I fled Him, down the arches of the years;

I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears

I hid from Him, and under running laughter.

Up vistaed hopes, I sped;

And shot precipitated,

Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,

From those strong

Feet that followed, followed After.

But with unhurrying chase,

And unperturbed pace,

Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,

They beat – and a Voice beat

More instant than the Feet –

“All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.”

Francis Thompson. The Hound of Heaven[1](p23)

Where I live, (illegal) foxhunting with hounds persists. The hounds in this reality are agents of amusement for the followers, and death and suffering for foxes. The idea of being pursued by hounds is further enshadowed by traditions of using hounds to hunt people such as escaped prisoners or slaves.

Thompson takes that ability of hounds to follow a trail in relentless pursuit of their quarry and its ineluctable fate, and turns it on its head - to show that boundless love of the Beloved that will never give up on us, and always has the victory, even over death.

In The Hound of Heaven we are introduced to a hound that does not pursue us to harm us, but as a servant of the Divine, who is on our trail and will not give up on us. This hound is a relentless re-minder. Indeed, he writes in symbolic language, it’s not about a dog at all, but a quality, a something both internal and external that constantly prompts is. It helps us to see our fear, and how it feeds our distraction, yet there is a hopeful message that “fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue” (p24). No matter how knowledgeable and powerful are the attributes of the fear-driven life, its powers are never as much as that of Love. .  , it is wist-ful , not in the sense of being dreamy, but as resolute in its purpose and knowing it fully. It is constantly chasing us, summoning us, to follow our soul’s path and not be distracted and follow the paths of self-will. Anything to which we do become attached, will let us down anyway in one formor another (All things betray thee, who betrayest Me. p23).

The word ‘wit’ comes from the Old English wist, meaning, to know. But it is not just about knowing as facts, it suggests a deep knowing, of being fully aware, a collation of perceptions of the intuitive and the observable that enables us to the see the whole picture at a deep level. Hence someone who is a half-wit or witless is someone who doesn’t ‘get it’. A person who is ‘witty’ has a quality of insight and knowingness that cuts through perceptions. A witness is someone who sees and integrates information at many levels to get a sense of the whole. Such persons understand, a word which in everyday use suggests knowing facts and figures, but understand has deeper meanings than everyday useage. It is derived from the Latin inter which became unter (under) in Germanic and Old English and the Latin stare to stand. Inter as joining together, standing not as being physically upright, but being inwardly centred, present and purposeful.

I’m smiling now as I write for I am reminded of my old school motto sto ut serviam – ‘I stand that I may serve’ and how often schoolmasters of the time tried to explain its subtle meaning to us. That is, the purpose of our schooling was to produced people who knew who and why they were here from a place of inner knowing of self and the world, and to use that knowing for the good of humanity.

No matter how much we stray, the hound of heaven is always in pursuit, howling to remind us of who we are and summon us to our true path, the soul’s trail. It is not a hound of brutality and wounding. It is not ‘out there’ (although sometimes it may call to us in persons and situations), it is within, welling up through the miasma of our everyday activities and agendas to call us home.

How often, honestly, like me, have you sensed that call in life and ignored it? How often have you listened to and followed its promptings. And what was the result of each?

Where now is the hound of heaven calling you in your life, and where now is that self-ego-driven hound of hell tempting you away from what is true? How will you discern which is which? Anything that is not authentic, truly grounded in the Love of the Divine, that ‘betrayest Me’, ultimately passes away and is cast off, or deserts us, or lets us down. Only Love is the constant…..

The Hound of Heaven symbolises the ‘love that will not let me go”[2], the recognition that all things, all earthly concerns and connections no matter how wonderful or terrible, even death, must pass, but that which is no-thing is eternal.

Of course, Thompson wrote with the view of God of his time – as male and separate, but in this poem and others he nudges towards a deeper perception, if the essential unity of God and Soul, beyond labels and genders.

Later in the poem, Thompson (whose own life had much tragedy, after leaving his childhood home in Preston, yet it released in him literary and mystical treasures like Hound)embraces that contemplative truth that nothing loves us unconditionally like the Divine does and the very Sufi inclination that the one we have been seeking has been seeking us – and always find us. “Rise, clasp My hand and come.” (p31).

Listen to the Hound of Heaven today.

