Tony Hendra - Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul

TONY HENDRA

FATHER JOE

THE MAN WHO SAVED MY SOUL

RANDOM HOUSE
NEW YORK

TABLE OF CONTENTS

This book is for
Judy, Carla, Katherine,
Jessica, Nicholas, Sebastian,
Lucy, Christopher, Timothy,
Julia, and Charlotte.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It would have been impossible to write about Father Joe without the inspiration of The Moth and the encouragement of its Creative Director, Joey Xanders; without the hard work, dedication, and boundless confidence of Dan Menaker, Jonathon Lazear, and Webster Younce. Most of all my thanks go to the Abbots and Community of Quarr Abbey, past and present, especially Abbot Cuthbert Johnson, Dom Matthew Tylor, Dom Robert Gough, Brother John Bennet, and Brother Francis Verry. The encouragement, spiritual and otherwise, of Father Joe McNerney. The help of Father Tom Faucher and Arthur Wells.

Finally, I owe a debt of gratitude the size of the federal deficit to George Kalogerakis for his perspicacity, patience, and good friendship.

PAX

PROLOGUE

T here he stands on the muddy clay of the little promontory, hands under scapular for warmth in the chill, his wide rubbery mouth beaming serenely at the gray turmoil of the English Channel. Hooked over vast ears, framing a fleshy groundhog nose and battered granny glasses, is his black monks cowl, ancient and rudimentary shield against the blustery rain. Farther down: irredeemably flat feet in black socks and big floppy sandals, these emerging from scruffy black robes whipped by the squalls and revealingif youre luckyglimpses of white English knees so knobbly they could win prizes.

Dom Joseph Warrilow is his formal monastic name, but everyone calls him Father Joe. I have seen him in this pose and place countless times down the years, in the flesh or in my minds eye. Never once have I been able to stop a smile from coming to my lips. Hes as close to a cartoon monk as you could imagine. And he is a saint.

That poor, weary, once-powerful wordbowed and enfeebled by abuseis not used lightly. Saint does not mean merely dedication, or selflessness, or generosity, though it subsumes all those. Nor does it mean the apogee of religious devotion, though it can subsume that toosometimes. There are many pious people who believe themselves to be saints who are not, and many people who believe themselves to be impious who are.

A saint is a person who practices the keystone human virtue of humility. Humility in the face of wealth and plenty, humility in the face of hatred and violence, humility in the face of strength, humility in the face of your own genius or lack of it, humility in the face of anothers humility, humility in the face of love and beauty, humility in the face of pain and death. Saints are driven to humbling themselves before all the splendor and horror of the world because they perceive there to be something divine in it, something pulsing and alive beneath the hard dead surface of material things, something inconceivably greater and purer than they.

This man is one of those rare, rare creatures. Gentleness and goodness come off him like aftershave. For all his irrepressible curiosity and concern, for all his love of talking and listening and then talking some more, a great stillness surrounds him in which he will fold you without your knowing it, numbing the pain of your most jagged obsessions, soothing away the mad priorities of your world with the balm of his peace.

For more than forty years, since I was not much more than a boy, this lumpy gargoyle of a man has been my still center, the rock of my soul, as steady and firm as the huge oak on the curve of the hill where the monastery stands, the hill that runs down to the sea. I have lost and found him more than once, gone far, far astray from the haven of his presence, but never ceased, however dimly and distantly, to love and revere him and hunger for his company. His was the wisdom I cravedthough it was never what I expected; his judgment alone I fearedthough never once did he pass judgment on me.

All my conscious life he was my strongest ally, the cherished gatekeeper of my lost Eden, a lighthouse of faith blinking away through the oceanic fogs of success and money and celebrity and possessions, my intrepid guide in the tangled rain forest of human love, my silken lifeline to the divine, my Father Joe.

Years ago the promontory of clay where he stands was much farther out, but the waves erosion is relentless. Hes gazing at the gulls swooping and diving for their lunch. He turns to me and smiles that fond crooked smile:

Tony dear, I was just thinking of you. How are your beautiful children?

More beautiful than ever. Happily as they grow older they bear less and less resemblance to their father.

And you, dear?

Still alone, Father Joe.

You are not alone, dear. We are never alone.

I remember. And every time you said that, I felt Gods presence. But I felt it in you, through you. Now I am a void.

He smiles again, the old no smilea no which has always meant yes. Taking it as an invitation, I move a little closer. Hoping. Just this once...

But he melts away, still smiling, into the eternal rain.

The bare ruined trees drip their drizzle, chill my aging body. The tide snaps and tugs at the reluctant clay.

How to make my dear, good friend live again? Roll back the rock from the tomb, take him by the hand, and lead him out into the light. See him laugh and teach and heal once more...

CHAPTER ONE

H ow 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 didnt 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 towhich 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 otherwhich is to say a grown-upand 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 DeHavillands 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 hadmuch more the norm were interminable, agonized, what she called existential silencesconcerned 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 wed never met and plunged ourselves into this cauldron of raging emotions from which there was no escape!