Observations placeholder

RICHARD CHURCH. From Over the Bridge.

We had been set to learn a passage from one of Paul's Epistles by heart. I had already got this and I sat turning the dreary-looking pages of the school edition of the Bible, covered in shiny black. One hand was thrust into my inside pocket, clasping the tiny silver watch as a talisman. The other stopped at the page opening on the Fourth Gospel.

I saw the phrase, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

I felt the hair on my head tingling, and a curtain of red blood appeared to fall before my eyes. I leaned forward clasping myself close, while the world rocked around me. And as this earthquake subsided, I saw a new skyline defined. It was a landscape in which objects and words were fused. All was one, with the Word as the verbal reality brought to material life by Mind, by man. It was therefore the very obvious, tangible presence of the Creator.

Sitting in Surrey Lane School...I received a philosophy which I have never lost, a working faith in the oneness of all life. My fears of evil, the old Satanic dreads due to the division between the flesh and the spirit, vanished in that moment of revelation. Everything was now contained, for me, in the power of the Word.

On this sharp and concise symbolism I was to build a concept of universal singleness that gave me authority over the horrors, the divisions, the guilt complexes, that beset us all as we go through life, in a world supposedly split into two, the flesh and the spirit, where civil war rages eternally, in sombre Miltonic gloom and hopelessness.