Julian Thornton-Duesbery, in conversation with Reggie Holme in the early 1970s, recorded by Chris Harding as part of his ‘Pioneers of MRA in Britain’ series. (edited version)
I went up to Oxford, to read Classics at Balliol in 1921 and was put in touch with a number of good Christian people in the university who helped me a lot in various ways. I had been confirmed at school. It had meant something to me - not a great deal but it had meant a fair amount and I carried on my religious practices quite regularly. Towards the end of my first year at Oxford two important things happened, in the light of what occurred subsequently.
The first was that I accepted to go up to the Keswick Convention in the summer of 1922 with a party of other Oxford undergraduates. The Keswick Convention is an inter-denominational gathering, founded around 1875 for the deepening of spiritual life, I am not sure of the exact date. I suppose it was not unconnected with the missions of Moody and Sankey and the evangelical movement and revival going on in North America and spreading across to England and the continent around about that sort of time. A few weeks before the end of that term I remember one morning in Broad Street, outside Balliol, meeting with another old school and Oxford friend of mine who told me of a very harassing experience he had had the night before when he had met a dreadful man called Frank Buchman. He wished to warn me against him very solemnly indeed, because he was a very terrible person whom I should avoid carefully.
I replied that I had never heard of Frank Buchman but was careful to take this advice. My interlocutor was in fact a person I respected, a very fine person, subsequently a quite leading MP and office holder in Neville Chamberlain’s government who in the end gave his life very nobly during the Second World War. He was killed in Italy.
I duly went to the Oxford house party at the Keswick Convention. This ‘Oxford house party at the Keswick Convention’ was an established event - a party of Oxford undergraduates were entertained there year after year, most generously and entirely free, as the guests of a marvellous old couple from Scotland - by this time very old. They weren’t there that year but I met them later on. They had attended the first Keswick Convention on their honeymoon in 1875, or thereabouts, and their lives had been changed by it.
There I was with a number of people my own age, sharing a bedroom with a couple of them. One of them became a very great friend of mine who later on was Dean of Bristol and died about 5 years ago, Douglas Harrison. One night we came in to supper with Bishop Taylor Smith. It was the custom at the Oxford house party to have evening prayers and generally get in one of the main speakers to talk to us after supper. What he talked about I have not the faintest idea but he was a marvellous person. Very disconcerting because he was enormously fat (that was not disconcerting, that was rather comforting) but he had the habit of looking at you and saying ‘Now, what was your best thought today?’ What you had to do then was to produce the verse in your bible reading that morning which had meant most to you. If you hadn’t read the bible or read it rather casually this could be rather disconcerting, as you can perhaps imagine.
Anyhow, he took prayers and at the end of it we all knelt down and were praying. For the first time in my life, I came out in the presence of other people, aloud, with various things that were wrong in my own life. I can’t remember exactly what they all were but I did make a surrender of myself to Christ in that respect. I think that was when the fires laid by my father and mother had the match put to them and things took light. Our Oxford house party at Keswick meant, through Bishop Taylor Smith, what I always regard as the most decisive moment in my own conversion and life was entirely different. Two or three days later one of the other members of this house party who had met Dr Buchman brought him in to supper and took prayers. There were one or two Americans in our party and I think it was one of them who brought Dr Buchman. He wasn’t a Dr then his doctorate came later - he brought Mr. Frank Buchman. Remembering the awful warning I had heard in Oxford only a few weeks before, I was extremely careful to keep right at the other end of the room and avoid anything to do with this man. I probably warned other people against him too. I can’t remember anything much about him that particular night except my own anxiety to keep out of the way.
This all ended and I went back to Oxford. During the following year, my second year as an undergraduate, I forget how but I heard a good deal more about Buchman and realised that the warning which I had been given was an incorrect warning, That the truth about Buchman was in fact quite different. I had entirely misjudged him. If I had said unpleasant things about him, which I probably did, they were wrong things that shouldn’t have been said. When I was up at Keswick again the following year for another party of Oxford undergraduates there, I heard that Buchman was in the place. I think I was sitting in St John’s Church quietly one morning, I can’t quite remember - anyhow the conviction came strongly to my mind that really I had been very wrong in the attitude I had taken to Buchman the year before and that, as he was about in the place, I ought in decency to go and apologise to him for this attitude and for anything I had said wrong. I also had the feeling that there were things in my own life which were not by any means straight and upon which I felt he could probably help me, from what I had heard about him.
