FOREWORD

For this first issue of 2008, our team of writers chose as their project to study how different people react spiritually to different circumstances. There was no shortage .of material covering a very wide range from the dramatic and tragic to the commonplace. In the end we, chose to report on how Oscar Wilde reacted to his imprisonment in 'De Profundis' (Essie Wise), how Robert Wedderburn coped with slavery and fought for abolition (Terence Skene) and how Jan Struther, the hymn-writer, sought fulfilment within her domestic setting (Sue Good).

To set the scene we reflect upon the importance of consciousness as an aspect of spirituality, particularly in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Bill Stephen).

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EVOLVING CONSCIOUSNESS

By Bill Stephen

I have been applying the theory of evolution to literary accounts of religious and spiritual experience. Re-reading William Wordsworth's poem, "Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" recently, I realised that although this poem is again reflecting upon the moral influence Nature exerted upon him as a child and indeed, by means of contemplation as an adult, in its concept of human destiny it is firmly rooted in Christian tradition. Wordsworth assumes that every new born child has a soul and has come straight from heaven, possessing spiritual knowledge which will gradually fade away as the child grows and which will linger in the adult mind only as a faint echo or dream to be sought after but never to be recaptured. At birth we emerge from a state of innocence and bliss which gradually lose their influence as we grow up until they become no more than a vague aspiration which some of us at least continue to cherish but never attain.

This, of course, we recognise as the Garden of Eden myth retold by the poet as personal experience; an account of the fall of Mankind from the state of innocence to the state of sin that is the inevitable result of the pursuit of knowledge, since the wish for knowledge undermines faith and usurps autocratic authority.

Wordsworth is describing a perfectly natural process which he transforms by the power of the imagination into a religious experience, another natural process in which we may all participate, to a certain degree, but more of that later. We all know that as children the world was a magical place. We were seeing, hearing, smelling, touching so many things for the first time. Our senses were brand new, alert, sharp, keen, transmitting a stream of intense experiences to our brain which transmuted them into feelings of awe, wonder and sheer delight. There was also the excitement of self-discovery: in reacting to our environment we became aware of our own consciousness and imagination. I still remember as a five year old, seeing a clump of primroses for the first time. The clear yellow flowers, laughing, waving from a corona of dark green, crumpled leaves, as thick as felt, entranced me. Nature seemed to be such a joyful, playful creature that was scattering her delights of colour, scent, shape and texture around like sweeties at a picnic. I looked around at the dark, swaying trees, the blue sky, the grass sparkling with daisies and was overwhelmed by the wonder of it all and its mysterious existence. It all seemed to mean something but what it was and who had put it there I could not fathom. I was glad, however, that I seemed to be a part of it. I am certain that the reason why so many of us seek out remote and empty places or travel to the ends of the earth in pursuit of novelty, is to feel again that childish thrill of encountering the new, the strange and the unknown and relishing its mysteriousness. So often, it is that we discover so much of our selves in contemplating the mysterious.

As we mature, we learn, and what was once new becomes familiar and common-place. This too is a natural process. We cannot resist it. How perverse then of Wordsworth to regard it as a degenerative process, when it is the opposite. Childhood is precious, for many a magical stage in life, precisely because it is a time of discovery, a time of increasing awareness, when we evolve from a spontaneous response to experience to an attempted understanding of that experience.

This mental, moral, spiritual evolution of the individual is our human nature. Our community life-style, also a feature of our nature, requires us to subordinate certain of our urges to promote social harmony, but there seems to be no justification for regarding our nature as base, degenerate or sinful, because we develop from the innocence of childhood to the sophistication of adulthood and perhaps lose that sense 0 wonder on the way. W ordsworth seems to have been unfamiliar with the scientific concept of evolution. He died several years before Charles Darwin finally published his work and so I suppose it is unjust to censure him for setting his experience within the Christian doctrine of four original sin, particularly as this view of human nature had dominated traditional thinking for hundreds of years.

It is an interesting, nevertheless, to speculate what our culture might have been had an evolutionary interpretation of the Bible been available in the past. It might have been possible to read the Bible as an account of developing human consciousness. The exit from the Garden of Eden might have been more positively interpreted as an account of emerging human consciousness rather than human disobedience; the Cain and Abel myth as a growing awareness that divine worship may take many forms, each one as valid as the other; Noah's Flood as an acknowledgement that natural disasters are a function of Nature and not the retribution of a wrathful God; that Abraham's attempted sacrifice of his only son, Isaac, is the realisation that self-sacrifice or sacrifice of a loved one to demonstrate one's loyalty to God, is an obsessive rather than a spiritual act; that Job's horrendous history shows the impossibility of ever comprehending the mind or intentions of an omnipotent and eternal being; the indefinable cannot be explained or explained away; that the New Testament concludes that love is the ultimate destination of human consciousness. The Bible is an account of a wide variety of human experiences, racial, communal; personal, emotional, spiritual, moral and historical interpreted as a relationship between a Divine Creator and humankind. Consciousness of the events of daily living, the weather, the fertility of soil, animals and people, the availability of food and water, vulnerability to disease, accidents, enemies and natural disasters, becomes transmuted in the mind, by the action of the imagination, fear, sense of wonder, sense of powerlessness, desire for meaning and understanding, into a religion, and in the case of the ancient Hebrews a religion dominated by a single creator God, who in time became also the Christian God.

Our consciousness has so evolved that we have a concept of the microscopically tiny and the infinitely large; we can imagine eternity and comprehend the instantaneous; we can cope with a factual and material world and simultaneously exist in a realm of imagination, suppositions, concepts and dreams. We also realise that there is a level of existence that we cannot access, a world beyond the reach of our senses and the comprehension of our mind. Evolution's having equipped us with this remarkable faculty of consciousness, it seems perverse of us to limit our response to existence by confining ourselves to a set of dogmatic precepts distilled from ancient scripture.

Increasingly I find myself thinking that spirituality and consciousness are perhaps the same thing, where consciousness includes empathy and imagination. How we react to whatever is around us, people, nature, inanimate things, events etc. depends upon our immediate knowledge of these things but also more importantly of our much deeper understanding of ourselves and of how the world is and of how we are connected to it. That is we try to take a cosmic view. The deeper our understanding of any person or situation, the more balanced our response. If we push understanding of reality to the limit we arrive at love.

