The first of these accounts is said to be a record made by someone called Didymos Judas Thomas of many brief conversations between his spiritual master, whom he calls Jesus, and other followers. Syrian Christians believe that this Thomas was a brother of the historical Jesus and the founder of the Eastern Christian church.
    The second excerpt is almost certainly better known. It appears in one of the most important of the canonical gospels selected around 370 by Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, to form the orthodox Bible. It appears to record the effort and concentration that the historical Jesus needed in prayer.
   I find both accounts important - and credible - because the first is very much in accord with my own late experience, whilst the second is like much like the earlier. I think the second is false, however - or at the very least that it has been seriously meddled with; but not for the obvious reason that if all his disciples were asleep at the time the only witness remaining must be Jesus himself.
   This is not a particularly important detail. A writer may describe a fact in a variety of ways. Far more important is the fact itself. I can identify with anyone who may pray, and who, moreover, may believe they need to pray, with such a degree of effort that they drip with sweat. I do not believe it is the way that Jesus needed to pray: that one of the greatest moral philosophers and spiritual directors known to history found it so difficult to achieve spiritual communion that he had to pour sweat 'like drops of blood'. This appears to betray a purpose. What may once have been an authentic account is not authentic now.
   The reason is that receiving grace is effortless. Both accounts should tell us this. We need no effort to achieve communion. We need not beg, implore, or degrade ourselves. There is no war between the flesh and spirit. We do not need mortify the first or pretend the soul is humble - what nonsense that is, before God! We certainly do not need to sweat. We only need to open and receive.
   The first of these accounts - if one is not accustomed to metaphor - may not be very easy to understand. Nevertheless it was clearly so much at odds with what the very early church authorities wanted to represent as the truth - and this was apparently evident to some of its bishops very early indeed - that everything they did not want was ordered to be destroyed. That one copy of Didymos Thomas's book survived at all appears to be due to the mutiny of an anonymous but heroic priest or priestess who placed it with other texts in a large pot and buried this in soft ground beside a large boulder, no doubt to make it easier to find, on top of a cliff near the village of Nag Hammadi in Egypt. One must suppose that the intention was to recover it when its contents might no longer be regarded as dangerous to the church. It never happened.
   The person who Didymos calls Jesus does his best in this parable to explain that to experience communion with 'the living one' is actually just as easy as taking off one's clothes and throwing them down - trampling on them, as children often do: as if to show that the garments that their parents have provided and society expects them to wear can be discarded without harm. They will then be able to relish - just as children do - the freedom and joy of being naked, alive and free of anxiety and guilt, free of rules, freed from all of the emotions that bind them to obedience: and then they will experience grace.
   This is not meant for children. Still less, I am sure, did this Jesus intend his followers to become as children. This has been amongst the most damaging of all the inversions promoted by the later Church. That to know grace one must first be reborn 'as a little child' is nonsense. The intention - if this is ever a useful simile at all - is to be reborn as a more responsible adult: not less responsible and infantile.
   Yet the powerful allure of such notions are as obvious now as they would have been to the architects of a soon to be imperial church two thousand years ago. The reason is that the child's version of power is belief.
   The belief that the child knows is nearly physical. Our usage betrays this fact. A belief can be strong; can be held; can be a refuge - but also an anchor. Beliefs can defend against evil and turn back the terrors of the night. Without beliefs we may feel naked. Which is precisely the point the parable wants to make. To be naked of belief, and unafraid, is spiritual maturity.
   But it is not easy to persuade the child not to be afraid. Form its earliest moments of life it had been dependent almost entirely on the whims and emotions of its parents. It is natural to be afraid of those very more powerful than oneself and in whom the tides of anger and affection swing hither and about without reason. Being limited in its ability to perceive, without being informed, usually again by its elders, what it is that is perceived; unable to travel much beyond the control of these more powerful agents on whom its future still depends; able only to exert physical and mental independence to a very limited degree, the child in most cultures it is still allowed to express its emotions without much restraint.
   The child is therefore most easily controlled by limiting its reasoning and giving freedom to its emotions. It is only necessary then to tutor the child to feel certain emotions in response to certain objects - then to identify these emotions with beliefs. The child is now easily controlled by eliciting any of the desired emotion from its repertoire by either showing it the object, or invoking the belief.
   Such a child will know its belief of right or wrong as emotions also. This can be a further advantage to conservative societies. Once such a pattern is established, the child will not - indeed, cannot - respond to any challenge of its belief that its culture knows absolute truth with any interest in investigating the truth or otherwise of the challenge. With what, precisely, would it investigate? It has no habit of inquiry. Instead it will simply be enraged: and in its rage will want to eliminate, not just the challenge, but the challenger.
