I suppose now is as good a time as any to let you know what I've been up to in my absence. The short answer is nothing. Work continues to be the bane of my life. I'm dumb and stuck, to quote a charwoman from Stephen King, and I'm convinced I'm becoming stupider the older I get. Covid has a lot to do with it. The past three years have put a deep paralysis on normal living for most of us. A friend of mine who works in banking, like me a misanthrope, enjoyed lockdown, as I did at the start when the weather was nice. By January 2021 I took to going to a local cemetery, which opened in 1890, to pass the time. That wasn't nearly as dreary as it sounds because it was an interesting exercise to read the old headstones, which come from a time when faith was still strong in this country. They all have quotes from popular hymns and the Authorised Version, whereas modern headstones, the memorials of a generation without memory, feature such phrases as "stand by me," and "forever in our hearts." It is a peaceful place. Peace, perfect peace, to quote some of the more sensible tombs.
My mother died in June 2020. A woman I work with observed recently that I don't seem to have mourned her death properly. Whether or not that is true, or indeed any of her business, I think is irrelevant; after all, how does one mourn? Nonetheless my mother's death did thrust into plain sight a sense of loneliness which was growing without notice over time and which, in the midst of Covid restrictions, was brought suddenly home. I can put it no better than by comparing the experience with the death of my dog in November 2013. When Lucy died lots of people gathered round me; three years ago I had nothing. And it wasn't just government mandate. As the years have gone by, past friends of mine have disappeared one by one for various reasons; we've fallen out, they've moved away (or died), or we have simply drifted apart. There's no very profound reason for this; these people have evaporated, and I haven't replaced them. And to think I used to believe that loneliness only happened to the elderly!
This brings me to the Church, heretofore a source of company. You may ask whether I still go to church. There I'm afraid the answer is no. A crying shame because church attendance is a very civilising activity. You may remember that at Pentecost 2017 I was baptised into the Church Outside Russia. Marvellous, I thought; this is the pearl of great price! Here was the Church of St Augustine, St Patrick and of St Hilda! I still believe that Orthodoxy is the ancient faith of these Isles, sent into long retreat by the Norman Conquest; but contemporaneously I think there's something a bit off about it. I was introduced to some young (and old) converts in ROCOR. Most of them I found very odd. And the native Orthodox, these Slavic and Romanian families, I found too "wholesome," or something I can't quite explain. Salt of the earth, but a definite cultural and intellectual barrier.
Then there was Lewis, and I'm being awfully candid here but he's not going to see this and none of you know him. During Confession you confide in your confessor all the secrets of your heart. This comes quite easily to me because I have no skeletons. Lewis is a young man with whom I became infatuated a little while ago. He is charming, charismatic, infectiously funny and incredibly good looking, especially in jeans. I think you know where this is going. From a personal perspective, unintruded by moralising clergy, Lewis and I have almost nothing in common. He is heterosexual, extroverted, secular, from a very different family background. Nonetheless I enjoyed being with him, indulging all the personal qualities I perceived in him that I felt that I lacked in myself, and developing romantic feelings for him, which needless to say, were not returned. I told my confessor about him and his response was that this was against nature, that I should forget about him, and also that I really ought to discern a vocation to monastic life.
I disagreed, in part. And I never went back. This is not the forum to debate the contentious issue of sexuality. All I'm going to say is that my confessor was right to advise me to forget about Lewis. But I do not accept that my feelings were "against nature." I don't think that the Devil can counterfeit what I felt, and I say that knowing that not all loves lead to God. In any case, I had encountered this reactionary and oppressive response to my feelings years ago in the Roman Catholic Church, and rejected it, so I found the whole experience more boring than traumatic. And I have never felt called to monastic life!
This brings me back the state of loneliness. I worked with Lewis, and years ago I was wont to keep a lofty distance from work colleagues, for two reasons. I didn't share their values and I had enough friends and activities to keep me occupied outside work. I used to have something on most weekends, and I looked aghast at my colleagues going to some dive of a local pub for a "night out" with people they probably didn't like very much! One thing I take to be axiomatic about work relationships is that they are transient. They last perhaps a few years and then fizzle out, most likely because they are shallow in nature. Perhaps it's indicative of my idealistic nature that I like things to be deep and lasting. Friendship, of the kind the Prophet Samuel describes, is dearer to me than I can express. So when it dawned on me, after my mother died, that I had precious few people left and colleagues of mine reached out to me in kindness and compassion, perhaps I mistook that for friendship in my grief? Just as what I imagined with Lewis, actually not a very nice person, was a chimera; that the beauty and fecundity of what I had imagined between us was just not real.
That's my life in a nutshell. I think that writing about it makes it easier, and I hope makes an interesting read for you. I look at these things clinically now, the better to understand things and try and do something about it. What I'm going to do about religion, I don't know. Perhaps writing, and constructive feedback from readers (do comment!), will help me along my way.
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