There are several versions on YouTube of actors reading this poem. Most notable David Suchet and David Burton, but my favourite is by the anonymous actor (I suspect Ciaran Hinds) using the pseudonym Tom O’Bedlam.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6hNu8U7NSc

[1]Thompson F 1916 The Hound of Heaven. Philadelphia. Kelly p23

[2] Matheson G 1882 O love that will not let me go. in Church Hymnary 2005 Canterbury. Canterbury

…it suddenly occurred to me that my Life was none of my business; and, even more unsettling, I realised that it never had been any of my business. It’s hard to explain but I sensed that some other thing, some other element had overseen my existence. Most peculiar. I still can’t explain this wake-up call, because that is what it was – a wake-up call, and it was my first breath of freedom from the feeling of hopelessness. [2]

These two statements are from the autobiography of actor Anthony Hopkins. Apart from being a jolly good read about a man with a fascinating history, and who is also a damn fine actor, they tell us something about those ‘wake-up call’ moments, those epiphanies when quite suddenly and unexpectedly we see ourselves and reality differently and clearly, and our lives are never quite the same again. Like all of those mystically inclined, such moments are often brief and may never recur.  But if we pay attention to them, life is never the same again. Hopkins touches into that sense of presence, that transcendent quality where he was lifted out of limited perceptions of self and into a grander reality, yet deeply inner and intimate.

My first such experience was at the age of five, as I looked out of the window in our front room, over the rooftops and across to a blue sky and the waving branches of a sycamore tree. I saw countless possible shapes in that tree and had the strange feeling of how things happened, just lots of life becoming, like the tree, against a blue sky, out of nothing, like me. Then my mum told me my tea was ready and the moment was lost. I tried to tell my mum about it, but I didn’t have the vocabulary, and she always just saw me as daydreaming. But it wasn’t a dream, it was a feeling and an image.

There have been many such moments in my life, with increasing frequency and intensity down the years, until somewhere along the line I seemed to settle into Hopkins’ lived experience.

That’s a brief digression into my experiences. Why not use these pages to share some of yours? I’m sure others would love to hear of them.

Love

Stephen

April 2026

[1] Hopkins A 2025 We did OK, kid. London. Simon & Schuster. p223

[2] Op cit p319

On my way to the abbey this morning, though I am readying to depart Iona, I had that feeling of space between and found myself singing a track to Abbey Road.

In ’68 this Manchester working class lad took off for London – where else was there to go in those days? Abbey Road came out not long after and could be heard in every boutique on Carnaby Street. Yes, I was there.

And this morning that phrase ‘oh that magic feeling, nowhere to go’ was like a mantra to my steps.

At that time, it meant Sunday mornings, off work and escape from the youth hostel to fulfil my intellectual pretensions buying a Sunday Times and settling down to read it by the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. Then the lyrics just met that feeling of having nothing planned, no obligations, no packed tube to the office.

As we have often noted in our groups, sometimes a song takes on new dimensions and meaning as we grow older and perhaps mature spiritually. Now the magic feeling of having nowhere to go is an inner quality of feeling settled within, in communion where, really, there is nowhere to go. My day ahead is filled with plans and travel and questions to be answered as is usual in participation in ordinary reality. But learning to live with the eyes of the soul we may find that wherever we are outwardly or in our minds, in the spirit of the depths is the peace that where we are right here right now is timeless and placeless. This, the still point in the turning world.

Stephen April 2026

[1][1] Lennon J & McCartney P 1969 You never give me your money. Apple Records

"They were predictable people, predictable because they worked for the robot. What the robot said they would also say, what the robot did they would also do, and what the robot believed was what they believed because people like them had fed that belief into it. And they would always be right so long as the robot worked, because the robot was the standard of rightness. There was no originating passion in them. Whatever they felt was original would die the moment it came into conflict with what the robot was geared to feel.” (Scott P The Raj Quartet. London. Heinemann p 432)

My (professional) heroine, Florence Nightingale, also broke the 'robotic' conventions of her time. She described how she found her 'must' - that which she had to follow, no matter the obstructions, which, among other things in her case, led to the foundation of modern nursing.

And I include above a picture of a sculpture of Jesus from the Anglican Cathedral in Brisbane. I was fascinated by its audacity - not least because he is naked and is breaking free of something to which so many are attached, and all the symbolism that goes with that, perhaps also how Christianity can become robotic.