I went round one evening to the hotel where he was staying and we had a considerable talk together. He was a very great help to me. At that time, he was very cheerful and matter-of-fact, down-to-earth, practical, gave good sound pieces of practical advice about how to live a pure life. I think we prayed together and then, if I remember rightly, he said ‘Let’s go round and go into the later part of the general meeting in the big tent’. This was 1923, so he would have been at that time a man of about 44 or 45 I suppose. I remember him celebrating his 50th birthday at Oxford a few years later.
At Balliol I took Mods and Greats. I was extremely fortunate in having at all three stages, three or four of the best tutors in Oxford. [Julian got a Double First, and then a Triple First when he added Theology a year or two later]. As it so happened they were all extraordinarily good people in their own subjects. I think I am right in saying that without exception, not quite, almost without exception, they did also happen to be people who were men of Christian faith. One was Cyril Bailey who was a leading Anglo-Catholic, another Pickard Cambridge, my main tutor, who was a leading evangelical. Those were the two Honour Mods.- tutors of my first 18 months. My ‘Greats’ tutors were perhaps not quite so markedly Christian but they were people of faith - John MacMurray and Charles Morris. Then for Theology I was extraordinarily lucky because I was to have gone to DC Simpson of Keble. He did most of the Balliol Theology at that time as we had no Balliol theology tutor but Simpson got made a Professor just that long vacation so he was no longer able to take me. Instead, I was sent in next door to Kenneth Kirk who was at that time Chaplain of Trinity, later Bishop of Oxford. Theologically Kenneth Kirk and I were about as far apart as the sun and moon could be but he was a superb tutor. He was extraordinarily kind to me and I owe him a very great deal. Later on, when he was a Bishop and I was a priest in the Oxford diocese, he was extremely kind to me right to the end of his life.
I was ordained onto the staff of Wycliffe Hall in 1926 where I had gone for my theological training on the more pastoral side. Wycliffe Hall is a theological college in Oxford, founded in 1877. I was there under the principalship of George Francis Graham-Brown. Then two years later in 1928 I was appointed Fellow and Chaplain of Corpus Christi College, where I was for 5 years. At Corpus, I was a very bad chaplain. Looking back, I was appointed far too young, I hadn’t enough experience. I don’t think I was at all the right person to do it. Nevertheless, I am very grateful for having had the time there. In the intervening years I kept up more or less, though intermittently, with Frank Buchman and his work. What had impressed me as a young don in Oxford was that quite obviously people with whom Buchman had been in touch, though he wasn’t much at Oxford himself during those years, were reaching and helping and changing the lives of a number of people whom I had no power to reach and touch. These people were undergraduates for the most part, and slightly older undergraduates,
Buchman had given them some good sound advice of reading their bibles, for one thing, particularly their New Testaments, of making a very real time of quietly listening to God in the early morning, directing their minds towards God and letting God talk to them. Buchman used to make a great point that prayer was intended to be a two-way matter - that it wasn’t just a matter of talking to God down the telephone, you had to let God talk to you. He used the simple phrase ‘ you have got two ears and one mouth, you ought to listen to God twice as much as you talk’. This is not a bad principle for Christian life in fact. By keeping together and talking to each other about these things, Buchman’s friends, of whom I became one in due course, were able to make quite a lot of progress and had a considerable impact on the university.
About 1928 (I went to Corpus in 1928) I had the feeling that it would be right to allow this group of people, if they wished to do so, to come and meet in my rooms on Sunday nights, and this they did. It attracted some criticism in the college at the time, but this used to happen. There were all kinds of stories going round about Buchman - by the light of later events one sees that some of these things had been planted in people’s minds. He was supposed to be emotional. He was supposed to be mad about the idea of talking about sex and that these meetings were really a kind of perverted sexual orgy of some kind. This sort of idea went round. Naturally senior and responsible people hearing this were worried and may have made their enquiries. Certain very senior people in the University, including Sandy Lindsay, the Master of Balliol and WB Selby, the Principal of Mansfield College, known because of his diminutive size and his superb eloquence as ‘the inspired mouse’, these and other people made enquiries about this. In fact, they wrote a letter to The Times saying that they had enquired into the matter and that they had come to the conclusion that Buchman’s work was extremely sound and good and to be encouraged. I think FR Barry wrote too.
