Personas of the imagination 2 — transforming the legacy of pain — Peregrine, Tom and William

In the sixth story of The Hawk and the Dove series, The Hardest Thing To Do, Brother Tom says this to Father Theodore:

‘I hate the way I feel about him, Theo.’ Tom blurted out his distress.  ‘And I hate myself for feeling as I do.  When he first came here – well, you know; you heard what I had to say – all I knew was that I hated him.  But it made everything different, did something to me, seeing him choking and throttling, hanging from that rope.  Sancta Maria, it scared the life out of me!  And of course I had to save him.  How could I not?  I didn’t even think about it.  After that, I stopped hating him, just suddenly: snap! Stopped.

‘But I’m left with this awful bitter residue… this kind of toxic sludge.  It still rankles so badly, what he did to Father Peregrine; how he made him suffer, on purpose like that.  And I don’t know what to do with it: that resentment I mean, and the sore it’s left inside me.  I can see well enough what Christ is asking of me: to get over it, basically.  I’m meant to let go of what’s gone by and move on.

‘But I need him to see that what he did was so wrong, and that it mattered.  And if he won’t – then what?   Where does that leave me?  How can I be a monk when I feel like this?  What can I do with all this old bitterness?  I can’t see how to turn it into something different.  And inside a man, the living soul, it’s like a cistern, a kind of closed reservoir with no outlet.  What way is there for it to drain away?  It just seems to stay in there, stewing and fermenting and not getting any less.  How can I get rid of it?  What am I to do?’

Theo waited, not speaking, watching the fall of ash and the red glow of the burning wood; but that seemed to be all Tom wanted to tell him.

One of the thematic threads running through the series is the transformation of legacies of pain. It's considered in differing ways in the lives of Father Peregrine, Brother Tom, Father Francis (lets look at Francis in the next post) and Father William. 

The first three books in the series explore Father Peregrine's response to personal suffering in disability, chronic sickness and dying, by identification with the sufferings of Jesus. He draws down strength and steadiness by maintaining focus on the present reality of Christ who is with us in the circumstances of our own lives, their limitation and adversity. Peregrine returns again and again to choosing simplicity, humility and compassion, as a means of passing his own life and spirituality through the refiner's fire of Holy Spirit.

He also offers the template of willingness to listen as a means of transforming legacies of pain. Particularly in the second book of the series, The Wounds of God, the reader is taken through one instance after another of Peregrine, as abbot of the community, having responsibility to help his brethren with their struggles and crises, but having no idea how to steer them through to peace. His strategy is simply to offer them his complete attention, to be a witness to the reality that belongs to them, and sit with them while allowing Christ who is always with us and part of our every dialogue, to interact directly with their souls.

My proposal through the medium of these stories, from the point of view of Father Peregrine's character, is that if we start with reality rather than imposing an ideal aspirational construct we cannot reach, and bring to that reality simplicity, humility, compassion and complete attention, then we can rely upon the presence of Christ as we invite it into the fabric of our daily circumstances, to work transformation. This is a Eucharistic principle — we open our souls to the healing and renewing power of the Spirit of God by ourselves becoming the host of Christ's broken body, saying 'yes' to the one who stands at the door and knocks.

The same issue of transforming legacies of pain is also explored in Brother Tom's character, in particular in the stories of The Long Fall and The Hardest Thing to Do.

In The Long Fall, Tom struggles with, and in the course of the narrative surrenders to, the costly pilgrimage of beholding someone else's pain, and being willing to travel alongside them through the bitter valley of suffering and dying. 

As he sits with his abbot, and helps him express the legacy of internal pain belonging to the experience of deepening disability, the following dialogue takes place:

So that was it. It shook Tom to the core to see the power that had been in his hands.

‘Let me be sure of what you’re saying. Do you mean… my coming to see you has made the difference between wanting to die… and wanting to live?’

A long, long pause. Even now it was terrifying to reveal his need of Tom’s friendship, how he had ached for his company, wept at his absence. Like a man confessing a secret, shameful guilt, hanging his head he whispered, ‘Y-es.’

Brother Tom sat in silence, looking down at the hand he held between his own.

‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘it hurts, loving you. You turn me inside out.’

