‘Good evening, my children,’ he said, holding his arms out and stepping forward to the microphone. ‘You are now part of our family. And as you attend the Course over the next few weeks and, I hope, over the years to come, you will find yourself feeling increasingly that your family is here. Some of you may have come to the service on Sunday. Doesn’t matter if you didn’t, but those who were here will have got a measure of the intensity of the bond between us, the strength of this community. It feels sometimes like intensity isn’t approved of in the outside world, as if it somehow isn’t cool. Well here at St Botolph’s, intensity is very cool. We encourage it.’ He smiled and took a sip of water. The lights dimmed slightly. Lee rested her head on Mouse’s shoulder.
‘I hope that, over the past week, you might have noticed some changes in yourself. Maybe you haven’t. Often we’re too caught up in the business of our lives and we don’t have time to think about how we’re feeling. Sometimes it’s hard to make space for God. But if you have felt something different, if you have found yourself praying, and maybe you’ve read some pages of the Bible, well, that’s all great.’ His smile faded and Lee noticed a subtle shift in the atmosphere. The light around the priest grew colder, wind whistled in the roof. She shivered. David clasped his hands together.
‘Now I mentioned that this is a family. And families work best with rules. So today I’m going to talk about some of these rules and about why we have them. I used to leave this part until the end of the Course. No one likes hearing about rules. We are always being told what to do: mind the gap, don’t walk on the grass, get to work on time. So I’m only going to talk about the really major ones. There are signs all along Beachy Head which say stay away from the cliff edge. Well, the rules I’m going to talk about tonight are like that — life-savers.’
Lee found herself zoning out as David spoke about the need to attend church on a regular basis, the necessity of nightly prayer, the fact that they were now missionaries for the Course and had to think about how others would view them. She was due to go up to her parents’ house the weekend after the Retreat. She would sit and play the piano all day Saturday in her dad’s music room at the top of the house. You could see the sea through the window if you leaned out a little as you played. A grand piano sat in the centre of the room, sheet music was piled in corners, there was a desk at the back beside which stood a wire basket full of crumpled paper. She would often kneel by the basket with her dad looking for melodies that he had abandoned during his fits of frustrated rage. A mobile made of piano keys hung in the window, black and yellow-white keys that clunked together like bones when they were stirred by a breeze.
She was worried that her dad might commit suicide. It had started as a passing fancy and then grew in her mind until she couldn’t drive from her head the picture of him slumped at his desk, an empty bottle of pills clutched in his delicate hand, his long white hair flowing out across the wood. He was terribly fragile, Lee knew this. Disappointed in the gradual diminuendo of his career. He had never been close to Lee’s mother, a quiet and efficient woman who worked in an administrative role at a teacher training college in Ipswich. Her parents hadn’t shared beds since Lee was a child. Now Lee wasn’t there to look after him, and her trips home were less frequent than before she’d moved to London. She recognised that her own demons were handed down from him and she hated the thought of him battling them alone.
She and her dad would take a long walk by the sea on the Saturday evening while her mum watched telly. He always asked her to tell him about her university work. He loved to hear her stories about mystics and visionaries, martyred virgins and ancient anchoresses. Lee enjoyed reciting the Old English poems most of all. On stormy days, her dad would rise from his chair and pull on his coat, helping her into her Barbour as she slipped a scarf around her throat. They’d march along the tideline, eyelashes pearled by the salty spray from breakers, the sky so low that the highest waves seemed to grab handfuls of the dark grey clouds. Lee would quote poetry at her dad in a lilting voice, occasionally tripping as she forced the words into her mind, but always full of drama and tragedy: The Seafarer, The Wanderer, Deor. Her dad would repeat verses that struck him as particularly moving, his voice still heavily accented as he stumbled to shape his mouth around the unfamiliar sound of the ancient language. They’d hold hands as all brightness leached from the day and return, cheeks red, to the warmly glowing house.
The night before, her dad had emailed her a piece of music that they had worked on together during her last visit home. Drawing on her translation of the Old English love poem Wulf and Eadwacer, it was a desolate, minimalist piece, built around a series of distant notes that developed tentatively into the refrain, sung by a soprano: A difference exists between us. Her dad had tried to convey the loneliness of the original poem, the sexual longing, the betrayal. She had sat at her computer and played the piece time after time. With Darwin curled at her feet, she listened to the haunting, austere music and cried: for herself, for the nameless author of the poem, for her dad.
Lee realised that David was looking at her. Mouse had his hand upon her knee and was tapping out a jittery rhythm with his fingers. David blinked as she met his eyes. The church was utterly silent.
‘Now for the reason I decided to talk about our rules tonight. One of the things I hope that you guys have discovered about the Course is that we aren’t exclusive. All who come here are welcome. All those who join our family, who respect that family by acknowledging and abiding by the rules that keep us together, are welcome. You may have heard things about the Course — there have been newspaper articles, disaffected former members, rival priests who envy our crowded pews.’ He smiled sadly.
‘The Course isn’t for everyone, and I’m afraid some of you will leave. Some of you will feel that we ask too much of you, that you can’t cope with the pressure of living up to Christ’s ideal. What I say to you is this: embrace that pressure, strive for the perfection that Christ achieved and when you slip, the Course will be there to help you up. And you will find that all the other pressures in your life, the things we were discussing last week, fall away when you start abiding by the rules of the Course. We have been described as being outmoded and old-fashioned. I disagree firmly with the idea that our teachings don’t have any relevance to the modern world. Quite the opposite. But when I hear that people think us old-fashioned, I say yes, that’s probably true.
‘We believe that the best family, the most stable and enduring family, is one where a man and a woman come together in love. And when that love is recognised in the eyes of God. Sally and I weren’t blessed with children — in many ways our children are you lot — but, back when we were planning for a family, we felt very strongly that a mother and a father, living together as man and wife, was by far the best way to raise kids. And I know this isn’t a cool or a politically correct viewpoint, I know it is very old-fashioned. But look at the statistics, think about it logically. It’s what nature intended, it’s what God intended.’ The light softened now and David smiled out at the congregation.