apron (original) (raw)

MEN IN APRONS

A book arrived from New York, winging its way through the World Trade Centre crisis: Secret Texts: The Literature of Secret Societies, ed. Marie Mulvey Roberts and Hugh Ormsby-Lennon (New York: AMS Press, 1995), ISBN 0-404-64251-9. In it Elizabeth Imlay describes Bramwell Bront�, Charlotte and Emily's drug-addicted brother, being inducted into Haworth's Lodge, his clergyman father officiating as its chaplain. Bramwell, the family black sheep, died tragically young. And in it Paul Rich, who is apron, describes the plot of Rudyard Kipling's Kim, and wonders out loud why the hero goes to a Catholic school, rather than to a Lodge orphanage, concluding it is to save the Lodge money.

In my mother's house (my father married her for her money), a great Elizabethan chest lay beside her bed; in it were dress-up clothes in which my brother and I could play, Napoleon's coat and hat, bought for a Bombay Ball, a Queen's train and crown in cloth-of-gold, and among these things an exquisite apron in white doeskin leather with watered blue silk ribbons. I asked my father what it was and he explained he no longer was a member, it costing too much money. The Royal Colonial Lodge in Bombay. He visited the border between Afghanistan and India. Later, when I grew up, I would learn that the Lodge was also Young India, the group of men who worked to reconcile the Viceregal Lodge and Nehru and Gandhi, bringing about India's Independence and Partition.

My father in India was governor of a school. My brother, before he died tragically young, spoke to me with rage of the pederasty there, a brilliant Anglo-Indian writer from that school made homosexual. As had been my father when he went to Oxford to work in the Bodleian as an orphan, with a strong vocation to the Anglican priesthood, finding he had to prostitute himself to men, to priests. In anguish he would be server at St Barnabas, then sit on the benches of Quaker Meeting, on alternating Sundays/First Days. A vicious cycle; what is done to one one does to others. My brother was to die young like Bramwell Bront�. So has my son. This stuff is about death.

I was educated at a learned Anglican convent, spending the war years there in a beautiful house, sometimes our lessons being held in its cellars while flying bombs were passing over. After the war we were divided into two schools, the little ones, myself included, going to an ugly house. The kindness of the nuns now changed to the cruelty of the lay matron, who brought up generations of children to scorn the daygirls, undoing Christianity. Night after night the senior girls in my dormitory would subject myself and another junior girl to rituals of cruelty, Satanic rituals, in which we had to worship the senior girls on our knees, with threats of their hitting us with their heavy swinging censor chain made with horse chestnuts, if we did not, all of which the Matron allowed. Finally, the daygirls begged me to tell them what was happening that made me so distant. When I told them I was forbidden to speak about it, they told me to write about it. I did. Then fought each senior girl fairly one morning, never hitting below the belt, as my father had taught me, nor above either, only at their shoulders. Then, cleansed and sobbing, I was free. I now see what happened there (many other girls tell me their minds are a blank about it) as akin to what happened to Augustine.

Augustine's Latin Schooling, where we see the child taken from his mother by the school master, then flogged by him shamefully, then Augustine smirking at the schoolmaster's side, contemptuous of his former and innocent self.

Somehow they were brain-washed into thinking the abuse done to them privileged them. Their contempt for the daygirls who were not subject to the same abuse was tremendous. And totally un-Christian. In this way the ruling class is formed, Plato's 'Myth of the Metals', the concoction of a terrible lie to exonerate slavery. The English class structure, the deadly discrimination in Germany of Jews, in America of Native Americans and African Americans, in South Africa the apartheid against Indians and Africans, in Europe against gypsies, all products of the projection on to the other a contempt bred into the self. These methods have now penetrated monasticism and ordination to the priesthood and come under the rubric of 'formation'. They are used, too, in American fraternities and sororities and honour societies, and male-only private clubs. They are used by religious 'cults', which play games with suicides. They are used in Protestant Irish Lodges inflaming sectarian violence against Catholics, such as at Holy Cross. An American President, a former alcoholic, shaped by his fraternity and by such sectarian Protestantism, had the world on the brink of nuclear war. Mercifully, now we have Obama, instead.

