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Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul by Tony Hendra Rating: ••• (Recommended)
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Stability What saves Tony Hendra’s memoir, Father Joe, from turning into a hagiography, is the realization that we learn about Benedictine monk Father Joseph Warrilow from a single point of view. Father Joe became a substitute for Hendra’s biological father, and at the many times when their lives touched, Hendra found himself led closer to becoming the person he was meant to be. Ever patient, gentle, and understanding, Father Joe never judges Hendra, but always loves him. With the tragic stories of clerical sexual abuse of children, it’s important to comment that the love of Father Joe for Hendra never becomes inappropriate. Hendra’s fine writing is worth the time, no matter what he’s saying, and in Father Joe the writing comes from his heart, and he’s at his best. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of Chapter Nine, pp. 102-106: Back home I was a stranger in the door. It was a Saturday evening and my father was out in the garden. Mum was beside herself with rage. At first I thought it was the running away, which I apologized for copiously, but as she raved on I saw that “the episode,” as she called it, had brought home to her the hold Quarr had on me and that someday soon I was going to enter it and be lost to her. “Isn’t a Catholic mother supposed to be proud to give a son to the Church?” “If you want to be a priest, that’s one thing. But these—these— pansies—chanting and making pottery and honey and whatnot! That isn’t Catholicism!” “Of course it is. The Benedictines are the oldest order—” “Escapism! That’s what it is. Running away from reality!” “No—discovering true reality a life of prayer and—” “Why can’t you do Something Useful? After all the sacrifices we’ve made! Just you wait till your father gets here!” On cue, my father entered. He took one look and knew what was going on. His face was grim. “Robert, you must put your foot down once and for all about this monk rubbish.” Dad went over to the laundry cupboard and opened the door. “In here, please, Anthony” This couldn’t be happening! The laundry cupboard—where the laundry dried—was actually a tiny boiler room. In times gone by, it was here he’d take me for punishment. For most infractions, a boxing of the cranial region; for capital crimes, a tanning with something made of leather. I hadn’t been in the laundry cupboard for years. He shoved me in and closed the door behind us. I was much bigger than the last time, and I floundered in the laundry I turned toward him just as he turned toward me and flung up an arm instinctively to ward off the blow But there was no blow In fact, he flinched as though I were going to hit him. It was the first time I’d ever seen him flinch. I was a good inch taller than he was now, broad-shouldered and trim from track and swimming. He was out of shape, with thinning hair and a thickening waistline. In the long moment he took to recover himself, to pretend he hadn’t acknowledged his weakness, he seemed literally to shrink as if I were looking at him through the wrong end of telescope, his head tiny, far away down there below. The head said: “I didn’t bring you in here for the usual reason. It was to say something private I don’t want your mother to hear. I don’t mind what you do with your life. Do what you want, not what others want. I did. But don’t hurt her. And you must finish your schooling. Is that clear?” His head was the right size again. I nodded mine. From that moment on, we never had another fight. Even before this I’d thought there was finally some chance of a relationship with my dad. A month earlier I’d announced that I wouldn’t be going into Science Sixth Form after all but would be heading over to the arts side. Mum was deeply dismayed: perhaps she hoped I’d be the ticket to a degree of prosperity I think she hated being married to an artist, living from stained-glass window to stained-glass window, with no fridge, no television, and a very-used car every year or so that broke down within weeks. Dad would buy these with at least forty thousand miles on them—a huge mileage in pre-motorway Britain—and though he’d been trained as an engineer in the RAF, he had no talent for car repair. Since he also refused to buy American, we became victims of superlative British workmanship. The Home Counties were littered with the corpses of our Morrises, Austins, and Vauxhalls. Mum did have compensations, like getting to meet dignitaries at the unveiling of new windows. Usually these were fat churchmen or sozzled minor nobility At the Westminster Abbey do, she actually got to shake the hand of the charming young Duke of Edinburgh, who, though sozzled, was not fat. But these occasions were infrequent—it takes several years to get a window from sketches to a hole in a church wall—and anyway, none of them translated into a fridge. I suspected that Dad, officially in accord with her about my