   It was these emotions and beliefs that Thomas recalls his Jesus telling his listeners they must learn to throw off like unnecessary clothes 'to see the son of the living one': and not to be afraid. But so entirely common is this direction, from so many sources, East and West, that one must wonder, with near despair, why is it that it is so rarely observed. Is it - the most pessimistic explanation - that the majority of people simply do not want to grow up? Is it that the web of emotions and beliefs, anxiety and anger and fear and guilt, that nearly all cultures spin around them are so clinging and strong that only a fraction ever can struggle free? Or is it because the directions are still not simple enough?
   I have some suggestions to offer. In my own case, I do not know why I was suddenly transformed from somewhat baffled searcher after truth: for some certainty, for some solidity; for some fulcrum - as Aristotle called for - on which to set a lever and move the Earth. I do believe I know, however, how it happened. It happens because I followed the direction of the Didymos Jesus without know that I did.
   In the years after I lost that charming future I had promised myself with Ari, years of reading and searching which led repeatedly into dead-ends, I had become much engrossed in writing. If - as had been promised - I became completely deaf it seemed to me that this might be a way to earn a living.
   I did not write well. But I did write a lot. And the long nights that I spent alone as the duty officer in the empty operations room of the Army's headquarters writing my play about his trial I found an answer to the fateful question that Jesus had been asked: 'What is truth?'
   Remember that this script would be given a reading by the not entirely amateur Belfast Dramatic Society - in Belfast; remember that it even got a positive review from the critic of the Belfast Times, a hard man to please: so it cannot have been all that bad. That it was never produced was disappointing, but possibly it was thought to be not the best choice of subject for a theatre when Catholics and Protestants were killing without asking any questions, often choosing their targets by their postal address alone.
   I transformed the commonplace confrontation between the brutal Pilate, the upper-class Roman Procurator of Judaea, and the dishevelled, beaten lower class country Jew into a meeting between two thoughtful and courteous thinkers. Pilate knows that he cannot save the man. My Jesus certainly knows his life must end. My Pilate, then, is not so much concerned to save him, but is deeply interested to know why a man who has broken no Roman law has so much infuriated the priests that they want him dead. A Jew, accused by other Jews. But more than just any Jew: any crook, robber, rapist, or adulterer. They were ten a penny: always were. This was a famous teacher, a reb - with even a small band of followers. Yet other rabbi were demanding that he be killed. Who better to ask for an explanation than the man himself?
   I had, at that time, no spiritual experience whatsoever of my own, and I disbelieved not only the veracity and mental state but also the purpose of those who said they had. I had no understanding whatever that this must always be the deepest motive for rebellion against orthodoxy in any culture. I had therefore become fascinated by this question entirely within the limitations of my own thinking: what, indeed, is truth?
   I had no complete answer to this question. But no-one, it seemed to me, had ever given a completely satisfying answer. Was it possible that this really is the answer: that it is, in other words, a question to which there never is an answer?
   I was excited by this at the time. It was the response that I then gave to my Jesus: 'I can tell you so much, but only so much, of the truth: for what is most true of truth is that it is never complete.'
   It is always on the way to being completed. It never is. In every culture in every epoch, however, there are always those who think they have grasped the truth completely: and even that they have found the symbols, the words, or the rituals that to contain and express it; that they know how to whisper it in secret conclaves; to write it down in scrolls and books, perhaps still disguising it in myths or codes - or even, and then most sure and triumphant of all, carving it all in stone, but always, always, declaring that their authority has this basis: that the truth is what they know!
   But all, I had my Jesus explain to my Pilate - a Pilate at first fascinated, even sympathetic, but soon horrified - all these attempts must fail. To pretend to hold the truth as the basis of authority of any kind: secular, religious, or spiritual - must be a lie.
   This Jesus of mine was of course little more than a projection at that time of myself. I, too, was intoxicated just then by a sense of the limitless potential of the human mind to go on and on discovering. Inevitably the more ambitious would always be erecting little tabernacles - giving them grand titles such as the theory of this, and the proof of that - but always being delighted to cut each other's tent ropes, pulling down their canvas, setting them on fire, and then continuing their quest. 'What is truth?' The truth - he told Pilate - is that this is a search that never ends.
   It was in this way: not reeling from hunger and beating, near incoherent from pain, but in a quiet and almost private discourse between the apparently lowborn but clearly highly educated scion of a proud and ancient race, and my own Pilate, a highborn and doubtless very able servant of the world's greatest military and economic power, that my Jesus sealed his fate. After what he told Pilate, he lost his only hope of being saved.
