Many a slip – more meditations on mortality

My parents' wedding

My visit to the gravesides in Stockport, described in a previous post, triggered a lot of memories. It also reminded me of the sayings that almost always spring to my mind when I am working towards some particular outcome. ‘Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched’ and ‘There’s many a slip twixt cup and lip’ are the two main ones. I have had to learn to enjoy the process of getting there without becoming too anxious about the destination, but even so these two stress-inducing sentences can come bursting through at times of high arousal. Being so concerned about an outcome adversely affects my ability to achieve anything. Understanding better the possible nature of the over-concern helps me to control it.

The life courses of my relatives on my mother’s side gives me some clues as to why the disconcerting mind-tapes might be there. Their unlucky stories were being drip fed into my consciousness as far back as I can remember.

Aunts and Uncles and Such

Uncle Harold, who was 11 in 1901 at the time of the census I looked at, married an Irish girl called Nell. They called their son Richard after Harold’s father. He had some kind of learning problem. By the time I knew anything about him the son was called Dick, and was a very big man, probably in his forties.  Harold’s wife died young and he had to bring his son up alone. His end was very much in character. When he was in his eighties I heard that he had tried to carry two one-hundredweight sacks of coal, one under each arm, back to his house one winter. He succeeded, only to find his legs swelling up soon afterwards. He was diagnosed as having a heart condition. A year or so later he died.

Aunt Ann, who was eight at the time of the census, was the elder daughter and the second eldest child. Like Uncle Harold, she failed to complete her education: she had to leave school and earn some money to help the family out. I cannot remember what work she did but think it was secretarial. She was a great walker, like Uncle Harold, and played a lot of tennis, I believe. She married my Uncle Joe who was a tailor. He fought in the First World War  and was wounded in the arm (his left, I think). He damaged a nerve which never mended properly and caused him a lot of pain throughout the rest of his life.

They had no children of their own. Aunt Ann had more than one miscarriage. They treated my older sister Mary very much as their own. She used to visit them often and stayed at their house for long periods. Mary died on 11^th January 1939, four years before I was born. Aunt Ann was almost as distressed as my parents were. The exact sequence of events at the time of Mary’s death is hard to disentangle because Aunt Ann’s account and my mother’s differ somewhat.

They both agree that Mary died of something they refer to as septic pneumonia. She was twelve years old and died in great discomfort, with foul fluid issuing from her lungs. (Incidentally, watching a programme called The 1940s House, in which a family lived through a re-enactment of the war years for several weeks, made me realise just how traumatic this whole period would have been for everyone including my parents and my older brother, Bill, even if they hadn’t had to cope with Mary’s death near the beginning of it.) In my childhood I received a highly idealised view of Mary from a portrait tinged with almost intolerable sadness that my mother painted in bits and pieces over a long period of years. My father never spoke of her at all, though I know from everything my mother said her death affected him very badly. I tried to capture what I sensed in him in a poem:

I’d creak my way upstairs sometimes and dare
the backroom where my sister, Mary, died
before I was born. ‘Her lungs were putrid
at the end,’ my mother said. ‘I couldn’t bear
to see.’ I’d stand there questioning the air
for traces of some meaning it might hide.
On the wall above the iron bedstead,
fading in his photograph, my father,
his broad shoulders stretching his jacket tight,
held a huge bullcalf by a rope, half-stern,
half-smiling, proud: younger than the grim grey
man I knew – and straighter. Then the thought:
a man that to trench-fire did not bow, the burn
of one small child’s loss bent easily.

To return to my grandparents’ family, the next oldest was Tom, who was five at the time of the census.  I know very little about him and rarely met him. He lived in Stoke by the time I was born and visited us only once that I can remember for Uncle Frank’s funeral. Tom was some kind of engineer or boiler maker. The only things I can remember about him are that his wife had Parkinson’s disease and he nursed her for many long years. By the time I met him she had died and he had remarried.