Certain rather amusing things happened. Of course, one did have a certain temptation to soft-pedal one’s connection with Buchman slightly in this kind of atmosphere. I remember wondering whether I was prepared to take Buchman in as my guest to dine at High Table in Corpus. It seems ridiculous now, but it was a great issue with me at one stage. It took me a long time to summon up my courage to do this. Finally, Buchman came and it so happened that there were only 2 guests there that night. The other guest who was dining with the President of the College was one of Buchman’s sharpest critics at Oxford. So as duty bound, and a matter of courtesy, I took my guest up to sit beside the President, as I was expected to. Therefore, Buchman and his chief critic were face to face across the table. It amused me highly that the President in fact talked to Buchman rather than to his own guest practically the whole dinner. What about I can’t remember.
Neither can I remember quite when these Sunday night meetings began, but what used to happen was that on a Sunday night it was a kind of clearing house for those who were connected with the Oxford Group to bring along our friends to meet some of our other friends within the Oxford Group. It was rather a kind of free-for-all. Somebody would take responsibility for leading this meeting in my rooms in the Fellows’ buildings and people would talk about decisions they had made during the week. They were free entirely to get up and say anything they liked, as rude or as anything else that they wished to. There were no holds barred about this. There was plenty of free and vigorous speaking, particularly when a number of people who were very keen motorcyclists attended - a motor club in fact. They were extremely interesting people. They arrived, certainly on occasions, armed with large mugs of beer which they drank rather noisily, gulped down in the back row, and made rude remarks from time to time. I always liked it because the ruder they got, the happier the rest of us were. It is a well-known fact of human life and divine life that if you really are challenged by something your reaction is that you might accept it or if you don’t accept you will of course have to fight all the harder. So, when these friends from the motor club became linguistically violent, it was clear evidence that the hook was very firmly in their mouths and something of considerable importance was going to happen - which indeed it did. Two or three of them got very considerably changed as a result.
RAE Holmes: I was, of course, one of those in the Oxford University Motorcycle Racing Club - we had just been on the Isle of Man in what was the last amateur TT race, because we had been found to be very rascally and dishonest. Many of the competitors had not been amateurs at all but had been getting help from the Castrol oil company, KLG sparking plugs, and all sorts of things which disqualified them technically from being in an amateur TT race. I myself had a works Rudge Ulster (?) handed to me on a plate because I threatened to disgrace the firm of Rudge Whitfield by entering the old trails machine on which I had incidentally won the Oxford-Cambridge trial. We were very interested to know what happened to the secretary of our club who was the son of a very distinguished Classicals professor and also a great figure at the League of Nations. Was he at these meetings? I have never been able to discover whether Stephen was there earlier on in those meetings or what part he had.
Julian: I cannot I am afraid remember exactly the order of events of who was there before whom and whose lives were changed in what particular order. Certainly, one of the people concerned was Stephen Murray who was a prominent member of this club and who certainly did undergo a very considerable change in his life.
RAEH: What did we look like from the point of view of the chairman of the meeting?
Julian: Ooh, pretty ordinary. If I remember rightly at this distance of time, I don’t think undergraduates were marked by such sartorial peculiarities as they are today. I think people dressed pretty normally, whatever they were like, in very much the same kind of way. It was I suppose the period of Oxford ‘bags’, which were trousers which measured about 50” around each leg at the bottom. They were not any particular mark of rebellion or anything - people wore them quite indifferently.
RAEH: I remember the effect of the meeting was like being shot at with machine guns from several sides. We ended up feeling rather like a sieve because there were good boys, so to speak, who spoke of their change, and there were equally bad ones, or even worse than we were, who could “out-trump” us. So, we got it from all angles. I can tell you in the back row, you really felt shot up!
Julian: You never quite knew who was going to turn up. There was one occasion when I think it was the Bishop of Leicester who was preaching the University sermon in St Mary’s at 8 o’clock. He had heard about these meetings and was very anxious to come and see what was going on and I think I am right in saying that leading the meeting was a cousin of his whom he had never met, an undergraduate - also later a Bishop. They met then for the first time. The Bishop came across from St Mary’s to the meeting in Corpus because the meeting was half way through and the room was absolutely packed with people.
