That phone call comes, the summons we all dread and to which so many of us have answered. 'Stuart's not expected to last the night and we're asking everyone to think of him, together, at ten o'clock'. As a nun, I know what to do and how to add the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence touch to my pre-grieving. Sure that I am part of collective of carers, ten o'clock sees me at my Canterbury shrine, in my habit and veil, hard at it, celebrating a healing ceremony. Stuart survived, in fact long enough to be flown back and die at home.
Being a Sister of Perpetual Indulgence helps me cope with grief. This Pandemic is the War and the Crusade, and in my lifetime I don't expect to decamp from it. I take my vitamins, read the leaflets, have sex. But I also fight alongside my Sisters, with ceremonies, blessings, dreams, in the power of our habits. Saint Derek Jarman of Dungeness described the Sisters as the 'shock-troops' and maybe we get more shocks than we ought to give. At least we Sisters open up another flank.
The established churches deny us Heaven? The Sisters - Sissies - guarantee you heaven on earth. And beyond that? We dream of what we call, in our nunology, 'The Rendez-Vous of Victory', when we will meet again with all our waiting Angels, who have gone on before. It's our Dream Time for the future. You can join in our Masses, Memory Ceremonies, Weddings, Healing Circles, and get a Sex Blessing. You even get a safer-sex leaflet with a quiche recipe on the back. And you certainly get a proper hug and maybe a bit more on top, if a Sister fancies you.
It's the bright morning of Saint Derek Jarman's funeral, Wednesday 2 March. Mother Brigid Over Troubled Water and I stand in Saint Clement's churchyard, Romney, over the freshly-dug grave and dedicate it. In four hours time, the C of E vicar will do his bit, but we got there first for our Number One Saint. At the funeral we do not manifest in habit as we have a policy never to enter a church as Sisters. The hatred that's preached we meet with politeness and a call to repentance.
We've distributed everywhere the blue ribbon we wear for the Saint of 'Blue'. We endure the Anglican service because our symbols are everywhere displayed and we relish the traditional reference to the 'Communion of Saints'. We see visions of Saint Derek now in the company of those homophobe Saints and Fathers of the Church he denounced - Augustine, Jerome, Origen, and we divine that those spiritual swooners, Saints Catherine of Siena and Margaret Mary Alacoque, will soon become deeply attracted to Saint Derek as so many women rightly have. Just before going into hospital for the last time, Saint Derek intended to move for a while into our Bethnal Green convent, so that, he said, 'I can hear the swish of the Sisters' habits around me'.
Back at the Saint's lattie (home), Prospect Cottage, we carry through the instructions the Saint gave me: to end with 'Hail Saint Derek'. He's got the beautiful artist's funeral he designed, nearly all of it. 'The happiest day of my life', he said, 'was when I was canonised'. Laid out in his golden Saint's robe, once the king's in 'Edward II', he was buried as a Saint. The front-page photograph in the gay press is our Sisters' circle calling 'Hail'. We feel our little ceremony represents the grief of all, if for a moment.
January 9 again and the third anniversary of Bob's death. We had fifteen years together, loving and never lovers, but closer than that.
Nine of us gather in a Battersea flat and before dinner we must face the Memory Ceremony I'm leading. Each year it's a hill to climb and right now, making so much fuss of it seems the wrong thing to do. Why cry together even before we get drunk tonight? Once I'm in habit, I get the security that this ritual will hit the spot and that it's a link across borders, to all the guys that Bob shared ecstasies with, to all who've forgotten him just now. The altar holds photos and mementoes - Lps, letters, photos, porn, rope, bills, and camperie, a favourite recipe, a death certificate. Even the birth certificate which bizarrely, we discovered after Bob's death, gave his birth day exactly a month after the birthday Bob celebrated thirty-four times. We sing 'Amazing Pride'. We each lift an object and tell its story. We've done the right thing again. We end with linked hands and say 'Good-bye Bob, good-bye, good-bye'.
And I meditate at my shrine when I get back to my convent. Actually, Bob would hate all this. He laughed at me being a nun, there wasn't enough sex in it - his worst insult. It's my freedom and truth, to say to Bob that I celebrate and remember you in the way I want. For all the times we cried together, for the times you made me cry. For the suicide feelings I talked you down from, for the poisonous drugs you had to take. For your last words to me, six hours before you died - a bitter complaint that the oxygen mask was not designed so that you could smoke at the same time. 'You make me feel, mi-i-ghty real'.