Uncle Frank’s story is probably the saddest in the whole family. He was the youngest – two at the time of the census. He fought in WW1 as did most of that generation. (When I think of the difficult lives of my uncles and my aunt, it’s tempting to think that the luck of the menfolk at least was all used up in surviving the First World War.)

He survived, returned home and married. He had two or three children. At some point later, he developed a tumour on the brain, which affected his behaviour. His wife attempted to get him permanently hospitalised. My father apparently thwarted this plan by refusing to leave Frank alone at the crucial moment. Frank’s wife then disappeared with the children and he never saw any of them again. He had an operation which cut away part of his skull to remove the tumour. They inserted a plastic flap in the temple area to protect his brain from the pressure of the skin. As time went on the plastic wore away and he knew that when it wore out he would die. I am not quite clear why surgical practice was not able by the time of his death in 1960 to renew the plastic “skull”. When, as a child, I visited him or met him in the street, it was hard to tear my eyes away from the deepening pothole clearly visible on his right temple. It made my interactions with him tense and awkward and I’m sure he sensed this. I was 17 when he died.

The Impact on my Life

Mirzá Mihdí

I have often reflected upon the combination of factors which blighted the lives of so many of that family.

Their histories explain the keen sense, with me since childhood, that this life is transitory and our hold upon it weak in the extreme. That feeling has not left me even though modern medicine and the quality of life we enjoy in the developed world has strengthened our ability to postpone death and prolong health.

It has given me a strong sense of fellowship with the bulk of humanity that do not share my good fortune, though I don’t act on that feeling as often or as vigorously as I should. I now regard that inheritance as a gift not a curse, though this wasn’t always my attitude towards it, and perhaps it goes some way towards explaining why I was so drawn to the Faith when I found it and moved by the suffering of its Founding Figures. Having seen at close hand my parent’s suffering over the death of their daughter gave me a porthole to a deeper understanding of Bahá’u'lláh’s pain at the death of His youngest son in the prison city of Acre than I would otherwise have had, I think. It helped me resonate, at the least to some degree, to the magnitude of the sacrifices He made to spread the Word of God with such wisdom, compassion and persistency and spurred me to a pale imitation of it.

I started this post by considering the way in which the suffering of my ancestors might have contributed to my special form of performance anxiety, and have ended with a greater awareness of how much it has probably contributed to my choosing the spiritual path I am striving to tread. A good example of how working towards one goal often brings another quite different one into reality – not so much a slip between cup and lip, then, as an inexplicable transformation, en route, from tea to coffee.

An Unusual End

On Armistice Day 2009 the Hereford Baha’i community held a memorial meeting for Dave Black who was buried exactly one year ago today. Prayers were said indoors and memories of his life shared. It was a moving celebration of his life in which sadness and laughter were mixed in roughly equal measure. Dave would definitely not have wished for the final mood to be one of sadness, so everyone went outdoors to mark the occasion in a playful symbolic way. These photos tell the whole story.

How does it work?

Let's try this.

Perhaps not!

This looks better

So far so good.

This is getting scary!

Definitely the right idea

Here it goes!

Going!

Going!

Gone!

Expanding the Moral Imagination

Any religion whose prerequisites for individual salvation don’t conduce to the salvation of the whole world is a religion whose time has passed.

(Robert Wright: The Evolution of God page 439)

I am getting towards the end of Robert Wright’s fascinating book  – I’ve been fitting the reading of it into the narrow gaps between other major commitments recently. I’ve just got to the point where he discusses how the expansion of the moral imagination (page 428)  can ‘bring us closer to moral truth.’

His line of argument will not appeal to everyone: it’s probably too materialistic for many religious people and too sympathetic to religion for many materialists. He states:

The moral imagination was ‘designed’ by natural selection . . . . . to help us cement fruitfully peaceful relations when they’re available.