It would hold 60, sitting on the floor. If it got beyond 60 we had to move and go down to a room downstairs in case the floor gave way. The furnaces were below that. A young history don, a Cornishman, was living underneath me at the time. He was very nervous about these meetings not for any social reason but he had heard awful stories about people who had danced so violently at a rival meeting in Cornwall that the floor of the barn had given way. He had visions of 60 undergraduates coming through on his head down below. He was rather alarmed. I sympathised and understood.
Anyhow this Bishop arrived and looked into the room. There was just room to get him into the door and these were the days when Bishops still wore all the kind of paraphernalia of aprons and gaiters and that kind of thing. He was in full proper episcopal dress. It was characteristic of him, a man of immense modesty and charm and spiritual power altogether, that he took it all in in a second and just sat straight down on the floor exactly as he was by the door - gaiters, apron all the rest of it. Cyril Bardsley - a very great person.
RAEH : In those days there seems to have been a reaping of a crop of undergraduates who went out into the world, who met every day at St Mary’s Church. What was the secret behind this? It was a very difficult thing to achieve, to weld a force of people, to sort of grow them out of the soil then cultivate them and then, so to speak, market them on a world scale.
Julian: We talk about Buchman, quite rightly, as having done a great job in connection with Oxford. But Buchman himself would have been the first person to say that this was in fact the work of God, more particularly of God the Holy Spirit, who was very active in Oxford at that particular time. Looking back now, I think I can see that that generation - the generation to which the motor club belonged, the people who came up about 1928-29-30, were probably the first generation who were really coming up pretty well free from the reaction after the First World War. When I was up as an undergraduate we were still very much dominated by it. I was too young to fight in the First World War but we were still very much dominated by all that. Then Oxford went through a rather tough period after that. Around about 1928, 29, 30 I think Oxford was beginning to recover something of itself, and this worked out in various streams. There was a strong religious movement at that time, not only with Buchman but other things happening too. The coming of FR Barry to be Vicar of University Church was a very great stimulus to Christian life in Oxford. The coming of, firstly Christopher Chavasse (?) and then later on Edward Mole to be Rector of St Aldate’s again had a great effect upon Oxford and Oxford life. The other stream things - the perennial idealism of young people - showed themselves in great sympathy with, for example, the Hunger Marchers from Jarrow. This was just the beginning of the period of the Great Depression. The October Club, which was a Communist Party thing in Oxford, was founded about this time, getting its name from the October Revolution in Russia. Also, there was certainly a period about 1930 when not only I, but other people of quite different outlooks, were saying quite firmly that the two most vital things going on in Oxford at that particular moment were the October Club and the Oxford Group. They were poles apart, though it was interesting how people might move from one to the other, quite rapidly and did. This was all going on in Oxford at the time, so there was a fertile soil for seed to be sown in and to grow. I think the Spirit of God was very much operative and using people like Buchman in this connection.
I see Buchman very much as a pioneer thinker inspired, I know, by the spirit of God to have ideas and put them into practice a long way ahead of a great many of his contemporaries. Things which have become considerable forces in Christian life across the world since then were already blossoming in Buchman’s mind and were to become things much in the life and practice of the churches at a very much later stage.
For example, we hear a great deal these days about the church in the house - the small family group which in many ways, talking now in 1979, is tending to be a much more vital centre of life than the more institutional life of the churches and chapels - this smaller, more intimate thing. Of course, there is nothing new in this. You can trace it back to the Wesleyan class meetings of the 18th century. You can trace it back to the upper room in the Acts of the Apostles. But Buchman talked a lot about the church in the house and the small group was one thing which he was very much led to pioneer - a way of working which the church has later and in a bigger way begun to see and use.
He was very perceptive - it was forming in his own mind because he was a person who was developing in his mind, his spiritual life and vision all through his life, right to the end. He was never static. He also saw a great deal of what technically theologians and churchmen talk about nowadays as ‘interfaith dialogue’. The relationships between the great faiths of the world - Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and so on, and a realisation that, whilst Buchman himself was a very confirmed and convinced Christian and a firm believer in the uniqueness of the Incarnation of Christ, the resurrection and so on, yet the various religions had a lot to give to each other and to learn from each other. This again is something in which he was a long way ahead. William Temple, who was roughly his contemporary in age, was thinking in the same kind of way. It comes out in the Report of the Jerusalem Conference of 1928. (Temple became Archbishop of York and one of the great moments of Oxford life was William Temple’s mission to the University in 1930. Nobody there will ever forget it for a moment. It was an amazing experience to be present at such a thing.