Rose Lloyds, An English Rose , 'Scorn for the Orphans'

I was taken out of school and sent to America at sixteen so my parents need not educate me, only my brother. Immediately I was thrust into a world of that year's model cars, the paper dolls of sororities' cannon fodder for apron fraternities with sadistic hazing initiation rituals, and the prohibition by everyone against other languages, ' English Only ', amongst people whose names were not at all English, against history, against culture. I kept my virginity. In my loneliness for Europe I studied European literature, pondering over the figures of Dr Faustus, Don Juan, Napoleon and his consumptive son. Later I would read Viktor Frankl and come to see that Frankl's definition of happiness, sanity, healing, as meaning (not power, not sex, not wealth), is absolutely true. Meanwhile, I read between the lines of Marlowe, Goethe, Byron, Shaw, and saw all was not well. I remembered as a small child being taken to a ballet on 'Dr Faustus' in Hastings by my father. At the end, its hero/villain is carried off to Hell, with a most frightful scream. Brought up on Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies in Sussex, I had been indoctrinated, like Kim, but like Kim, was free from its bondage.

For my doctorate I chose Dante's Commedia, which is deliberately not a tragedy. Though its Hell is. Next, I worked on Brunetto Latino, Dante's teacher, whom Dante placed in Hell for sodomy, finding an important strand in Brunetto's works and the treasuring of his manuscripts, the editing of his books, to be amongst aprons, who saw him as one of their own. Napoleon, an apron, ordered the first critical edition of his Li Livres dou Tresor. In the Florentine archives I uncovered thirteenth-century Brunetto Latino's plotting against his King, Charles of Anjou, with the collusion of the Emperor of Constantinople, the Pope, the King of Aragon, the Republic of Genoa, instigating the Sicilian Vespers against that cruel despot. Next the Tresor was given by the fourteenth-century Earl of Salisbury, a William Montague, to Thomas Woodstock, the Duke of Gloucester, while they plotted against their King, Richard II. Finally, a copy was given by an eighteenth-century Montague to the first apron Lodge in France, in Dunkerque. Napoleon would then study Richard II, his manuscript preserved in the Laurentian Library. Brunetto Latino was Chancellor of Florence's Primo Popolo, Niccol� Macchiavelli would similarly become Florence's Chancellor. For further research, wanting to get the taste of power out of my mouth, I changed to women such as Birgitta of Sweden, Catherine of Siena and Julian of Norwich. Choosing as well their context of prayer. One can choose poverty and be no longer a slave to debt. One can choose humility and be no longer ambition's pawn. One can choose chaste love and be free.

At twenty I was married to an apron's son, himself, I believe, an apron, losing my virginity to him the night following the wedding. Aprons recruit through fraternities and through honour societies. My husband's Tower Honor Society, for its initiation ritual, used a hangman's nook and a plank out the top storey window of its grim Tower overshadowing the campus. Yale has its Skull and Bones. I saw Jefferson's University of Virginia graffittoed by its secret society. My husband exulted in discovering my father also was an apron. He, too, as had my father married my mother, married me for my money, which he took, leaving me with three small boys to raise on my own, penniless, whose hearts he broke. During our marriage were endless tirades that my having children had ruined his life. He would come home late, even on the supposed honeymoon, would take off days from teaching, telling the school he was ill when he was well. He made his marriage vows to me before an Anglican priest, he made his marriage vows to his second wife in Synagogue, and he meant neither. Endlessly, I was bullied into co-signing loans for him we did not need, and having to work long hours away from my children to pay off these loans' interest, while also paying babysitters out of my low woman's pay, while he claimed our children as dependents on his income tax, not I, though I also paid every single penny they cost. My husband never apologized, always denied, lied brilliantly to blame everyone but himself, manipulated all around me against me, causing further generational damage. My father grieved at what he had done wrong and tried to make amends.

Under both my father's roof, and my husband's (though I bought his), I was constantly told of women's inferiority to men. My husband's name for me was 'Aristotle's creature', Aristotle having said women were 'less than slaves'. Homer said slaves have only half their souls. My husband's family had been Quaker slave owners in Kentucky. My husband echoed my father's contempt, expressed in The Tragedy of Gandhi, both men despising our espousal of poverty and our feminine masochism. Under both my father and my husband, I was made to work my fingers to the bone, paying back debts I had not/had assumed. Aprons despise and loathe women. In their vow they promise forever to exclude us, 'never to consent to the passage of a woman'. Their vows are based on selfishness, to protect their families more than outsiders, their Lodge brothers more than their families, themselves more than everyone. I found they believe we lack human souls. I came to sense they had sold their souls. They can destroy souls.