He is aware that this sounds like a glorified pursuit of self-interest. He argues, though, that it leads beyond that.

The expansion of the moral imagination forces us to see the interior of more and more other people for what the interior of other people is – namely remarkably like our own interior.

(page 428-429)

He rescues this from cliché by pointing out that the idea of common humanity may be a self-evident point when we read or hear it, but it’s far from obvious if you look at the way we act. This is because we are under the illusion that we are special.

We all base our daily lives on this premise – that our welfare is more important than the welfare of pretty much anyone else, with the possible exception of close kin. . . . We see our own resentments as bona fide grievances and we see the grievances of others as mere resentments.

(page 429)

He links the progress of humanity with the application of the unifying insight in daily life.

. . . . the salvation of the global social system entails moral progress not just in the sense of human welfare; there has to be as a prerequisite for that growth, a closer encounter by individual human beings with moral truth.

(page 429)

He feels that it is inevitable that we will either move closer to moral truth or descend into chaos.He feels that

. . . history has driven us closer and closer to moral truth, and now our moving still closer to moral truth is the only path to salvation . . .

(page 429)

by which he means salvation of the social structure. He feels (page 430) that religions that have ‘failed to align individual salvation with social salvation have not, in the end, fared well.’

As I have quoted in an earlier post, Wright argues (page 435) that as social organisation grows God tends to draw ‘a larger expanse of humanity under his protection, or at least a larger expanse of humanity under his toleration.’

I find this tremendously encouraging after the evangelical atheists have, for what seems an age, been partially successful in their attempt to sound like the only scientific take on God. Wright’s view and Reitan’s complement each other beautifully. Eric Reitan contends in Is God a Delusion? that, while you cannot prove  the existence of God by rational argument, it is entirely reasonable to believe that there is a God: Wright appears to agree and he speaks from the point of view of evolution, the world-view that Dawkins has sought to colonise and exploit as providing an absolute refutation of God’s existence for all time.

As Wright’s words quoted at the start of this post explain, the challenge now is for all religions everywhere to recognise that the time for making special and divisive claims about their God is well and truly over. The core of the moral vision of all faiths, though often encrusted with contradictory and partisan traditions, is that all human beings are members of the same family – the human family. Any religion that does not express its recognition of this courageously and persistently is doomed and may doom everyone else along with it.

The Universal House of Justice wrote to the world’s religious leaders in 2002, exhorting them to do all in their power to combat religious fanaticism, and stating:

. . . that interfaith discourse, if it is to contribute meaningfully to healing the ills that afflict a desperate humanity, must now address honestly and without further evasion the implications of the over-arching truth that called the movement into being: that God is one and that, beyond all diversity of cultural expression and human interpretation, religion is likewise one.

And they close with the following appeal:

The crisis calls on religious leadership for a break with the past as decisive as those that opened the way for society to address equally corrosive prejudices of race, gender and nation. Whatever justification exists for exercising influence in matters of conscience lies in serving the well-being of humankind.

Wright and religion are definitely not a million miles apart. Bahá’ís believe that our moral imagination can and must expand to embrace the whole of humanity within its compass of compassion.

A Fine and Private Place

My cousin's grave

I’ve had a graveside week of it this week.

That’s not quite as morbid and unpleasant as it sounds. The visits I made to gravesides in my home town were full of interest and contained at least one fascinating surprise. The visit to the resting place of the Guardian of the Baha’i Faith along with other members of the Hereford Baha’i community was a spiritually rewarding one.

We went up to Stockport to see my cousin’s husband. My cousin died recently and we wanted to keep in touch with him during this difficult period. Obviously we also visited her grave, which awaits the headstone once it has settled. When we told him of our plan he mentioned that my grandparents’ grave was close by in the same cemetery. I was astonished because I had never realised this, even though I had had many conversations about their parents with my aunt and my mother before they died. It was amazing to me that they had never mentioned where my grandparents were buried, nor could I remember their taking me with them to visit the grave.