Taking the cosmic view, trying to see the overall picture, is an essential aspect of our consciousness. We lift an experience out of the here and five now into a creative realm of the mind, the imagination, where we are less dominated by immediate personal concerns or habit or the expectations of others and allow ourselves to test our response against an infinite background. Ralph Waldo Emerson, I think, might recognise this process as verging upon his notion of transcendentalism, that is raising experience beyond the ordinary to a cosmic level.

He writes this in his essay 'Nature', "Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky...my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I see nothing; I see all: the currents of Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God." In other words he cannot distinguish himself from the rest of creation. He is at one with the while cosmos.

This sense of wholeness, of oneness, of being in harmony with and absorbed into everything else, we might call mysticism, but what is mysticism if not consciousness in its most perceptive form. Although the experience raises him above purely personal concerns, above egotism, he is still aware that the experience is his. There is a strange contradiction here in that the experience is both objective, he has become merged into the totality of all creation, and subjective, his individuality has survived for him to describe the event. He is still the same physical human being, who is having a remarkable spiritual experience. This objective/subjective contradiction recalls Heisenberg's theory of uncertainty and its corollary that there is no such thing as an objective view of reality, as the very process of observation alters it.

This paradox, this state of having a unique identity while being totally absorbed in the wholeness of creation, of being a discrete, recognisable droplet in a whole ocean, is not a unique experience. Here again is Emerson, dashing off in his Diary on 11th. April 1834, an account of another occasion when he felt at one with the cosmos. "I opened my eyes and let what would pass through them into the soul. 1 heeded no more what minute or hour our Massachusetts' clocks might indicate. 1 saw only the noble earth on which 1 was born, with the great star which warms and enlightens it. 1 saw the clouds .... It was Day, that was all Heaven said. The pines glittered with their innumerable needles in the light and seemed to challenge me to read their riddle. The drab oak leaves of the last year turned their little somersaults and lay still again. And the wind bustled high in the forest top."

Once again he remains aware of being an individual, but all the stifling layers of self-hood have been shed, self-centredness, anxiety, distrust, disappointment, frustration, discontent, resentment, all the feelings that prevent our whole-hearted engagement with life, that get between us and love. All the trappings of self do m drop away and in that moment of release, he is aware of another self, his real self, that spontaneously reaches out and blends with the whole of creation in a loving union.

Evolution has equipped all creatures with a degree of awareness so that they may survive within their own environment; only human beings, however, as far as we know, have developed a theory of mind and this ability to hold a comprehensive view of the universe that includes the physical, the mental and the spiritual, the actual and the hypothetical, the finite and the infinite, the unknowable and indifinable, the changeful and the eternal. Presumably such a facility helps us to survive. It certainly allows us to predict the consequences of our actions which may help us save the planet in the very near future. It enables us to value creatures and things other than ourselves, instilling in us a moral sense. It raises our aspirations above that of the merely materialistic, in that it allows us to be the consciousness of the universe, since to our knowledge, we are the only species capable of appreciating its vastness and complexity.

We live in a materialistic world which paradoxically yearns for the spiritual nourishment which it has rejected. Traditional religions with their prescriptive, authoritarian approach have for centuries denied us the freedom to explore and enjoy the vast richness of our consciousness and our barren materialistic world has emerged as a result, as millions of us have turned our backs upon religion and spiritual exercise as an unfulfilling experience.

Somehow, as a society, we must recover the joy of consciousness, raise our horizons beyond the mundane, the familiar, the commonplace and focus upon the endless vistas that are always open and opening in the cosmos of our own mind. This is how we access the divinity of the universe. Of all the benefactions bequeathed upon us by evolution, Consciousness is the greatest. Let us exploit it to the full.

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ROBERT WEDDERBURN

During the Summer of 1820, William Wilberforce, the principal architect of the 1807 Act of Parliament that abolished the Atlantic Slave Trade, paid a surprise visit to a prisoner held in solitary confinement in Dorchester jail, one Robert Wedderburn, convicted of blasphemy, a journeyman tailor and Unitarian preacher. Although Wilberforce was a devout member of the Church of England and considered it his Christian duty to bring spiritual comfort and enlightenment to the inmates of His Majesty's prisons, travelling all the way to Dorchester from London by coach, however, to talk to a man who had attacked him in print and by word of mouth and whose political, social and religious beliefs were anathema to him, was surely above and beyond the call of duty. Why Wilberforce did so has remained a mystery. He certainly did not go to Dorsetshire to enhance his own reputation for generosity and magnanimity as he went there incognito and he certainly did not go to gloat. It is very likely that he went there simply to do his utmost to save the soul of a man he admired, a man of passion and great sincerity, who had devoted his whole life selflessly to the great cause of slave emancipation, but whose methods he considered extremely dangerous and socially disruptive. The interview was conducted politely but .:without warmth, neither man apparently making any impression upon the other. However, Wilberforce presented Wedderburn with two books, saying, "I know you are an honest and conscientious man", and four years later when Wedderburn published his autobiography and a selection of his writings, he dedicated the volume to W. Wilberforce MP. In spite of their differences, they clearly respected each other deeply.

For years the slavery issue had been hotly debated, up and down the country, the abolitionists arguing against it on religious, humanitarian and moral grounds and the anti-abolitionists on economic grounds. Thousands of people, directly and indirectly, were employed in the Atlantic slave trade; vast fortunes were being made by owners of sugar plantations in the West Indies and much of this wealth was funding the industrial revolution in Britain. Were this trade to end, economic catastrophe would follow, not just in the West Indies, but much more importantly in Great Britain.

Within the burgeoning Unitarian community this debate raged as elsewhere, but perhaps even more intensely, given the Unitarian dedication to the cause of freedom and the rights of individuals. In 1788, in Birmingham Rev. Dr. Joseph Priestley had delivered a famous sermon deploring the practice of slavery throughout the world and the Atlantic slave trade in particular. 'Slavery is perhaps the greatest, and most crying evil under the sun' he declared. 'You will consider all mankind as brethern, and neighbours.....As men and as Christians, we should not rest ourselves not only for our relations or friends; not only for our countrymen but for the different inhabitants of Europe, Asia, Africa or America; and not only for Christians but for Jews, Mahometans and infidels. And as we ought to feel for our own distresses.' He argued that slavery was physically brutal, morally degrading and in the end economically stultifying. He claimed that British slave owners were the worst of all, being cruel and inhumane in their treatment of their slaves, regarding them, not as fellow human beings but as beasts of burden, creatures of a lower order, intellectually inferior and morally degenerate. Inspired by this address, many high profile Unitarians rallied to the abolitionist cause, including William Roscoe, MP. for Liverpool, the principal slave-dealing port, and William Smith MP. for Norwich, who worked hard to persuade parliament to pass the 1807 abolition bill an enlightened and humane piece of legislation which changed the lives of millions of wretched people.

