17 AUGUST, 2021

Dear Harry,

Dark days ahead. Fair warning.

Did you really believe in sin? Okay, sin, yes, I understand. I no longer believe in it myself, not in the same form, but that’s for another letter. And what about evil? You believed in the existence of evil in the world—how could you not, after Hitler, his willful slaughter of six million Jews, and the devastation he and his henchman caused in World War II.

But hell? Eternal damnation? Redemption? Did you struggle with all that?

I wish you were still around to tell me what your sins were. That would be okay, wouldn’t it, now that we’re no longer bound by the old father-son conventions? Pride, for sure. You may have tried to hide it with your “simply country priest act”—which served, to those of us who knew you well—to hide a raging ego! But I wonder what else you might have had to confess, if you still went to confession in your later years?

Anyway, à propos, could you not have found some other more, well, more enjoyable gift on the occasion of my confirmation than that copy of St. Swithun’s prayer book? I lost it many years ago. It never really felt like mine. It was your book. If I’d had the nerve I would have given it back to you.

I will say that it was a beautiful, almost ceremonial object, bound in soft, pliable maroon leather, with gold edges. It was nice to hold, to touch. But—surely you’d recognize this now?—inside it was a booby trap in the form of what we’d call today a heavy guilt trip, a real burden for a boy who wanted more than anything to please his dad. No ordinary Book of Common Prayer, St. Swithun’s was a special version of that liturgy, with an enlarged text that included, at the end, a user’s guide to the sacrament of Confession, where every sin known to man or woman was listed, itemized, detailed, categorized, page after page of them, so that no one could feel left out.

That was my confirmation gift from you, my father. My Father.

Guilt.

You yourself had prepared a handful of us children for the ritual of confirmation. We had dutifully learned the catechism of the Anglo-Catholic church (we were not, you always insisted, Roman Catholics, but nor were we Protestants!), the basic rules and conventions of church dogma. Then the Bishop of St. Albans came, arrayed in his purple cassock, and laid his hands on our lowered heads, admitting us officially into the arms of the church. And afterwards there was tea at the Vicarage.

I took my prayer book, dutifully, back to school with me. It was, as you’ll recall, a very catholic Anglo-Catholic school, and attendance at chapel was a daily requirement. Holy Communion was an optional extra, but now confirmed, and still wanting to be a good son and live up to my father’s expectations, I felt obliged to show up for the service and, in preparation, for confession in the crypt chapel. To ready myself for this encounter with the school chaplain, I made a conscientious study of what St. Swithun had to say.

There were a good number of sins I could identify with: pride, envy, greed, and—what a great word!—concupiscence. But the most glaringly obvious and grievous of my sins, the one I knew I would be obliged to confess, was in the category of lust. And I can tell you now, Harry, what I could never have told you then: I was by then fully addicted to the sinful pleasures of the flesh. Solo, or sometimes, if I was lucky, in the company of another boy.

What I had learned—to my delight!—from Philippe in that little pup tent had developed into a full-blown obsession, perhaps even the more pleasurable because I knew it was a sin. In bed at night, daytimes in the Groves (the communal school loos) and out in nature behind bushes and trees, I was at it constantly. I even had worked a hole in my trousers pocket so that I could offer myself at least a little promissory comfort in the classroom and in chapel.

So here was something that needed to be confessed. Indeed, it stood out—if you’ll forgive that way of putting it—as the sin that was most frequent and most culpable. But how to present it to the chaplain in such a way that would not embarrass him—or me! Or, somehow, dishonor you.

The options presented by St. Swithun tiptoed delicately around the subject, but rather than come out and tell the embarrassing truth, I settled on evasion. An innocuous “I have sinned in thought, word and deed” would just about cover it, I thought. And when the time came the Chaplain seemed ready to settle for this obfuscation. Serving at an all-boys boarding school, I’m sure he was able to read between the lines.

It’s also possible that he, too, had a hand beneath his cassock in the confessional. I wouldn’t put it past him.

Just teasing, Harry. With love, and a little bit of shame (but not too much),

Your son,

Peter