What is your 'must', your 'originating passion'?

Love, of course,

Stephen

In our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action.[1]

Our Sunday morning consideration, as war spreads its vicious tentacles, was of a man of peace. I was just about old enough to be aware of global events when Dag Hammerskjold, the then Secretary General of the United Nations, was killed indeed almost certainly assassinated, in an air crash in 1961. He was man of peace and, looking at his posthumous publication Markings, was deeply contemplative in nature.

As such, he was that rare phenomenon of someone who achieved high office and power, while not losing his soul. He felt it was possible to retain his connection to the Beloved, to hold inner peace amid war. In doing so, he overcame the temptation of the mystic to want to withdraw from the horrors of the world and into Quietism, “an indifference to and impatience with, not only ‘works’ in the conventional sense, but also all the institutional and intellectual aspects of human life.”[2]

That tension between being in the world as participant, yet not captured by it an of it, has been a regular part of our discourse in our School. Hammarskjold shows us the common path to live with this contradiction - by differentiating his essence, his I Amness, from the many ‘I’s of identities he, like all of us, possesses. His life was lived from the former:-

“At every moment you choose yourself. But do you choose your self? Body and soul contain a thousand possibilities out of which you can build many I’s. But in only one of them is there a congruence between elector and elected. Only one – which you will never find until you have excluded all those superficial and fleeting possibilities of being and doing with which you toy, out of curiosity or wonder or greed, and which hinder you from casting anchor in the experience of the mystery of life, and the consciousness of the talent entrusted to you which is your I.”[3]

Hammarskjold, like many other followers of the Way, senses the ‘Another’ present in all things, yet contained by none. It is the Alone, the One, of which Plotinus speaks, in which we are alone, but paradoxically therefore can never be alone. It is the faith in even in nights, of which the poet Rilke writes, where he finds “a great presence”[4] is moving there.

Rilke’s faith in nights summons us, like Hammarskjold, to “keep our hearts open in hell”[5], to find our point of participation (however great or small that is outwardly judged to be) free of our ego agendas.

And thus, I return to Hammarskjold and adapt his words[6] for a prayer:

‘That each moment may we let go of the image which, in the eyes of this world, bears our name, the image fashioned in our consciousness by social ambitions and sheer force of will. That we may in each moment trust in blind devotion in the Another in which we are.’

Love

Stephen

March 1st 2026

Thy will be done

[1] Hammarskjold D 1971 Markings. London. Knopf pxxi

[2] Auden W 1971 Foreword. Markings. London. Knopf. pxxxi

[3] Hammarskjold op cit 1 p 19

[4] Rilke R (trans. Barrows A & Macy J 2005) You darkness. New York. Riverhead p63

[5] Wright S 2024 Fugue. Penrith. SSP p26

[6] Hammarskjold op cit 1 p24

The original Greek texts of the New Testament, as well as the early Aramaic words (brought to us anew with the amazing work of Neil Douglas-Klotz) are literally and metaphorically written in a different language.

By the time the Bible was given to me in school, I was terrified of hell. Like many in the Christian tradition, then and now, hell and heaven were and are real physical places. The former ‘down there’ the latter ‘up there’. Yuri Gargarin, famously the first man in space, reported that he saw no heaven or angels; toeing the atheist party line of the USSR at the time. Science has done a good job of refuting so much biblical ‘truth’ – not many of us would take our child with epilepsy to an exorcist, or consider burning a suitable response to a woman healer.

That distortion of heaven and hell has kept people in place for millennia. Does anyone believe in them now? It seems about 40% of the UK population still does.

Followers of the Way tend to be more circumspect about such concepts, and incline to the realisation that heaven and hell are not places, but conditions, qualities of consciousness. Primarily varying according to the sense of connectedness to or oneness with the Beloved – the closer and more loving the more heavenly, the more separated and fearful the more hellish. From that inner place of harmony (heaven-connection) we find the world with all its ‘sham and broken dreams’ a liveable place.

[Curiously, at least to me in my role as a spiritual director, I have sat with many people who have felt like they were in hell. When asked to describe it, words such as cold, lonely, dark, solitary are commonly used. It seems that hell is not the hot and fiery place usually depicted, but a condition that is brutally isolated and desolate. I wonder, what is your experience of hell? May be add some commentary here.]