Not surprisingly then my wife and I could hardly wait to search for my grandparents’ grave. We found it without too much difficulty apart from soggy turf and uneven ground. Then I had another shock. My uncle Frank, whose funeral I attended in 1960, was also buried in the same grave. How could I have stood there when his coffin was lowered and not realised? The only explanation that occurs to me is that the stone was not visible at that time he was buried and, as I had never been particularly close to my uncle, I had not visited his grave after the stone had been replaced. It also makes sense of why neither my aunt nor my mother ever thought to tell me where my grandparents’ were buried.

Alice and Richard

Because there was very little information on the stone, we called in at the cemetery office on our way out to see if we could learn anymore. The lady there was very helpful. We saw the register of Catholic burials for that period and to my surprise I learned that my uncle and his parents had lived at the same address from at least 1937, when my grandmother died, and he had stayed there after their deaths. I had visited him a couple of times in that same tiny terraced two-up-two-down red-brick house, with its steep narrow stairs and dark interiors, but never realised that this was where they also had lived for so long. I thought they had lived and died in Heaton Norris, not off Shaw Heath as it finally turned out.

This news gave me a link to them that I never knew I had: I knew the house they had lived in till their deaths. They had both died before I was born. Memories of what I had been told about them came flooding back.

Alice, my grandmother, from what I can make out from what is left in my memory from all my mother’s accounts, was a very brave and resourceful woman. Richard, her husband and my grandfather, had been a signalman on the railways, a skilled and well-paid job by the standards of the times. This would be at the turn of the nineteenth century into the first decade of the twentieth. In the census of 1901 he described himself as still a “railway signalman.” He was 37 years old: his wife Alice was 36. My mother wasn’t yet born.

They had both converted to Roman Catholicism as a result of the influence of Cardinal Newman in the wake of the Oxford movement. While he was able to work the family would’ve been reasonably comfortable. Sadly, when my Uncle Harold, the eldest child of the family, was fourteen years old and not very long after my mother was born, Richard had an accident which sprained his ankle. Nobody thought that was much of a problem at first and he carried on working as best he could. It didn’t get any better. His doctor said it was nothing serious but he ought to rest it for a while, which he did. Even when he rested it still got worse. The pain got so bad that he could not bear the leg to be touched. Eventually Richard went to another doctor who explained that the situation was serious. The sprain had turned gangrenous and an amputation was necessary. They cut off his leg to save his life. I am not sure whether he was able to return to work after that. I have the impression he did, but to lighter and less well-paid duties. The family coped with the downturn in their fortunes reasonably well.

The final and most disastrous blow was when he fell on the ice of a children’s slide one winter and damaged his hip. After that he could not walk at all easily or well and therefore could not work. There was no longer a wage coming in. Harold had to leave school and give up his piano classes, at which he was doing very well, and go to work to earn some money to help the family who were now struggling very hard. Their savings were too little to manage on. They had had to pay so much to the doctors (there was no Health Service or Social Security in those days). His sister, my Aunt Ann, also had to go to work. This would have happened by about 1904 I reckon. My mother would have been about three.

It was apparently my grandmother’s resourcefulness that kept them going. She fixed and mended and did odd jobs for extra cash. She was creative and tireless. The strain did eventually take its toll on her also. She developed a heart condition which caused her death after a long illness in the late nineteen-thirties. Still, she survived into her early seventies.

My grandfather, Richard, who survived her by four years, had his own way of coping with the drastic change in his circumstances. He had a passion for music and had been instrumental (sorry about the pun!) in encouraging Harold to keep up his piano practice. Though he couldn’t read a note of music he had a good sense of pitch and rhythm and knew immediately if Harold made a mistake. He loved to go to listen to concerts and the opera at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, so when Harold and Aunt Ann were earning enough they used to treat him to surprise trips there. He also had a wide-ranging curiosity about other countries and about nature. He used to get hold of books on these subjects from the library and read them all voraciously. His memory for what he read was apparently excellent.