Other Unitarians, however, found themselves, in a very ambiguous situation, as their own livelihood depended upon the slave-trade. For instance, at least one Liverpool Unitarian James Irvine, was a slave-ship captain, and although he himself had spent fourteen months as a slave in North Africa, after escaping, continued to practice the trade until his death, because, he said, he knew of no other means of making a living. Others, indeed were slave-owners, as were the Hibbert family, founders of the Hibbert Trust, and owners of a sugar plantation, occupying four hundred slaves. Many more benefited from the investment of slave-earned money in factories, workshops, farms, roads, canals and later railways. The abolitionist issue, therefore, provoked much anxiety and heart searching as vulnerable consciences struggled to reconcile deeply held principles with practical economic concerns. To what extent did the misery of the slaves in far distant lands outweigh loss of income, impoverishment or at least reduction in standard of living of hard-working, honest people in Britain? Should Christian duty be the predominant concern in this matter when the whole economy of the British Empire might be jeopordised? This was an acute issue which would not countenance compromise. Individuals were obliged to align themselves with one side or the other.

The Unitarian abolitionists fought a war of attrition over two decades, both in their own religious community and nationwide, and by amassing evidence, first-hand testimony from former slaves and reformed slave-dealers of the appalling brutality of the trade, persuaded Members of Parliament to admit eventually that their case was unanswerable.

Unitarians today are justly proud of the involvement of their forebears in this noble struggle and several articles in the 'Inquirer' over the past year have celebrated their achievements. However, one omission from the lists of those so honoured is the name of Robert Wedderburn who worked as hard as anyone in this cause, and as a result suffered more than most. This contemporary oversight may be explained by the fact that Unitarian historians seemed to have overlooked him altogether; while. all the other abolitionists are dutifully listed in 'The Unitarian Contribution to Social progress in England' R. V. Holt's encyclopaedic work, his name does not appear,

Fortunately, other sources have been less reticent. 'The Edinburgh Evening News' in an article in March last year (2007) acknowledged Wedderburn's lifelong commitment to slave emancipation and Action of Churches in Scotland Together organised a walk along the River Esk in his honour and to celebrate the bicentenary of the 1807 Act. His descendant, Lord Wedderburn, expressed his intention of being present at the walk, in recognition of "Robert's activities as an early anti-slavery campaigner."

Born in 1762, Robert Wedderburn was one of several sons of James Wedderburn esq. ~f Inveresk Estate, near Musselburgh, possessor of a large sugar plantation in Jamaica, and consequently a slave-owner and slave - trader. His mother was one of his father's slaves, snatched as a young child with the rest of her family from her native village in Africa and transported to Jamaica where she was sold as a slave. James Wedderburn had earned himself a reputation for debauchery towards his young female slaves and was generally regarded as a cruel and vicious master. Two months before Robert was born, his mother, Rossanna, was sold to another Scottish slave-owner, Lady Douglas, who seems to have been more humane in her dealings with slaves. Part of the sale agreement was that the child when born would be registered as a free person, the illegitimate offspring of James Wedderburn, and so Robert was brought up among slaves, by slaves, and of course shared their life--style but was not obliged to work in the sugar cane plantations. When he was four years old, Lady Douglas died. His mother was sold on without him and he never saw her again. He then moved in with his grandmother, Talkee Amy, a prominent member of the slave community, who in addition to possessing entrepreneurial skills, valuable to her master, was also the resident witch-doctor and chief practitioner of the African Obeah religion. Both his mother and grandmother were highly intelligent, independently-minded women who deeply resented their enslaved status. Talkee Amy was also shrewd, cunning, street-wise and a talented market-place-orator, characteristics which Robert inherited and which helped him survive in the slums of London. His father refusing to recognise his very existence, Robert at the age of 16, like many other young black Jamaicans, joined the Royal Navy in which he served for several years. He eventually fetched up in London, working as a journeyman tailor, living in the black community of escaped slaves, servants and ex-servicemen, all of them miserably poor, accommodated in filthy, unsanitary tenements known as the rookeries, and earning,a living any way they can.

Robert is deeply troubled by his own life style and that of his neighbours, and that of his friends and family in Jamaica. He is also unfulfilled spiritually. His life seems to have no purpose or meaning, passing in a relentless procession of days, spent working, eating, sleeping, achieving nothing but bare survival. He feels there must be something better for everyone than this miserable struggle to stay alive. His conscience prompts him to action....but what?

The issue is suddenly resolved when he meets a Methodist street preacher, who encourages him to become a Christian and to join the anti-slavery movement. John Wesley, although a high Tory to whom the very notion of democracy was terrifying, nevertheless, was appalled by slavery, calling it in a letter to Wilberforce, 'an execrable villainy which is the scandal of England and of human nature,' and condemning it out of hand in his book 'Thoughts on Slavery' published a few years before Priestley's abolitionist sermon. Slave-emancipation seemed to Robert to be the inevitable consequence of Christianity and in espousing both he was finding himself an aim in life which would be fulfilling, both spiritually and politically. As he had become aware of his own intellectual gifts, he had also felt uneasy that he had deserted his own people in Jamaica and that he had an obligation to help them in their struggle for freedom. The anti-slavery cause in Britain now gave him that opportunity.

Thus far, he appears to have been illiterate, having received no formal education. However, he embarks upon a study of political institutions, of current revolutionary political literature and of the Bible. How he achieves this is not clear, but the consequences were his decisions to become a Spencean in politics, a Unitarian in religion and in uniting the two, to develop what is now recognised as the first attempts to develop a black Liberation Theology.

Tommy Spence, a teacher, born of Scottish parents, published in 1775 a revolutionary political agenda which might be regarded now as communist and was certainly democratic. In addition to demanding universal suffrage with equal rights for women and children, annual parliamentary elections, the abolition of all empires and slavery, he advocated land nationalisation, declaring that no individual had the right to own the means of production which should be held by the community and worked entirely for the common good. Tommy Spence was imprisoned for sedition but his ideas took root and eventually became the basis of the Chartist movement and eventually influenced the agenda of the socialist party. Robert Wedderburn became an ardent supporter of Tommy Spence and devoted himself to spreading his ideas in London among the factory workers and labouring classes, many of whom were starving because of the high price of bread and mass unemployment after the Napoleonic wars, and in Jamaica among the black population whose demands for freedom were becoming ever more strident.