   The reason was elementary. Pilate must know that Rome depends on emotions just as much as it does on belief: they are so interwoven that it is perfectly impossible to say where any one begins and another ends. Rome's mission is to civilize the world. Pride in this mission, belief in the same: neither must fail. It must be believed, further cause for pride, that Rome - a government of laws, not a government of men - can do no wrong. There must be belief in these laws. There must be in emotion, emotion to the highest degree, in patriotism itself: the summary of all this logic, 'dulce et decorum est pro patria mori' would survive long after Rome's fall
   Pilate must know that Roman soldiers lived, marched, fought, endured and conquered - all ruled by their emotions and belief. They knew no other truth.
   Now here was an enemy: this gently speaking ruffian, this supposed healer advertised as a pacifist - but Pilate had an excellent secret service and he had seen its reports; this pacifist has told his followers that they should differing opinions not as insults to their honour but should always be prepared to turn an ear to the argument, to listen and reflect. This he could welcome. It might even reduce the violence that he had to deal with every day. But this same man had told the selfsame confederates, Pilate had memorized the words: "Men think, perhaps, that it is peace which I have come to cast upon the world. They do not know that it is dissension which I have come to cast upon the earth: fire, sword, and war."
   Was that also from a pacifist? But abruptly Pilate knew there was no contradiction. What he confronted here, the philosophy of this gentle scholar could destroy the Empire. This fellow's preaching could set the world in flames. His spies had recorded this boast as well: "I have cast fire upon the world, and see, I am guarding it until it blazes"?
   Clearly he must not be allowed to guard this fire any longer. Rome could deal with enemies. It could deal with mutiny. It could defeat armies, raze cities and destroy their idols and their temples and carry away their treasure. Rome could parade the leaders of insurrections, execute them before the Roman mob and sell their people. Rome could pull down the walls, plough the foundations, salt the land. It could not resist what this madman planned.
   I lost the script of my play somewhere in my own more recent past. Possibly the Belfast ADS still has a copy. I believe I have made my argument more explicit here, but the original was still a good attempt, I think, to show that Jesus might not have been either the victim of other jealous Jews, nor a deliberate suicide, nor the bungling leader of a hopeless insurrection: the only reason that the Romans would arrest him. He might also have simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
   Above the hand covering his mouth, Pilate's tired eyes watch the man. He has decided. What a fool to speak to fools with words like that: 'to set fire to the world and guard the blaze' - when all he really wants is that these idiots should learn to think and speak for themselves. Now this audience is over: the guards step forward again. What a pity. But not even Rome can allow everyone to be a senator. Allow - what was the last estimate? - six million so-called citizens the belief that all their opinions matter: and the Empire would indeed be set alight - from end to end.
   If I was to write the play again, I would want to add these lines. It would not be difficult to make them audible. Pilate could even speak them aloud alone; or to a scribe. There is nothing more that he can do. He knows now that the man has committed no crime. He needs to commit no crime. He must still die. What he says, so patiently, in so many ways, is too dangerous. Sooner or later one of his sparks will indeed ignite an inferno: "Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over the All."
   For over a year after this moderate dramatic success, I continued to seek - and what I found was indeed extremely troubling. Bloody Sunday happened in this period. I had by then returned to England and had already written my famous paper, but I was not so much annoyed that it appeared to produce no response whatever as relieved. I had done my duty. I could now go on thinking.
   The Army is excellent for thinking. Most of the time one is not doing those things for which soldiers are trained - none of which, incidentally, suits them to serve as either nannies or diplomats - and in much of this time thinking is the best escape from boredom. I was also married by now, and in a good position to test the truth of Socrates' famous comment: 'By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you'll be happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher." *
   Philosophy is undoubtedly always a great consolation, but in trying to do philosophy in the Army the great disadvantage is that of isolation. The next problem that I noticed at first appeared as only a niggling anxiety. It soon grew to be a monster. It was the realization that the impossibility of ever achieving complete truth extended in both directions. In other words, not only was it foolish to imagine that there could ever be a time when anyone might achieve a total grasp of all possible truth, it was also foolish to be sure that everyone could agree - and even that were actually agreeing when appearing to do so - about even the most minor and simple truths. We have really no way of being sure that anyone else understands anything exactly as we do. All that we can look for is whether they behave as if they understand what we mean, and whether they then act accordingly. Even then, we cannot be sure that either their understanding or their reasons are the same as our expectations.
   The reverse, of course, is also true. I may believe that I have understood exactly what another intends in speaking or writing - even in shouting or waving their arms - but there is so great a range of all the other possible meanings of even the simplest actions that, in truth, I am really always only guessing that my interpretation is the same as the meaning that was intended.
