When I was coming of age in the 1960s, we liked to think that we were a privileged generation, who could perhaps put Big Misery along with a heap of lies finally behind us, and build a new world of tolerance and enlightenment. Bob Dylan and the Beatles were our guys! Needless to say, there remained some grave problems. Within the Catholic Church, there was talk of breaking out of the spiritual fortress within which our parents had prayed and worshipped in ways that related poorly, if at all, to secular life, or often even to our own personal experience.
As for Downside Abbey..., with its mighty church tower presiding over the Mendip hills (frontier between Celtic and Anglo-Saxon England), we were used to considering it a bastion of the Catholic Church in England, where it had managed to establish a reasonably comfortable relationship with the national establishment. The monastery had been described as 'the best gentlemen's club west of London', and as a headmaster's quip to an Etonian put it, 'Downside is what Eton was,- a school for Catholic gentlemen'! We thought that time was fast running out for this peculiar social and ecclesiastical niche, even in 1965. It turned out to be harder to despatch than we expected, but Dom Luke Suart, with the inspiration of Teilhard de Chardin behind him, thought that he had the makings of a new narrative for the place, one that would reconcile the arts and humanities with science, 'overcome the Cartesian split', and feature a Catholic Church renewed by the Second Vatican Council, at least on speaking terms with modernity, and enabling her children to 'take on' both their own subconscious and the secular world.
Luke was making a huge impression with his sixth form religious instruction course; I recall earnest debate as to whether he was mad or really on to something. There was an intensity about him that was at once impressive and unsettling. We were used to blissfully and quite successfully sopping up information for the purpose of regurgitating it in exams. Now this man was telling us this wasn't good enough, echoing indeed the likes of Dylan. It was vital that we learned to think for ourselves; the very future of the planet depended on this, according to Father Luke!
Predictably enough, he soon ran into establishment buffers. Parents were paying large sums of money for us to pass exams and 'get on', whatever they said about a 'catholic education'. My Dad was to be heard making noises about 'those monks'. Luke was gathering a circle of disciples, among whom was Brother Anselm, but then, his course suppressed, he had a nervous breakdown, and tragically he ended up jumping out of a hospital window. Nothing was said officially, in accordance with establishment practice, except some lame story of a heart attack. The truth leaked out by way of those monks with more integrity. In due course, the leading 'flower children', Doms Sebastian, Peter, Kevin and Anselm, found their way to the Downside parish in the Liverpool docklands (yes, there had already been attempts to counter the 'best gentlemen's club' narrative). They could go and have their revolution there!
Fiona and I joined them, living in the parish youth leader's flat while I taught in a local school. The drab old parochial house really came to life, and that was where our friendship with Anselm really began. However the revolution had to wait. Part of the trouble was the preoccupation with the unresolved situation at Downside. There was an abbatial election coming up, and Peter had quite a lot of support. We had all sorts of 'post public school' ideas for the place, but Peter was not elected. Downside embarked on a long and painful decline, which has only accelerated with time. To this day, many of us feel loss. For poor Anselm the demoralisation back then was acute, and ended his career at Downside.
He worked in adult education in Liverpool and made two ultimately unsuccessful marriages, though for us he remained a warm and humane friend, and we know how fond he was of his three children. He was in a bad way when his relationship with their mother finally broke down and he had to leave his home. After a while he made his way to our house in Carrigaholt, eventually getting a caravan in our field. He was great to have about the house, helping the children with homework and then he was practically so very competant.He got to know Glenstal, and the community took him on as a gardener, before eventually, with great generosity, taking one very English failed priest into the community.
Anselm was sceptical, a tad rebelious, humorous, passionate, open, an avowed enemy of bullshit; perhaps, like his actor brother, inclined to be trying out roles to see which fitted! All in the interest of 'authenticity'; I suppose it's one of the ways we have of trying to get at the truth! No doubt this is always beyond us, but in the course of Anselm's lifetime, it is to be hoped that we have all learnt a thing or two about getting there, and that the attempt to reveal and understand it really is the supreme business of our lives, regardless of whether this involves the odd smash-up.
Yet who would have thought that at the end of our lives, we sixties children would be back to looking at trenches and tank warfare in Europe, and massive lies rampaging through the world, for all our vaunted new self-knowledge? Now, for instance, about covid and these vaccines; will the truth ever be established and acknowledged? There is as ever a mountain of vested interest stacked up against naked truth! The rare sensitive souls who wrestle with it tend to get into all sorts of trouble, but we are all very much indebted to them.
Something is finally coming to a head which, it seems to me, will determine humanity's fate in this twenty-first century! So we come back to the need which has shaped this story of Anselm, to get our heads out of our own little holes, and aspire to that One Big Story, wherein truth is fearlessly embraced and where even science and art can lie down together, not to mention the English and the Irish! It is the strain and the whiff of this story that constitutes the excitement of his life, along with his zest for life and simple physical things. At least he left us a very good recipe for marmalade!
