1984 - Journey Of A Soul

The year was 1984 - not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but yet another time when I really should have been doing a lot better than I was.

A couple of years earlier, I had realised and admitted that my life was in pretty bad shape. ‘Admission’ seemed to be the order of the day because no sooner had I ‘admitted’ the badness of the shape of my life, than I myself was ‘admitted’ to a treatment centre whose sole purpose was to facilitate the rehabilitation of alcoholics and addicts.

To be fair, this all happened in the days before it became fashionable to have had a ‘drink and drugs hell‘. Had I known then that what I was experiencing would subsequently come to be viewed as one of the ‘must have’ credentials of every aspiring man or woman of substance (no pun intended), then perhaps I might have been grateful for the opportunity it afforded me to stake my claim among the stars. In the event, I was just mortified that something so painfully private - the state of my mental health – had now gone public. At least I didn’t have to pretend any more.

“How did it come to this?” Isn’t that what everyone asks? Perhaps the copious amounts of alcohol and drugs might have had something to do with it - that and the fact that nothing in my life ever really got dealt with. Instead of growing up, I had dropped off the edge of life and was now no longer capable of functioning in society.

I became reconciled to the idea that it would take no little time nor small miracle to ‘get on my feet’. Most people like to be getting ‘back’ on their feet but, to be honest, my life was never really on any sort of footing even before the orgy of alcohol and prescription drugs.

It wasn’t that I had lacked intelligence or talents - but whatever it was that I suffered from had nullified all of the abilities and ambitions of my early life.

I was lost, long before I realised that I was lost.

Being nothing if not relentless, the unidentified and invisible enemy went on to effectively remove the contents of my soul - such fundamental and defining characteristics as self-respect, dignity, honesty, a capacity to love or care, an ability to laugh or cry.

I realised at this point that as an aspiration, ‘Normal’ was probably off the menu, so I would have to make do with trying to get ‘Better‘ now that ‘Well’ was beyond what I could realistically hope to become.

By 1984 though, I had made little progress on the path towards recovery and/or the fullness of life. In relatively few years, I had become a very good example of someone who was just completely overwhelmed by it all - a broken man, utterly defeated by life.

Nothing made any sense now and I was suffering in ways which were as incomprehensible as they were unendurable.

My mind had gone (in a quiet sort of way) and I had lost any sense of who I was. Why was I still alive then when life had become unliveable?

‘Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem‘ said one of my old music buddies at a time when I was at a particularly low ebb. ‘Yeh but it is so relentless’ I protested ’it only ever changes to get worse!!! What’s the point of it all?’

Inexplicably, a good and beautiful woman had come into my life some 18 months before. Later, she would tell me that one of the most noticeable things about me was that I never smiled.

She knew I had some problems but believed me to be one of those exceptional (if somewhat damaged) individuals who would just need the love and understanding of a good woman (such as herself) in order to take my rightful (no doubt, brilliant) place in the world.

I suspected I might have needed a good deal more than that, but of course was not about to argue the point.

For the next year or so, I did only what any addict would do - I drained the life out of her, drawing her into a web of sickness and delusion. By the end of that ‘relationship’ she asked in total exasperation ’How does anyone get that sick?’ Nope! I didn’t have an answer for that one either.

So she left, and I was left alone with my very sick self. The only thing on the menu now was a 12-step program of recovery which I (by turns) felt that I had either already completed or somehow never quite managed to properly engage with.

It seemed to be some sort of Spiritual Rubiks Cube of which I might have been able to make a decent job, had my mind not been quite so wrecked.

Yes, I had been going to meetings and talking with people who seemed to have a lot to say about what I was suffering from. Some of them even seemed to have a bit of an idea of what might be able to be done about it. Apparently recovery was possible for someone like me but … recovery from what exactly? How does a person recover from life? Would I recover?