Temple was a very great man, who incidentally I remember in quite a different connection .. towards the end of the Second World War when Temple was Archbishop of Canterbury and was at Lambeth, I was very anxious to get permission to go to America along with Peter Howard in order to link up with Buchman and others who were on that side. This would have been 1944. I remember going with Peter Howard to see William Temple at Lambeth in order to enlist his support, because it was very hard to get permission to go abroad. We failed in the end, but we went to see William Temple to ask his help. It was a highly adventurous journey because the flying bombs were just beginning and we were out of our taxi two or three times in the course of the journey from Central London to Lambeth that afternoon. It was quite exciting. When we got there, we found Temple sitting in his room in Lambeth, window facing out more or less south-east, quite unmoved by the bombs. He said, ‘I can see them coming if I sit here, and if they are coming very close my staff tell me to get into that passage just round the corner.’ Completely unmoved. He was a man of very great physical courage. I believe that when there was the so-called Baedeker raid on Canterbury he was there and that his staff practically had to hold him down by force to prevent him still seeing what he could do for people while the bombs were actually falling.
He was in very great sympathy with the work which Buchman was doing and realised that there was something of God happening, as indeed his successor Cosmo Lang did too. I remember Temple doing a great deal - though it was in the end unsuccessful - to try and get us permission to go off to America. He wrote a long letter with his own hand to the Foreign Secretary of the time, saying it was important we should go and did all he could to help us to go.
RAEH: At the same time many people were far from sympathetic. One of your books was to controvert one of these men, Tom Driberg, who launched a considerable attack from 1928 onwards, didn’t he, as a newspaper man?
Julian: What was not yet known as Moral Re-Armament, the Oxford Group, did of course have a good many enemies in many places. Sometimes this was just due to misunderstanding and misinformation, quite honest misunderstanding. In that case perfectly understandable. Other cases, I am afraid that the misunderstandings and misinformation were the result of deliberate propaganda on the part of people who probably had been in one way or another challenged in their own personal lives by the Oxford Group and reacted not by accepting the standards of Christ but by violent criticism. The most outstanding of those was Mr. Tom Driberg, who was an undergraduate at Oxford shortly after the First World War, later an MP, also an implacable enemy of Buchman for many years for reasons which some of us knew something about at the time. These became quite obvious in the book, Driberg’s autobiography, published after his death. Naturally he couldn’t accept the kind of standards that Buchman stood for. He also wrote earlier a book against MRA called ‘The Mystery of MRA’, a book which I think was intended as a source of misinformation to go round the world. This was only too successful in many ways in doing so. The book which I wrote, ‘The Open Secret of MRA’ was in some sense not exactly a reply to that book because they were published at the same time. It was rather a reply to some lectures which Driberg had given in Scandinavia upon the subject a bit earlier. The books in fact came out at the same time and we reviewed each other’s books - I forget now for whom. I never met him personally.
RAE Holmes: Interesting that one way or another Driberg’s book was found all over, placed in embassies and in all the libraries of Fleet Street and his articles attacking the OG got into the clippings services of every newspaper library of Fleet Street and formed the basis that any journalist would naturally refer to for background. It was a very widespread net of hostility and misinformation. I was interested in the excellent documentation of the book you wrote, even though Driberg in my view, being a crafty news man, had got the better title psychologically.
Julian: Of course, there is a close connection between the words ‘mystery’ and ‘open secret’, closer than you might think unless you happen to be a student of the Greek New Testament. The word ‘mystery’ is of course a Greek word, and, strictly speaking, means something about which you kept your mouth shut and in front of which you kept your eyes shut. There was a primitive barbarian custom, which had certain parallels in Oxford, which was not keeping your mouth shut - in the sense of not talking about things you ought not to talk about but seeing how much liquor you could get down your throat without closing your mouth. It is closely paralleled to a practice known in Oxford colleges as ‘flooring a sconce’ which was a penalty in older days - I don’t know whether it still happens - inflicted for misbehaviour at table or supposed misbehaviour at table. This was very much at the discretion of the senior scholar present and how often the penalties were inflicted would very often depend upon how thirsty the senior scholar was that night because if the man could not manage to get the sconce down the first go, the beer was then passed to the senior scholar, who then had the rest of it. This was very popular.
