Chapter One

How I met Father Joe:

I was fourteen and having an affair with a married woman.

At least she called it an affair; she also said we were lovers, and
on several occasions, doomed lovers. An average teen, I was quite
content with these exalted terms; in practice, however, I only got
to second base with her. (I didn't yet know it was second base, as
I was growing up in England.)

It was only rather later too, when I saw The Graduate, that I
realized my Mrs. Robinson may have been somewhat older than she
admitted to --- which was twenty-two. To my unpracticed eye she
could certainly pass for that; I was still young enough that any
woman with breasts and a waist and her own teeth was roughly the
same age as any other --- which is to say a grown-up --- and the
mysterious repository of unimaginable pleasures deserving . .
.

. . . hideous, very specific torments. The fly in the ointment of
this relationship was that we were both Catholics. At least in
theory (theory to me, practice to her), there was a terrible bill
being racked up somewhere, calibrating the relative sinfulness of
everything we did, every gesture made, every word exchanged, let
alone every kiss. Should death strike, should lightning fork from
one of the huge trees outside into our concupiscent bodies, should
one of the experimental jets being developed over the hill at
DeHavilland's disintegrate and plummet to earth (as they often
threatened to do when trying to break the sound barrier), turning
her trailer into a fireball, down, down we would plunge, into the
bowels of Hell, unshriven, unforgiven, damned for all eternity to
indescribable suffering.

A lot of what little conversation we had --- much more the norm
were interminable, agonized, what she called "existential" silences
--- concerned whether we should even be having a conversation,
should even be together for that matter, doomed lovers in the
throes of a hopeless and illicit liaison, wrestling with the
irresistible temptation of being in the same neighborhood, town,
county, country, planet, dimension. We were so bad for one another,
she said, such a monumental occasion of sin for each other, it was
playing with fire; oh, if only we'd never met and plunged ourselves
into this cauldron of raging emotions from which there was no
escape!

These sentiments were very new to me. My instinctive response was
that they were pretty goofy, but what did I know? I dimly
recognized that I was going through some kind of passage out of
childhood and would from now on be required to learn, without being
taught, how grown-ups acted and spoke. Best not to rock the boat,
by suppressing a classroom splutter. I had a good thing going. Mrs.
Bootle was no slouch in the looks department. Perhaps this was the
way women always spoke in extremis. Books were my only guide and so
far it all seemed pretty true to form --- like being in The Thorn
Birds if it had been written by Christina Rossetti.

But it had been a long time since the first hesitant kiss, and we'd
done lots of kissing since. I was getting restless, anxious to find
out what would be the next cauldron of raging emotions from which
there was no escape.

Now on a bleak Saturday morning in the damp, dank early spring of
green, green Hertfordshire, England, The World, The Solar System,
The Universe, in the year of our Lord 1956, I was about to find
out.

She stood at the kitchen end of the trailer, where the sink was,
surrounded by dirty dishes, her back to the picture window through
which a waterlogged plot ran down to the river, swollen and sullen
in the rain, the depressed little green caps of her
higgledy-piggledy vegetable garden poking through the mud. "Should
we?" she said in an agonized half-sob. "I think we should," I
replied, having no idea what she was talking about. "But . . . but"
(she never used just one "but" --- always at least two) "it will be
the end, the point of no return, all will be lost." "Well, then,"
said the voice of proto-adult reason, "perhaps we shouldn't." "No!
no! yes! yes!, how can we help ourselves, I'm swept away, I tell
you, let's cast all caution to the winds! Turn round."

I did as I was bid, averting my head and closing my eyes, mad
excitement welling up through my body from my heels to my eyelids.
This must be it, whatever it was. From behind me came surreptitious
noises: rustling clothes, eyelets popping, zippers unzipping, hot
little pants of effort.

"Turn round," she whispered hoarsely. I did. "Open your eyes." I
did. Her eyes were now closed, her head inclined to one side, long
hair draped over her white, slight, naked shoulders, framed by the
rain-drenched window, the Madonna of the drizzle. My eyes ratcheted
nervously down to her breasts. They were quite small, of slightly
different sizes, and rather flat. Well, actually very flat. Making
the nipples seem somewhat larger than I would have expected. The
baby --- to all appearances a sweet little scrap --- must have been
a voracious feeder.

