over his erection. No control over his heart beat, over his hands running up inside the sleeves of Benedict’s cassock.

‘Brother,’ Benedict whispered, backing away, disentangling his fingers. ‘See what being alone can do.’ And as they parted and came out of the alcove, Benedict returned to his desk. Aelred stood at his side. The door of the library opened and Father Justin came in. He was obviously
surprised to find Benedict and Aelred together. Aelred should have been in his cell at study.

‘Oh,’ Father Justin glanced at Aelred as if to say, what on earth are you doing here at this time, but directed what he said to Benedict. ‘I was just wanting to talk to you, Benedict, about Edward. I see he’s having trouble getting to Prime on time.’ Aelred slipped away and left the library for his cell. He could feel Father Justin’s disapproval by his look. Aelred felt that he should have continued looking at the library books. He felt that his slipping away was an admittance of guilt. He felt naughty. What had Father Justin realised? He expected that Father Justin would follow this up with a request for a talk. He might have seen them kissing and holding hands.

It was a blue May. It was warm. Aelred spent the siesta back at the cemetery, on the same bench where he had spoken to Basil during the gravedigging. He had brought with him his
De
Spirituali
Amicitia,
and a book of Aelred of Rievaulx’s letters. He felt torn between the goodness that Basil had made him feel the night before coupled with the sense that he was now embarked on some deep adventure with Benedict, and conflicting feelings, sexual and spiritual, to go further with Benedict. These feelings thronged his mind with images that distracted his reading. As in a dream, the most unusual connections were made. It was like a strong force independent of his feelings for Benedict.

Aelred read again where Aelred of Rievaulx wrote to his sister:

It was that hot Good Friday afternoon when he accompanied his mother to the Good Friday Mass of the pre-sanctified. They had to wait in the hot three-o’clock-in-the-afternoon sun on the gravel road for a taxi into the town, as there was no Mass in the village church.

Holy Week had pulled a black curtain over his mind. There were purple shrouds over the statues and crucifixes. Since Palm Sunday, thoughts of the impending crucifixion of Jesus accompanied his play, his mealtimes and his inability to fall asleep. The family rosary was always the Five Sorrowful Mysteries, when he would have to meditate upon the agony in the garden, the scourging, St Peter’s betrayal, and Jesus being spat upon, crowned with thorns, having his face wiped by Veronica and his arms and legs nailed to the cross, pierced with a lance, being raised on high, crying out of severe thirst, being taken down by Nicodemus. This was a passion. He had to meditate on the fate of the two thieves who had been crucified with Jesus: the one who had asked for forgiveness and who had been promised heaven - ‘This day thou shall be with me in paradise.’ The other thief had jeered, and challenged Jesus that if he were the Son of God he could free himself and them. He would go to hell. All during Holy Week, he had had to meditate on the last seven words of Christ from the cross, and the profound loneliness of Jesus, who had
felt abandoned by his father.

‘I thirst.’

Now, on the gravel road in the hot afternoon sun, with the taxi not turning up, he panicked that they would not get to church on time for him to be able to go to confession. He and Ted had jocked together. The new sensation had entered their play, their boyhood love. They had slipped from play, climbing trees behind the house, eating pomme aracs, stripping off and bathing in the ravine. School had broken up for the Easter holidays. They dived. Then, scrambling up the muddy bank, they slipped into the pool. Their naked bodies fought in the water, in the mud, where their bodies first held, then slipped from each other, and became a pleasure they did not resist, till they fell back into the water released, pleasure satiated.

‘It is accomplished.’

Ted had gone back home. J.M. had jocked on his own the next day after lunch, knowing that it was Good Friday, knowing that that act put nails into the hands of Jesus and crowned him with thorns. He knew that his sin was what made Jesus suffer. He was responsible for the crucifixion. He had been taught that the Jews had only been agents of history a long time ago, but Jesus, with sins like his, was continually being crucified. ‘Father forgive them for they know not what they do.’

Weighed down by the complications of this theology of guilt and remorse, it had not occurred to him how retrospectively he could be held personally responsible.