As the series unfolds, on a number of occasions (with Peregrine, and later with William) Tom without speaking takes someone into his arms and hugs them, holds them, as a self-offering with the purpose of healing. The first occasion is in the first book, The Hawk and the Dove, when Tom is still a novice, and Father Peregrine has suffered the devastating injuries that have crippled his hands:

Without giving himself time to think better of it, he followed his impulse, and leaping to his feet dragged the heavy table askew so that he could approach his abbot—who watched him, wide-eyed, white-faced and, Tom realised with a stab of pity, scared. Brother Tom seized the stool, placed it emphatically beside his superior’s chair, and sitting on it, took the man in his arms and held him close. ‘It’s all right,’ he said gently, ‘you can let it go.’ He cursed himself for a fool as he felt the awful rigidity of him, like a man of wood; but he persisted, holding him, not speaking, his thoughts racing. ‘Oh well, might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb. Faith, I wish I’d shut the door. I hope to God nobody walks in on this. Maybe I should go now. …’

But as Brother Tom held him and the fortress of his iron self-control was replaced at last, at last, by the fortress of the arms of someone who loved him more than he went in awe of him, Peregrine began to weep, and wept until he lost all self-control and abandoned himself to sobbing grief. ‘My hands …’ he wept, the words barely intelligible, ‘Oh, God, how shall I bear the loss of my hands? To have died would have been nothing … oh, but my hands … oh … oh God. …’ and the words were lost in uncontrollable tears.

What comfort could Brother Tom bring but his presence and his silence and his holding him?

Then there is the occasion in The Long Fall, when Tom pushes Peregrine towards practising speech again after his stroke:

It was a moment not like any other in Tom’s life. Without warning he was in the howling place of storm, the fearful meeting ground of the tortured and the torturer, the betrayer and the betrayed, the powerful and the powerless, those who have and those who have nothing; the still place of knowledge in the eye of the storm. The look on Peregrine’s face filled that hateful, howling desert, assaulted Tom with the violence of a blow. In unendurable, stabbing accusation, Peregrine’s eyes helplessly filled with tears. He bent his head, in a futile effort to hide his face, dismayed that Tom should see him so childishly upset over such a little thing.

But Tom was across the room in two quick strides, and dumping the fruit and cream on the table he fell on his knees by the chair and hugged Peregrine to him, his heart torn open in an agony of pity and shame.

‘No, no, no,’ he moaned. ‘What was I thinking of? Oh, what was I thinking of? Father, forgive my cruelty…’

In that moment, Tom detested himself beyond bearing. He had never dreamed that he might play a part in driving home the nails, hoisting the cross, in this particular crucifixion.

He pressed his lips against Peregrine’s face, tasting the salt of his tears as he drew back to look at him, his hands holding his shoulders, his eyes beseeching his forgiveness. ‘Oh, my God, I’m sorry.’

Tom had known the blissful security of a mother’s arms and the intoxication of being in love; but here, in the anguish of wounding and forgiveness, was a steep, austere intimacy; knowledge beyond ordinary loves. Such unconditional encounter demanded no lesser honesty than the humble, painful disclosure of his naked soul. He bent his head and closed his eyes, suffering the pain of it to sear through him and through him, a merciless, costly compassion.

‘I haven’t been much of a friend to you, have I?’ he mumbled.

In the tenderest gentleness, he felt Peregrine’s finger trace lightly across his cheek.

‘Y-es. Oh y-es. Thank you, T-om.’

This is the practise of entering intimate space in allowing healing to take place. Tom does it again in The Hardest Thing To Do,  this time with William in the aftermath of William's attempted suicide:

The moment the last strands gave proved spectacular.  The body of the choking monk dropped fully into Tom’s arms, knocking him completely off balance; as the cart also tipped and Stephen tried to keep his footing, but fell.   All three of them, crashing amid the cart and the stool, collapsed in a tumbled heap on the stone floor of the barn.   Stephen’s knife fell from his hand and clattered at a distance onto the floor. Both men hastened to straighten their brother’s body, and loosen the rope about his neck, which mercifully proved not difficult to do.  Still gagging and coughing, still with the rope loose about his neck, the man gasped and groaned, rolled over on the hay-strewn floor, and began to vomit.  Tom knelt beside him, holding him up in his arms, lest he choke again.

‘I’ll go and fetch Brother John,’ said Stephen, almost incoherent, scrambling to his feet and limping crazily for the door; leaving Tom clasping the man snatched from death, as if he dared not let him go.   Stephen’s running feet beat away into silence down the stony track.  Bright sunbeams streamed from the cold, clear morning through the open door.  The brightness seemed surreal as Brother Tom knelt there, trying to process what he felt.

‘William de Bulmer,’ he whispered, suddenly dizzy and cold and shaking like a leaf, as he brought his brow to rest on the prostrated Augustinian’s shoulder; ‘you are nothing but trouble’.