His intense Bible study led him to reject much of what the Methodists had taught him, because he could find no scriptural foundation for them, including the doctrines of the Trinity, Atonement (which absolutely horrified him) the eternal damnation of souls, and the Divinity of Jesus. There was also no justification in the New Testament for the practice of slavery. He had never felt comfortable with the Methodist view that slaves ought to be taught how to endure their condition in patience until it could be terminated, now he rejected it outright and mounted a savage attack on the Methodist position. He became licensed as a Dissident Preacher and founded a Unitarian Chapel in Hopkins Street in Soho, where he preached several times a week to capacity houses of the unemployed, the destitute, tbe hungry, the down-trodden, the desperate and despairing masses of tbe London slums. Although he was below average height and stockilly built, be had an impressive manner and an autboritative bearing. He was a fluent, vigorous and colourful speaker, employing the language of the street to get his religious and political message across, his buge voice, still bearing its West Indian accent, escaping tbe confines of the cbapel into the street where people stopped to listen. What they heard was that every living person was equal in the sight of God, irrespective of race, colour or creed, and that God intended all the world's resources to be available for everyone, equally, thus eliminating the possibility of vast differences in wealth, power and opportunity. Universal brotherhood was the indisputable message of the New Testament but so far none of the Christian Churches had observed it. Indeed tbe Church of England, so far from being Christian, was no more than a department of government and was particularly ,prejudiced against the non-landowning and politically powerless majority of the British population. Freedom from outmoded notions, from authoritarianism, from prejudice, from life-diminishing attitudes are all implied in his religious teaching.

His religious and political beliefs merged into one: preaching the one, he felt he had to live the other. For several years, following the defeat of Napoleon he became the leading revolutionary voice in London, demanding better conditions for the poor, and freedom for all slaves in British territories worldwide. Although the 1807 Act had ended the transportation of slaves across the Atlantic, it had not abolished slavery, which still flourished unhindered. While William Wilberforce preferred a gradual, softly, softly approach to emancipation, hoping for some consensus between slave-owners and abolitionists, Wedderburn, impatient and angry, pursued an unrelenting campaign by means of letters, his antislavery magazine, 'An Axe laid to the Root' and pamphlets advocating immediate revolution. He incited the slaves in Jamaica to go on strike, to practise passive resistance until they were freed, and he alarmed the plantation-owners and the British government by suggesting that, with the example of the successful slave revolt in Haiti before them, the Jamaican slaves might also free themselves violently.

For years, the government Secret Service had monitored Wedderburn's activities. (Indeed much that we know of his sermons has come from transcripts made by spies at his meetings.) He was regarded as a dangerous revolutionary, an extremist whose influence upon the poorer classes and slave populations had to be ended. Eventually, in 1822, they decided to muzzle him. Having failed to implicate him in the Cato Street Conspiracy to assassinate the Cabinet, the Government charged him with blasphemy on the evidence of under-cover agents, He had told his congregation that the Bible contained a great many inconsistencies which indicated that it had been written over many hundreds of years and did not represent the work of one mind, however divinely inspired, but by many, and demonstrated a gradual development in spiritual enlightenment. It should not, therefore, be regarded as the absolute and final truth but a reflection of the level of understanding achieved at the time 9f its writing. In sentencing him to two years solitary confinement in Dorchester jail, the Lord Chief Justice agreed that there were inconsistencies in the Bible but it was not Wedderburn's responsibility to inform illiterate and uneducated pet;Sons of these in language they could understand. To do so was to undermine the authority of the Bible, of religion and ultimately of the ruling classes. He was being punished because his language was too explicit and his teaching too effective.

 There is no doubting Robert Wedderburn's Unitarian beliefs or his sincerity, we have this on the authority of William Wilberforce, himself. By the time of their interview in Dorchester Jail, his theological thinking had advanced beyond the Bible, which he said was too limiting to account for all the possibilities of God. He said his Bible was now the whole Universe, a view Wilberforce could not comprehend.

Why, therefore, has Robert Wedderburn been overlooked by Unitarian historians? Was he regarded by the great and the good of the 19th. century as being too revolutionary in politics and too avant garde in religion? Did they perhaps see him as an unlettered opportunist, masquerading as a Unitarian? Or was the propaganda of his enemies that he was a violent and unruly trouble-maker from the slums of Jamaica and London, effective enough to have him for ever categorised as an undesirable, who would only tarnish the reputations of more worthy abolitionists? Whatever the reason for his neglect by Unitarians, other bodies including the other Scottish Churches - one wonders if they are aware of his blasphemy conviction - are now anxious to honour him as an important figure in achieving the final emancipation of slaves within the British Empire, in 1833, just a few months before he died. We hope he felt a life-time of struggle and commitment had at last been vindicated.

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DE PROFUNDIS

During the spring of 1897, Oscar Wilde, prior to his release from Reading gaol, where he was serving a two years hard-labour sentence for homosexual practices, wrote a long letter to his erstwhile lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, who had ignored him ever since the court case that condemned him to imprisonment and ignominy. This letter was eventually published in its entirety, some 120 pages, in 1962, under the title bestowed upon it by Robert Ross, Wilde's literary executor, "De Profnndis", the opening words of Psalm 130, one of the seven penitential psalms, 'From the very depths, I call to you, Lord'. One can but admire Ross's sensitivity and understanding in selecting such an apt title for a work by an author crushed by humiliation and shame but determined to find some positive meaning in the life he was enduring. The psalmist knows that God accepts him as he is, weak, rejected, emotionally wounded and in despair, seeking justification for his fate, and this knowledge gives him the strength to combat the anguish that assails him. Oscar Wilde's circumstances, physical, emotional and spiritual, apart from one very significant aspect with which we must deal later, seem to coincide with those of the poet who wrote: 

Wilde's 'De Profundis' is one of the finest of the great 19th century autobiographies. It is deeply, even painfully personal. Every mood, feeling, thought, impression, hope and fear, every one, is laid bare; his inconsistency, his volatility, his spontaneity along with his brilliance are all intimately exposed. This is a work about Oscar Wilde's relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, with the Authorities which incarcerated him, with friends and acquaintances, but most of all, his relationship with himself. This is a work by Oscar Wilde about Oscar Wilde, charting a spiritual journey from despair towards deliverance, a destination at which he admits he never arrives.