‘Mother, behold thy son. Son, behold thy mother.’

He and his mother had arrived late for the liturgy and there was no confession. He kept pondering whether a
firm act of contrition would do, to cleanse him of his sin and so allow him to go to communion; or whether to take that chance with fate, and be damned even more for a double mortal sin that would condemn him to hell fire in a most dangerous and dire way. All this on Good Friday, the day of the Lord’s death!

Father Gerard mounted the pulpit for the sermon. In the midst of lurid descriptions of sins and the suffering they caused Jesus, he came to speak of the dreadful betrayal of Judas, who had sold his Lord for thirty pieces of silver; then he had gone out and hung himself. The church was stifling hot, smelling of cheap scent and the talcum powder of the women parishioners, and the mothballs of the men in their Sunday-best black suits. He was sweating through the back of his shirt and the sweat was running down the sides of his cheeks, and his hands were all clammy as he kept weighing up the state of his soul. ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’

Then Father Gerard compared the betrayal of Judas to anyone who would come up to the communion table and who knew that they were in a state of mortal sin, and so, like Judas, would be damned for all eternity to the fires of hell.

He was ashamed. He did not know where to put his eyes. He could not pray. He felt like a criminal in the dock, being condemned by the judge. He was sure that Father Gerard knew the state of his soul, because he had confessed the sin of impurity to him on many occasions before and received the penance of one decade of the rosary. But this time, on Good Friday, it was worse, much worse, and he was sure he was looking at him and speaking to him personally, to warn him not to
contemplate any idea of approaching the communion rails. But even in the midst of his fear, the moment in the ravine came back to excite him, so that he moved between that excitement and guilt. Pleasure and sin: they lived side by side. He could not bear it any longer, and before he fainted, he got up in the mêlée of those approaching the communion rails and left the church. ‘Sweet Sacrament Divine …’ The congregation wailed. He ran out on to the promenade and sat down on a bench, letting the cool breeze blow over him. He was drenched with fear and sweat.

He would have to confess before Easter Sunday. But at least he had been rescued from committing a second mortal sin. He just had his jocking and sin with Ted to be sorry about, not the betrayal which was like that of Judas.

‘Father into they hands I commend my spirit.’

Aelred dipped back into his reading.

Benedict’s hands were in his hands, his lips on his lips, as he read on:

Aelred stared at Sebastian’s grave.

St Aelred’s sin, those vices? Could they be just what Aelred now was feeling? Were they the sins he had to confess and which he had committed with Ted? How could he have done so much, known so much, yet be still so innocent and unknowing, be so guilty? But guilt did not enter how he felt for Benedict. Guilt entered about how he felt for Edward. He kept smelling the smell of his clothes and seeing him in his tight black shorts climbing the rock face. There were things which he wanted to do with Edward which he did not want to do with Benedict. They were now crowding his mind. He kept thinking of things in this way, this way of not actually naming what he wanted to do. It seemed now as if he had tasted something sweet with Ted and then Ted had been taken way from him in death as a punishment for that sweet thing, which was a sin. Father Basil said it was sweet, but not this kind of sweet.

He wanted to know of that. He wanted to break through the form of medieval hagiography that hid what he really wanted to know, to move from the implicit and the metaphorical into the explicit and literal. He needed the details, to know that his desires had some precedent. He had not found it elsewhere. Aelred’s sanctity was
clearly described, but he wanted Aelred’s sin to be described. He wanted to know what kisses were like for him, what touch felt like, where he touched. He did. He wanted to hear his voice saying, touch me where it is forbidden, where the ancients have put up a gate. He wanted to know what he did. He wanted it described: what fantasies were unleashed in his mind when he looked at a boy, at a young man, at Simon, Ivo, Bernard. Aelred of Rievaulx felt these things, did these things. They were recorded for all time. Buried in metaphors. Aelred read between the lines with his own desire as guide. In time, he came to know that the nature of a twelfth-century boy and the nature of a twentieth-century boy were essentially the same.