The beginning

My three earliest memories were of war, nightmares and Christianity.From as as soon as I could walk I would go into our large garden and the after time play out the same scenario.I was a soldier advancing .I was hit and fell and as I lay on the grass looking up into the sky I knew I was dead and experienced a wonderful feeling of release and peace.When I learnt to read I collected war comics, I loved all the stories of the second world war particularly those about the war in Burma.I never felt I was an observer but more as if I was recalling an immediate memory. I remember that my mother found all of this very disturbing along with the fact that that I suffered from terrible nightmares and slept walked every night.Over time I was dragged off to a series of Docs and shrinks but none of them could work out the problem.Slowly as I grew older I started to leave my war games and nightmares behind like waking in the morning and the dreams of the night slowly vanished. My mother is a Christian and every night I would say my prayers. I remember that it seemed at the time a story that I already knew and Christ climbed into my head as I kneeled as a little boy and has remained there ever since.

I came from a wealthy family and my dad had the first twenty one years of my life mapped out before I was born. At seven years old I was packed off to boarding school followed by Eton college and Oxford university. Boarding school was horrid as were my first few years at Eton but around my third year we were allowed gradually to specialise and for the first time in my life I came into contact with teachers rather than school masters. I was introduced to a new world of literature,history,metaphysics and science and suddenly my brain came alive. Phrases such as ‘ every road you travel down you find Shakespeare travelling back‘ and ‘ we are the stuff that dreams are made of’ caused disinterest to give way to wonder  and delight. At Oxford I read English literature and as a result delved into theology,philosophy and comparative religion which laid a foundation of interest in the nature of belief and being which has never left me.

In Paradise Lost Satan has a line ‘ in me all contraries meet as one’ which pretty much sums up my life. Half of me philosopher , dreamer, poet ,the other a creature of the world. Oxford was a melting pot where for me the dreaming towers met the pleasures of the flesh and I never looked back. I traveled the globe , finally settling in Asia happily reconciling the two sides of my life. In truth at times combining the two in a way that now recalling them I find hard to believe but at the time felt totally natural.But God is not mocked ‘ as ye sow shall ye reap’ but such is his grace that he ‘punished’ and then ‘ took me as his son’ and through a series of angels brought me to a better place.

Conversion on the road to Damascus no, the fire of revolt still lurks but I do now understand the man in the mirror more clearly than ever before. If I was asked today to describe my belief I would say that I am a ‘ metaphysical empirical Christian’ but how given my strange life did I in end up at this place. If my life was a painting the colours are a series of questions and lessons that have been the signposts that has led me to where I am today. I’ve always thought of faith as a private matter and shied away from all forms of ‘ evangelism’ but the colours of a painting don’t preach they are just there and as you look at the picture it is up to the viewer to decide if he or she see anything of value. So six years ago largely due to the prompting of my wife’s words ‘ if you believe you have received a blessing always try and give something back to God’ I started writing the daily thoughts which form the main body of this journal.  The Celts believed in ‘ thin places’ where we can sometimes  feel especially close to God just as a glimpse of sun behind a curtain suggests the dawn. Henry Vaughan the Welsh metaphysical poet called  it ‘ Silex Scintillans ‘ I pray that some of my readers my find this flash in my thoughts.

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