St Paul took the Greek word for keeping your mouth shut and used it quite frequently. His use of the word is exactly ‘open secret’ because what St Paul says over and over again is that God had kept a secret for a very long time. The secret was what he intended to do in Jesus Christ. God had kept this secret but now, in the first century AD, as we think of it, God had revealed his secret and it was now something which everybody could look at and which Paul and others, Frank Buchman in later times, made it their great business to proclaim from the housetops.
Let us go back in thinking to the actual movements in Oxford and what came out from it all. By about 1932, the force of men and women in Oxford who had been in touch with the Oxford Group was a very considerable one and began to move out from Oxford into other parts of the United Kingdom. I always feel myself that one small, but quite crucial movement of this kind, was a party of us going down to a Congregationalist church in South London. It was the home church of my friend Roland Wilson, who later on became Secretary of The Oxford Group for many years. Quite a force of us went down at that particular time and I think that was the start of things moving round the country quite considerably. By this time a very large number of clergy and ministers had become aware that something significant was happening in Oxford, were interested in it and began to come to the house party conferences organised in Oxford and elsewhere. All this had a very considerable effect upon the church of the country during the middle 1930s .
And then there came a really very drastic move outwards where Buchman began to take parties of people to different parts of the world - back to his own United States of America, to Canada, to South Africa and elsewhere. His vision of personal change moving on into national, racial, international change, was really beginning to come true. I can’t talk from personal experience of what happened across the world during those following years because in 1933 I personally moved from Oxford out to become Headmaster of St George’s School, Jerusalem and was there then for 7 years till after the outbreak of war when I came back to Oxford permanently. Certainly, I found that the things I had been taught in Oxford - that I had learnt through the Oxford Group - were of very great value and help to me particularly in dealing with the many Moslem friends whom I made in Palestine during those years. I think I learnt much of the way in which there could be a very real fellowship and understanding between people of different faiths if they were honest with each other and were prepared to approach problems, really listening for what was the right kind of answer to them. I found this a very great help in dealing with boys in the school of which I was headmaster.
One interesting experience was that for internal reasons I suddenly found myself teaching a class of mixed Moslems, Jews and Christians, aged about 15, the history of the Crusades, about which I knew absolutely nothing. It was altogether a most fascinating experience that term, as anybody can imagine. Think what the background of the Crusades is. Whether they learnt much I am not quite sure. I learnt an awful lot. The great point about it was that they were all chaps who had been in school for some time and we trusted each other. We could talk pretty frankly about our own convictions and didn’t need to be afraid about pulling punches. Hard words but no hard feelings at all. It was a gathering of friends. That kind of approach to people of other nationalities and faiths is something for which I am extremely grateful. Much of it I learnt in the Oxford Group. To look not for the points of disagreement but for the points of agreement and readiness to go forward together from this to explore further.
What I have also found very much myself in meeting with people of other faiths is that the last thing they want one to do is to play down one’s own Christian convictions. They want one to express these fully and strongly. Obviously with a proper sense of respect and common courtesy to other religions, not being rude about them. But they want one to say very firmly, ‘now I as a Christian hold this that and the other, what do you feel as a Moslem and a Hindu?’ I have learnt a great deal from my Moslem and Hindu friends in this kind of way.
When I went out to Jerusalem my mother and sister came out with me, my father having died in the meantime. My sister employed her midwifery training to looking after the health of small boys.
Jean: Yes, that seemed to be the need of the moment there and I was a little bit nervous about this at the beginning. I had had certain experience of other nursing and of First Aid, and as the need was there in the school I had to go to work. Over the matter of living with those of other faiths, I too felt that what I had learnt through the Oxford Group was such an immense help.
