I grew up in a home where a sense of sacredness emanated from my father. When he and my mother began their family, they didn't really know how to be parents. There was no preset script within which we were all meant to fit. We had a lovely blend of good-hearted love along with a thoroughness of contour you rubbed against, where you found yourself. My father was in that realm of the mystically sacred. How he got there I don't know. There was this privacy and depth to him. Some might call it a lack of expression, thinking you have to be told each day that you're loved. We didn't need to be told that: we just knew. There was a natural elegance, a restraint. Sometimes restraint is an incredible gift, because you know there is more than is being shown. It's that sense of moreness that completes you. It's the art of all art. What's held back is actually the ultimate gift to the imagination.
I was 22 and studying to be a priest when my father died. When someone close to you dies, a number of things happen. One is that your innocence breaks. The illusory childlike dimension was gone, because I could see then what the world was about, what death is. You know then there's no final shelter here. I was the eldest of the family, so I took on responsibility for dealing with the practicalities of his death. I didn't have time while dealing with that to let the emotional weather of it reach me, but it all came out six months later in a huge wave of forsakenness. The death of a parent is an amazing, primeval thing. I think Sylvia Plath puts it this way in one of her poems: it's like a huge tree falling. There's an exposure to yourself that you could never have known before.
I was old enough to be responsible, yet not really mature. I'd entered the seminary as an invitation to openness and receptivity. I wasn't there because I was fulfilling anything for my family or my father. I never believed in clericalism, and from the first day there I never practised it. I think it's an awful atrophication of the self, a sinister ideology. It's about being a priest from the outside in, not about the awakening of the soul and liberation of the imagination.
This time awoke a huge affinity with the invisible world, because that's where my father now lived. There was a sense of him being very near, a call to get on with my own life. Whenever I returned to school or college, he'd take me to the bus and the last thing he'd say was: "Have your own mind." And I found that lovely: an invitation to trust my own judgment and equilibrium. I realise now there are echoes of my father in my love of the landscape and of the divine. It was just there. He had left some important stepping stones. They didn't disappear when he died.
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After 19 years, I left the priesthood. I found myself having less and less in common with the hierarchy. I miss the Eucharist, helping the dying, those encounters where people are spiritually searching and you have a chance to enter into conversation with their consciousness, stretch it and bring to it sources it never knew it had. There's little room for that sense of wonder in the grind of the institution. There's huge nourishment in there, but it's up to people to take it. People just need to take the tradition back from the hands of the frightened functionaries. There are such riches and beauty in the Catholic tradition. It has an ancient elegance.
Regardless of my differences with the church, it's possible that I would have eventually led a more contemplative life. I now live in some isolation as a writer.
A lot of the time, even when I'm with people, I'm absent, waylaid by an image or a possibility. Language is almost a person, a spirit in itself. It knows a lot more than its seekers do. A poem has no preamble - it's all there or it's not. There's such a pleasure each morning in getting to the desk, then sitting down in front of the old white page and waiting for something. It's a very exciting life to put yourself in the way of visitation.
There is a sense in which my father's life and death has shaped all of this. There is a divine call to us all in knowing our own minds. The most important place to go out from is where you're at home in yourself. Nobody can tell you that, and if you don't know that, you're vulnerable to abuse from people's opinions, expectations and control. If you know it, you're on your own path of discovery.
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