My brother went to outrageously expensive schools, where sodomy was the rule. I wish I had understood at the time why his behaviour suddenly changed, why he became a stranger, hating girls, women, instead of being friend and brother. When they first sent him to 'prep school', run by two homosexual biological brothers, I sensed something was terribly wrong, refused to eat until I saw my brother again. But it was too late. Next it was 'public school'. We know now this cruelty (it is terrorizing rape by men of boys), changes brain chemistry, creates a primitive warrior culture of cruelty, madness, meaninglessness, within civilization, breaking all moral codes through its shock. The loathing of what is 'politically correct', is the consequence of abuse and its changing of brain chemistry. A child is naturally loving. This 'education' makes them rigid, hate-filled conservatives who despise the victim. I recall a friend, dying of a brain tumour, and her angry husband, who beat her on the head, saying beauty to him was one perfect rose on one perfect table. Save me from such perfection, such cruelty. Sparta used these methods, while Athens preferred not to. Socrates and Plato were dissidents to democracy, hankering for Sparta's monarchy, military and helots, the myth of the king of gold, the nobles of silver, the slaves of iron, the perfect table, more than Athens's democracy and freedom of speech. Socrates chose to drink the hemlock, in obedience to law, instead of pleading for parresia , 'freedom of speech', allowed, revered, by Athenians in their law.

I was sent to an Anglican convent school, because it was cheap, but even then my school bills went shamefully unpaid, a school that had once been splendid, with learned nuns living and working in poverty. I returned to my convent school, because of the Presence of God there, to pay my debt to them and to God, to become myself a nun. Only to find the convent had changed utterly, become ugly, dirty, cruel and rich, though these last two facts I did not learn in time, believing they were poor and in despair and that I could help and repay them. My Novice Guardian was an apron's daughter, a Lord Mayor's daughter; violated by him, she violated others, the littlest children, the novices, the dying. Besides being Novice Guardian, she had been Head Mistress of the littlest children, and was also Guest Mistress, and now is even the Superior. Demanded silence, secrecy, utter obedience. I was back, it seemed, in the junior school's dormitory with its vicious hazing. She would laugh in telling me about the police laughingly returning runaway children back into the cruelty from which they had fled from, that same junior school of which she was Head Mistress, her mistress that matron, . Looking through the archives of the convent I found when the apron world entered it, when the chaplain initially arranging its Trust was also chaplain to London aprons.

It was as a nun I received the papers from the Bodleian that unraveled my orphaned father's story of sodomy rape by clergy at Oxford. That would cause his abuse as governor of a school in India of a child there. At the same time my youngest son, though I did not know it then, attempted suicide. I had left him an apartment and an income, gave him my car, my furniture. I had discovered my husband had stolen my dowry and benefited greatly from it, using it to support himself while gaining his Ph.D. While getting my Ph.D., I and our three children lived in degrading poverty without any help with which to support us, no child support or alimony being paid and lies being told to my relatives. Finally, I challenged my husband, and asked for $10,000 to be put in a Trust for our children and our children's children. Which was less than one quarter of what I gave to that Trust. And far less than what the Judge had ordered him to pay us. Not one penny for myself. He then had come to stay with my son, under that roof, and told him he resented the Trust, resented the apartment, resented the car. So my son took my car and vacuum cleaner hose and went up into the mountains and tried all night long to end his life, finally smashing everything against a rock and being helicoptered out.

When I was crying about my injured son, not knowing it was suicide, my Novice Guardian wanted sex. I refused. Because I would not break the Vow of Chastity I was not allowed to make it. I became a hermit in the mountains above Florence. Living for four years in one room without heat on foot, an hour's walk each day to Mass. Truly learning poverty, truly learning humility, truly learning chastity. Meanwhile, apron bishops stole millions of pounds sterling from our Community, bulldozing our chapel and convent, and even arranged the theft of the accumulating legal evidence against themselves from my barrister and had it burnt. I was told I could not have one penny, not being Professed. Clothing as a nun for four years and then making my Vows to God not being sufficient for them. They required their being made to an Anglican Bishop, who preferred the Community's endowment and who therefore wouldn't consent. My Sisters were loaned a mere thousand pounds of the Trust created for their support of the more than two million pounds they had earned teaching girls for a century and from the sale of land for a hospital. Their newer apron chaplain meanwhile continued to draw his salary as Chaplain General of a Community he had destroyed, while serving on the Trust he, as Trustee, had re-written to benefit himself. Lately he has even drawn more than a thousand pounds for 'travel' expenses from the Trust besides that salary. Its Charity Commission document reads these Trustees may do as they 'think fit'. How pirates talk. In turn, the Trust stated in writing that a Catholic may not benefit according to English law under this Trust, then next cited that phrase, as the 'Trustees think fit', when challenged to explain what English law. Later, retroactively, they wrote into the Trust's document the legal explanation that they were complying with the Church of England (Ecumenical Relations) Measure 1988.