In 1895, Oscar Wilde was convicted of indulging in homosexual practices and imprisoned first in Wandsworth Scrubs and then in Reading gaol. For more than a decade he had been the most brilliant member of the intellectual and artistic community in London, an outstanding critic, playwright, novelist and essayist, a leader of fashion and arbiter of taste, renowned for his learning, conversation, his devastating wit, his style, his charm and social graces. His opinion was sought on all matters literary and artistic and in the opinion of many including himself, he was the genius of the age, a living legend, in whose company it was the ambition of every rising young writer, artist, socialite, to be seen. His fall from pedestal to pillory, from pinnacle to pit was sudden, and irreversible. Apart from a tiny handful of close friends, all his acquaintances abandoned him and the mob, encountering him handcuffed and in prison garb, jeered at him in the street His wife divorced him; the state forbade him any contact with his two young sons; he was declared a bankrupt; he was refused permission to attend his mother's funeral, an official cruelty he found particularly hard to bear; and of course he was physically and temperamentally ill suited to prison life which undermined his health and hastened his early death less than three years after his release.

The opening pages of 'De Profundis' are steeped in bitterness and anger, emotions that, try as he may, he is never quite able to cast off, even by the end. He has been stigmatised by a society which chooses not to comprehend his artistic temperament. He repudiates any suggestion of having committed a crime or of feeling any sense of guilt for what he has been imprisoned, but regards himself as a martyr, condemned to misery by hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness, for an act that is widely practised in secret, but reviled in public by many who participate in it. 'The love that dare not speak its name', as Wilde himself satirically defined it. In his martyrdom, he finds nothing heroic but only what is mean, sordid, squalid and commonplace. His situation may be tragic, but he says he is nevertheless a figure of ridicule and scorn, not taken seriously by society or the community at large. While reproaching Alfred Douglas for his role in his downfall, he accepts that he allowed his infatuation for this attractive but disturbed young man to dominate him in every way and so must accept responsibility for his own undoing.

Anger, bitterness, resentment, despair, however, are not fit companions for such as he, contemplating his return to freedom and the resumption of his literary career. If it is not to be wasted, his two years incarceration must yield something positive, in terms of self-knowledge, an improved understanding of the human spirit and even in some artistic production, which will transform the ugliness of the prison experience into something beautiful and rare that humanity will find life-enhancing and awe-inspiring.

Suffering is his via dolorosa, his bitter road, to spiritual enlightenment. Suffering has become his way of life. Every waking hour his mind is twisted and wrenched with destructive thoughts that only exacerbates his misery. In an effort to find peace of mind, he tries to teach himself acceptance. He must humble himself, surrender without rancour to the greater power of the system and reconcile himself to the fact that he is being punished. He digs deep inside himself and to his surprise discovers that his spiritual life has all this while been evolving. A sudden insight tells him that, suffering hand in hand with sorrow, shows humankind at its best. Suffering has led him to humility, that is to an acknowledgement of his own weakness, his own inadequacies and vulnerability. After all, he is not a god, possessed of miraculous powers. He is not a noble hero is some great poetic drama, Oedipus or Hamlet. He is just as any other man you might pass in the street, nondescript, unremarkable, nameless. He can no longer evade the fact that he is daily on his knees scrubbing out his cell, wearing coarse prison uniform, performing meaningless physical tasks far beyond his strength, humiliated hourly by his surroundings and regarded in the sophisticated drawing rooms of London as a moral and spiritual degenerate. He has lost everything; he is at rock bottom. The only emotion left to him is humility. He becomes convinced that suffering is endemic world-wide and that sooner or later it afflicts every single person, irrespective of race or class. On his realising this, his whole being is overwhelmed by a feeling of unfathomable sorrow, and sorrow is the inevitable consequence of love. Suffering, he claims, is beautiful. It can transform the past into something meaningful and worthwhile. It transforms his erstwhile indifference to the troubles of other people into understanding and compassion, a spiritual alchemy which fills him with awe and profound gratitude that the experience of imprisonment has conferred upon him such a boon. Sorrow for the human condition, its trials and tribulations, its tragedies and catastrophes, sorrow, unselfish and uncalculating, enlists him in the ranks of the down-trodden and the despised. An ability to feel at one with the sorrowing world is as close as any of us get to approaching God. Henceforth his relationships with other people and his writing in particular would exhibit a level of sincerity and sensitivity that he could never have imagined possessing. Sorrow permeated his whole being, characterising not only his mental state but also his physical appearance. He looks at himself and he sees in every gesture a human being in distress. Sorrow is the one emotion that cannot be concealed nor counterfeited. A sorrowful spirit will be revealed in a sorrowing body, achieving the ideal of all artistic endeavour, the perfect union of body and soul. He is sorrow incarnate. He has achieved the perfect form of expression. What he is, is what he feels and what he shows.

These insights draw from the author an important conclusion. He had achieved this all on his own. Traditional religious practice had been of no help whatsoever. His spiritual regeneration had been achieved from within. By reflecting upon his own situation, he had brought about his own change of heart. Humility being the only thing he could now call his own, being his only possession, was his only thing of value. Humility gave his life meaning since it emerged genuinely from his own experience and his own spirit. Enlightenment is a very personal achievement, the result of intense reflection upon personal experience and one's sincere reaction to that experience. It cannot be taught; it cannot be reduced to a formula or system or frozen into a monolithic orthodoxy or tradition. It is alive, spontaneous, multiform, rejoicing in individuality, and responding to life. Jesus, he claims, is the supreme example of this individuality. He rebelled against the religious bureaucrats. He scorned their conventions and legalistic attitudes. The spirit, not the text or the ritual or the formula, is the seat of whatever is divine in the individual human being. Such is the message we receive from Jesus of Nazareth.