Implications

It may just be a coincidence that I share his love of books – not noticeably, of course – and found a new Faith which I enthusiastically embraced rather as he seems to have done. (His passionate and accurate ear for classical music rather missed me out though!) On the other hand a combination of genes and the experiences my mother shared with me about him could easily have influenced me in that direction. Either way my identity owes more than a little to his influence.

But for him my visits to the Guardian’s Resting Place might never have taken place. Who knows!

Graveyard encounters don’t just evoke our ancestors though.

Andrew Marvell

Two views of mortality are strongly connected with images of death such as skulls and tombs: memento mori and carpe diem. Each view of mortality has a different take on morality, interestingly enough:’Gather ye rose buds while ye may’ (Herrick) versus ‘be mindful of thy last end and thou wilt never sin’ (translated from the Vulgate’s Latin rendering of Ecclesiasticus 7:40). It is a rare sensibility that manages to look both possibilities squarely in the face as Marvell’s lyric masterpiece To His Coy Mistress succeeds in doing. Shira Wolosky has written a brilliant critique of this feat in The Art of Poetry pages 70-79. She states:

The poem offers, then, not one, but two topoi [themes]: the overt “carpe diem” and a subversive remembrance of death inscribed into the text alongside the call to seduction. . . . . . Both topoi are urgent calls, calls to weigh your life to see what, in its short compass of time and space, you really can accomplish; what, in its short span, really has value; what you should be striving for.

(page 79)

Which view we take hinges as a rule on whether we believe in an afterlife or not.

I have dealt at length in earlier posts with this issue in terms of its truth value and usefulness. It is interesting to add into the mix Robert Wright’s evolutionary perspective. It is not as dispiriting as you might think.

Evolution and God

In The Evolution of God he attempts to show how the image of good Christians being welcomed by Christ into heaven

may have been crucial in the eventual triumph of Christianity. This image gave it an edge over the religions  that didn’t offer hopes of a pleasant afterlife and kept it competitive with the many religions that did.

(page 310)

This image was also a lever to help ensure that people who became Christian behaved in ways that helped the faith succeed socially:

The message has not just got to attract people, but to get them to behave in ways that sustain the religious organisation and spread it. For example: it would help if sin is defined so that the avoidance of it sustains the cohesion and growth of the church.

(page 316)

He ties in the value of a religion with its capacity to create solidarity amongst all the diverse people’s brought together within a developed civilisation. When it is inclusive enough to prevent conflict between all those that  trade and travel bring together it works for the benefit of all.

Resting Place of Shoghi Effendi, London

There is a catch for us though:

But [the] modern-day effectiveness is a more complex question. When Christianity reigned in Rome, and, later, when Islam was at the height of its geopolitical influence, the scope of these religions roughly coincided with the scope of whole civilisations. . . . . Today’s world, in contrast,  is so interconnected and interdependent that Christianity and Islam, like it or not, inhabit a single social system – the planet.

(page 324)

He sees the progress of civilisation, which has now reached a global level, almost inevitably driving the development of a global faith in only one God with one name.

[As] the scope of social organisation grows, God tends to eventually catch up, drawing a larger expanse of humanity under his protection, or at least a larger expanse of humanity under his toleration.

(page 435)

He sees this as compatible both with a materialist view of the process and a sense of God working through the logic of the universe to bring about this shift in consciousness. He argues that its explicability from a materialist viewpoint does not disprove the religious case.

Which is how my graveyard encounters have led to both a keener sense of the contribution of my ancestors to my view of the world and, with the help of Robert Wright, a keener sense of how awareness of our mortality can underpin an expanding consciousness of God’s purpose for all of us not just for some of us.

Those who wish to see the grave as leaving no room for God are free to do so. Personally, I’ve made a different choice which I believe is equally rational and valid.