At one point the lawyer and the administrator for the Trust had come to visit me in Italy, to my unheated room where I had lived for four years, in rags, on foot. The lawyer explained they had begun to believe my letters when I told the story of my cloak, given away to another, then being told to give back my nuns' clothing, having nothing left, not even the cloak I had brought with me, and the Sisters had said that this was true. During our conversation, in which I described the damage done to children, and about the children who had died, the administrator remarked they could do nothing about those already dead. But there is no Statute of Limitations for murder. I was put in touch by them with a Bishop's wife, in charge of clergy abuse to children in the Diocese. I sent her blessed olive leaves for her work. There was no reply to my suggestion. At that same time a married apron Bishop described why he disliked poverty. He had seen a death of a father of a family in the presence of that family in a slum and disliked it. He had seen a death of a rich woman amidst her paid gardeners, looking onto a beautiful garden, and that was the way he wanted to die. Why he and his brother bishops colluded together for money from women and children, from theological libraries, from women's foundations. To have plenty of money to buy care for themselves in this life. Where is Christianity? Where is the family?

I begged with the Trust to let me have the books and the buildings, not the money, to use these to help Hastings lift itself up from its poverty, the young being on the streets, drunk, in despair, without skills, without work. To live the Gospel where Christ and the disciples earned their keep with carpentry and fishing and tent-making. To use what we had in such abundance for teaching webcrafting, librarianship, bookbinding, furniture restoration, and our quarry for stone masonry. To teach these skills also to ordinands for the priesthood so they could teach them in turn to parishioners in need, rebuilding and restoring their churches together, and also the homes for their families. My scheme 'for being practical was not practical', they replied.

During this time of extreme poverty, for I had used all I had for my Community and for my research for the preparation of a theological edition of Julian of Norwich's Showing of Love, I came to learn that the bishop directing my degree and others had arranged that another, a priest, plagiarise my work. Even that the Julian of Norwich manuscript I had caused to be re-found, the second earliest we have, was then taken from Catholics and placed in Anglican hands. Meanwhile, I had already been finding that another nun had had her work on this material also be plagiarised, not once but many times. I talked with my alma mater, Berkeley, and my scholarly organization, the Modern Language Association of America. They explained the best strategy was to publish our edition together, so that finally credit would be due to the true scholars, not the false. In this process I lost trust in academic and ecclesiastic integrity, in published research, in degrees, and in the archbishop and his state church awarding the degree in theology for which I gave up all. They work together. My dean who had had arson carried out to get at documents that could have incriminated his office, next became the first openly gay university president. Already, my colleague defending me had mysteriously died from an influenza shot given him in the university hospital system, his publication of my transcription - acknowledging my work - being published posthumously, yet antedating that of the priest.

The buildings the Bishop had bulldozed were our Convent and our Chapel. Our secular buildings are sold off for luxury housing for rich laity. Another Convent had similarly had its Chapel bulldozed, even its Sisters' graves dug up, and its other buildings sold off for secular use by Bishops. I was sent to retrieve its books for our library, and to make sure our Bishop got all the Tolkien books that were in it. In both cases women's religious foundations had their assets seized, sacred buildings razed, and their books placed under control, not allowed to be read. Our books, on the Bible in Hebrew, Greek and Latin, the medieval women mystics, St Teresa of Avila, St John of the Cross, in Spanish, in English, all of German literature in fraktura, all of French literature, twenty thousand volumes, collected by women scholars over a century, were shut up in boxes, unread for eight years. The Della Robbias from Florence were sold off by the apron chaplain's wife in boot sales; everything secularized, turned into money, not prayer. The Sussex hand-crafted Pascal Candlestick and Altar Crucifix with Hebrew and Greek were officially given by the Trust to the Chapel at Gatwick Airport, noted for its ecumenical pederasty. Later, I learned that the Bishop helped himself to the Pascal Candlestick and that it is now in his own Chapel. The other convent, from which I had retrieved books for our convent, likewise had its endowment, earmarked for 'Missions', taken by Bishops.