Yes, I know about grieving work. About attachment theory and that grief is not a disease. Being a nun, I can enjoy parallel mourning. There's the secular me and the nun, and I get the benefit of grieving twice in a parallel universe. The secular me gets attached to self-reproach and anger, and often gets the grieving wrong. While the nun tucks into a little ceremony and recites an antidote spell:
Prayer of the safer Nun
It's the prayer of the survivor, just. Wartime in the Pandemic means self-reproaches as a survivor, especially when you pop your head over the parapet again and think sweet thoughts of sex. You can posh up this terror by naming it 'erotophobia'.
A-gays pen us articles about such fears, like the visions of prophet Larry Kramer, gazing over the land he will not visit ('Kramer versus Kramer'). GMFA tells me to get stuck in.
But I'm 45 and what I call a gay 'baggie': bags under the eyes, bags around the waist and bags of experience. What's safer survival for the baggies of this gay world? My parallel world takes over. Nuns get to rename the world and we call all sexual activity, from mono to duo to bi to anything with a pulse, 'charver'. Sex seems different when it's 'chavering'.
This a traditional word from the language of polari, the heritage lingo of homos, revived in our ceremonies. I think of polari as like reviving the old Cornish. When its last vernacular speakers died off, the only Cornish words left were the Bible translation and the medieval religious play cycle, the Ordinalia. What a vocabulary range!
Polari is the language of same-sexers across the ages: heard in those eighteenth-century molly houses; it's what the telegraph boys muttered to each other in the Cleveland Street brothel, in the year Wilde and Bosie met, and took to watching them at it; it's the fumblings of GIs and London comrades in the blackout. On that Sicilian cave drawing of 10,000 BC, in Addaura near Palermo, the bird-masked male dancers with erections must have chanted in polari.
'Charver' doesn't sound like safer sex and its terrors. I can charver and feel no guilt.
Each Sisters' ceremony opens with the polari 'Introit':
We each have our own recipe for grieving. Every time round, when it's trauma time, I wonder if my pattern will repeat and it does, it unpacks itself, sometimes even speeded up. One of the big numbers I do is Searching, seeing a trait or two of the Significant Other suddenly. I see the angel - in nunology, somebody who has passed on becomes an angel - in sudden flashes, in other people, sometimes in the rather unlikely. It's a bit of hair, a collar, an ear, a wave of the hand. Everybody I've asked confesses to performing this Searching. So I've seen my mother (an angel mother since 1988) speeding by in a variety of cars (she was a careful driver), and smoking (a thing she detested). Gay Searching is even easier to trigger.
Because the gay tribe sorts itself into distinct categories, like Boyz and baggies, shaven- and flat-topped and no-topped, Guy-Ikea, caps and the Don't Cares, you can go crazy when Searching. Especially if you're caught looking at the backs of gay heads. (Backs are so important to us as identifiers.) Walk into Trafalgar Square for the Candlelight Remembrance and it's compulsory Searching time just when it stresses you more. I can understand why so many cannot make it to this ritual and I can tell them that I am there for them, as their nun. And I will light a candle for them at my convent shrine.
As a nun, Searching and its twin, Carrying the Treasured Objects, fall into their places. They are rituals, become normalised, that have their own time and place. I put the angels' photographs and treasures around the shrine. I rearrange them and can put them away when I want, seemingly more in control. It could otherwise become insupportable and obsessive, and just not fit into my work diary, when I am in secular mode.
What's more difficult is Reminders, which pop up too often and get themselves in the way. So when at work, I tell the popped-up Reminder that I'll deal with it in my evening shrine time. I'll cuddle the Reminder then and give it the attention it craves. Then I can do the Calling Out the Name, as it's not the time to do it now.
I've always been good at crying, in fact I'm a snivelling nun. I respect the pro-crying lobby ('Have You Cried Enough?'), the air-time they get on Radio 4's Woman's Hour and The Locker Room, and above all, that it is a way for others to express their sympathetic concern. Suppressed crying is harmful, they say. Sure. But overactive snivelling for me is exhausting, especially on a crowded tube train. I have to plead guilty to that, on several occasions - just openly blubbing - and many, many times, when driving, and quite often in the theatre, usually twenty minutes into the performance of a piece. When I'm snivelling in habit, those baggy sleeves come in so useful and I can wipe away with the satisfaction that | am doing what I was punished for doing as a child.