Humanity is our Business (5/5): (b) What can we do for our children?

THE BAHÁ’ÍS MUST WORK WITH HEART AND SOUL TO BRING ABOUT A BETTER CONDITION IN THE WORLD

(‘Abdu’l-Bahá: Paris Talks, page 99)

What do we do?

We have looked at the plight of children. We must face the truth. We are all responsible and we all need to respond to the challenge: we must all do everything in our power to change this situation for the better. The same message already quoted from our world centre states:

Our worldwide community cannot escape the consequences of these conditions. This realisation should spur us all to urgent and sustained action in the interests of children and the future.

(Universal House of Justice: April 2000)

Obviously the whole problem cannot be fixed overnight but we have to start somewhere. This need to do what we can sustain over a long period, however small a step that may seem, has led to a concerted attempt to provide classes for children in as many localities as we can using all the resources currently at our disposal, though these are as yet inadequate to the task that faces us:

Aware of the aspirations of the children of the world and their need for spiritual education, they extend their efforts widely to involve ever-growing contingents of participants in classes that become centres of attraction for the young and strengthen the roots of the Faith in society.

(Universal House of Justice: April 2008)

Young people, on the threshold of independence, have comparable needs which we are seeking to learn how to meet:

[We] assist junior youth to navigate through a crucial stage of their lives and to become empowered to direct their energies toward the advancement of civilization.

(Universal House of Justice: April 2008)

How should we treat them?

We must appreciate fully and whole-heartedly

. . . the imperative to tend to the needs of the children of the world and offer them lessons that develop their spiritual faculties and lay the foundations of a noble and upright character. . . [and] the full significance of [our] efforts to help young people form a strong moral identity in their early adolescent years and empower them to contribute to the well-being of their communities.

(Universal House of Justice: 20 October 2008

Character building and society building are inextricably linked. The positive results of doing it properly are beyond dispute.

But how do we do it?

The House of Justice seek to define the qualities a community should possess:

An all-embracing love of children, the manner of treating them, the quality of the attention shown them, the spirit of adult behaviour toward them – these are all among the vital aspects of the requisite attitude. Love demands discipline,  the courage to accustom children to hardship, not to indulge their whims or leave them entirely to their own devices.

(Universal House of Justice: April 2000)

It is perhaps worth dwelling a little on what they might mean by discipline and hardship, not positive ideas in many people’s thinking today.

Layard and Dunn, in an article in the  Sunday Times on 1st February describe four styles of parenting and point out what they feel is the optimal. These are: disciplined, authoritative, neglectful and permissive.

Researchers have studied the effects of each upon the way in which children develop. They agree that the style that is loving and yet firm – now known in the jargon as authoritative – is the most effective. In this approach boundaries are explained, in the context of a warm, loving relationship. Without boundaries and the management of frustration that these require children to learn, it is hard for them to develop the kind of impulse control that the work on emotional intelligence suggests underpins a successful life in society. All too often childhoods are  seriously warped by indulgent neglect, though it is the cruelty of an abusive background that more often hits the headlines.

They also refer to other things such as mutual respect, commitment and education in parenting:

An atmosphere needs to be maintained in which children feel they belong to the community and share in its purpose. They must lovingly but insistently be guided to live up to Bahá’í standards, to study and teach the Cause in ways that are suited to their circumstances.

(Universal House of Justice: April 2000)

The Needs of Young People

They describe the special needs of a sub-group of young people:

[Those between the ages of, say, 12 to 15] represent a special group with special needs as they are somewhat in between childhood and youth when many changes are occurring within them. Creative attention must be devoted to involving them in programmes of activity that will engage their interests, mould their capacities for teaching and service, and involve them in social interaction with older youth.

(Universal House of Justice: April 2000)

Paul Lample explains that this has led to

[a]n effort to endow youth with the capacity to conquer the word and unravel its meaning both for their own spiritual upliftment, and as a basis for social action. The work with Junior Youth broadened beyond efforts for SED to become a fourth core activity.