We are like the Native Americans who had their teepees burned by the American Army (the women made and owned the teepees which were essential for their families' survival). We are like the Black South Africans in the Townships. We are like the Roma in Italy, whose camps are being razed and bulldozed as I write. We are like the Palestinians in Israel, where the same is taking place. The thread that runs through this crime is the opposition to life, to women and children, denying them existence. Most of these acts were supposedly carried out by Christians. Christ's teachings were to protect and educate widows and orphans, women and children, not to harm them. All these Bishops are members of Forward in Faith, against not only women as ordinands, but women altogether, to be exploited, robbed, abused. Do a Google search on 'forward' 'faith' and the apron word and you will see we are in apron land, not Christ's.

Eight years later they opened a library, though not called such and no longer named for the Mother Foundress, but after a piece of metal, placing its books down by Hastings Front, where the sea will rise, instead of on the Ridge, where they would be safe. A bishop and an actress together opened it, an actress whose nude pictures taken at sixteen are still for sale on the web, and whose expression (in the one I saw that was free), was exactly that of my Novice Guardian's when she exposed herself to me, mirroring that trauma. In her speech, the actress talked of her schooldays with the nuns, her rebellion by smoking. Now she plays the role of an alcoholic. Next, searching for the Hermitage of St Pega on the web, also once our Community's, and given to it by the woman scholar who also gave them so many of the learned books in our theological library, I find its bishop has deconsecrated this living monument of English Church History. In the same web document that he consecrates the island of Princess Diana. It is clear bishops and deans only tolerate women if they are traumatised or lacerated. English saints, religious, scholars, of the wrong gender, past and present, must be done away with, must be secularized and deconsecrated.

Alongside of this the evidence accumulated of trauma done again and again to school children. Finally there was Dunblane. Which was deeply apron, both perpetrator and investigator. I fled. But not before confronting our chaplain with a story the police told us, of being blocked from investigating a murder of a child by clergy connected with an endowed theological library in London they sold off. His chilling response was not shock but the comment, 'I have no illusions about my brother priests'. Dunblane dominoed into Columbine, then Beslan. These suicide murders, so much like the one my husband planned of all of us, are now being mirrored by terrorists. Are they, too, manipulated by the apron world? MK-Ultra? The Taliban was underwritten by America. Sadam Hussein likewise. Afghanistan, now so polluted with depleted uranium, is apron land. (Since writing this, they have also blighted Iraq with this same depleted uranium.) Not only are schools targeted, but theological libraries, their endowments seized by apron clergy. And religions themselves. A working from within against themselves, an annihilation. Augustine and Julian tell us that evil and sin are nought, the tending to non-existence. One school child, stopped from killing himself, sobbed that if he had been taught God he would not have murdered.

Who were the aprons throughout the ages? Among them were Giacomo Casanova, Tsar Peter the Great, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Napoleon Buonaparte, Abraham Lincoln, Giuseppe Mazzini, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Adam Mickiewicz, Lev Tolstoy, Lord Baden Powell, Rudyard Kipling, William Butler Yeats, Charles Williams, the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury Geoffrey Fisher, Timothy McVeigh, Thomas Hamilton and the Lord who investigated his killings of school children at Dunblane and other British disasters. Men whom we heroize mixed with the most deranged criminals who die with 'Invictus' on their lips. People who truthfully write that they only seek the insatiable 'pursuit of happiness', not happiness itself. Aprons made the modern states of Russia, America, France, Sweden, Poland, Turkey, Israel, Italy, Ireland, India, Pakistan. Because, amongst aprons, there is no loyalty, except to brother aprons, these states can then freely war against each other, such as Napoleon against Russia and England, and, as Tolstoy tells us, really against their own people. Even kings, as in Sweden, can be aprons, their best protection against apron plotting against them.

The titles of my father's books often had the word 'Tragedy' in them, The Tragedy of Gandhi, Czech Tragedy . My father wrote in one that he despised Gandhi's espousal of poverty and his feminine masochism. Twenty years ago, Zbigniev Brzezinski told me that it would be 'tragic' to wage nuclear war in Europe against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but necessary, inevitable, while my knees shook, remembering illuminated medieval manuscripts in European libraries. He was then training the Afghan 'freedom fighters', the Taliban's future terrorists to be accused of the WTC, so that they would be fanatically against the education of women and children, against the kindness and mercy manifested in the ancient and feminine Buddhas sculpted in their rugged mountains. Kipling notes Afghanistan is apronland. My father visited its border when an editor of the Times of India in Bombay, no Englishmen then being allowed to enter it.