These were my first live breasts. The only ones I'd seen to date
had been in nudist magazines. Were they all like this? I'd just
read The Four Quartets for the first time: the image of Tiresias
popped into my head and wouldn't budge.

Then she kissed me. Her lips and face were hotter than usual, like
my little brother's when he had a temperature. She came closer. I
could feel the warmth of her skin through my shirt and then what
must have been those nipples. I put my hand inside her rolled-down
dress between her hip and her belly. "No! no!" she whispered,
covering my hand with hers. But she pushed it down infinitesimally.
As I followed her pressure, she resisted, pulling it up even more
infinitesimally. "You mustn't!" she sobbed. "Think of the sin, the
mortal sin, the eternal flames!" Then the downward pressure again.
A textbook case of no-but-yes --- though I was too young to grasp
such psycho-sexual antics. I followed her hand down for a few
millimeters. It resisted. Up we went. But not so far --- we were
definitely making headway. Down . . . up, down, up, down . . . My
whole hand was inside her dress now, inching inexorably earthward.
Her skin was silky and her flesh deliciously soft. And it kept
getting softer. Where were we? Way down there, surely? Waves of ---
some unknown emotion --- shuddered through me. I was dizzy with
excitement, Tiresias having definitely taken a powder . . .

Ben and Lily Bootle had first appeared at the local Catholic church
a year earlier. She was petite and slender, he was big and rangy, a
head or more taller than his mate. Though she was very pregnant she
wore a clingy, full-length shift-like dress, emphasizing her milky
breasts and bulging belly. Open leather sandals advertised tiny,
shapely feet. Her outfit had a distinct bohemian flair in a Sunday
congregation made up for the most part of dowdy English widows and
hungover Irish laborers with the occasional large unruly family and
cigarette-ashen wife.

Ben looked as though he'd just emerged from a night of
electroshock. His thick wiry hair stood up in uncombed clumps and
spikes, his clothes were always rumpled with at least one element
undone, and he wore battered tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses of
impressive thickness.

They seemed to have no friends and kept very much to themselves; no
one even knew where they lived, least of all our ancient and
embottled parish priest, Father B. Leary (the "B." --- for
Bartholomew --- leading us altar boys to call him Father
Bleary).

In due course a baby Bootle appeared, which Lily carried in a
rather self-consciously peasanty manner on her hip. Its gender was
unclear, since it wore no conventional baby garments, being wrapped
regardless of season in what my mother acidly called "swaddling
clothes." But still no one had found out a whole lot about them,
except that Ben was some kind of scientist doing hush-hush work on
jets or rockets or something. Since the church was the only place
they made contact with us earthlings, it had also been noted that
Ben was quite devout. As well as Sunday Mass he would appear at
non-obligatory services like Rosary evenings to pray for the
Godless Soviets.

Though our paths hadn't crossed, serving Mass was also one of my
chores, which I loathed not only because of the tongue-twisting
Latin responses but also because Father Bleary had last brushed his
teeth to celebrate victory over the Kaiser and his breath would
have stopped even the leper-hugging St. Francis dead in his tracks.
One moment of the Mass in particular, the Lavabo, at which the
server is required to ritually wash the priest's fingers, putting
the anointed face inches from yours, was like being gassed in the
trenches at Verdun.

My level of devotion was at a fairly obligatory level. I was the
product of what the Church called a "mixed marriage" --- one
between a Catholic and a non-Catholic, which in my father's case
meant nothing fun like a Muslim or a Satanist, but simply a
desultory agnostic, a "nonbeliever in anything much, really."
Ironically, he was a stained-glass artist, so he spent far more
time inside churches and knew far more about Catholic iconography
than his nominally Catholic brood.