(Paul Lample: Revelation & Social Reality page 135)

Parents

The role of parents is clearly critical:

. . . parents . . . bear the prime responsibility for the upbringing of their children. We appeal to them to give constant attention to the spiritual education of their children. Some parents appear to think that this is the exclusive responsibility of the community; others believe that in order to preserve the independence of children to investigate truth, the Faith should not be taught to them. Still others feel inadequate to take on such a task. None of this is correct . . . . ..

Independent of the level of their education, parents are in a critical position to shape the spiritual development of their children. They should not ever underestimate their capacity to mould their children’s moral character. Of course, in addition to the efforts made at home, the parents should support children’s classes provided by the community.

(Universal House of Justice: April 2000)

In the end where does all this leave us?

For Bahá’ís the message is clear. In capital letters on page 99 of Paris Talks we find the quotation at the head of this post:

THE BAHÁ’ÍS MUST WORK WITH HEART AND SOUL TO BRING ABOUT A BETTER CONDITION IN THE WORLD

The words immediately above that are:

Let your ambition be the achievement on earth of a Heavenly civilization! I ask for you the supreme blessing, that you may be so filled with the vitality of the Heavenly Spirit that you may be the cause of life to the world.

There’s really nothing else that anyone can add after that and it seems to me that it applies to everyone, Baha’i and non-Baha’i alike, each in his or her own way inspired by the purpose of God in this age which is to make us all act upon the realisation that we are one family — the human family.

The whole of humanity is indeed our business.

Living the Vision

London Conference

This year has been one where experiences of various kinds have been constantly cranking up my consciousness. All of it has served the purpose of helping me to grasp more completely what I have striven to explain in the last few posts about ‘Humanity is our Business,’ so I won’t rehash the content all over again.

There was the amazing conference in London at the beginning of the year. There have been several seminars — in London, Caerphilly and Manchester — where we have all been striving to get our heads round the full significance of what we are doing. There has been a summer school where I attempted to convey my understanding of it all. And there have been occasions where I have tried to express my understanding in action.

Summer School

All of this has shown me clearly that there are many levels of understanding and it’s important to know which one(s) we have reached.

For instance, at the first seminar I attended I really felt I ‘got’ it. But I found I couldn’t hold onto it even though I tried to ‘fix’ what I had learnt in a post I wrote at the time.

Then I reached a stage where I understood it well enough to start explaining it to other people: I’d got the words at least.

After that, and it’s about where I’m at at the moment, I can explain most of it fairly well, I think, but I can only act on that understanding some of the time – the music comes and goes.

I feel that the ultimate destination is being able to live in the reality that understanding entails and be in it all the time so that everything I do is imbued with its fragrance, resonant with its melody.

I know what that state feels like because I experienced it vividly for a period of hours after the last seminar I attended in Manchester. Two days of intense interaction with people who were all exerting themselves to pool their understandings so that we could all rise to a higher level of consciousness got me there, and the energy and insights created kept me there for quite a while until the routines of my ordinary life saw this clarity of vision fade to far more muted colours, still helpful but not so intense.

Action helps. For instance, just yesterday in Hereford we were graced with the presence and assistance of four radiant youth who spent the day in town talking to anyone who would listen, engaged intensely in spreading the fragrance of this world-enhancing vision. The hope is to touch hearts who will then act on the insights that have been conveyed and take a step, however small, to mending their part of the world. Just to participate in a small way in the inspiring audacity of these young people and support them as best we could, has helped us grasp and consolidate in our hearts a stronger sense of this divinely-inspired purpose. Their involvement lifted our devotional meeting yesterday evening to an altogether higher level.

Our Devotional Meeting

All I have to learn now is to hold onto the vision, keep the colours fresh and paint the world we live in with them. No big deal then!