For instance, one day I went back into my little sickroom which I had for any of the boys who were boarders and who were ill. I had four boys in there. One of them said to me, ‘Miss Duesbery while you have been out of the room Aboudi has been very naughty’. I looked over into the corner of the room and there in his bed, sitting upright and looking like a thunderstorm, was a small boy of about 5 or 6 years old, a little Moslem boy. He looked thoroughly angry and sullen. So, I said, ‘Well, what has he been doing?’ ‘Oh, he has been saying, “You are Christians. I - I am a Moslem.”’ I thought quickly and threw myself back on God over it and said, ‘Now what am I to say?’ Then it came to me and I said, ‘Well, he is quite right, isn’t he?’ ignoring the tone of voice in which it had been said. I said, ‘You see, he is a Moslem and we are Christians.’ The other three boys happened to be Christians, Arab and Greek. I said, ‘Yes, we are Christians, he is a Moslem. But the thing that really matters to us here and now is that we are the children of one father.’ And at that this little boy jumped up on the bed, because he was only really a baby, about 5, and he bounced up and down and he said, ‘Yes, yes, that’s right. Miss Duesbery’s right.’ Then without a shade of change he just turned so happily and pointed to a picture of the Good Shepherd above the bed and he said, ‘And look fellows (all in Arabic of course) this is Jesus. These big sheep are the big people, and the lambs are the little people, the children. And you see this little lamb that Jesus has in his arms, it isn’t afraid because he has it in his heart.’ I thought it was one of the most wonderful interpretations of the Christian message from that little Moslem boy that I had ever heard. Yet there was no conflict for him. He felt we were the children of one father. I think that this is the approach I had learnt very largely through the Oxford Group.
Julian: I would want to start from the point that Christ did conceive his mission to be a universal one, that he was sent to everybody and that this does really run right through the New Testament. You get it for example with the people at Pentecost. We do hear all that long list of names. St Paul in the opening chapter of Romans, which I suppose is his first theological work, does speak about God always having had a witness wherever he has been. Paul said the same thing in his sermon at Athens. In his letter to the Colossians in chapter 1 he makes very strong statements about the universality of Christ - all these people felt they were preparing for a cosmic Christ who had a message for the world and was of great significance for the world. The same sort of thing comes out in the opening verses of St John’s gospel, which are very important in this connection.
Our business is to talk to people in the language they can understand and start from the place where they are. This isn’t new, but it is so much the thing which Frank Buchman did insist upon. Go back to where people are and start there. It is no good - I forget Frank’s picturesque phrase - his equivalent of casting your pearls before swine ... that’s right: putting the hay where the mules can get it. I think this has a great application to Christian things because time and time again, and this was true before Buchman’s time also, you have to approach people at the point of their need and at the point where they are prepared to listen. Where you have something to give them and where - which is perhaps even more important - you go to them with the sense of having something to receive from them. Because this is time and time again the way in which people are won. You win people’s confidence by asking them to do things for you.
One has seen over and over again all sorts of ways in which people can be included, by asking them to do something for you. They then feel themselves ready to do more on the next step. I am sure that this is part of going to people and ‘proclaiming in their own language’ the wonderful works of God. I am sure this is the kind of thing we have got to do. You can’t go rushing people in this kind of way. I know my own temptation is to go too slow and not nearly courageous enough. I am conscious of this and I know it is wrong in me:- I am not quick enough and drastic enough, not challenging enough. But I am sure that the opposite effect is equally wrong, people who try and ram it all down your throat may extort some kind of verbal profession of some kind but it doesn’t last.
Where you really do go to people is that you go to them with the proclamation of what you already know. You are going to talk to somebody and you are going to talk about something that is already here.
There is a good story about a man who was a patient in some mission hospital in South India somewhere. He went off back to some extremely backward, out of the way village. Years and years later the first Christian arrived in this place, started talking and telling stories about Jesus. ‘Oh well we know all about him, he is here!’ said the villagers. ‘He lives here, come and meet him. He is up there in that hut, that’s where he lives’ and took him back to this chap who had been at the hospital, whose life had been changed there and who had lived there in such a way that they all knew Christ in that kind of way. In that particular case they hadn’t even had the advantage of having a bible!
This is the kind of thing which we are rediscovering. These are things which a lot of people are writing about and saying. There is this rediscovery of the new language in which you have got to talk to people. A new language is desperately needed.
I got a much clearer sense about this in India. I found there that so many of the Hindu and Moslem people that one met didn’t want you to water down your message. They wanted you to say you were a Christian, say what you believed, but to do so with a proper sense of respect. Not ‘We are the people and wisdom will die with us’ - not all that. But ‘We have found so and so and so and so, it has been a help to us, we say that this is Christ doing this to us and for us and in us and we find it very helpful, you may find it the same.’ I am sure that this is the kind of approach - a sort of Christian modesty.
Christ always approached people as people and not as ‘souls’, so to speak, on the coconut shies to be knocked down and collected. I am sure this is the kind of way we have got to approach people these days. It seems to me this is what MRA can do.