And then, in Remember Me, an exploration in fiction of the theology of the Eucharist, Tom comes to find William when William is at his lowest ebb:

Eventually, when he judged that everyone had gone, William rose to his feet and walked slowly to the door.  He did not know what he felt.  He felt nothing.  It was as though shame and failure had engulfed him and broken him, and left him nothing.  He felt his body moving of its own accord as though it no longer had a soul.  He was lost now.  He was nothing.

As he went through the doorway, he caught sight of a pair of sandalled feet.  Startled, he looked up, to see Brother Thomas leaning against the wall, waiting for him.  Tom moved to block his path, and for a moment William’s vision blurred and his throat closed in terror.  He did not take in the expression on Tom’s face, only the size and bulk of him standing there.

“Oh, you prize idiot!” said Tom, and enveloped him in a hug.  “For mercy’s sake, what did you think I was going to do to you?”   Shaking and faint, William gratefully allowed Tom’s strength to hold him.  “Oh God, I’m so sorry, Brother Thomas,” he whispered: “I’m so sorry.”  And Tom just held him, thinking nothing but that this seemed to be his own principal contribution to the life of the community.   

Through these interactions, the character of Brother Tom proposes the concept that pain can be transformed through human closeness — wordless intimacy, the impulse to reach out and comfort, the perception and acceptance of someone else's suffering, seeing how it is for them and responding with simple and natural empathy, understanding and kindness. 

The third strand of exploration about transforming legacies of pain is in the unfolding story of William in the last six books. It follows the theme of learning to love, proposed in this scene with Tom and William in The Hardest Thing To Do:

‘I confess my fault, to you my passionate brother, of many mistakes: hard-heartedness, wilful ignorance, unfaithfulness in my call as Christ’s disciple. I have permitted compassion to grow cold and die in my soul.  I did not care, and I do not care, and I wish I did.  I ask your mercy, passionate brother.  If I am permitted to stay with this community, if there is time – I ask you to help me learn how to love.  Please.  Help me find my way in. I ask forgiveness, of God and of you.’

Soft and light, slowly, deliberately, he kissed Tom’s feet.

Why do these things happen to me? Tom asked himself, incredulously. I’ll wager nobody ever did this to Father Chad!

He leaned forward and, mindful of flesh still sore and bruised, carefully put his hands to William’s shoulders and raised him up.

William's story begins in the second book of the series (The Wounds of God), where the reader encounters him at his most objectionable and obnoxious. He re-enters the narrative in the sixth book, The Hardest Thing To Do — in which is proposed that the hardest thing to do is see life from someone else's point of view rather than one's own.

As we follow William's character through its trail of disasters, antagonisms, relational struggles and catastrophes, we become aware that what he's trying to do is transform the legacy of massive embedded pain.

Peregrine grew up with wealth, privilege and power, but engaged with the severe demands of extreme simplicity through vocation, disability and illness, struggling to find the humility to embrace Christ in His poverty and suffering. Tom grew up in an ordinary, happy home, close to the earth, shaped by natural and loving family relationships, and learns to offer his emotionally robust health for others to lean on in moments of fragility.

William grew up with the unremitting torture of isolation in extreme and relentless abuse, and as a consequence lacks the tools to transform the legacy of pain. His efforts to restore order and create peace in his fractured and chaotic world take the form of constructing a material fortress to shut out physical adversity. Only as he encounters and is embraced by love does he learn to love, to open himself to risk and discover for himself the Christ whose nature is love. In saying 'yes' to Jesus he says 'yes' to love, and the consequences of that are neither simple nor straightforward. The character of William represents the person whose legacy of pain is so deep-rooted that it permanently disfigures his ability to relate with others. His way of transforming the legacy of pain is by sheer persistent courage, trying again and again to find his way back to the light.

In writing this series of novels I've tried to portray both what I have observed in others (initially in contexts of palliative care) and what I've experienced myself, as useful methods of transforming personal pain. These would summarise as: the willingness to start with reality, sitting with others who are suffering, beholding and acknowledging their struggle; the importance of loving-kindness and simple friendship; the necessity for courage in persistently overcoming setbacks, disappointments and failures as we find our way towards healing and the establishment of love; holding fast to Christ in his incarnation of redemptive suffering.

Going back to the first passage quoted above (from The Hardest Thing To Do) in which Tom asks, "What can I do with all this old bitterness?" and "How can I get rid of it?", I would say that the process of healing is long, costly and arduous, that it requires the patient and reliable help of others we trust, that it begins with openness — having space to tell our story to people who are willing to listen, and being able to bear the costly exposure that brings — and it is at the heart of our formation as disciples. It is, perhaps above all else we do, the most worthwhile and spiritually valuable endeavour. It is how we bring the Eucharist out of its enclosure in the rites of the church into the ordinary fabric of our everyday lives.