I was beginning to think that I had a problem for which there was no solution - an illness from which there was no recovery. For years I had been in decline - spectacularly at first but then more slowly, yet relentlessly. My instincts were telling me that ‘slowly, yet relentlessly’ was just about to become ’spectacularly’ once again and I believed that another ‘spectacular’ decline of similar magnitude to the first would take me off the scale of life entirely.

If only I had stuck to the alcohol or the drugs. Anxiety or depression might represent a fairly respectable challenge for any challenge-minded person, but altogether such a plethora of woes offered significantly less than a sporting chance of survival.

After everyone who had a view had expressed it, I was still getting sicker. Good people - people whom I had come to trust in the light of their own life experiences - were beginning to run out of things to say. No matter what anyone said, I seemed to be sliding inexorably towards a door that I couldn’t help but think was the Exit.

I seemed to be incapable of holding a sensible thought.The only thought that I had no trouble at all holding on to was the obsessive, predominant and exclusive thought that only a drink or drug could give me the peace I needed to be able to live my life. On some level I had come to see that this was almost the exact opposite of the truth.

It was becoming clear that something of a miracle would be required if my life was to yield any satisfaction at all prior to its ignominious conclusion. Some of my acquaintances from around the meetings were beginning to say as much.

One evening, I picked up a leaflet about a Christian Community in the little village of Taize in France. This community welcomed visitors to join them in their life of prayer and meditation. It reminded me of a television documentary I had seen about the place some weeks (or maybe months) before. Could this be an answer to a prayer? I resolved to go there, believing it to be probably the last throw of the dice.

Having succumbed to a shockingly short hair-cut, I set out on a pilgrimage leaving nothing behind but the wreckage of my former life. My resolve was to find God, have the (allegedly) vital Spiritual experience or to die in the attempt.

It was a fairly straightforward decision in the end. There was no problem about getting time off work - I often reflect ruefully that at this point ‘I didn’t work’ - nothing in my life worked - in fact, I had also become unemployable.

There was no worry either about leaving my girlfriend. She was already gone but not forgotten. Responsibilities? Family? Friends? Hobbies? Nope! I wasn’t really capable of doing any of those - there was no longer anything which meant more to me than going on this pilgrimage in search of my miracle.

If my quest to find God should end in spectacular failure, then it would be indistinguishable from just about everything else in my wretched existence.

Finally, I would know that I had exhausted every suggested solution to the problem of my life, and death would then doubtless be a blessed and welcome relief.

I travelled from Donegal to Dublin where I stayed with my sister and her family for a day or so before driving on to the Monastery of Mount Melleray near Cappoquinn in County Wexford.

It was there I first encountered the Monks of the Cistercian Order for whom the Monastery is home. Dressed in their other-worldly, white robes, I found them to be a remarkable group of men who certainly seemed to exude a peace which I could only hope might be contagious.

For them it was all so matter of fact - life was such a magnificent adventure, an extraordinary gift for which they appeared to be unequivocally grateful.

My own life had brought me to a somewhat different conclusion. I couldn’t muster even a pretence of gratitude for what I perceived to be nothing more than a cruel catalogue of loss. If indeed there was a God, then He was taking great delight in torturing the life out of me - never mind what He was doing to the rest of the world!!!

However, the lives of the monks gently challenged this perspective - theirs was a simple way of being - unfettered by the need to escape from silence and seemingly liberated from the slavery of intellectual rigour.

It was not that they were devoid of intelligence but they seemed to instinctively understand its limitations. In matters Spiritual, they proposed that the intellect is a total liability - it only gets in the way - it is the wrong tool for the job - I could be too clever for the Spiritual life but not too stupid. That seemed to ring a bell with me.

Their beautiful cloistered home was … well, how would you describe the opposite of ‘haunted‘? Yeh, a bit like that - with hindsight I would say there was a palpable sense of omnipresent goodness. It was a place of sanctuary for mind, body and soul.

Every part of me ached - spiritually broken, mentally shattered, physically weary.

In this amazing place, however, I found some relief in the silence and the gentle rhythm of the days.

