Absolute Truths (14 page)

Following my usual routine I rose at half-past five and made myself
some tea which I took to my dressing-room. No matter how
crowded my timetable was for the day ahead, I devoted at least the
first hour to being myself, alone with my Maker; I was recharging
my spiritual batteries. While I drank my tea I focused my mind
on the coming day and recalled, item by item, all I had to do.
Then I prayed that I would do everything in a manner acceptable
to God and I prayed for God’s grace and God’s help. Afterwards,
if
I had no plans to attend a service of matins, I said the office before moving on to my reading.

I read the leading books as recommended by the most important
theological and ecclesiastical journals, but this was no chore
because I was being myself, indulging in one of my favourite
pursuits. I enjoyed a book if I agreed with its propositions, and if
I disagreed with them I enjoyed the book even more because I had the opportunity mentally to tear it to pieces. I loved demolishing
a
slipshod theological construct, just
as a
counsel for the prosecution
loves demolishing the case for the defence in a court of law. I was often asked to write reviews, and my cool, lucid little paragraphs had earned me bitter enemies. Periodically my opponents tried to
soothe their wounded egos by demolishing my own books, but this
was an uphill struggle for them because I applied to my theology a
logic and scholarship which my enemies, if they had any professional integrity, were reluctantly obliged to acknowledge. Revel
ling in these academic battles I found each clash greatly stimulating.

My spiritual director was keen that I should read exactly what
I liked during this period of early morning solitude. I often thought
another spiritual director would have queried this self-indulgence, but Jon realised that the more eminent I became in public life the
more I needed to have this time to exercise my intellect, my special
gift from my Creator. So on that particular morning I read just as
I always did, my brain skipping from concept to concept in an
ecstasy of intellectual satisfaction, and when I had finished this treat
I washed., shaved and dressed before setting off to the Cathedral for
matins.

In accordance with tradition, the Cathedral offered the full range
of services every day. During the week and on Saturdays these
consisted — at the very least — of matins, Holy Communion and
evensong, the latter being usually a service sung by the Choir, and on Sundays this weekday programme was elongated into a sung matins and a sung Communion in addition to the sung evensong. (In 1965 the Dean was still refusing to convert the sung Com
munion into the main Sunday service and refer to it as the Euchar
ist.) I never cease to be amazed by the idea, prevalent among the
unchurched masses, that nothing now happens in cathedrals except
the occasional royal wedding, but perhaps this misunderstanding arises from the fact that apart from the chaplain, the guides and the flower-arrangers, no devoted local supporter of the Cathedral
would dream of visiting it between ten and four when the tourists
rile the roost. The twentieth-century revival of our cathedrals as
places of pilgrimage must certainly be welcomed as a manifestation
of the Holy Spirit, but the swarming hordes can be disconcerting to anyone in search of peace and quiet.

Leaving the South Canonry on that cold, dank winter morning, I took the short cut across the Choir School’s playing field and
began the short walk up Palace Lane towards the wall of the
cloisters. The Cathedral, invisible at first in the darkness, began to take shape
as
I approached so that I was reminded of a sculpture emerging mysteriously from a block of stone. A masterpiece of English perpendicular architecture, built within the short space of
forty years with no later additions, its eerie perfection so dominated
its surroundings that it seemed to wear the darkness with the nonchalant elegance of a beautiful woman modelling a long black velvet gown. As I drew closer I fancied that the dawn, which was about to break, was making the Cathedral vibrate in anticipation.
Beyond the wall nearby birds had begun to sing in the branches
of the ancient cedar tree in the cloister garth.

A bishop need have little to do with his cathedral; the running of the building is not his business, even though he remains ultimately
responsible for the spiritual welfare of all who work there. However, although tradition required that I should keep a certain distance from those who did run the Cathedral — the Dean and the three residentiary Canons who formed the Chapter — I had felt driven in the early days of my episcopate to set the pace in the matter of daily worship. That was because of the shortcomings of my enemy, the Dean.

Let me say at once that Aysgarth did have virtues: he had a
good brain, a talent for administration, a genius for fund-raising,
a not inconsiderable gift for forceful preaching and a certain range of social skills which made him popular in Sturbridge. A self-made
man, he had a chip on his shoulder about his origins in Yorkshire
where his father had been in trade. This inferiority complex mani
fested itself in frequent references to the fact that he had read
Greats at Oxford. (He was a scholarship boy, of course.) Not
having a degree in theology he was hostile to those who had, but
I must in all fairness concede that he was a sincere Christian.
Unfortunately, after an upbringing among the crudest kind of
Non-Conformists and an intellectual reaction in which he had
embraced the wildest forms of Liberal Modernism, his theological
outlook
was,
to put it kindly, confused.