Opening my eyes I see secret societies as protecting utter criminality at the top. In prisons pederasts are most likely to be killed by other convicts. For the worst know this is the worst crime. But in the corridors of power, in churches, in schools, among the police, among judges, in governments, a secret brotherhood will protect and recruit by these means. Women fear rape. We haven't dared see that men rape boys. That our children are at risk. In the end, following Dunblane, I wrote to the Queen. In it I spoke against such acts by clergy to children, saying it shattered the souls of both. Her answer came in a letter written by her command after I had fled the country. It began by speaking of her deep concern, but continued with saying they could do nothing. That Christmas in her Message she looked up from the text at its ending, into our eyes, and begged that we keep the faith that we had had as children. My loyalty is to God, to the Queen, to the Pope, and above all to my children, our future.

My son told me I had poisoned him in the womb. Why he became like Bramwell Bronte. Men blame women whom they despise and hate. But I gave my husband his cars, his house, I gave my son his cars, his apartment, I gave my husband and my brother the money for their education, I have given them so much more than I had, that there was none left to educate their sons, their nephews. Nor did they in turn educate their nephews, their sons. I see my son's brain chemical changes, against which he struggled magnificently, as caused by the trauma of many times being nearly murdered by his father; then, when he was ten and I was teaching at Princeton, of sodomy by a student, who, now married, teaches at a prestigious boys' school. Looking back, I remember my first year of marriage and my husband losing his teaching job because of his abuse of children he taught while I was expecting our first child. I remember my husband reading obsessively Knock an Any Door, because of its account of pederasty. I remember my husband's never-ending tirades that young fatherless boys must have older male companions, mentors, lest they grow up homosexual. I had failed to understand this was a recipe for homosexuality, for recruitment to its ranks. Why I let my son have a Princeton student for mentor - not knowing he was to be his abuser.

The apron world turns words into their opposite, blames the other for the sins it itself commits. I learned from my brushes with the apron world that 'Trust' is not a word to be trusted, nor is 'Charity'. Directors of schools, of trusts, of charities, are a terrible brotherhood who steal from widows and orphans, who rape the weak and defenseless. In their vows they promise to protect each other first, before their families. It seems they climb/descend, into higher/lower grades according to the evil they dare to do, the governor of the school in India sodomizing the Anglo-Indian schoolboy, the father violating his only daughter, the father attempting to kill his wife and sons, the apron thrilled at visiting the burned child in hospital. Their insatiable thirst and hunger for money. From glimpsing their world and their desire for control through terror of their own families, and their own people, a Coventry, a Dunblane, I fear that even the WTC, like the Oklahoma City Federal Building, is theirs and all the evidence contrived, for war, for oil, for taxes. And linked to this, Nairobi and Omagh. (Now, Istanbul.) Terror controls. Search the web for Bohemian Club. The value of the dollar immediately afterward soared by a third, I found, after WTC, when sending money by Western Union to my ill son in America.

One day, having drawn from the bank the pitiful money of my pension on which to barely live, and walking along distracted, thinking in a rage of bishops who steal millions of pounds sterling from women and children, who live in palaces and are chauffeured about, I suddenly realized a gypsy child had her hand in my bag. In shock, I spoke in English, not Italian, but was relieved that what I said was, 'That was bad!' Not 'You are wicked'. Blaming the sin, not the sinner. She hadn't succeeded in taking it. She and I looked into each other's eyes. I saw this small, scared child suddenly as my sister. Who had no palace, no chauffeur. I wrote about this on the web and Chesko, a Thomas Merton scholar, answered me. 'Yes', he said, 'My people steal. And she would be beaten when she returned home by her father if she had not got enough money for him'. Adding he was gypsy, from China, coming to America at twenty, becoming a Trappist monk, then hermit, then marrying. Since then I have been friends with gypsies, giving them food, clothes, postcards of Florentine religious art; this last they love the most, kissing the images, exclaiming about their beauty, the children running after me in the streets for them, their fathers approving. These are people brutalized by war, by discrimination, but loving God, capax dei, capable of God. A widow will tell me she has four children, her husband killed at Kosovo. Another family I know now live in one room with ten children, the mother of five of them whose husband was killed, being with her sister who also has five children and their parents, fifteen in all, who had had a house in Kosovo. Every day from such Rom I hear 'Grazie'. I have never, in all these years, had a word of thanks from aprons, though I gave them everything I had.