Nuns have been sighing, snivelling and working their tear ducts for centuries. Just think of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, she who invented the Sacred Heart, that floating organ, and how she kissed the Sacred Wounds all night. (Four thousand and five hundred wounds, by medieval theology.) She tells us in 1671:
'I tied this wretched criminal body with cords full of knots, and I bound it so tight that I could hardly breathe or eat. I left these cords there so long that they buried themselves in the flesh, and I could not tear them from it except with great violence and cruel pain. I did the same with little chains which I fastened on my arms; I could remove them only by taking away with them pieces of flesh. I lay during the night on a plank, or on knotty sticks which I placed on my bed, and afterwards I took the discipline.'
The Order of Perpetual Indulgence has a penchant for Counter-Reformation sex, its maudlin meditations and folk art, especially when filtered through later pastiches and shiny 'tinklements' (my friend Royston's word). Nuns, for example, when viewing an object of significant sexual choice across a bar, can fall into an 'ecstasy', a la 'Ecstasy of Saint Teresa'. Reference here is to Bernini's bona statuette, showing the saintly palone's Transfixing by the Dart of Death, in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, in Rome. As one of my favourite meditative texts, Mrs. Jameson's Monastic Orders, says of it:
Then there are my Dreams of the Angels. Grief work that's pain and pleasure, because it's memory recall, but it's work when we should be resting and restoring. Sometimes I can't go to sleep until I've rearranged all my photographs of my Angels in my mind. All that dream symbolism can be offered up. Symbols which are terrifying can be reinterpreted by nunology, the ice and cold and border-crossings need not only be bitter and lonely. As a gay middle-aged man, I don't believe in the Other, I'm a non-deist and a materialist vegan. I'm a spiritualist materialist. But while as a nun, I'm anyone's for grabs as a medium from the Beyond, I'll channel promiscuously. Caught awake in the lowest hour, the 'watch before dawn', I meditate on our after-life, the angels waiting at the Rendez-Vous of Victory for us. It's a rave come-all-ye, a barbecue, the ultimate nut roast. The angels hold out their arms and halloo to us, crooning all those funny names we use of each other, when we call across bars, bank holidays, pillows.
Being a Sister, I try to manage and organise my other grief work. Visiting the Places of the Past becomes a pilgrimage and not just a sad duty or detour. I bless the lattie (house) doors, the bushes, the beaches, the bungarees (bars), waving benedictions out of my car window. Then there's my other symptoms, Confusion and Absent-Minded Behaviour - well, they just have to be acknowledged and fit in.
Treasures of the Past become valuable relics preserved in the convent, and carried around for their profit and efficacy. I'm a great one for locks of hair, letters, clothes, wash-bags. Relics are a wonderful and powerful tradition, and Saint Derek of Dungeness and I would often list, with giggles, the most bizarre we'd spotted. There were the hairs of Our Lady in the San Marco Treasury in Venice and the 'Santo Praesupio' (The Holy Foreskin) in an Abruzzo village, processed on its feast day once a year. So I'm enjoined to collect Relics and each holds that 'odour of sanctity', unmistakable miracle-working or thaumaturgy from an Angel.
Grieving for Saint Derek is sweetened by the sure knowledge that he continues to work miracles. He has left so many Relics of his among us: every book and film of his printed, everything he signed, every painting (Saint Luke only left one!), his Sacred Lattie at Dungeness and his Saint's Tomb Shrine, every gift of his, for he lavished so much on us. Defiant of literalist Saintology, the Sisterhood has declared through the terrible Nunquisition procedure that each of these Relics is a first-class relic. (The technical term, for the legalist among you, is that each relic is a bona 'bona fide' Saint Derek Relic.)
Then there is the can't-win grief symptom - Guilt, spawn of suppressed anger, rejection, sexual frustration, jealousy, defeat and just plainly brother of Sadness. In my secular mode, I can fall into the pattern set up in me by my father's death and his total rejection of me. But as a Sister, I side-step this.
Have I made this Grief Work sound like the plodding on of Bunyan's Pilgrim? But the War has put us all 'in via', on the road, as the Latin preacher famously put it. We are all pilgrims and in transit. We have to live out our personal Last Things, painfully invent our own theology of the end, live through our personal eschatology. Sisters throw themselves into the task, plundering and inventing from the religious anthology of the world. My first in Classics (including Sanskrit) and my national Silver Medal in Biblical Greek must be pulled into service. So we know that the Catholic 'Four Last Things' (Death, Judgement, Heaven & Hell) are really and truly: a Living Will, cat food, flowers and rest.