Of course, trying to experience only heaven and avoid hell, the inclination of our personalities, is a kind of hell itself! Wanting one and not the other creates attachment which keeps us stuck; letting go and finding that unifying Beloved trusting and loving relationship, which transcends clinging desire, seems to be the key. Here the Greek original is helpful in the use of the word Truth, which Jesus (English translation) uses. English translations tend towards ‘truth’ as facts, and ultimate truth applicable only to Jesus. But the Greek aletheia does not indicate facts, but process. It means unforgetting. Our Way to Truth invariably means breaking through the veils of constructs and memories and stories which have left us with a distorted view of the Real. A view which is discovered there within us as we unforget.

Easy peasy of course! Throw a switch and we have instant aletheia!.... But to help us on our Way we have assorted spiritual exercises such as we find in our School, not least the simplicity of prayer.

Rabiah, the first recorded female Sufi (to my knowledge) wrote in one her verses[1]:-

I carry a flaming torch in hand

And a bucket of water in the other:

With these things

I am going to set fire to Heaven

And put out the flames of Hell

So that voyagers to God can rip the veils

And see their real goal.

I share Rabiah’s words; the page in Daniel’s book that fell open to me this morning as I readied for 9am silence. May we carry bucket and torch each moment to rid the Way of delusions and illusions and help us in our aletheia. Thus, may we encounter its twin: anamnesis – re-membering.

Love, Stephen, probably February

Thy will be done

[1] Rabiah in Dyer D 2016 The 99 Names of God. Kendal. Chickpea Press. p41

Here with a loaf of bread beneath the bough,

A flask of wine, a book of verse – and Thou

Beside me singing in the wilderness –

And wilderness is paradise enow.[1]

My uncle was an unschooled farmer, a quiet man who taught me much about nature and the ways of the farm animals. I was, literally, farmed out to him and my aunt as they had no children; my own mum was an exhausted woman with a hard man for a husband. In many respects my uncle was more of a father figure to me than my own.

When he died, I was left some of his books. The first surprise was that he had any books at all, he never revealed his inclination to reading; second hand encyclopaedias and, the second surprise, poetry. He would sing folk songs on our walks or while mucking out the pigs, but never a hint of his love of poetry. One of these works is a gloriously illustrated copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1048-1131). It’s one of those deeply mystical works that can be interpreted at many levels. In this case either as a statement of the lover for his human beloved, or for the Beloved.

In the latter case, this quatrain (the full Rubaiyat is a series of hundreds of such four-line verses, rubaiyat derived from the Arabic word rubai meaning four) is full of spiritual meaning. Like his more famous compatriot, Rumi (1207-1273), he was an ecstatic lover of the Beloved. ‘A loaf of bread beneath the bough’ suggests spiritual nourishment while sheltered from the world; all the spiritual food we need is from the Beloved. Wine, verse and singing suggest the presence of the spirit and the opening of the heart to union with God. Thus full-filled, the contemplative is able stay present, all that he or she needs is to be at one with the Beloved. In that condition, even the horrors of the world, the wilderness, can be embraced as part of all-that-is; the great unfolding cosmic story.

I was prompted to return to Khayyam after reading the autobiography of that marvellous actor Anthony Hopkins, who mentions him as an inspiration. I knew of Hopkins only through his many roles of stage and screen, and not, until now, his personal journey through Asperger’s and alcoholism; and with it the emergence of a gentle, uncluttered spirituality. There is something of the Way about him, as an escapee from his Welsh chapel background and into a general wariness of the religious.

He tells a story of Chekhov, to which Hopkins seems to relate: “One morning, travelling in a coach to meet a friend for breakfast, he noticed a funeral ceremony about to take place in a nearby cemetery, and he asked the driver to stop for the moment. He watched the casket lowered into the newly dug grave and listened to the bereaved saying prayers. He contemplated the meaning of it all, the great imponderables. Then, having faced the ineffable mystery of the universe, he signalled the coachmen to continue the journey. His next thought was about the deliciousness of the coffee waiting for him at breakfast.”[2]

Like Khayyam’s quatrain above, the Chekhov story mirrors Hopkins’ evolving contemplative spirituality in the face of suffering, in its almost Zen-like equanimity. Hopkins later, in a lovely turn if phrase that would not be amiss in our School, concludes “There’s nothing to win; there’s nothing to lose. No sweat, no big deal. Of myself I am nothing, and of myself I can do nothing. It is the presence within than transforms and does anything.  Of myself, I am nothing. And so I go about this business doing the best I can with what I’ve got.”[3]

He was writing about the acting world, but he could as well have been talking about the contemplative life. After all, are not our many identities just actors? And if so, who’s the playwright?!