   Of course these exchanges must work, approximately, most of the time. If not we would be in the Stone Age exchanging grunts. Nevertheless I found this realization at first so startling that for some time I felt not only paralysed by it, but as if I was staring into an abyss.
   If I had not been so isolated, if, I had had contact with almost anyone knowing something of the developments in philosophy in the past century: anyone, that is apart from Sir Anthony Kenny who had assured me that the study of philosophy would not help anyone to understand the world any better - I might have learnt that what I had discovered was more or less precisely the discovery with which that strange man Ludwig Wittgenstein, Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, had bewildered his students and his contemporaries for decades.
   Ludwig was a monster. He might have been rather less of a monster if he had taken a few classes of adolescents for a few years. They might have taught him some real humility. He had been a schoolteacher for a time, but of a primary school which he left after being accused of treating his pupils with too much physical severity. He never liked people who disagreed with him.
   And as a full professor of philosophy, the combination of his exoticism, his intensity, his aggression and his extreme volubility, either intimidated, frightened or repelled almost everyone around him. He also managed to bewilder or anger or disgust - sometimes all at once - nearly everyone obliged to listen to him. Very many, unfortunately, had to listen to him, and he did not help them by telling them repeatedly that if they believed that they understood what he was saying, they must know what he said was nonsense.
   It was all 'important nonsense', as one contemporary snorted contemptuously - or perhaps it was also enviously -: for it is very typical of philosophy that when a sufficiently eminent, or just sufficiently confident philosopher begins to talk nonsense - 'gassing' Wittgenstein, as called it - it is surprising how few are prepared to say that it is all nonsense out of fear of being thought insufficiently subtle or clever by others.
    What would undoubtedly have helped me just then, however, would have been to know that the great Professor Wittgenstein he had described the difficulty that was troubling me - and had does so, on this occasion, with exemplary clarity.
   "Suppose," said Ludwig, that "everyone has a box with something in it: we call it a 'beetle'. No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he know what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. - Here it would be possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. .. the box might even be empty."
   Which was exactly what was worrying me. Almost everything that I knew - almost everything that I had proudly learnt ever since I had learnt to read and virtually everything that I believed I understood could be more of these 'beetles'. I doubt very much even if I had known Wittgenstein that he could have helped me very much. He died in 1951, having published in his lifetime only one book, which he later scorned, and one article. He seems never to have convinced even the kindest of his critics that he knew his way out of the maze that he planted around himself. Instead he made himself and others so uncertain of the ability of anyone to communicate anything of importance to any one else that in the end this was precisely their situation: they did not know if they had or had not.
   In creating this exhausted silence, Wittgenstein of course prepared the way for the later inanities of Derrida, whose views - in sum: that there is no such thing as meaning anyway: so say whatever you like - were equally reverenced by people who should have known better. My own opinion is that Wittgenstein may have been fairly mad, but he was at least not a deliberate fraud: whilst Derrida was.
   Since, however, I had no-one help from anyone, I was still worrying about this problem when I received the cheerful information that a medical officer wanted to see me - and, if possible, straight away. And when the MO told me of the plan to 'have another look at your hearing problem in a proper hospital down South', I was still worrying about the problem two days later when I walked up to the Receiving Sergeant's desk in that 'proper hospital' and discovered that I was not there for hearing tests at all.
   By this time virtually all my belief in my beliefs was nearly dead. I was not so much alarmed by this situation, as annoyed. I was no longer sure that what I thought I knew was what I supposed it to be or something else - or whether, indeed, this was the real ground for annoyance I had spend nearly twenty years carefully selecting a whole wardrobe of ideas from people whom I had trusted - and now I suspected that what I was actually wearing might only make me look like a clown.
   I was now prepared to throw all these beliefs away and start again. I was prepared to abandon all my 'understanding'. I was even ready to accept that I might be already naked: that everything that I had thought clothed me in authority might not be real at all. I had achieved by chance - in other words - that very rare condition that Didymos Thomas's Jesus required his followers to achieve in order to see 'the son of the living one'. The result was indeed astonishing.
   About twenty years more were to pass in which I made no other attempt at all at prayer. I was rather afraid of it, really. A second encounter like the first might be more than I could take. In any case I had very little sympathy with the idea of people regularly asking their Lord God for a little bit more for themselves. If this rarely achieved anything very much, surely they ought to get more of a grip on their lives.