My mother was what the priests called a "good" Catholic. She
attended Mass every Sunday and holiday of obligation, went to
confession once a month, shelled out handfuls of silver when
required, but otherwise, as far as I could tell, didn't allow the
precepts of the Gospels and their chief spokesman to interfere much
with her daily round of gossip, bitching, kid-slapping,
neighbor-bashing, petty vengeance, and other middle-class
peccadilloes.

One aspect of my mother's behavior did seem to me to be well up the
scale of venial sin, if not all the way to mortal: she shared with
local non-Catholics a broad prejudice against the Irish laborers
who were appearing in our village in considerable numbers, as they
were in many other parts of England, to work in the ongoing
reconstruction of postwar Britain, particularly the new motorways.
All of whom were Catholic.

The vast majority of these workers were fleeing chronic
unemployment in the new Republic and brought with them habits of
poverty that didn't sit well with the upwardly mobile Protestant
burghers of southeast England: the drinking and plangent midnight
singing in the street --- naturally --- but also the taking a leak
round any old corner, the possession of only one jacket and pair of
trousers --- worn to the construction site every morning, to the
pub every night, to church on Sunday, and to sleep in
anytime.

Mostly they were loathed just for being Irish. The depth of British
odium for a people they robbed, murdered, enslaved, and starved for
eight hundred years is hard to exaggerate; I often experienced it
at second hand when gangs of local toughs would run me to cover as
I walked home from school, screaming "dirty Catholic go home" and
heaving stones at me. True, British anti-Catholic prejudice harked
back to the seventeenth century and was institutionalized in many
ways, but it's unlikely these troglodytes had the excesses of James
II on their tiny minds; for them, "Catholic" and "Irish" were
interchangeable slurs.

I hadn't made this connection yet; kids tend to take prejudice in
their stride, a fixed peril you find a route around on your journey
toward adulthood. For the moment its larger meaning was opaque and
my dealings with it open to compromise if not outright
collaboration.

Example: every November fifth in England, Guy Fawkes --- a Catholic
conspirator of the early seventeenth century who almost succeeded
in blowing up the Houses of Parliament --- is burned in effigy on
thousands of bonfires across the land. While it's fine that Guy
Fawkes be remembered for what he was --- an odious antidemocratic
terrorist --- this custom has for centuries also expressed and
refueled anti-Catholic prejudice. So every Sunday before Guy Fawkes
Day, Catholic priests would condemn it and order Catholics not to
participate. For me --- a serial pyromaniac --- the prospect of no
bonfire was bad enough, but it also meant missing the truly
glorious part of Guy Fawkes Day: fireworks.

In a mixed marriage this sort of thing could be sheer poison. The
arrangement my father worked out was as follows: (a) fireworks,
naturally --- kids have to have fireworks; (b) smallish bonfire
(though I'd always creep out in the night and pile it higher, and
if possible stick tires in it); (c) absolutely no guy (as the
effigy of Mr. Fawkes is known). When my mother objected that we
were still symbolically burning a Catholic, Dad would reply yes,
but every time we let off a firework we were symbolically blowing
up the Houses of Parliament.

So then we'd celebrate the same prejudice that got rocks thrown at
my head on the way home from school. And the same prejudice that
had the good villagers muttering about lazy drunks and refusing to
rent rooms to the Irish or serve them in their shops. I found this
obnoxious in them and, to the degree that she agreed, in my mother.
I'd like to pretend that I was smart enough at fourteen to have
worked all this out in total consistency, but in fact I had simply
picked up from somewhere an aversion to discriminating against
people because they had next to nothing and did work no one else
wanted to do.

Unbeknownst to me there was more at work than mere altruism; a
deeper bond made me take the Irish side.

If challenged, Mum would have said she was just being protective in
putting as much distance as possible between us kids and the boyos
down the pub. (She certainly did in church, where she would sit as
far away as she could from her boozy coreligionists, moving up a
row or two if they got too close.) Something much juicier, however,
was going on beneath these maternal protestations.