During these years as a veiled nun I have had aprons screaming irrationally, uncontrollably, at me. Grown men, like my convent's chaplain (who had also said chillingly, when I challenged him on the murder of a child, that he had no illusions about his 'brother priests'); another of my bishops, married, but enraged that I wrote for married love and against clerical child abuse, speaking of his loyalty to his 'brother bishops', insisting that love between men is greater than married love, and of the sacredness of mentoring; yet another bishop enraged that I translated inclusively, saying it was of the devil if I brought in women, as well as men, into theology and the Gospel (he defended his friend the archbishop who was temporarily relieved of his duties for pedophilia, the judge noting that that bishop's defense saved the archbishop from further punishment, though the judge also told and believed the victim's story); a prior of a monastery, a president of a library, and a director of a library. Who else has screamed at me like these men? A doctor of the deaf, angered because the V2 rocket explosion when I was six means I cannot hear without aids, slammed the door against me, screaming. The screaming with rage seems to be about the quest for power that becomes meaningless, becomes impotent, when in the presence of truth. Doctors also are forced to be apron

I have never seen a happy apron. My mother-in-law, the apron's wife, said she would not look at the face of my first baby because he was going to be killed by the atom bomb. War is not about happiness. Conquest is not happiness. In the apron context women, children, minorities, the Third World, are to be despised, to be enslaved, to be terrorized, to be murdered. But the most enslaved of all are the aprons themselves. Homer said when a man is a slave half his soul is lost. Quakers and the Knights of St John say for clearness one must be free of all secret societies. Amongst aprons I hear praise of Machiavelli, praise of Napoleon, praise, and a misreading, of Darwin's 'Nature, red in tooth and claw', insistence upon hierarchies, pyramids, competition, secrecy, and 'survival of the fittest', Eagle Scouting, Outward Bound, market forces. A Moloch paganism involving the sacrifices of children. Children play 'Dungeons and Dragons', in which some obey the rules, others are 'Chaotic' and criminally allowed to break all rules. That is the domain of aprons. But when I translate medieval texts, such as Julian of Norwich, it is to find that 'nature' and 'kindness' are the same word, that God creates Nature, and is his Love. The love of a mother for a child mirrors the love of God for Creation.

I've heard Catholics believe the apron world is Jewish. Also Baptists. It is not. Though it recruits from Protestants and Jews, it turns them against their loyalties and beliefs. I have heard the grossest anti-semitisim on the lips of aprons. Because they borrow at highest interest from them. And, having sold their souls, they are in debt bondage forever. I found the apron world shutting down theological library after theological library, especially sneering at Hebrew studies in Christianity. One such library, run by apron priests, was shut down by themselves for its endowment, and whose Trust document for the Charity Commission reads that they exist for 'brothely [sic] intercourse'. The police told us they knew of a child killed by them but were blocked from investigating. I suddenly realized with horror that the pogroms against Jews in the Middle Ages, accusing them of ritual murder of a child, were a scape-goating for Christian cathedral clergy's child-murders. The crucible of the Holocaust is here, and Hess's flight to Hamilton in Scotland and Dunblane and Columbine and Beslan's massacres. Rabbis rage when having to share funerals with aprons. Solomon and Herod used evil to build the Temple, its priests paying neither taxes to it nor to Caesar, while Jesus' family was bled white by them for both. True Judaism and true Christianity and true Islam are not apron.

When I fled from my Anglican convent I sought a Catholic one. Its father founder spoke magnificently about Christ's theology of inclusion. As do aprons; except they exclude women. I was Consecrated. Then made my Vows. But insisted on putting the word 'God' into my Vows. And found the cult shifted at that point from the aged father founder's splendid theology to its opposite, the youthful father superior excluding the old, the women, the poor, while demanding total obedience and total secrecy. It was there that the bishop was screaming that I had to exclude women from my translations of the father founder's contemplative inclusive theology and that nuns were of the devil. It had become apron, not Christian. It was there a cardinal praised an artist's work of the 'Machine of the Sun' triumphing over Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa and the Crucifixion, in the final bronze mockingly showing his own cat-like mustaches in the halo instead of the cross nimb at the Ascension. Once again I fled. Aprons have infiltrated Catholicism. But the Pope's Pardon in the Jubilee year spelled out and condemned what Catholicism cannot accept with complacency, the degradation of women, the persecution of Jews, the abuse by clergy of children. While the Anglican Communion institutionalizes such abuse with all-boy choirs, the police protecting the perpetrators.