artsy-fartsy plans and coming lifelong penury, was secretly delighted. And that my monastic dreams, far from offending his agnostic sensibilities, tickled them. He wasn’t a mere artist after all, but an artisan in an ancient craft. He set great stock in mixing his paint from the antique pigments his forerunners had used in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which gave his glass intense, evocative colors; his windows had a certain authenticity from the traditional techniques of leading and aciding and firing he also insisted on. Forward-looking socialist he might be, for him “medieval” was not a dirty word. Greater communication between us revealed how private and saddened a man he was; our alienation hadn’t been of his making, but of Hitler’s. His reaction to the ghastly landscape created by the Cold War generals was not very different from mine; the Age of Faith may not have been perfect, but those benighted centuries had been a sight more civilized than this one. I don’t mean we had an easy time of it; he was weak and had a foul temper and he cheated on my mother. But one thing remained rock-solid; I was deeply proud of what he had chosen to do with his life. That summer I went to France for the first time, on a bicycle tour of Normandy and Brittany, with a school friend, Michael Church. Michael’s last name was odd, because his dad was a C of E Vicar, the Reverend Church. He was a gentle, patient guy of a somewhat spiritual bent himself, who shared my new literary enthusiasms and would put up with my occasional religiosity He also shared my passion for churches, at least the great cathedrals of northern France; if he tired of having to stop in every other village to check out its nondescript place of worship, he was too polite to say so. I couldn’t get enough of them. I’d never been in a Catholic country before, and this hard evidence of the Church’s transnational reach and cultural depth gave me a reassuring sense of belonging—not something I often felt in England. I told my parents the fib that we’d be in France for three weeks or more. Actually we were there about a fortnight, so I had almost a week to spend at Quarr. There was no more playing at monk. I wanted to get as much training as I could in my chosen profession before actually entering the monastery I stayed on the third floor of the guesthouse, which seemed to be the preferred spot for those interested in entering the monastery, and I regularly worked on the farm or on the grounds. I also started to get occasional instruction from the Prior, a formidable scholar and historian named Dom Aelred Sillem. Other people found Dom Aelred a cold fish, but he filled a cerebral need I was feeling. His large and unforgiving intellect could grapple with formal questions of philosophy or theology which Father Joe tended to deflect. As I got to know him better, I found that he also had an intense mystical core, in sharp contrast to Father Joe’s down-to-earth saintliness. He came from a distinguished German family with origins in Hamburg and had entered the Benedictine order at the Abbey of Downside. Dom Aelred and several other monks, including the celebrated historian Dom David Knowles, grew unhappy with the worldliness of Downside (whose rich and prestigious public school had many secular liaisons) and began agitating for a new foundation which would live by a contemplative and far stricter interpretation of the Rule. They failed in this goal, and Dom Aelred came to Quarr. He was a severe and ascetic man who believed in the virtues of order and discipline and could hardly have been more different from Father Joe. As the most prominent younger men in the community its future leaders, they nonetheless complemented each other beautifully. Dom Aelred and Father Joe were the head and the heart of Quarr, a monastic Odd Couple, one living by logic and precedent, the other by emotion and intuition. The two were a real-life version of Ben and Lily’s Franco-Prussian fantasy: a man with actual Teutonic roots and one who, if not French, had spent almost two thirds of his life speaking, thinking, and breathing French. They represented the extremes of the Benedictine spectrum: at one end the ultraviolet of awe and order, at the other the infrared of love and community Dom Aelred held that the fear of God led to the love of God. Father Joe never tired of telling me “we have to take the fear out of religion, dear.” I never spent an hour with Dom Aelred that didn’t leave me feeling I’d been through an intellectual car wash; it was with Father Joe that I felt safe. It was natural as air to call Dom Joseph Warrilow “Father Joe”; it would have been unthinkable to call Dom Aelred Sillem “Father Ael.” Hendra spent many years as head writer and editor at National Lampoon, and his talents come through on the pages of Father Joe. He finds the right times to lampoon himself and writes a tribute to a man who brought stability to his life, and who saved his soul. Steve Hopkins, November 26, 2004
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