It was here that I first began to understand the function of silence - that space beyond thought and word where contemplation offers the possibility to unlock mystery. Perhaps in a place such as this, the mystery of my own broken life could be unlocked.

The next few days challenged my rather fixed views about many things and offered insights into an entirely different way of being. It would have been obvious to anyone that this was a way of being of which I was totally ignorant, but even I was starting to lose the belief that I was positively excluded from it.

The grounds of the monastery were large and (not surprisingly) very beautiful. There was a peculiar sense that I was exactly where I was supposed to be. Here, for perhaps the first time in my life, I was beginning to feel safe - broken but safe. At this point, there was no connotation of the word ‘fragile’ with which I was not familiar.

It was becoming clear that I suffered from a soul sickness as well as a mental and physical malady. The monks certainly understood matters of the soul.

My spectacular thirst was not so much for alcohol but for what I now saw in abundance in these men - a rich inner life - a life of Grace.

I desperately needed what they had.

Before coming to Mount Melleray, I had been told of a monk there who fed wild birds as he walked and prayed in the grounds - the birds flew out of the hedges to feed from his hand. Of course I had forgotten all about this when one day, as I looked out of a window into the monastery garden I saw it for myself. So this was a place where remarkable things could happen - I really needed remarkably good things to start happening in my life.

Would I stay in this place of sanctuary forever? Perhaps, but on this occasion I was on my way to catch a ferry from the docks in Cork to Roscoff in France, so I left Mount Melleray at the end of that week. The journey from Cappoquinn was uneventful but I was excited to be on my way at last to Taize.

I checked on to the ferry in the afternoon and as I wandered about its decks, I felt relatively comfortable. There was no need to talk to anyone - I didn’t know anyone. My old strategy of letting people think I was part of someone else’s life (just not theirs!!!) stood me in good stead here too. It was easy to avoid engaging with anyone on a trip like this.

Six feet four and a half inches tall and weighing 16 stones with a very short hair cut is usually enough to deter just about anyone from starting an unnecessary conversation. With this strategy firmly in place I went off to the ship’s restaurant to get something to eat before finding a place on deck to crash out for the night.

As I stood there at the back of the self-service queue, I had one of those strangely surreal moments. At the other end of the queue I saw a man who turned out to be none other than my old boss from my days as a Mathematics Lecturer in the local College of Technology.

I had left that job ostensibly to do other things, but the truth was that I was practically glued together with a cocktail of prescription drugs, without which I would have been incapable of turning up for work at all.

He too was going to France - but on holiday not on pilgrimage!!! I quickly racked what was left of my brain to remember what apology I owed him - by now, I owed most people an apology and some people a great deal more.

I am not sure that he would have been glad to see me, but at least he acknowledged me and invited me to join him and his wife for the evening meal.

God alone knows what we spoke about, but I probably gave some sort of explanation for the very short haircut and the trip to Taize.

The following day he and his wife gave me my first ‘lift’ in France. From the ferry, they took me to a little village where we had breakfast and said our farewells. Now I was on my own and needed to find a way of getting from Brittany to Taize swiftly and directly.

The plan was that I would spend a night in each monastery en route to Taize beginning with the Monastery of Melleray-de-Bretagne. I learned about Melleray-de-Bretagne from the monks of the Mount Melleray in Ireland. They told me that Melleray-de-Bretagne was in fact their Mother House.

Centuries before, Cistercian Monks had come from Brittany in France to found the Abbey of Mount Melleray in Ireland. The Irish Monks asked me to convey their love and best wishes to their brothers in France. So now I had a goal – a mission - get to Melleray-de-Bretagne by the end of my first day in France.

I have little memory of how I managed to get to the Monastery that evening but was very relieved to do so while there was still light. Having been checked in by the guest-master I had something to eat before joining the monks at their evening prayer.

Melleray-de-Bretagne was not so grand as its counterpart in Ireland but it had the same sense of peace, hospitality and sanctuary that I so desperately craved.