She always insisted that her maiden name --- McGovern --- was
Scottish, even though it began with "Mc" as all the finest Irish
names do, not "Mac" like all the finest Scottish ones. She and the
other four McGovern sisters had indeed been born in Glasgow, so she
did have that on her side. But as one of her older sisters would
say, less skit- tish than she about their true origins: if a cat
has kittens in the oven, are they biscuits? Nonetheless Mum stuck
to her guns; we were Scottish and proud of it, och awa' the noo. Of
course the British weren't much fonder of the Scots than they were
of the Irish, but on the spectrum of Anglo-Saxon anti-Celtic
prejudice she evidently felt it was better to be ridiculed as
Scottish than despised as Irish.

Once when I was about ten, Dad brought home a book of Scottish
tartans --- he was painstaking about the heraldic and chivalric
symbols he used in his windows --- and I got very excited over the
rich old aristocratic patterns. Surely with our deep Scottish roots
we must have a tartan? That in turn would mean we could wear a
kilt, och awa' the noo. This line of questioning threw Mum for the
biggest loop so far. "Um --- that one," she said, pointing at the
Campbell tartan. "But that's the Campbell tartan," I objected.
"Well," she fired back, "the McGoverns are part of the Campbell
clan."

Only later, when I moved to New York, where I met dozens of
McGoverns, every one as Irish as a pint of stout, did all become
clear; I realized that the closest my maternal ancestors had ever
come to the Highlands and a Campbell kilt was the wilds of County
Leitrim.

If I'd known at the time how Irish I was, I mightn't have been so
pleased about it. I wasn't a whole lot keener about being a
Catholic. This had less to do with being on the receiving end of
prejudice than with the growing gap between what I heard in church
and learned in school. Not that my mother hadn't tried to prevent
the gap from growing. The mixed-marriage contract the Church
required the infidel half of the couple to sign said that all
resulting offspring had to be brought up in the Faith. If humanly
possible, this meant being sent to a Catholic school.

Between the ages of five and eight, therefore, I had gone to the
nuns, in this case Dominicans, followers of the intrepid Spanish
preacher Domingo de Guzman, aka St. Dominic, scourge of the Cathars
and inventor of the very first version of the Inquisition. The good
sisters were known by baffling names like Sister Mary Joseph,
Sister Mary Frederick, and Sister Mary Martin. While they never
actually condemned us first-graders to an auto-da-fé, they
certainly devised some Inquisition-level torments to instill the
One True Faith in us; and, to be fair, they were effective. (Why
did God make you? God made me to know him love him and serve him in
this world and to be happy with him forever in the next.) There are
several concepts and assumptions in this catechesis which might be
a little beyond a six-year-old, but half a century later I can
still recite it in my sleep.

The next stop after the good sisters was the good brothers.

These hard men ran a joint called, benignly enough, St. Columba's,
quartered in a sprawling old Victorian mansion. I've blanked on the
name of their order; I'd like to think it included some phrase like
St. Aloysius The Impaler, but it was probably more along the lines
of the Holy Brothers of the Little Flower. They were, to a man,
Irish; in all my years in and out of the Church I've never come
across a gang so utterly unholy. They dressed in lay clothes and
wore lay haircuts, and as far as anyone could tell, they performed
no religious observances whatsoever. Nothing distinguished them
from what they appeared to be --- members of a sleeper cell of the
IRA or participants in some particularly vicious form of organized
crime.

They beat us with their belts, they beat us with their metal rulers
--- the thin side, not the flat. They set dogs on boys who strayed
into their quarters, they had beer on their breath at morning
assembly. They encouraged the older boys --- especially if they had
Irish names --- to beat the crap out of the smaller ones ad majoram
Dei gloriam. This toughening-up process would turn us seven- and
eight-year-old boys into good soldiers of Christ. Religion was
invoked only as a prelude to violence; the fires of Hell awaited
any infraction or indiscipline, especially the mortal sin of being
anywhere near a Holy Brother with a morning head. Threatening the
fear of damnation had limited force --- as far as I could tell, I
was already in Hell.