    When at Trinity I must have thought that I might need to know more some day and had asked the Dean of Chapel if he would give me some instruction in how to pray. Dr Robinson was not known as Honest John for nothing. He gave an irritable little twitch - rather as if I had just asked him for a hot tip on the Derby - and told me: "Oh, that's something I don't know very much about." Presumably he did not mean the prayers that he conducted in his chapel twice a day.
   As I became more and more exhausted, however, with all that I was trying to do, I began tentatively to try to find out more by myself. The picture I had in my mind of what I had to achieve at this time was almost exactly modelled - I suppose very ludicrously: but this is historic, dammit - on that famous picture of the man who climbs so high that finally his head pokes through into heaven. With Mags, as well as with Dali, I had been able to discover the very delightful and of course very well known fact that immediately after making love - and after, that is, what I shall follow the example of the incomparably great Giacomo Giralomo Casanova de Seingault in coyly calling 'the Crisis' - I would find myself in a state of blissful relaxation which really did feel divine. I used to like this a lot.
   Now, however, I would be often alone for months at a time. The stress of the job; the stress of trying a new way to teach; the stress of everything - had nowhere to go. Stress is a very bad poison. Masturbation would relieve it a little; through it I could achieve some semblance of the right true end - which is no doubt why it is regarded as yet another sin - but the worst moments were not when I had time to pleasure myself. They were when I woke up. The transition then from full sleep to consciousness was becoming as hard as being hit in the face: "Oh, god! I'm awake!"
    Sheer panic; pitiful; pitiable; dreadful; and now almost every day.
   Over time I learnt to deal with this Anti-Crisis, as I suppose it may be called. I did it first by making sure that I always woke up early enough to defeat it. A full hour was best. I must have ample time to persuade myself to relax into that state of disembodied bliss, which I did by remembering it as a memory. This was safe. Then I would try very hard to lift my consciousness up and up from this safe level, higher and higher, and squeezing it tighter and tighter so that all its fear and its anxieties were squeezed out and left behind; and if I just could this well enough by concentrating on it I could finally reach a level - and I did learn to succeed in this repeatedly - at which there was some refreshment of my courage through some sense - although now only ever a very distant sense - of that immense force of assurance I had experienced before.
   I came to depend on this ritual. It was often hard to concentrate for so long. It really required effort - and sometimes it needed repeated effort if anything was allowed to pull my concentration away from that precious trajectory: as fine as silk but brittle, like ice.
   The stress continued to increase. The ritual continued to serve. Until one morning. One morning I woke up far too late.
   It is easy now to smile at what was actually a moment of truly abject terror. Do I exaggerate? Of course I exaggerate. Stress is a very bad poison. It destroys perspective. Over time it destroys personalities. Lawyers become crooks; executives throw themselves out of windows. Their chiefs embezzle millions; need to screw - and be screwed by - hungry little boys and girls. Fathers kill their children; mothers, their babies; heads of governments make wars.
   I was struggling now to do all that I must do - but there was no time. In anguish of spirit, of longing and need, I tried even harder. I could not, could not, could not rise -
   Only once before - and just once again - would I ever receive a direct command. Now it came again, just as it had before, as a calm quiet voice from just behind and to my right: "Reverse the prayer!"
   Of course: reverse the prayer! I knew at once what this must mean. I stopped at once trying to push my consciousness upwards, carrying with it all its heavy baggage of world-given identity and anxieties to hold it back and down. I let all of that go - and simply opened. Opened what? I do not know. Is it possible for the head to be full of self-importance whilst the soul is empty? I just did it.
   I have often tried to describe the result before, and I have really found no better description than one which I will use now: it was like pushing an empty jug into the falling torrent of a waterfall, and I was filled at once - flump! - solidly, overflowing, with an inexpressible weight, a true cascade of happiness and joy: grace.
   Since then: this has never failed. We do not need to try to reach out or up to God. We do not need to try at all. This is inherited by us all. The calm certainty of this that Jesus preached still survives: "Only turn, and I am that I am: I am there." And we may love another who offers us the same truth. "The One," said Mohammed, the warrior, for both his friends and enemies: and he had many enemies: " is closer to you than your neck-vein."
   Grace requires nothing from us to be received, but that we be humble enough to accept it.
   Full stop.

* My heroically patient website designer, Guy Staniland, has implored me not to include so many footnotes in this text, for they are apparently the very devil to include. However, I am cannot resist adding this end-note to record that after the preceding full stop I did not quite know how to continue, and decided to go downstairs for a cup of tea. I found on the way that my son had cut this quotation out of a magazine and had stuck to the wall of the stairwell where I had not noticed it before. Synchronicity is real!

GRACE:  A POSTSCRIPT

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Colin Hannaford,


28/07//05

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