Stephen.  February 2026.

[1] Khayyam O (trans. Fitzgerald E 1869) The Rubaiyat. Glasgow. Collins. p58

[2] Hopkins A 2025 We did OK, kid. London. Simon & Schuster. p131

[3]  Hopkins op.cit.2 p 223

Our School has no doctrines or theologies. We are not bound by a faith for we have members from all faiths and none. What binds us together is not an ideology but a purpose, the fulfilment of a longing for the Beloved through experience and encounter, the dis-covery through praxis of that Beloved in a unique relationship that is paradoxically common to all. In opening to our essential I-Amness, we find that same essence of self-identification across traditions, the I Am.

That relationship, as we sink into it over time and trials, is life transforming. It is gloriously illuminating and can also be tricksily ego inflating. In my early, new-agey days I awoke one day to say aloud ‘I am God’. As did everybody else in the group. A statement both true and false depending on its interpretation. The ego gets a grip on it and, lo and behold, the next thing we know we’ve either abandoned our responsibilities, or formed a cult, or thrown ourselves of a skyscraper believing ourselves to be immortal and we can fly.

Like all our experiences and insights, discernment is the key. ‘Is this true?’

Clearly I am not God, as will be evidenced when, when the bread I will have for breakfast will not toast itself at my command. Nor will the various ailments of my body right themselves by my orders. Nor will the various ills of the world be put to right by my wishes no matter how heartfull.

Deification, a word found along the Way, does not mean that we inflate ourselves as the Beloved, but it does recognise in our essential nature that we are of the Beloved. There is something of that Life force in all of us, indeed as it is in all of material reality. Not so much pantheism or come to that panentheism, rather a deep recognition, re-cognition, (to rearrange a quote from the Pagan poet Epimenides in the 6th century BCE and cited by St Paul) of the One in whom we live and move and have our being, and which lives and moves and has being in us.

Deification does not mean that we become God, the Beloved, rather that we learn to identify with the divine in every aspect of our being, we draw close in relationship as one in the One, a kind of union where we see as the Divine sees, know as the Beloved knows. Now I’m slipping into anthropomorphic terms here, for I do not think that the Beloved thinks or knows as we do, nonetheless we come to reflect those qualities in our everyday lives – learning to see through the delusions and illusions of ordinary reality, opening our hearts and actions to living compassionately. Not for nothing across traditions do we commonly see the symbol of the eye as representing the Divine. Awareness, loving awareness, is the key to seeing our true nature and our deified relationship in the Beloved.

And now at 0845, time for a cuppa and then at 9 to sit with you all and All.

Love

Stephen

 ...From the works of Amado Nervo (1870-1919): idolised in his own country of Mexico, but little known elsewhere. Mystic and poet. See his works in Poems of Faith and Doubt trans John Gallas 2021, and Plenitude (trans. Alfonso Zabre 1938). The latter is hard to get hold of, but assorted translations appear on the internet, and it is from Zabre's work that the poem The Sign is taken;a poem I have often shared in our groups as it explores how we can speak our truth (or not) amid the crowd who do not understand.....

This morning's translation and slightly edited, was based on Gallas' work....and touches on the notion of Christ not just as a one-off (idolised) being, but as a quality of consciousness, embodied in Jesus as the prime example, readily available to all:-

Christ
Christ came not from the sky,
but from the depths of our souls;
deep, deep in the lands
of the spirit that understands.

Look not for Christ in a cloud;
who sits not there on a throne.
Look not for Christ in the stars -
their lights are but chemistry, flames of stone,
gases and globes, dark matter and moons,
no more. And the planets about us, like earth,
revolve still without Christ, shining balloons
lit by the sundogs that gave them birth.

Christ came not from the sky,
but from the depths of our consciousness,
and the ancient instinct in us all.
Christ came not from above,
but rose from the immanent sea,
profoundly quiet and armed with love.
Christ is, has been, and shall always be.
Search inward then, down in the darkness of life,
with the light of love, beyond the bright shore,
and Christ will be there before.


And in case you have forgotten it, or cannot find it among the handouts, here is the earlier poem about sharing:-

The Sign by Amado Nervo

Talk not to all about things sublime and essential
Seek the level of him with whom you speak
So as not to humble or distress him.
Be frivolous too, when you are with the frivolous,
But once in a while, as if unsought,
Drop into their cup, on the foam of frivolity,
A very small petal from the flower of your dreams.
If it is not noticed, recover it cautiously,
And, always smiling, go your way.
If, however, someone picks up the frail, small petal and examines it, inhales its fragrance,
Give him forthwith, and carefully, a sign of direct understanding.
Then let him behold one, or a few, of the marvellous flowers in your garden,
Tell him of the indivisible Divinity which surrounds us all.
And give him the magic word,
The Open Sesame to true freedom.

It was very lovely to enjoin in our silent gathering today.

Blessings to one and all from a clear blue, ice cold Lake District morning.

Stephen

January 4th 2026

Thy will be done

One of the groups to which I belong is having explorations of ‘The Incarnation’ – being as this is Christmas. I dropped out of the discussion, as it was entirely led by particular biblical interpretations and I did not feel there was much space for other suggestions.

I begin with a truth, of course, that the scripture we use was not written initially in English. Everything we have before us is a translation. Not necessarily wrong, but possibly missing out many elements and nuances. In these notes to you all, I have often cited the Aramaic work of Neil Douglas-Klotz and others, bringing us new and deeper insights that help us to read the mythos as well as the logos.

Jesus was not, after all, born on December 25th – that was an arbitrary decision by the then Roman emperor, to fit it with existing Pagan festivals. The exact date has been the subject of scholarly debate for generations. Early Christians did not celebrate the birth of Jesus a) because they did not know when it was and b) because it was to miss the point; emphasising a kind of idolatry of one man and an event rather than a moment-by-moment truth of the relationship between Realities.

Now as to incarnation, the notion of the divine reality descending into human form, taken literally that narrows our options. Jesus is reduced (or elevated, depending on your point of view) to a one-off idol and the story that follows is factually true. A contemplative perspective also sees this story symbolically, spiritually true, about the nature of the incarnation. That the Christ consciousness is born in us, all of us, or we are made aware of it, when we are reborn out of our personalities, our ego perceptions of I am who I think I am. In that sense, born of a virgin (consciousness) uncluttered by the accretions of what we believe we are as humans, indeed our limited understanding of who ‘we’ is at all.

From this perspective, the Christ was not only supremely embodied only in Jesus (at birth), but is a potential in all of us. He perfected the way to attain this condition in his life and teachings. That’s why we hang on to the Jesus story at the roots of exploring the Way, he lived it for us and offers us the teachings…a Way, however, that does not rule out the illumination of truth in other traditions.

I find myself repelled by so much that has become Christmas. It has become a global phenomenon even in cultures that do not subscribe to Christianity. Why? Because it has been colonised almost entirely be capitalism. It took the religious story and Santa and embellished the whole damn thing into a money-making machine in which it requires no small effort to be unseduced, cling to the essence and still be joyful amid the ersatz schlock. In a sense, every time one of us comes up for air and sees what’s really going on and finds the Beloved there, that is a moment of incarnation.

I leave you with a birthing story, which I’m not sure I’ve revealed to many (but if I have, scroll on to the reflection at the end). It concerns our School. Anyway, I think for the first time to feel prompted to set it in writing.

I was quite involved in the Anglican church in the local parish, as well as guiding the ‘Caring for the Carers’ retreat days the Rydal Hall Diocesan Centre. Dave Roberts, Director of Communications for the Diocese urged me to meet up with Richard Passmore. Neither were priest and the latter was heading up the ‘Fresh Expressions’ work of the Diocese – supporting innovative projects to encourage more people into a life of faith. Dave felt Richard and I would have much in common, both being somewhat ‘on the edge’, if not over the cliff, when it came to conventional approach to religion in general and Christianity in particular.

It was 10am on the 17th August 2017. Richard came to my home, which also doubles as a retreat for those in spiritual crisis, among other things. We sat on the deck in front of the house, my base for my morning meditation and tai chi…and a place to simply sit and watch life unfold around me. With the nearest neighbour a mile away, it’s a precious bucolic idyll; a startling contrast to the working-class Manchester estate in which I was raised.

Richard and I chatted as if we’d known each other for years, sometimes touching into the most intimate aspects of our beliefs and values. Dave was right, there was indeed a lot of common ground. I enthused particularly about my deep years-long dive into the contemplative Way, and I felt there was such a hunger for it, inside and outside the church, and how I felt prompted to help this is some way. Richard turned to me and simply asked, ‘What do you want?’. For what seemed an age no words were needed. Almost like a photograph, an image flashed before me. “I need a School,” I said, ‘Somewhere remote on the side of a mountain. The Lake District is a great and often unsung heart of so much spiritual life, there must be the right spot somewhere that isn’t weighed down by being associated with church, or any religion, for that matter. The School is not the building, it would be a gathering of fellow travellers who’ve been wandering around in the spiritual quest, nomads who can’t feel at home because of creeds or community mores. They’re longing for a direct and deepening relationship in the Beloved, free of labels and doctrines, and their transformation in being and doing in the world. They need other seekers to hang out with for mutual support. I envision a ‘course’ of sorts, with residential session and weeks apart to permit time to read and pursue spiritual exercises.”

I was used to working with so many of these nomads down the years.  People feeling lost from rule- bound communities, yet whose hearts we longing for the Beloved. Sometimes it would be 1-1 work, sometimes group retreats and courses, especially with my fellow trustees and spiritual directors, mark and Jeannie, of the Sacred Space Foundation. ‘Beloved’ was my term of choice for the Presence, because it got me and others free of a gendered God, and I knew that others grew in such language too. I’d been gifted with teachings in the spiritual life from wise teachers, almost 40 years of them by then. “I’d just like to find the right milieu and support to make it happen.. Something that has the deep secure roots in the Christian mystical life that I’ve been given, and which is also open and free and secure enough to say ‘this is true’ in other traditions too.” And because of my interest in our local saint, Kentigern, and a book of the same in press, I felt it had to have his name.

Within the month, by chance if chance it be, Richard and his wife Lori, also part of the Fresh Expressions team, had set in motion some ‘open days’ for possible course participants. Kristopher, one of our trustees, helped me find a suitable venue on the side of Blencathra, our local mountain, and slap bang in the middle of Kentigern territory, religion neutral and with views to die for. Richard unearthed some secretarial support within the diocese, with a view that this might continue for a few years until the School could stand on its own feet. Lori came up with the logo and designed the prospectus. Networks were plugged to the max to get the word out. Together they made things happen, such that with breathtaking speed, the first cohort of 18 students of the contemplative Way gathered on the side of a mountain. Between two residential weekends, six months apart, we conferred and learned together, back up with regular letters from me which morphed eventually into the Heartfullness book. The rest is pretty much history.

Maybe some day a detailed account will be written. But that’s the gist of the birthing, inspiration followed by the hard graft of making it into ordinary reality. And it felt like a birthing, an incarnation, not least in the quality of being swept along in something that was not under my control and natural falling into place of all that was needed. That’s how things move when they are meant to be, I guess. The course has now touched the lives of 96 participants, about half keep in contact, members have created a website, organise an annual gathering with about 20 attending each time, and extra events with guest teachers. While initially being Diocese of Carlisle supported and assuming only Cumbrians would attend, the world soon spread, such that apart from participants across the UK, seekers from the USA, Ireland and Switzerland have joined us.

But my point here, apart from relating a story that means much to me, but perhaps relatively little to you, is that birthing is not just about making babies. And for some at least, the Christmas story is more powerful as the personification of a deity. It is not a one-off event. The Christ when seen as a quality of human consciousness takes us to a wholly (holy!) different level of awareness of truth. Embodied in Jesus, the one whom we came to call the Christ, we find the prime exemplar of deification and the potential of incarnation of the same in each of us. This kind of Christification is not an idolatry/////…………., but a birthing of the highest self, of full awareness, of joining with the divine and infused by the same in each of us. As the Christ consciousness thus incarnated and ripens to fullness, each moment this happens, both we and Christness are born again.

So, at this time of year, or any time of year come to that, what in you, in each of us, this moment, this day, and the next, and the next, and…is ready and waiting to be birthed? What is our inner nativity ready to bring into the world, once or many times, it is all there. Waiting to be born. Christmas is every day then. Not an event, but a forever process.

SGW Christmas 2025