Grace In My Life
Noël Staples, Peterborough Quaker Meeting
This £10 pom returned to his parents in London from Perth WA in December 1970 a very sick man, having had six sessions of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT ─think One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) in a Perth nursing home to try to shake him from severe mental health problems coupled with drug and alcohol abuse. It was a last resort.
It worked! In May 1972 I spent six months in a Richmond Fellowship therapeutic home in North Oxford run by young Australian warden Mary Miller. It began a period of recovery and emotional maturing over at least the next five to six years.
My old Compact Edition of the OED defines grace in religious terms, sense 7, as: ‘The condition or fact of being favoured’. The sense of the presence of God or the spirit, certainly as I’ve experienced it, probably is the experience of grace and I have drawn upon it much of my life. How it has affected my life is hard to say, but it has. I didn’t know this presence, or grace, as such then, but in 1972, while in the therapeutic community, I took a job in the village of Cassington, outside Oxford, delivering building supplies to farms. This often took me through the beautiful Wiltshire Vale of Lambourne, between Wantage and Hungerford, delivering to an isolated farm well away from the road. Overhead the sky was alive with skylarks singing ─almost all gone now. I felt glad to be alive.
From 1972 a sense of identity with the beautiful Oxfordshire and Cotswold countryside grew, gradually expanding to take in all creation ─grace! Still I didn’t know it. I could not then articulate it. I now see that it upheld me through difficult times in 1976-8. It was very hard then for a man to win custody of his child. Somehow grace, I now realise, upheld me through protracted, painful custody proceedings and I was awarded custody of my two-year-old son. I became a single parent family.
Perhaps grace in 1982 led me to start an Open University (OU) degree while working as a Cambridgeshire bus driver. The Arts Foundation Course included a module called Man’s Religious Quest. Theologian Rudolph Otto’s book Das Heilige ─The Idea of the Holy introduced me to the numinous, a mysterium tremendum et fascinans ─a tremendous, fascinating mystery which draws you in. Now I had a name for this experience! I vividly remember chortling to my OU tutor: “I know this! I live with this all the time!” My OU tutor Gordon Steele, a 6’ 4” basso profundo opera singing Scot, looked down at me and, after a dramatic pause, remarked “well you are very lucky my boy”. I was 37. On completing a full-time degree, I started as an unqualified social worker and in 1994 completed a two year MA/DipSW qualification as a social worker.
Further grace came during the summer of 1990. While hosting an American friend I took his suggestion of going to the local Quaker meeting. Immediately I knew this to be my spiritual home. That October, aged 44, I was accepted into membership ─one of the best things in my life till then!
At Cambridgeshire Area Meeting in the early 2000s I tried to minister about my spiritual experience. I spoke of what seemed like a flow, like a warm breeze. There could be a frightening, cold edge. Sometimes it seemed to peep at me through the interstices of reality. It was tremendously powerful, immense. I sat down. A pause, another Friend stood. Jim Platts remarked that what is available to all, freely and undeservedly, is the grace of God. Grace developed a new meaning.
In 2006 near the end of MfW I became aware that I was shifting about on my chair, struggling both physically and intellectually, trying to get some understanding of this experience. Clear as a bell came the words just let it be. Hardly original, I know! I accepted that this spiritual experience is beyond intellect, beyond human comprehension. Just accept it. This is a gift of grace.
In 2009 I reviewed in the Friend Antony Seldon’s new book Trust, how we lost it and how to get it back. At Wandsworth MfW I pondered how I might trust this strong, growing sense of presence. It’s hard to trust what one cannot comprehend. Trembling, I stood and tried to minister: “Do I trust this sense of presence? Yes I do”. I sat down, overwhelmed. Ultimately one must decide whether, or not, to leap off the spiritual cliff, trusting that one will be upheld!
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Wandsworth Quaker Meeting House, 1778, seen from its cemetery at the rear. It is the oldest Meeting House in London.
By 2010 I realised I was on a spiritual journey and identified various points. The best gift of grace by far occurred in London at BYM [Britain Yearly Meeting] in May 2012. Asked to spend two minutes each way with our neighbour to explain why I am a Quaker, I hogged all four minutes! My neighbour quietly observed, “I think you would find it helpful if you had someone to talk to about your spiritual life. I’m a spiritual director. But I don’t direct, God directs.” I’d never heard of a spiritual director. Quite soon I was regularly visiting Maggie’s London home to benefit from her spiritual support, listening ear and gentle spiritual prompts.
I talked about how my sense of presence was so strong it often reduced me to helpless tears, not unhappiness, quite the opposite, it was just so overwhelming. Maggie said, “Have you ever tried talking to God?” Very self-consciously I did and still do. That August of 2012 I wrote “Encounters with God” for the Friend.
In the first week of October 2012 my Quaker meeting paid for a week’s convalescence at Glenthorne Quaker Guest House in Grasmere, near William Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage. Still on chemo I had just finished 38 daily exhausting sessions of radiotherapy for prostate cancer. On opening Glenthorne’s copy of the Friend I found my Further Encounters which I had not intended for publication. I was surprised and embarrassed. One really makes oneself vulnerable writing about such intimate personal experience. These Encounters were direct gifts of grace.
Nowadays the grace of the spirit seldom reduces me to tears but is always there just to turn to, often just coming over me spontaneously. Maggie once asked, “Have you ever wondered: why me?” I simply don’t know. I didn’t do anything to deserve it. It just came of its own and, like Topsy*, “just grow’d”. As I write it is twelve years since finishing chemo and, through grace, I’m well into “extra time”! Much more grace has been given since. I am so lucky!
I’ve tried to show something about the growth and working of grace in my life, how I have drawn on the continuing presence of the spirit. Supposing I was arrested for being a Quaker, receiving grace, would there be enough evidence to convict me? What evidence could I present to the jury? What witnesses would I call? What would they say? Really, it is for others to judge and I am quite uncertain what evidence my witnesses might offer the jury!
*Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The young slave girl Topsy was asked if she knew who made her. “Nobody as I knows on . . . I spect I grow’d. Don’t think nobody never made me.”
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