For himself, as an individual, then, beyond the reach of organised religion, he seems to suggest that the ultimate reality is suffering. He quotes the poet William Wordsworth: " Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark and has the nature of infinity". Presumably he means that suffering, whether physical or mental, claims our immediate attention. It tends to take priority over other concerns. Pain may be treated or it may be endured, but it cannot be ignored. Therefore, it is there, a recurring problem to be coped with. Many people may rise above it, even perhaps, like Oscar Wilde feel they have learned something from it. 'Suffering', it has been said, often enough, 'is good for the soul'. Others find it an enormous burden that makes a mockery of their existence, yet they endure it. Others find it quite unbearable and it destroys them. None of us wishes to suffer and suffering is generally regarded as destructive of human life and happiness. Acts of cruelty intended to cause suffering to any living creature are regarded with horror by most people. Traditional Christians are expected to be eternally grateful that Jesus voluntarily embraced the torture of crucifixion to redeem them of their sins, redemption through pain, an act of martyrdom that in its time was unique, but has been repeated many times since by religious zealots of various religions, wishing to demonstrate their commitment to their faith or cause.

Suffering, nonetheless remains Oscar Wilde's reality because he has been unable to resolve another major human dilemma, exacerbated by his staunch individuality. He has travelled a long way on this spiritual journey. He has tried to leave hatred, bitterness, resentment, rancour, self-pity far behind but the ultimate goal of peace of mind, acceptance of himself, is still a speck on the horizon. He was unable to forgive himself. In an earlier portion of the book, he says he is prepared to forgive Lord Alfred Douglas for his part in his downfall, but, although he raises the question, never discusses his attitude to self-forgiveness. Elsewhere he claims that no-one is ever worthy of being loved and should not expect to be loved. He adds that anyone who thinks he or she ought to be loved, certainly is not deserving of love. Forgiveness is an aspect of love and it may be argued that in view of these remarks, he has difficulty loving and, therefore, forgiving himself.

The poet of psalm 130, like Wilde is in deep despair, but unlike Wilde, believes that ultimate reality is a loving and forgiving God, who will relieve him of his crushing sense of guilt and so end his suffering. Wilde has no such resource. If he cannot forgive himself, who can? He has encountered, the problem that is familiar to everyone who assumes total responsibility for his or her spiritual well-being. Complete Spiritual self-sufficiency is probably unachievable. There remains a longing to be valued by a benign presence that is beyond the reach of human reason and is perceived instinctively, if at all. Wilde acknowledges this. Dreaming of the beauty of early Summer that will greet him upon his release, he writes, , I am conscious now that behind all beauty, there is some spirit hidden.....and it is with this spirit that I desire to become in harmony. I have grown tired of the articulate utterances of men and of things. The mystical in Art, the Mystical in life, the mystical in Nature - this is what I am looking for, .....and in music, in the initiation of Sorrow, in the depths of the sea I may find it. It is absolutely necessary for me to find it.' The 'De Profundis' psalm is a work of Faith: "Trust in the Lord, 0 Israel, for with the Lord is unfailing love and great is his power is as he admit to deliver." Oscar Wilde's 'De Profundis' is a work of aspiration and hope rather than certainty, but as such it is of immense value to thoughtful people of our own time, in that it reflects many aspects of our own experience as we try to find a way towards spiritual enlightenment and fulfilment.

* Translated by John Rogerson & quoted in his book 'Psalms in Daily Life '.

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BEHIND MRS MINIVER

By Sue Good

Joyce Anstruther was born in 1901. Her mother Eva was the eldest daughter of Lord Sudeley and her father Henry Anstruther was Chief Liberal Whip and MP for St Andrews. His political future seemed promising, but he resigned to become an administrator in the Suez Canal Company. Eva was bitterly disappointed and relationships became even more strained when Lord Sudeley was declared bankrupt. All Joyce's memories of her parents' marriage were unhappy ones and they finally separated, though never divorced, in 1915. She was conscious from a very early age that any show of affection by her to either parent would upset the other one. Joyce was very close to her father, although their love was of the unspoken kind that has to find outlets for expression in mutual interests like carpentry, heraldry, English grammar and knots and splices. Eva had slightly more off-beat interests, including witchcraft and all things occult. Joyce had the sort of up-bringing that most upperclass girls of her time had, with a succession of nannies and other servants providing some sort of continuity and warmth. Her older brother went to boarding school, but she attended various morning classes daily from her London home from age six to sixteen. She longed to have been born a boy, and with her short curly hair and slim figure she looked very like one. She was of necessity very self-reliant and could occupy herself for hours, creating fantasy lands and acting out roles.

Eva was herself a published author and it was thanks to her that Joyce's first story was published in the Saturday Westminster Gazette in 1918. From this time on, she became a much-published short-story writer, light journalist and poet. Her pseudonym was very simple; she took her initial and her surname and made Jan Struther. Jan was a name much more suited to her and in later years she was to become known as Jan rather than Joyce. In 1923, she married Tony Maxtone Graham, the son of a Perthshire laird and they set up house together in Chelsea. Tony worked for Lloyds Insurance Brokers and came home each evening to play with his model trains, something that was popular with men of the upper classes in the twenties and thirties. For him, playing games, telling jokes and doing funny accents never lost their appeal - it was a way of hiding from the tedium of adulthood and at first was one of the bonds between himself and Joyce. She wrote that there was a part of her that had never stopped being the curly-headed girl who would rather have been born a boy anyhow and who had a strong prejudice against becoming a grown-up ever. It remained with her, as did an enthusiasm for taking up new pursuits

Joyce spent her days writing and her articles, poems, short stories etc were published at the rate of about one a week in the Evening Standard, the Daily Express, the Graphic, the Lady's Pictorial, Punch, the Spectator and the New Statesman. Editors particularly liked her conciseness, her epigrammatic style and her great gift for observing the minutiae of universal daily experience. The Maxtone Grahams had a small circle of close friends and a wider circle of not-so-close friends with whom they partied, dined, or stayed and then of course invited back. They also went each August to Scotland for the grouse shooting. In 1929, they decided on a whim to go off to Rumania for a three week holiday, taking with them a friend who couldn't raise the cash and so for whom they footed the bill. At this time they had two children, aged five and one who stayed firmly behind in the nursery with Nannie. Contact with parents was limited, as had been the case with Joyce, to an hour in the evening, clean and tidy in the drawing-room.