When he became Dean – at the same time as I became Bishop;
a testing stroke of providence – he made no secret of the fact that
he disapproved of the habit of receiving the sacrament more than once a week, and that he thought auricular confession was Papist
^poppycock.
One simply
cannot
go around making those sort
of
statements if one is the dean of a great cathedral in the middle of
the twentieth century. I concede that one may be allowed to
think them; after all, in our broad Church Protestants and Catholics
arc equally welcome, but such thoughts should be kept private and
balanced by a determination not only to be tolerant of the other
side but to learn from it. The older cathedrals in England arc
shrines to the pre-Reformation Catholic tradition and are now
witnesses to our famous Anglican ‘Middle Way’ where the Catholic
theology of the sacraments embraces the Protestant theology of
the Word; in consequence a dean has no business making inflam
matory statements in the manner of some Non-Conformist fanatic
who bawls out: ‘No Popery!’ whenever he sees a statue of the
Virgin Mary.

Fortunately Aysgarth was no fool and he soon
realised
he had
to modify his stance in order to avoid giving offence to a great
many people. He backtracked on auricular confession, although
he refused to hear penitents himself, and he swore devotion to the
cause of ecumenism, the reconciliation of the different branches
of the Church, although his statements were strangely silent on the subject of Rome; I suspect he confined his ecumenical yearnings to
union with the Methodists. But despite this improved behaviour
he still failed to show up regularly at the early morning weekday
services, and during the months when he was officially ‘
in
-residence
’ he constantly delegated the saying of matins and the
celebration of Communion to one of the minor canons. (Lyle said
Aysgarth needed the extra time in bed in order to recover from his hang-overs, but this charge was not evidence of Aysgarth’s
drinking habits but of Lyle’s dislike.)
The upshot of all these abstentions from public worship was
that I soon felt obliged to give the residentiary Canons the spiritual
lead which he was apparently unwilling to provide, so I started
turning up more regularly at the Cathedral’s early services. I was
careful not to exaggerate my response. I did not turn up every
day. But I appeared at least twice during the week and often three
times.

That made Aysgarth reform with lightning speed. His competi
tive nature ensured that he could not bear to be outshone by me,
particularly on his own territory, and the embarrassing absences
ceased.

This tense game of spiritual one-upmanship, with all its revolting
worldly implications of rivalry, dislike and distrust, was played
between us for six years in an atmosphere which, despite repeated clashes of opinion, we managed to keep tolerably civilised. By that I mean we never actually had a row, although we often came close
to one. Then in 1963, as Jon put it in his old-fashioned way, ‘the
Devil wriggled into the Cathedral and caused havoc.’ It is not my
purpose now to describe the events of 1963, but this was the year
when Aysgarth commissioned a pornographic sculpture for the
Cathedral churchyard.

I regret to say that there was even more going on than this row over the sculpture (the commission
was
eventually cancelled), but
I still cannot bring myself to write about what Aysgarth was getting
up to on his days off. Some forms of clerical misbehaviour really
do have to be buried six feet deep for the good of the Church. I
think I may divulge, however, without going into lurid detail, that
his two most dangerous habits at that time were a tendency to
drink too much and an inclination to be undignified with women
many years his junior.

Naturally I wanted to sack him, but I had no power. The Dean
ery was a Crown appointment., made by the Prime Minister on
the Queen’s behalf, and although I could have threatened to make
a considerable fuss in high places in an attempt to extort his resig
nation, it had seemed clear that my duty was to conceal the scandal,
not risk exposing it. In the end I took the pragmatic course, aiming
for rehabilitation by forcing Aysgarth to pray about his situation
with Jon’s guidance, and fortunately by that time Aysgarth was so
shattered by the consequences of his aberrations that he did not
even have the strength to whisper: ‘No Popery!’ when compelled
to seek help from an Anglo-Catholic spiritual director.

Jon patched him up until he was once again capable of running
the Cathedral with dignity. Then Jon began the task of patching
up
me.
I was the bishop, and in the manner of Harry Truman I
could have kept on my desk a sign which read: THE BUCK
STOPS HERE. There could be no denying the fact that the
cathedral of my diocese was in a mess, and like Aysgarth I had to kneel before God, confess my part in the disaster and pray for the
grace to do better. It was only after this ritual had been performed
that Jon and I tried to work out how to cleanse the poisoned
atmosphere and mend the fractured community.

Jon never held a session which Aysgarth and I both attended,
but he suggested to each of us that the Bishop, Dean and Chapter
should all make a habit of praying together, and when he judged
that the moment was right I held a meeting at the South Canonry.
Here it was agreed that for six months all five of us would attend
matins daily and all
five
of us would participate together in the
early service of Holy Communion at least once during the week.
I also suggested that once a month we all met at the South Canonry
to discuss any contentious issues in a calm atmosphere over coffee.

Life improved. The coffee-meetings were a failure, since every
one was so nervous of a quarrel that
noth
ⁱ
ng
contentious was
ever
discussed, but at least afterwards the Canons were more willing
to confide in me whenever Aysgarth drove them to distraction.
Meanwhile the daily attendance at weekday matins had become a
successful routine and we all stayed on for Communion on Wed
nesdays. This agreed pattern of worship should have meant that
Aysgarth and I were free to abandon our game of spiritual one-upmanship, but I noticed that whenever I chose to exceed the
agreed pattern and stay on for an additional Communion service,
he usually stayed on too. Ho
wever I thought it best to try t
o
believe this was because of changed spiritual needs and had no connection with our old rivalry.