The travelling had been tiring and I slept well that night.

Next day, I spoke with one of the monks whose English was so much better than my French. He gave me a map of all of the monasteries in France so I could plot my course to Taize.

The hitch-hiking would have been quite demoralising if a person had any morale to begin with but I took the view that if I really was being guided on this pilgrimage then I would also be provided for.

Having stood by the roadside for an unacceptable length of time without much success, I decided to make a little card with the name TAIZE on it. It seemed such a ridiculous thing to do. I was still in Brittany and Taize is a little village on the other side of France. Surely no-one would have a clue where it was - except perhaps for someone who had been there. And someone who had been there would be very unlikely to drive past a fellow pilgrim - especially a fellow pilgrim with so little grasp of the foolishness of such a sign!!!

On that basis, I resumed hitch-hiking and shortly afterwards a car stopped. The driver explained that with such a sign I would never get a lift because no-one would have a clue where I was going. Taize was such a small village and so far away from where I was standing. The only reason she knew where it was, was that she had been there herself and thus began a lift which took me almost three hours closer to my destination. Thank you God!!!

The young woman who had picked me up was a doctor who seemed to have travelled extensively in her work - including a trip to Central America if I remember correctly.

We parted some three hours later and I subsequently got a lift to the next monastery. It is such a shame that I don’t remember the name of this monastery or even the town in whose vicinity it was, but suffice to say it was just like the others. It had the same sense of peace, sanctuary, strength and goodness.

France is blessed with an abundance of sensory delights none of which seemed capable of permeating my consciousness at this time. What a joy it would be to recount these delights in glorious, poetic prose and thus to convey some sense of the extraordinary beauty with which I was surrounded, but of course none of it registered with me. I singlemindedly, obsessively focussed only on that which could hasten my progress towards Taize.

Next day the Abbot of the Monastery gave me a lift in a little Renault 5 out to the main road. His English was excellent and as with most of the folks in this line of work he had the twinkle in his eye of someone who knows.

‘Of course’ he said ’we are all called to Sanctity but it takes time’.

I was making good progress now and by day three I was nearing my destination. A lorry driver gave me a substantial lift which broke the back of the remaining journey and I arrived in Taize in the late afternoon of my third day in France.

Taize is on a hillside near the village of Cluny. Due to the fragility of my mind at this time my memories are somewhat unclear. Mobile phones and digital cameras were yet to be invented so I was not able to record the sights and sounds of my journey.

There was a little church in the centre of Taize and what seemed like thousands of (mostly) young people milling about as I arrived.

Having brought a little tent with me, I registered as a camper and made a donation for my stay. Someone must have explained the ropes to me, so I made my way to the field where the other tents were pitched and set up my temporary home.

From there, I went to a prayer meeting in the Church of Reconcilation. The prayer service was so beautiful - the chanting of the monks and the congregation, the prayers lead by Brother Roger - the founder of Taize - all conspired to produce an extraordinary sense of sanctuary and healing.

There were perhaps 2000 people staying in the vicinity of the little village of Taize praying and sharing their faith. The days were similar to the (now familiar) monastic routine but the place had its own character too. Apart from the regular prayer meetings in the church, each day there were also workshops where people could learn more about the gospels and the message of Christ.

These workshops were lead by committed and enthusiastic volunteers - some of whom were regular visitors to Taize whilst others seemed to have made a longer-term commitment to the work.

I was glad to have brought my little tent where I could retreat if necessary to rest and pray - it was my little hermitage.

In subsequent days I did have several conversations with fellow pilgrims but most of my time was spent in silent prayer. The prayer meetings in the Church of Reconciliation were inspirational. The church was inevitably packed and prayerful. The famous Taize chanting was as beautiful as it was powerful - strong medicine indeed for a soul in such a pitiful condition as my own.

