The pine plantation surrounding our house has been blazing
for almost an hour. Volunteer fire fighters have been fighting
the flames as best they can, so that our house can be saved.
Suddenly one of the men drops to the ground. He is dead,
no doubt from heart failure. It is not difficult to imagine the
state of mind of the men who carried the body into the house,
and placed it there on the dining room table. My mother is
beside herself: she has my two-year old self to look after,
and she has a paralysing phobia about fire, dating perhaps
from the time when a number of horses were burned to
death in stables near her childhood home. At the height
of the emotion, the telephone rings. It is my grandmother,
150 miles away in Christchurch. She is making a long-distance
call (not readily done in 1931 at the height of the Depression).
"Molly, something is wrong. What is it?"

That was the experience, I believe correctly reported.
Yet experience is one thing, interpretation is another.
Hardened sceptics are likely to suggest that it was just a
meaningless coincidence that Grandmother called; or
perhaps she saw smoke 150 miles away; or perhaps there
is mis-reporting.

Less hardened sceptics will accept the story, but say
that it is but an "anecdote", and of no value in establishing
scientific truth, which is properly arrived at by repeatable
experiments which will either support or disprove an
hypothesis about reality. Some people of fundamentalist
Christian persuasion might see the story of this experience,
as a story about the occult, and therefore a story of the
activity of the devil. Others of more "New Age" tendencies,
may believe this experience without reservations, and see
it as a proof of the "psychic powers" of my grandmother.

The fact is, however, what happened, happened regardless
of these interpretations. I have often found it necessary to
hang on to this thought, in face of the opinions of others.
I am human and want others to approve of me. As well
as being human I am a clergyman, and have discussed
such happenings with other religious people. Amongst
them I find an astonishing diversity of opinion. Plainly
then, if I wish to please "religious people" in general, I might
as well forget about it. Which religious person am I trying
to please? Similarly with scientists, which of them am I
trying to please? I am left with having to remind myself
that experience is experience, facts are facts.

It would be asking too much of me, not to have any
views of my own about the incident. I can say immediately
that I fit the story of my grandmother into my belief that
mind, spirit and the physical participate in a greater whole,
in which all is connected. To support that interpretation I
appeal to the theories of certain prominent theoretical physicists
. I do hold firmly to that belief, yet I know I must keep
a little distance between my belief and the facts of the
experience in question. What happened, happened. Beliefs
are another matter.

Perhaps it is true that most of us are a little lonely, in
interpreting our experiences. How comforting it would be
if some supposedly infallible authority, religious or scientific,
could tell us what to think and believe, to conform to this
authority, and receive approval. But would not that do
violence to our knowledge of reality, to our own integrity?
Integrity I consider demands that we be a little lonely.
It also naturally demands that we be concerned about the
truth. Did that experience happen exactly as I described it?
Did, for instance, my grandmother use exactly those words?
Probably not, but she must have used similar words, for it
changed the family’s attitude to Grandmother ever after.
Integrity also demands that I take the opinions of others
into account, that I am willing to re-assess my own
interpretations. Integrity demands that I put this and
other experiences of many kinds together, and develop
my own feeling, my own faith, my own relationship to
all that is. On the other hand, seeing things solely from
my point of view could lead to a crazy view of things.
We all need to be corrected; we all need to listen
to each other’s stories. Yet in this cacophonously pluralistic
world of ours, we do violence to ourselves if we deny what
we know in order to please.

What brought all this on? You might well ask. What I
am writing here, is no generalising sermon. It is rather
my own personal attempt to cope with a whole long
series of life-changing experiences, in which other
people shared, which involved much meaningful
coincidence, and about one hundred and seventy
conversations with the spirit of St Stephen the first
Christian martyr. Now you begin to see my problem.
It is not simply a matter of that phone call from my
grandmother. It is a whole series of experiences,
extending over fifteen years, and one of the problems is
that they do not fit into any one recognised belief system.
New Age people will not be happy that the experiences
so clearly belong to the Christian world-view. Christians
are suspicious of guidance received through mediumship.
Sceptical people will dismiss everything out of hand, a priori.

My emotional problem is compounded by the fact that
in me I have the believer in my experiences, (shared
with others), and also the sceptic, the New Age person,
the charismatic Christian, and the rather rational liberal
Christianity in which I was brought up. The warfare is
within me. There are parts of myself that I am trying to
please. Therefore continually, in thinking about these
experiences, I find myself constrained to discipline
myself. Have I reported all these experiences accurately?
I believe so. I have been in fear of deceiving myself. Do
these experiences fit together in such a way as to demonstrate
that they are real, and not some kind of self-deception? I have
been over them countless times, discussed them in depth with
many people over very many years, and I believe them to
substantiate each other. I have listened to countless opinions
about individual experiences, and about the whole thing, and
I feel that I am on solid ground. Many people have reported
being immensely helped by reading and meditating on the
records of these experiences. Stephen has transported me
into a realm of depth, of spirit beyond my dreaming. It
all feels healthy, sound, leading towards a constructive
relationship with ordinary life, and a matter of fact relationship
to the world of spirit. It has led to love.