Disputes between boys were settled on the spot by boxing bouts ---
not with padded sparring gloves either, but ten-ounce ring gloves.
The first time this happened to me, I tearfully objected that I
didn't know how to box and couldn't I run a race or something,
whereupon Brother Colm, who happened to be headmaster, snarled,
"You'll settle it with the gloves --- as Christ intended." I
scrolled mentally through the Gospels for occasions where Jesus had
gone a couple of rounds with the Pharisees or Sadducees. Nothing.
Then the other boy hit me in the face and knocked me out.

After I came home for the umpteenth time with a bloody nose or my
arse covered in welts or a smashed hand bandaged in a handkerchief
--- there being no school nurse at St. Columba's, the soldiers of
Christ performed their own first aid --- my parents decided that
the mixed-marriage contract notwithstanding, my Catholic education
was at an end.

My first Protestant stop was a small Church of England prep school
with pretensions to be rather classier than was merited by its
location --- a nouveau-riche dormitory town north of London. I
didn't like it much, and perhaps as payback to some greater
educational authority in the sky, I became possessed by a demon of
petty crime, a juvenile delinquent playing right into the
stereotype of the perfidious Irish Catholic.

Excluded from morning prayers each day and C of E religious
instruction several times a week, I spent the time allocated for
spiritual reflection rifling through the pockets of my classmates'
coats and jackets in the cloakroom. I could garner vast sums this
way --- sometimes as much ten or fifteen shillings a day, a huge
sum for a preteen in the mid-fifties. The proceeds were then spent
at the local Gaumont cinema.

My visits were so regular that Mum became convinced that it really
did take three and a half hours to get home on the bus, not the
official hour or so. I caught --- at least four or five times each
--- the Ealing comedies, Olivier's Henry V, Billy Wilder's Sunset
Boulevard, and a long succession of early Technicolor Hollywood
goodies, best of all the garish biblical epics that aging 1930s
moguls were pumping out to nip TV in the bud (and in some cases to
subliminally bolster the scriptural claims of the new state of
Israel). My all-time favorite was Samson and Delilah, with
ravishing Yvonne de Carlo as the hair- clipping houri and bulging
Victor Mature as Samson. It riveted me that Samson's breasts were
almost as big as Delilah's. One of my earliest sexual crises had
been rage and bafflement that I would never be able to have a baby,
and I found Mr. Mature's bosoms strangely comforting.

I became adept at theft, staggering my raids and leaving the
heavier copper and bronze coins in the victims' pockets so they
wouldn't discover their loss till they were out of school, where it
could be blamed on their own carelessness. I'm sure the authorities
were leaning over backward to be Christlike and tolerant, hesitant
to conclude that the school's only Catholic was ripping off his
Protestant classmates.

Eventually the well-meaning dolts put a patrol on the cloakroom,
but by then the demon had parted as abruptly as it came, leaving me
with no further taste for felony. I'd scored high in the
eleven-plus exams and won a place at the best school in the county;
then, to everyone's surprise, including my own, I won several
events at the end-of-term athletics meet and was declared my year's
champion. A top student and a track star could hardly be a thief.
So the good Prots not only provided me with a small fortune in
stolen goods and a solid grounding in Hollywood movies, they sent
me on my way with a silver cup.

Robbery, violence, Hollywood --- all classic enemies of Catholic
piety. By the time I arrived at St. Albans School at the age of
eleven, I was already drifting away from Holy Mother Church. St.
Albans was nominally C of E; it was also the oldest surviving
school in England, having been founded by the Benedictine monks of
St. Albans Abbey in a.d. 948. This meant, for what it was worth,
that it had been Catholic far longer than it had been Church of
England, from 948 to the Dissolution being roughly six hundred
years while the Protestants had had it only since then, a paltry
four hundred. Up until the Second World War it had been a minor
public school, but by the time I got there, the socialist leveling
that was transforming British education had swept most of this
religious and classist history away. St. Albans was a
government-funded feeder school for the coming meritocracy, and
academic excellence was its overwhelming concern.

The level was scary. Where up to this point I'd had little trouble
making it to the top rank of any class, here I was just one of the
anonymous striving middle. The aim became simply to keep your head
down and your marks up. The syllabus included Latin and Greek, but
there was no doubt about the long-term utilitarian emphasis ---
math and science, with English (and French) literature a distant
third.