Neither Tony nor Joyce was in the least bit religious. Tony had suffered from the observance of the Scottish Sabbath dnring his childhood and Joyce had found the Anglican services a great trial. She always had difficulty in sitting through concerts and theatre performances, even though she enjoyed them, as she got bored very easily, so church services had seemed interminable. It may seem surprising then, that she wrote a dozen hymns altogether. Joyce's biographer comments that people often feel cheated when they discover that somebody who wrote what might be their favourite hymn, was not herself a church goer or even a believer in the conventional sense. I think that is to look at it the wrong way round - it's the hearer's attitude of mind that's important, not the writer's. She wrote because her friend, Canon Percy Dearmer, who was compiling the schools hymnbook "Song of Praise", asked her if she would write a few hymns for it. One was "Daisies are our silver", which was a popular choice at school assemblies. Another one that struck a chord with those reared on the romantic stories of Robin Hood and of King Arthur and his knights, was "When a knight won his spurs" Her hymns were mostly remarkable for their everyday detail, particularly when it came to nature. "High o'er the lonely hills" is I think, a beautiful word picture of dawn and yet it has never been as popular as Eleanor Farjeon's "Morning has broken". If it is used at all, it is usually around advent-tide, but it is not included in many of the mainstream hymnbooks. By far and away her most popular hymn is the one she chose to fit to the old Irish hymn tune Slane. "Lord of all hopefulness, lord of all joy", with its stanzas that could refer to times of the day or to stages in a life, is still very much requested, both at weddings and at funerals - the acid test of a good hymn!

Ten years into her marriage Joyce now had three children, whom she adored, although she avoided the daily drudgery of looking after them. But the marriage, which had seemed so perfect, was beginning to crack and in many small ways she and Tony started drifting apart. Tony became passionate about cars and also took up golf in a big way and Joyce, who loathed the game, resorted to botany and beachcombing. Tony became less communicative, Joyce sulked and to cap it all they had money worries. It was at this point that Joyce received the letter that was to change the course of her life. The writer was Peter Fleming, who was a leader-writer at the Times newspaper. He suggested that she might write a series of articles to appear on the Court Page of the Times, to provide a light and feminine touch in contrast to the news of Buckingham Palace, the funerals of Bishops and grand weddings. "We want someone to invent a woman and write an article about her every few weeks", Peter Fleming told her. To Joyce's query ''what sort of a woman?" he answered "oh, just an ordinary sort of woman, who leads an ordinary sort of life. Rather like yourself" I imagine that his definition of an ordinary woman is something we would all take issue with, but Joyce saw nothing ironical in it. She promised to consider the idea.

Finding a name for this character was to prove a challenge, as the name had to be long enough to sound nice, short enough not to be a problem in column headings; if possible it should begin with "M" for the sake of alliteration and most importantly, it shouldn't be a real surname, to avoid any libel actions. Thinking about this as she walked along a Westminster street, Joyce happened to notice a man delivering skins to a furrier's warehouse. She remembered the heraldic names for fur that her father had taught her and so the name Mrs Miniver was chosen. It was Joyce's intention to make the character of Mrs Miniver as happy as she once had been. In October 1937, with no introduction or explanation, the first Mrs Miniver article, "Mrs Miniver comes home" appeared anonymously on the Court page of the Times. This is how it began:

The article goes on to describe, in atmospheric detail, the tea-time ritual. It is beautifully observed and obviously a word picture of a very privileged and contented London lady. Each successive article contained a few gems; a metaphor that was exactly right; an observation describing exactly some small detail of everyday life; an insight into those philosophical discoveries we all make, even if we don't call them that. Here for instance is Mrs Miniver's take on rear-view mirrors: - "She wondered why it had never occurred to her before that you cannot successfully navigate the future unless you keep always framed beside it a small, clear image of the past" Or, on a child's inability to grade its misfortunes: "One never knew, when setting out to comfort Toby, whether to prepare first aid for a pinprick or a broken heart"

Inasmuch as Mrs Miniver had a husband and three children and she lived in London, her life mirrored Joyce's own, but it was an idealised version of her life and in time it served to underline for her how trapped she felt by her marriage. Many people, particularly those who knew her, mixed up the two lives completely and took the stories for autobiographical sketches. Others would write to Mrs Miniver, asking for directions to the place she visited in one of the articles to employ a charlady. There was also much speculation on the Times letter page as to the identity of the writer, and many readers were convinced it could only be a man. As soon as the second article appeared, the first publishers were applying for publication rights and 14 in all made application over the next two years to publish in book form. Chatto and Windus was the publisher finally chosen and the book "Mrs Miniver" came out in October 1939. As well as all the acclamation, the book had its detractors, notably the authors E.M. Forster and Rosalind Lehmann, but the fairly vitriolic letters in the Times only served to make the book more popular.

The book was set in the pre-war period, although there are one or two articles about preparations for war and Joyce, as the perceived persona of Mrs Miniver, found herself being asked to do various voluntary duties. It was through one of these, at the Jewish Refugee Committee, that she met the man who was to be the love of her life Viennese art historian and musician Adolf Placzek, known as Dolf, who was waiting for an entry visa to the US. They had four months together before he left for his new country.

Meanwhile, the US publication of Mrs Miniver was due in another six months and the publishers requested the author's presence to promote the book. Tony and Joyce's elder son was at Gordonstoun, but they decided that Joyce would do the requested lecture tours and also take the two younger children to Tony's sister in New York, where they would remain for the duration.

Americans took Joyce, or Jan as she now became known, completely to their hearts. Part of the book's fascination for them, as indeed now for us, separated by time, is the enchantment of a lifestyle completely different from their own. The situations described, even if they might be slightly dull, were what they thought of as essentially English and a way of life that was under threat. During Jan's lecture tours she was bombarded with all sorts of questions about the British way of life and she worked hard to convince her audiences that the similarities between Americans and Britons were greater than the differences, often speaking to audiences of more than two hundred. MGM approached Jan to buy the mm rights of her book and she soon realised that she would have no control over the mm. Hollywood would use the character she created to make a war mm about the plight of ordinary English families. Ironically, very little of Jan's original character remains in the mm, beyond the fact that she is married, has three children and a house in Kent. Hollywood created landed gentry, a German paratrooper, an eponymous rose and a village church with hymns that were surely sung by a cathedral nineteen choir. All the insights and the philosophy were replaced by speaking looks from Greer Garson. Still, it did the trick, and was credited by Winston Churchill with hastening America's entry into the war.

When the war was over, Jan and Tony did try to resume family life again, but it didn't work out and after the divorce Jan returned to America and married Dolf. Their happiness was short-lived, however, and Jan died in 1953 of a brain tumour.

That was a very condensed version of the life of Joyce Anstruther, otherwise known as Jan Struther, the lady behind Mrs Miniver. When I first read her biography, I felt rather depressed by her story, as it did seem to me that the most obvious way she was remembered was as the author of something she never wrote - that mm. All her poetry and her everyday insights have to be sought out. Then I remembered her most popular hymn - Lord of all hopefulness -it still provides spiritual uplift and comfort to many people today. Perhaps, as we measure our global footprints these days, we should also measure our philosophical footprints - how will people remember us? Will our footprints do as Longfellow says and help a forlorn and shipwrecked brother to take heart again?