Goethe, Mozart and Tolstoy all left their Lodges and left behind them magnificent monuments warning us not to choose to be Faust or Don Juan or Napoleon. Why does Kipling not have Kim enter an apron orphanage? Dunblane would have the answer. Orphans are cannon fodder for sodomy. The Queen Victoria School in Dunblane, founded for Boer War orphans, was used by Thomas Hamilton for extensive abuse by high-ranking officials of the littlest children. What Hamilton did at Dunblane is now copy-catted in America by the school children themselves, even WTC pathetically copy-catted by a school child in Florida. Why did Kipling have Kim educated by Catholics? Even the apron Kipling wanted to save his fiction from evil. His own two children, Una and Dan, of the books I read and reread as a child and with whom I identified, died tragically young. Apron families are dysfunctional, as with the Bront�s, because the prime loyalties are shattered, the mainspring of morality broken. Children in such families can attempt to write themselves free of tyranny. Emily and Charlotte Bront� and Elizabeth Barrett Browning died young doing so. While much children's literature, including that by the Inklings, is written to enslave them in such structures. In Norway a Tolkien fan was murderously burning down ancient stave churches, his witchcraft attacking Christianity. The 'Harry Potter' series is in both worlds. About how to live with fear, with evil, with death. Yet criticizing misogyny and classicism.

The apron world has seized hold of the artists and poets, changing them from being hard-working charitable Giottos, Fra Angelicos, Della Robbias, painting and moulding the Gospels and the lives of the Saints, from being Dantes writing of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven in his Comedy, to being death-desiring failures like Keats and Shelley, Ibsen and Strindberg, Vincent Van Gogh and Mark Rothko. They give us the 'Romantic' artist who is atheist, nihilist, filled with despair, speaking like the denizens of Dante's Hell, though even there snatches of God's beauty will break through. We change from beauty to ugliness, from meaning to chaos, from light to blackness, the gold gone from surrounding saints to the brown bitumen surrounding portraits of power and self. To walk through the Uffizi is a journey through time from serene saintliness to pornography, depravity and anxiety, as the Machiavellian Medici Princes take over, usurping the Republic of the people where Christ is King. Aprons claim the Medici created Florence. But when Giotto and Arnolfo di Cambio and Orcagna and Dante lived and painted, built and wrote, the Medici were yet unknown, unmentioned in the archives.

The apron world has seized hold and always has had the world of science, from alchemists to atom smashers. Robert Oppenheimer, tasting the devil's power/powerlessness, blasphemed Donne's Holy Sonnet on the Trinity to name the bomb and quoted the Upanishads, 'I am become the destroyer of worlds'. From atoms it now switches to genes, manipulating these, creating Frankenstein monsters in vitrio. Mary Shelley was Percy Bysshe's wife, who, with her half-sister Claire Claremont, Byron's mistress and mother of their child Allegra, later spoke out against Byron's and Shelley's doctrine of 'Free Love' as wrong. The struggle between Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning, which came to kill her, over her politics of liberation (though her heroes, Mazzini, Garibaldi, were apron), and over their child, is also shaped by this conflict. We are all God's sacred alphabet, children, women, men, all our Creation a sacred code created by God, the Atomic Chart of Elements, the genetic code, to be revered, not enslaved.

There is that in Christianity which counters the apron world, a natural kindness and love that undoes the other's unnatural cruelty and meaninglessness. Aprons' power lies in doing what it deems unforgiveable, inconceivable. It misinterprets God's Creation of Nature as the Machiavellian, Hobbesian, Darwinian 'survival of the fittest', of 'nature red in tooth and claw', of 'market forces'. It cannot forgive itself. The Christian answer is to pray, to forgive, such as with blessed olive leaves , and to stop such evil. There is mercy even for aprons. Julian says there is to be pity, rather than blame. If you are an apron reading this, you can always write your letter of demittance from your Lodge. You can free yourself to God. Christianity turns hateful Tragedy into loving Comedy, the Crucifixion become the Resurrection, Friday become Sunday, time and death undone to become again birth, a child, a mother, a miracle. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine:http://books.guardian.co.uk/video/2007/sep/07/naomiklein