It's the end of another nuncheon - our Sisters' meeting. I can't tell you what went on (confidentiality rule) but we celebrated a Mass and joy, and there was a silent prostration before we went into our Prayer of Conscration. (For reasons too technical to explain here, we worship the Australian dingo, of the 'Dingo Baby Case', She, the innocent and wild victim, She who stole baby Azaria from her appalling evangelical parents, and raises her as a lesbian in the desert. One day Azaria will return to star in the future 'Neighbours'. Hence our theology is termed Dingomatics, contained in the sixty-nine volumes of the Summa Dingoma Sororum.) Here's the main part of that Consecration prayer, the bit that gets to me:
Sister Celebrant (at the altar, strictly traditional, east-facing)
I'm proud that through our Celtic Sisters, Mother Brigid Over Troubled Water, Mother Marion Haste and Rent At Pleasure, Sister Immaculata Worksurface, Sister Voluptua and me, the Little Novice, we adhere to ancient Irish spiritualty. And especially to the monk's 'green' martyrdom, in Saint Columbanus's phrase, of extreme ritual practice. (Columbanus was born in 563). The Irish monastic ideal was that of an army, with three options: 'red' martyrdom (of blood - that makes all too much sense to us in the Pandemic), 'white' (renouncing the world - for us, abandoning the straight and narrow world), and 'green' martyrdom, of uncompromising austerity (in pursuing our Nunhood).
The Irish monastics pioneered the role of the confessor companion/master, the (in Irish) 'anamchara', literally the 'friend of the soul'. So they compiled detailed lists of sins and punishments, paranoid studies in spiritual accounting from the eighth century, the Irish Penitentials. From their penetrations into these most secret places of the soul we can trace the future pathways of verbal power and management: the Inquisitioner questions the heretic, the role-play and 'talking-cure' (?) of Freudian analyst and couch potato, and any medical examination that turns into our mental torture.
Each Sister has the duty of being 'soul-friend', the 'anamchara' to other Sissies. We are an old-fashioned Consciousness-Raising group, like the gay C-Rs I joined in the 1970s, modelled on the women's movement. We trust and depend on each other, and talk Sister-to-Sister, using our Sisters' names always, even when in secular mode. Lesbians and gay men have the advantage over straights of being able to make transformations of themselves and their worlds. Thus speaks Sister Mary Annilungus, who travelled from Australia to found us. We transform ourselves by the power of the habit, and gone are those boundaries of British class and accent, age and hairstyle ('ryah in polari).
Sometimes in the intimacy after a Mass, we talk of things we are most frightened of and of 'the thing which may not be named'. To be fair, this latter 'thing' changes bewilderingly often, whether this week it is the disunited opposition to Benetton or then it may be the binary 'queer'/'gay' imperative. In public, we might suffer from a vocabulary shutdown, our community's patchy version of PC. In the convent, we chatter freely. We are neither 'queer' nor 'not-queer'; we are nuns.
Sometimes the 'thing' is our fear of dying and witnessing death. After all, every hospital bed, towards the end Vigil, becomes like a chapel and a sanctuary. We search the face, but that strained expression could just as well be anguish as it could be the joyous invitation to the Rendez-Vous of Victory. How can we know?
Or the 'thing' could be the silences forced on us (rightly) by confidentiality, but which do not let us sometimes ask of a friend's symptoms, 'What is it?'. And so not to be able to express adequate sympathy, or to help lighten a dreary cough or the foot-sore. Or the 'thing' may be that we cannot affirm a friend's negative status and so to strengthen it. To live Strong and Negative, the good-boy, as American gay groups call it. Or the positive value of 'non-charvering' (celibacy). To be forced into the Grand Silence.
It's my Wedding Day, 26 March, when I am joined with fellow-nun, my darling Sister Sadomystica, as 'lawful and unlawful spouses' in our Bethnal Green Convent. There are 200 guests, fifteen nuns, four Saints, and my twin-sister gives me away, and my sixteen-year old niece is my bridesmaid. In the only defiance of traditional nuptial ritual, I, the nun bride, preach my own sermon on the text: 'Since we must attend so many funerals, why not a wedding?' The Gathered Faithful agree. (One Wedding and a Load of Funerals is our live-in script). In our Wedding Night - actually the next afternoon - I whisper my wedding prayer to my Sister who is my wife: