The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God (51 page)

Autobiographical Postscript

I do not require of you to form great and curious considerations in your understanding. I require of you no more than to look.

God, in conversation with St Teresa of Avila

Could I behold those hands which span the Poles,

And turn all spheres at once…?

John Donne

Who can deny me power, and liberty

To stretch mine arms, and mine own Cross to be?

… So, take what hid Christ in thee,

And be his image, or not his, but he.

John Donne

I think you will be interested to learn how the story of John a-Nokes connects with that of Douglas Harding, his author. It will most certainly have occurred to you that the Trial is a kind of spiritual autobiography, a device of the writer for bringing out and clarifying his own interior debate - a taking-to-heart of William James’s dictum that ‘we never fully grasp the import of any true statement till we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.’ Yes, of course: the purpose of this book has been to address questions which (for me, at least) are best resolved by something like Bunyan’s method of personification, or Moreno’s method of psychodrama, with all the resulting manoeuvres and clashes and mayhem; that’s to say, by releasing a motley band of lay figures who are in fact warring fragments of oneself, alter egos that have become alter enough to fight it out in the open, with a view to finally resolving their differences and arriving at a just and lasting peace. It’s not enough (I find) to have the courage of one’s convictions; one must have the courage to attack them vigorously and sincerely. And to abide by the outcome. The only way to see one’s own side for what it is, and to hear the other side at all clearly, is frequently to go over there.

So much, no doubt, is already plain. The autobiographical notes that follow (it’s straight autobiography this time) will show how I had far better reasons than you could have suspected for choosing to hang my spiritual outfit on the peg of a Blasphemy Trial instead of, for example (following Bunyan again), a pilgrimage or a war. Blasphemy - what it is and isn’t, and whether it’s I or my accusers who are guilty of it - has been the key issue of my life. What’s more, I really have been tried on this most serious of all charges, and sentenced to the most terrible of all punishments. By whom and with what result you are about to discover.

I was born on 12 February 1909, at Lowestoft, a fishing port in the county of Suffolk, England. My father was a fruiterer, and my grandfathers were shopkeepers also, all three in a small way of business. Before marriage, my grandmothers were domestic servants.

For two generations my family had belonged to the sect of Christian fundamentalists known to others as the Exclusive Plymouth Brethren, and to themselves as the Lord’s People, the Saints, the Little Flock, or simply the Meeting.

Exclusive is the word. We children were forbidden all unnecessary contact with the world - that is, with all children and adults not belonging to the Meeting. Our home was innocent of virtually all literature except the Bible and the Brethren’s voluminous commentaries on it. There had to be a minimum of worldly school-books around, of course, but any others smuggled in were liable to a ceremonial burning. Newspapers were for wrapping and wiping with, not reading. Theatres and cinemas were positively satanic - a conviction based on the rock of complete ignorance of what went on in those haunts of sin and shame. You could get away with the occasional smirk or grin in the Harding home, but not audible laughter; for, at the Last Judgement, you will have to account to God for every idle word, let alone guffaw. Attendance at frequent and interminable and unspeakably dull religious meetings, and extempore prayers and Bible-reading morning and evening, was obligatory from a very early age. Surprisingly, the ban on fidgeting in Meeting worked.

All told, in my case at least, an upbringing calculated to make blasphemy impossible, or else inevitable. It ruled out half measures.

Don’t think I’m grumbling. My cranky upbringing included some impressive advantages. In spite of their siege mentality and near-paranoia, these people weren’t petty or shallow. They were the Lord’s people and they meant business - the Lord’s business. Their passion was meaning and truth, as they saw it. And for them the ultimate truth was a God whose love brought Him all the way down to Calvary. He has stayed with me all my life. Also there were plenty of secondary reasons for thankfulness. A media-free childhood - now there was a spot of luck! I just had to develop interior resources. I got to know my Bible from soup to nuts - from the primeval soup, without form and void, of Genesis, to that nutty (but in places devastatingly word-magical) Book of Revelation. In fact, my lessons in literary style began before I could string together a dozen words of my own. Also I learned to concentrate - no matter on what subject - without too much mind-wandering. Oh yes, I was happy to let the dear Brethren imagine that the small boy, sitting so still all through Meeting with firmly closed eyes, was thinking on those things which are above - or at least on such things as the Ammonites and Jebusites here below - whereas he was probably thinking on the ammonites and belemnites in his treasured collection of fossils. Or on his bits and pieces of amber and cornelian, instead of the diamonds and rubies and emeralds of the New Jerusalem on high. To my present-day critics, who complain that I pontificate about Zen without having done my stint of
zazen
or sitting-meditation, I reply: ‘Not so! I put in an average of eight hours a week for twenty years, and am still feeling the benefit. So there!’

Unlike my sister and younger brother, in fact unlike nearly all Exclusive children, I came increasingly to question the theology (not itself very different from that of other evangelical-fundamentalist sects) and the very peculiar lifestyle of the Brethren. Silently to question them, of course: these weren’t matters for discussion. I was secretive, all right.

At twenty-one, my doubts having come to a head and exploded, I apostatized. The family, who had never suspected what was going on, were devastated. My father would himself have lit the faggot that burned his son alive, if burning at the stake had been feasible, and if that tip-of-the-tongue foretaste of hell-fire stood the least chance of inducing a last-minute recantation. He said as much, weeping and imploring. Out of deep love he said it.

Declining to ease myself gradually and for no clearly explained reason from the Brethren’s ranks, I had decided on a clean break. I addressed the Elders in a ten-page thesis (now, alas, lost) and also, at their request, in person, confidently setting forth my heretical views. Brazenly, I should say. I felt flattered rather than shaken when I was told (amid a flurry of tears and bitter anger and flopping to the knees in prayer) that my apostasy was the worst in the Brethren’s century-old history. It was diabolical on four counts: first, I dared to question whether the Exclusive Plymouth Brethren are God’s chosen ones in all the world, the sole custodians of His True Gospel; second, and worse, I dared to question whether non-Christian religions are devil-worship, and I went so far as to suggest that God was revealing His mind in them also, but differently; third, and worse still, I dared to regard Jesus as a man like other men, except that he saw what they were blind to - their oneness with the Father - and went on to live and to die in the light of that vision; fourth, and almost too fiendish to articulate, I unblushingly hinted - and more than hinted - at my own intrinsic Godhood. Which convicted me out of my own mouth of the ultimate blasphemy, the iniquity for which there’s no forgiveness: the sin of setting myself up on the throne of God. I wasn’t so much a limb of Satan as Satan in person.

So it was that in the spring of 1930, at the age of twenty-one, I came to appear before a kangaroo court of fanatics. In the house of one Mr French, of Finchley in North London, I was charged with the worst of all crimes, and found guilty, and condemned to the worst of all punishments. Of course it’s true that the court lacked executive power and had to leave the carrying out of the sentence to Higher Authority. Not that they doubted for a moment that the punishment would be inflicted without mercy or respite for ever and ever. Also it’s true, of course, that I had only myself to blame for bringing the full weight of the Brethren’s indignation down on my head. I could have extricated myself less dramatically, could have withdrawn from the Brethren by easy stages, leaving them to guess - with a minimum of tears and outrage - my reasons. Reasons, they would naturally assume, of weakness and depravity, of seduction by the world and the flesh rather than deliberately going to the Devil. But no: for motives I’m even now somewhat unclear about, I chose not to dissemble but to come clean. Not to run away but to stand trial. And this in spite of the fact that the verdict was a foregone conclusion, and that in any event I didn’t admit the court’s jurisdiction. My guess is that this farce of a drumhead trial, and my carefully worked-out defence, was for me a psychological necessity at the time - an announcement to myself and to the outer world, as well as to the Brethren, of my rebirth into a new life and freedom. My clear-cut chrysalis-into-butterfly metamorphosis.

To begin with, I felt less like a butterfly than a moth - the clothes-devouring, hunted sort, at that. At the time of my apostasy I was lodging with a kindly Plymouth Sister, Mrs Fox, in Muswell Hill. She was made to turf me out at once. I was very short of money, the parental supplement to my £150-per-annum scholarship (covering university fees and some living costs) having of course dried up at source. So I had to find in a hurry the cheapest feasible lodgings in London. Consulting Daltons Weekly, I settled on a place in Maida Vale, and moved in. The smell knocked you back and the mattress was alpine, but the food was eatable if you were hungry enough. Which I was. But after two days there I was ejected again, instantly. The landlady was another Exclusive Plymouth Sister! My reputation had caught up with me.

All that was sixty years ago. My life since then has been a development of the thesis I confronted those Elders with. It’s elaborated in this and other books, and more particularly in the experiments and the day-to-day practice they advocate. Some lapses apart, it has been a life dedicated to doing battle with the blasphemy (my own far more than others’) that ousts God from the Centre of that life.

It’s hard to imagine a life more different from its Exclusive beginnings, and yet at the same time more of a piece with them. Increasingly I have evidence of this.

Soon after breaking free of the Brethren, I came across four poems of the period which have haunted me ever since. A distant and muffled drumbeat, but compelling, a music all the more captivating for being only half heard. They were John Masefield’s ecstatic ‘The Everlasting Mercy’, Katharine Tynan’s sentimental ‘All in an April Evening’, Richard le Gallienne’s challenging ‘The Second Crucifixion’, and Joseph Mary Plunkett’s

I see his blood upon the rose,

And in the stars the glory of his eyes,

His body gleams amid eternal snows,

His tears fall from the skies…

All pathways by his feet are worn,

His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea,

His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn,

His cross is every tree.

To my shame I had to wait for sixty years - and for the emergence of the Pattern which is the bone-structure of this book - before re-awakening to the centrality of the Crucified Saviour in my life. True, I had inherited it, drunk it in with my mother’s milk. All along I’ve felt it, known it without perceiving it.
But now I see it.

Now at long last it surfaces to make perfect sense. And to think I might have died in my seventies, unblessed by this clearest of visions! How surprised and how thankful I am that the closing years of my life are turning out to be as Christocentric as the opening years - albeit for wholly different and wholly unforeseeable reasons.

What I can’t get over is how obvious, how actual-factual, how concrete - and, yes, how ‘materialistic’ - are this crucifixion and this Christing! Facing the world is crucifixion. ‘We are,’ says St Paul, with typical precision and boldness, ‘always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body.’ Or take Thomas Traherne’s outpouring:

The Cross is the abyss of wonders, the centre of desires, the school of virtues, the theatre of joys, and the place of sorrows. It is the root of happiness, and the gate of Heaven. Of all the things in Heaven and Earth it is the most peculiar... If Love be the weight of the Soul, and its object the Centre, all eyes and hearts may convert and turn unto this Object, cleave unto this Centre, and by it enter into rest.

Seventy years ago I’d have taken all that in my stride. Seven years ago I’d have dismissed it as overdone and a touch morbid. Today I revel in it as the sober truth. And though I can’t claim, with Chris Marlowe, to ‘see, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament’, I feel that mighty transfusion flooding me to the last and tiniest capillary.
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