As the week progressed, I found out about an area adjoining the Monastery of Taize which had been set aside as a place of silent retreat for pilgrims who wanted (or needed) to experience this. Of course I was interested and asked if I could do the silent retreat on the second week of my stay. This was easily arranged and so I decamped to the large garden known as the ‘place of silence‘. Meals were eaten in silence and pilgrims were encouraged to maintain the atmosphere of silence throughout the week of retreat.

My inner demons seemed to have a found their voice at this point and I was in considerable turmoil though (as usual) it remained unexpressed. How would I ever be well? Too much had happened and now it was as if life itself was against me.

There was some consolation in the thought that now at least something was happening inside of me - previously there had been long periods of my life when (but for bouts of abject terror and misery) I felt completely empty inside. Maybe this was progress after all. The feelings became intensified by the prayerful silence and in the end, overwhelming.

Perhaps halfway through the week of silence I was in the Church and reached the point in my prayer where I was thinking ‘What am I doing here? There is no God. There is no help. It is just me on my own against this awful, interminable illness.‘ Perhaps I had finally reached the end of my tether because this was the brave and honest expression of my despair.

As I knelt there in silence I felt that at least I had done everything that could have been reasonably been expected of me in the circumstances of my life and the outcome was - nothing. There was no God and therefore nothing to hope for.

That thought remained with me for some little time although I had become strangely unaware of time. What I had become aware of - acutely, intensely aware of - was the totality of the wreckage of my life. I had started out on life’s journey with a lot going for me - probably more than most of my peers and yet somehow I had contrived to lose or destroy all of it.

The next stark realisation was that I could do absolutely nothing to repair the brokenness. ‘What? You mean none of it? At all?’ This realisation was allowed to penetrate my consciousness before the next and final revelation.

If I were to hand my life back to the Creator, then God himself could and would repair all of the damage of my life and make it better than it ever had been.

This was the point at which I broke down - one minute I was relatively composed in quiet despair, kneeling in silence in the Church of Reconciliation in Taize having exploded the myth of the existence of God and the next minute I was sobbing, uncontrollably and unashamedly making the ground wet with my tears.

When I eventually got myself together enough to realise what had happened, there was the feeling that something fundamental had changed and somehow my life would never be quite the same again. ‘So this is what it feels like to have had a spiritual awakening’ I wondered.

Something inside me which had been switched ‘Off’ for such a long time and with catastrophic effect had now been switched ‘On’. As a result of this experience, I had the feeling that aspirations which had previously been beyond my ability to attain were now inexplicably within reach.

Later that same afternoon I spoke with one of the monks and told him what had happened. He was totally un-phased by my story and said ‘Yeh, if you try to explain to someone who has never eaten a chocolate ice-cream what that experience is like - no words are sufficient. Yet once they have eaten even one chocolate ice cream - no words are required.’ The monk asked if I would like to come round to the monastery that evening for supper with Brother Roger and, of course, I was honoured and delighted to accept this invitation.

That evening after the prayer service in the Church of Reconciliation, I went round to the meeting point at the back of the monastery where a small group of people were waiting to be brought to supper with Brother Roger.

We were led into the monastery itself and up some steps into what must have been some sort of converted hay-loft.

The guests all sat in a circle in a large, candle-lit room which was open on one side to the beautiful night sky. Prayers were duly said and supper was served by Brother Roger himself - radiant in his white robe. The upper room, the white-robed monk and the simple prayerful supper gave the experience quite a surreal aspect.

Then, in the middle of supper, without warning there began a spectacular, fork-lightning storm which lit the skies, adding to the sense of awe and wonder of this remarkable day.

For the remainder of my week-long retreat, I continued to pray in silence by the end of which I knew it was indeed time to head for home.

I was genuinely excited by the possibility of sharing my awakening with those whose burdens I had recklessly made heavier during the worst years of my illness.

Having left Taize, I began retracing my journey up through France to catch the ferry back to Ireland. The weather was fine and warm - the countryside was beautiful and I had a strong sense that God was with me. The lifts would come and I would meet who I was supposed to meet.

My life would now unfold as it was intended to.