Our classes were seated in alphabetical order, and right in front
of me for my first three years was an inarticulate homunculus named
Stephen Hawking. The great utility of Hawking to his classmates was
that he could do math and physics homework at the speed of light
--- a concept, by the way, only he seemed able to grasp. He usually
had the homework finished by the end of lunch hour, and the
thuggier element in his class --- including me --- found it easy to
persuade him to share it. Our math and physics marks were terrific,
until the inevitable day of a test, which Hawking would finish in
minutes and sit snuffling and grinning and doodling for the
remainder of the hour, while the rest of us sweated through the
now-incomprehensible scientific runes.

The custom of using Hawking as a source for spiffy homework marks
persisted until sometime in the third year when he began moving at
warp speed. Now he would take a fairly simple problem of, say,
calculus as the pretext for a far-ranging dissertation expressing
itself in pages and pages of equations and formulae that no doubt
stopped just short of the event horizon. The cloddier types duly
copied all this out, figuring it would lead to massive bonus marks.
It didn't, and soon Hawking disappeared from all math classes to
pursue his destiny alone.

The fine print in the Church's mixed-marriage contract demanded
that where offspring were forced to attend a non-Catholic school,
religious instruction should counteract the heathen lies with which
their little ears were filled. In practice my syllabus was so
arduous that I had no time for religious instruction even if it had
been available in a small country village. So there was no
counterweight to my favored subjects, history and organic
chemistry, leading my education in an increasingly secular
direction.

History textbooks hadn't caught up with postwar historical thought
or research; they tended to be Anglocentric, casually
anti-Catholic, and often virulently antipapal. This was very much
the case in my favorite period --- the Middle Ages. One of the more
egregious examples of skewed papal history concerned a local lad,
Nicholas Breakspear, who in the mid–twelfth century rose from
being Abbot of St. Albans to become Adrian IV, the only Englishman
ever to attain the papacy. Breakspear, it was emphasized, was that
very rare bird: a good Pope.

A teenager eagerly and uncritically lapping up all such great
stuff, I had no frame of reference to judge it by. As the Curial
bureaucrats who wrote the mixed-marriage contract no doubt foresaw,
I much preferred the new analysis to the old, maternal, pro-Church
one.

My fascination with chemistry added fuel to the heretical pyre. The
clear message of chemistry --- especially of lab experiments, which
I'd never done before --- was that everything in the
phenomenological world had an explanation, and that if it couldn't
yet be explained, further research would soon do the job. It didn't
take a genius to figure out that the standard proof of God's
existence ("someone must have made it all") began to get a little
rocky in the lab. There was the evidence in the microscope slide:
amoebas reproduced all by themselves without a flash of lightning
or a big finger pointing at them, just as they had long ago in
kicking off the chain of evolution that led to Hawking.

For me there was another factor too, in some ways more
all-encompassing and from a strict doctrinal point of view more
insidious. I had fallen in love with the Hertfordshire
countryside.

Hertfordshire contains many of the signature images of the great
landscape artist John Constable: slow, meandering streams winding
through lush meadows intersected with vast stands of elm; gentle
hills and soft bosomy fields trimmed with neatly laid hedges of
hawthorn and hazel; animals of all kinds, wild and domestic, in
huge profusion; rich clay and loam, its vegetation moist and
bulbous, bursting with primal juice. You could hardly break a stalk
in the meadows without some thick or milky essence bleeding from
the plant.

I don't mean I passed my youth in a Wordsworthian trance. I had
goals. The most important was the killing of small waterfowl and
the roasting of them over an open fire. Hunting in turn required
the construction of weapons --- first spears with, for one brief
and frustrating period, hand-chipped flint tips, but later and more
practically, bows and arrows.

In the wonder years that I spent wandering the countryside with my
lethal weapons, I never managed to kill a single living thing, let
alone roast it --- though I did once find an arrow sticking in the
rump of our neighboring farmer's Guernsey. (She didn't seem to
mind; he was livid.)

