Henry and Cato by Iris Murdoch Read Free Book Online Page B

loved her brother dearly and though she considered his beliefs absurd she never for a second regarded them as a barrier between them.
    Cato, for a time absorbed in the busy rhythmical life of the Church and serenely obedient to his superiors, continued to work as a scholar, dividing his time between theology and Byzantine history. He lived in a community house, first in Manchester, then in London, and did his share, first as an ordinand, then as a priest, in counselling students, talking to (as he then thought) all kinds of people, addressing meetings, dispensing comfort and instruction to believers and unbelievers alike. He sometimes, with wry self-observation, felt himself in danger of becoming a ‘popular figure’. Charisma Forbes: the swinging priest he once saw written beside a ludicrous drawing on a lavatory wall. Cato was not afraid. A cool sense of the tough old Adam in him had never left him. He knew how much he loved a certain kind of power, the power of the authoritative teacher, the power of the wise confessor. To be able to release a man from the burden of sin in the confessional filled him with an almost too exultant pleasure; and the precious jewel of the priesthood, the mass itself, was to him sometimes almost a temptation. He was too happy.
    He had of course his irrelevant desires. He found it ridiculously hard to give up smoking, which he felt himself bound to do. He would have liked to travel, particularly to go to Rome, but this in their wisdom his superiors still denied him; and he took this as an admonition, an attempt perhaps to ‘cool it’, to lower the temperature of his still too devotional Christianity by prescribing the most humdrum possible routine. He went at the prescribed intervals into retreat, preferring the more austere traditional practices which some of his fellow priests regarded as so emotive and old-fashioned. There was a sort of painful awkwardness about this discipline which seemed itself to figure the counter-natural demand of perfection. He had, on the other hand, always felt perfectly at home in his body, there was an athletic suppleness which was always a part of his worship, and his youthful strength moved naturally into adoration. Ever since those first ‘showings’ he had felt that God and he occupied the same space, and he found nothing difficult or quaint in imagining, even in detail, when required to do so, Our Lord, His Mother, the moment by moment reality of the Passion and the historical eventfulness of the Incarnation. Hell he could not imagine; it was for him an intellectual idea. Damnation if it existed was God’s affair.
    When he meditated upon his own sins he often thought about his father and about the grim and high necessity which had led him to become a bane of suffering to one whom he so much loved; and he lodged this pattern deep in God’s wisdom. He revered every austerity that was required of him and adored the strange and almost invisible tenderness that lurked inside it. At the same time he was without illusion about his ability to change. Perhaps sometimes, if he looked away from the world, if he looked only at God, there might be a little change, an atom of it. In a way that did not concern him. Only God concerned him, only God was his business, only God interested him, and man and his doings simply by extension. He did not find it difficult to listen patiently to dull confused people, to resist physical tiredness and boredom, to do without, when it was necessary, the intellectual joys which were also a communion with God. The vow of chastity and the practice of that virtue never caused him trouble. He had no major temptations except the deep subtle temptation afforded by the power itself which came from his givenness to God. He had friends in the order, especially Brendan Craddock, who had been his confessor since he came to London. He had friends outside the order and outside the Church. But these friendships had never