What effect our words, whether written or spoken may have on others, is something we can never know. I'll give the last word to another poet who bridges the generation gap between Longfellow and Jan and who seems to sum up the matter of influence, quite succinctly. His name was Francis Thompson.

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APRIL 1946:A SPRINGTIME EXPERIENCE

By Bill Stephen

Things happen to us which we did not intend and over which we have little or no control. How we react to these occurrences tells us a great deal about ourselves; and finding a means of coping with them also helps us discover what meaning our life has for us. What imaginative use we make of the events to which chance and circumstances subject us is vital to our spiritual development.

As a youngster, most of my leisure time was spent on the beach less than a hundred yards from our back garden. The arrival of Springtime was marked on our beach, not by the appearance of crocuses and daffodils, but by the smell of new paint. All winter long the yawls, little fishing vessels owned by the men who lived along the shore, had sheltered in their nesting nooks carved out of the brae, safe from on-shore gales and protected from rain and frost by several layers of heavily tarred canvas. At Easter-time, however, the cocoons were unzipped and the little craft were manoeuvred down to the shore with their sharp little prows pointing to the horizon. An orgy of caulking, tarring and painting ensued until the Victory, the Pandora, the Malinki, the Shepherd Laddie, the Speedwell and the Marigold were all attired in bright, new liveries, each a tribute to her owner's skill with a paintbrush and to his pride in his boat.

During the war years, one yawl remained cradled on her stocks, swaddled in tarpaulins. This was the Boy George, once owned by my grandfather, then by my uncle who had sold it in 1939 to its current owners, Jonathan and Isaac Watt, merchant seamen, who had had little leisure for fishing during the war years. I took a keen interest in the Boy George because it had been named after my mother's step-brother, who had been killed in 1916 as a boy sailor in the Royal Navy, and had then belonged to her brother who had perished in 1940 in the English Channel. I regarded it as a family memorial and as a talisman. The hardships of the war years would end with the coming of peace. The Watt brothers then would return, unship the Boy George from the stocks and send her sailing out into the bay once again. I could see her, cream coloured sides, green-painted mast and oars, brown sail pulling her towards the horizon. Almost every day I walked passed her and fantasised about the wonderful, peaceful days to come, when all our troubles would be over and she would glide across the bay, sail set, a lip of froth at her forefoot and my hand at the tiller.

Then one day on the way home from school in April 1946, I passed her stocks as usual.... and they were empty, after seven years, six abandoned posts aimlessly pointing skywards. A deep furrow led to the foot of the brae and there she was, in her rightful place among the other yawls, at last, resting on the pebbles, just above the high water mark. She looked terrible! Her seams were gaping. Her paint was faded and cracked. Strips had peeled off and left the bare wood exposed, raw and unprotected. This was so different from the smart little craft that had occupied my day-dreams for so long. How could she ever go to sea again? How could she ever out-sail all the other yawls as I had for so long imagined that she would. How could she banish all my worries and troubles? I had invested so much hope and longing in her. She had been my emotional support and now she had let me down, this pitiful wreck, this skeleton of dried out, shrunken timbers. My daydreams which had sustained me through many a bleak season, now collided with reality and were shattered completely. Deeply disappointed, I turned my back on her, tears of betrayal coursing down my cheeks.I felt utterly alone.

The Spring of 1946, saw our family at a low ebb. My father, seriously ill, as a result of his military service was unable to work. The Ministry of Defence was still haggling over his war pension, so we were living on our capital. My eyesight was deteriorating rapidly which created difficulties particularly at school. My mother was of course deeply anxious about both of us and about our financial situation. She was still grieving for her younger brother whom she had brought up after the untimely death of their mother. For us, as for many countless millions across the war-ravaged globe, the Spring of 1946 was a cruel season.

What sense was to be made of so much hardship and pain?

We lived within the religious community of the Church of Scotland. At Easter the focus of our religious exercise was, of course, the events immediately prior to and following upon the Crucifixion. Our Minister urged us to meditate upon the suffering of Jesus on the cross to win forgiveness for our sins, to be grateful for his sacrifice and to repent of all our. wickedness. However, I could make no imaginative link between the Passion of Christ and our own hardships. For me they existed on different planets and the one did not help to explain or alleviate the other. In spite of God's love and Jesus crucifixion, we were still suffering as, in one way or another, were most of the people we knew. We needed help, reassurance, comfort, but I felt there was none to be got here. The sense of utter isolation in a hostile world was confirmed. Down on the shore again, one day, I missed the Boy George from her berth among the pebbles. I discovered she had been sunk at low tide in mid channel and loaded with stones to keep her submerged until her planks were hydrated sufficiently to close her gaping seams. Later she was retrieved from the sea-bed, caulked, tarred, painted and varnished and one evening looking trim and yare in her green and cream livery, joined the little fleet in the bay on her first fishing trip for seven years.

I watched her progress that summer with mixed feelings. I was glad that she was seaworthy again and fulfilling her purpose, but she never fulfilled my expectations of her. She was a worthy little craft, but sluggish under sail and slow to answer the helm. Rather than rising to the waves she butted them and drenched her crew in any weather but a flat calm. She was not at all the ship of my day dreams. I looked at her but there was no upsurge of love, no sudden shock of delight, no release from anxiety. As a means of salvation, her resurrection was a failure.

The year dragged on for us, with little changing, but we got through it, I suppose by taking one day at a time and refusing to give in to despair.

Eventually, of course, I realised that what had helped to sustain me through the bad years, was not my grandfather's yawl, but my own daydreams. My paradise was a creation of my own imagination. Much later two ideas occurred to me. First, that resurrection for all of us is not a one off event, but a recurring exercise as we try to recover our emotional and spiritual well-being after every personal, instead of giving in to despair and dismissing life as a meaningless charade. And secondly that when we invest some person, a hero, or an ancestor, for instance, or even some object or event with special significance for us, as an emotional prop, much, if not most of the emotional energy is coming from us. We sometimes create expectations of entities beyond ourselves to compensation for our own feelings of vulnerability and powerlessness. In our weakness gods are born and religions flourish, as we reach out towards that unattainable sense of well-being and good.

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