I was fixated on a tubby little waterfowl called a moorhen ---
ducks were iffy since they might belong to someone --- but when
moorhens broke cover they ran in crazy evasive patterns and you
couldn't get a bead on them. But failure didn't matter. My
self-image as an intrepid hunter alone in the wilderness, surviving
on my wits, implacably tracking my prey, was reward enough.

I built a succession of secret huts from interwoven reeds and
boughs and grass. I got quite good at siting these in natural
blinds and clumps of vegetation to minimize construction. (Which
made them even more secret.) Nothing better than to sit in the
mouth of a secret reed hut after a hard morning's hunt, a campfire
sizzling in the drizzle, toasting a slice of bread or a sausage and
puffing on a dried, rolled-up dock leaf. Tomorrow, always assuming
I could figure out how to pluck it and gut it, a fat moorhen would
be spitted over this very fire and my entire life would be
fulfilled.

Nobody knew where I was, nobody could find me. I was one with my
allies, the trees and leaves and folds in the earth, the banks and
hedges and stands of wild grass. On fine days the sunlight became a
coconspirator, filtering through the filigree of leaves and
vegetation to make a second, even more secure dimension of dappled
camouflage --- and me even more invisible.

This was when I first came across Marvell's

Annihilating all that's made

To a green thought in a green shade.

No doubt I was creating an alternate or fantasy life (food,
shelter, security) in rejection of the one my parents provided. But
nothing so tediously psychological ever occurred to me. I was happy
without knowing it, at peace long before I knew how crucial and
elusive peace is.

One summer a terrible epidemic called myxomatosis ran through the
entire wild rabbit population, and there were little corpses of my
former prey everywhere, their eyeballs forced halfway out of their
skulls by the jellylike tumors the disease causes, making their
eyes, still staring wildly in death, look like tumors themselves.
There were trophies everywhere, meat for the taking, but I could
only think what a horrible way to die --- for my friends and
coconspirators to die --- and that in some implacable way my
callousness had caused their agony.

Why was all this a doctrinal threat? Because my woods and meadows
seemed a much better church than the Church. The irresistible force
of life --- the tiny eggs appearing in the nest, the buds on the
dead wood of winter --- evidenced a much more immediate presence of
something divine than the presence that was supposed to exist in
the tabernacle on the altar.

There beneath a flickering red lamp that was always lit to indicate
he was home (the Savior is . . . IN) was Christ himself, really
present in the Holy Eucharist, a chalice full of consecrated
wafers. We were taught this was a sacramental presence, the outward
sign of inward grace. The standard exegesis was that while the
outward accidents of the bread did not change at the moment of
consecration, its essence --- that which made it bread and bread
alone --- had been transformed into the essence of Jesus Christ,
that which made him and him alone the son of God. A neat analysis
and, if true, a mind-boggling miracle. The trouble was I felt
nothing gazing up at Christ's little brass hut. No presence at all;
just the exotic odor of last Sunday's incense and that dusty
mushroomy smell of decay all churches have, whatever their
age.

Whereas under my canopy of sun-dappled leaves I certainly felt the
presence of something, and something I was quite prepared to say
was divine, powerful, benign, even loving, and if beyond my ken,
not that far beyond. It could be God or a god, or more likely a
goddess, the spirit of sun-dappled leaves. The lazy River Lea,
polluted though it was, was still a miracle, a whole liquid
universe of life.

One early summer evening, down along the River Lea, following my
best moorhen route, I came upon something I'd never noticed before,
concealed by thick curtains of willow fronds and giant reeds: a
decrepit trailer with saggy old power lines running into the trees,
painted a morose green. In the yard outside, a couple, one with a
baby on her hip, were tending a newly turned garden. I'd come upon
the secret lair of Mr. and Mrs. Mystery --- Ben and Lily
Bootle.

Excerpted from FATHER JOE: The Man Who Saved My Soul ©
Copyright 2011 by Tony Hendra. Reprinted with permission by Random
House, an imprint of PUB2NAME. All rights reserved.