Always the internal warfare, the voices of the contradictory
opinions of others, internalised and a part of me. Always being
reassured when I actually re-examine the experiences. My hope
is that the Stephen experience will help readers take their own
experiences seriously, and stimulate them to be as disciplined
as I have tried to be, and it will open a wider reality.

One of the nice things about reading a book, is that one can
always skip on to the interesting bits. But you might care
first to read a little more about myself. The character
of the person, who is bearing witness, is an important matter.
Frequently, people who have read and been moved by my
manuscript, have said to me that they would not have touched
it with a barge pole, unless they had known and trusted me.
Therefore I tell a little of my personal story.

I am a priest of the Anglican Church in New Zealand,
and have been so for forty-five years. My great-grandfather
was the first vicar of Christchurch in the 1860s, a man with a
strong social conscience. My grandfather served most of his
life as a priest in the same diocese. He was known as "Honest
John", because of his reluctance to put up with rubbish and
superstition. My father too was a priest of liberal persuasion,
reasonable and sincere, and much attracted to Christian
mystics such as Baron von Hügel, Evelyn Underhill, and
Teilhard de Chardin. He introduced me to the Jewish mystic
Martin Buber, on whom I wrote a thesis for my honours
degree in Philosophy. Immediately after completion of my
studies in philosophy, I studied for an honours degree in Theology
at Oxford, where I was the protégé of Dr H.D.A.Major, former
leader of the Modern Churchmen’s Union in England. I got to
love both him and his wife, and together they reinforced what
I had already learned from my father, a deep and sincere faith,
together with a critical and dispassionate study of the Bible and
church teaching. That says a little about one side of my mental
and spiritual self.

There is another, shall we say, psychic side. This seems to
have been fostered from my mother’s family. There is that
story of the burning pine plantation. And then there was a
maiden aunt of my mother. I loved her, her musicianship, and
her devotion to Emmanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish scientist
and psychic. I cannot say that I would share her devotion these
days, but of course it helped to plant deeply in my mind, that we
can hear from God directly in the present day, that doors to
spiritual perception can be opened, and that a vision of the Unseen
World is possible. In my late teens and early twenties I became
obsessed with the idea of telepathy, carrying out numerous,
sometimes successful experiments, imagining that thereby I
could prove the existence of the spiritual world. Misguided
as this imagining may have been, it demonstrates the
continuing drive I felt to make contact with the Unseen.
Or maybe it was a dawning awareness that the Unseen
would one day be present to me in a very new way. In
my earlier ministry as a priest, during my first marriage, and
the bringing up of four children, my religion was more an affair
of the head. It was not until I was nearly forty that the drive to
be truly in touch with the Unseen returned and became overwhelming.
It happened that I had a friend whom I admired, and who was
a member of a group called Subud. At the time it professed
to have no doctrines, except that through prayer and spiritual
exercises one might be open to the Invisible. I eagerly sought
admission to the group, and for the next two years I was indeed
helped to remove many barriers between myself and the Unseen.
At the time, in my meditations or waking dreams, it seemed to me
that I was in some sort of dungeon, and that high up I could get
glimpses through slits in the walls of stone, of a sunlit world beyond,
unobtainable. These images became very real to me: on the
one hand, it seemed urgently desirable to pierce the veil,
while on the other, if I parted it only a little, lightning,
destruction, might be my fate. Thus, a deep contradiction
in me: I very strongly desired to expand my consciousness
into another realm, while at the same time I was deeply afraid
of the consequences.

My urge to penetrate this veil grew continually stronger.
Eventually light dawned, and I saw that the "veil" consisted
of my own personal defences against the Unknown. I was
defending myself against loss of my sense of self, which
meant my self-image, my beliefs, and all that made me myself.
I was frightened of being overwhelmed by subconscious
processes, and I was scared of intimacy with God. Yet the urge
grew stronger in spite of these fears. It seemed I had no choice
but to surrender to the Unknown. (Why not call that Unknown
"Christ?"). As I let go, it almost seemed that I was dying.
I remember thinking "I have lived forty years, so what harm
in dying?" I remember the tears, and the collapse. The unexpected
result of this "death" was that my meditations left the archetypal
world of strange images. I now seemed to be back in the ordinary
light of day. The difference was that I now appeared to have the
ability to converse with the Unseen and to receive answers to my
questions, in a way I had not known before. I became aware that
at least part of me was truly participating in a Spirit transcending
all our selves. One of the ways I "conversed" was to type a
question to the Unseen, then "listen" for a reference to a book,
a page and a line, and then type what I had heard or intuited.
Only then would I look up the passage referred to. True, the
information or ideas conveyed could have been available
to me by normal means, but receiving information in this new
manner, gave me direct experience of relating to an unseen
consciousness, and confirming its existence. I had many such
"conversations" and was gripped and fascinated by the phenomenon.
I made careful records, and on the basis of my academic record,
received assent from the University of Melbourne to my working
on a doctoral thesis on the phenomenon in general. Many people
record receiving similarly meaningful answers, and sometimes
refer to the phenomenon as "the library angel". I felt that I had a
contribution to make to the understanding of multidimensional
reality. Nevertheless I did not proceed, being side-tracked by what
was to come.