There has been so often in the past a sort of Christian imperialism where you come as the superior religion, to lord it over everybody else. Well, we probably do believe it is the best religion because we profess it and Christ means that to us, but Christ himself after all, when he really wanted to teach his disciples how to behave, washed their feet. He said emphatically ‘You are not to go about posing as benefactors and lording it over people. You are to approach them with humility’ and over and over again this point is made. I am sure this is true.
I always thought, in my ignorance as a young man, that I was nice and free from racial and colour prejudice till I went to Palestine and I jolly soon found I wasn’t. I very soon realised out there that there was any amount of racial superiority in me which is still there, I hope that I am a bit more conscious of it than I was, and had it dealt with to some extent. It dies very hard and this kind of superiority is one of the particular besetting sins of the clergy. It is over and over and over again. Coming back to the narrow English parish life, constantly you find the thing that really upsets the laity is that their parish priests will behave like tin gods. The laymen are partly to blame themselves because they will insist on building large pedestals and putting little tin gods on top and treating their priests like that. But it is for the priest to start getting down off there as quickly as possible. I am sure that what is true there in the narrower field of the parish at home is equally true when the church moves out into wider world things and dealing with other religions. Approach them with what they have to give you as well as with what you have to give them.
Christ for example was prepared to take things from the hands of tax-gatherers and prostitutes and so on. Why shouldn’t we take things from the hands of thoroughly good and godly Moslems and Hindus? I am sure there is an awful lot along those lines. It is one of the points where, as I see it, God has raised up MRA to be a sort of pioneer and spearhead of his way of approaching people in the modern world.
RAEH: It can also be a danger in MRA itself of feeling a sort of elite force of tough spiritual commandos who are like the SAS, super troops who spearhead everything. Again, one has to watch that one isn’t feeling like elite troops and handing it out to the lesser ones.
Julian: As I see it, this is something where in MRA we have often been responsible for misunderstanding and for giving much offence. We have made a lot of mistakes in the past and we have made mistakes particularly I think in dealing with the churches and with individual clergymen. It is very understandable. Particularly with young and less-experienced people who have been to some MRA thing and come into a new experience of life which they somehow hadn’t found at their home church. Then they go back and see the vicar and say to him, ‘Now I have really got it, and now I will tell you.’ Well not unnaturally a man of about 50 unless he has got a good deal of grace would find this very hard to accept. He may be gracious enough to do so, but it isn’t very easy. Quite a lot of the misunderstanding from the church has been caused by attitudes of that kind, for which truly this is our fault.
RAEH: Do you think that the Dean and Chapter of Liverpool Cathedral have recovered from the occasion on which Loudon Hamilton and I were invited to talk to them and I, as a brash pagan, said, ‘How many of you have been to a petting party?’ I was still alive at the end of the proceedings.
Julian: Well, the Dean and Chapter of that time are now dead, I think all of them!
Jean: Our mother had a very close personal relationship with Our Lord, and her bible meant so very much to her. When she first met the Oxford Group, really through my brother and through me, she saw how much it had given to us. But this one thing she fought against - she used to say ‘I think it is rather ridiculous when everybody gets their little guidance books out and writes in them’. Then one day she was reading in her bible from the prophet Habbakuk, which made all the difference to her: ‘The Lord’s answer to Habbakuk. He said’ I will climb my watch toward and wait to see what the Lord will tell me to say, and what answer he will send to my complaint. The Lord gave me this answer - write down clearly on clay tablets what I reveal to you so that it can be read at a glance. Put it in writing, because it is not yet time for it to come true, but the time is coming quickly, and what I show you will come true. It may seem slow in coming but wait for it. It will certainly take place and it will not be delayed.’
And from that day, when our mother wrote those words, she always kept her little quiet-time book. I have some of them at home now that were kept up to the time of her very last illness.
Julian: People naturally wonder about seeking God’s will and getting God’s guidance, and they realise that this is a very important matter. I think I would like to say this first - that I do believe very strongly that if you really have sincerely tried to look for guidance, even if you may think afterwards that you may have made a mistake about it, nonetheless God honours your sincerity and doesn’t allow the effects of the mistake to be too bad, either for yourself or for other people.
But the main point I really want to make is that this is not something which you can just, as it were, pick up the telephone and ring up Tim about, or get the latest Test Match score or anything of that sort, or looking at Ceefax or something. God’s guidance will be given to you at the time you need it and it may come to you with great rapidity and in moments of crisis. If you are living near enough to God you will know what to do, but upon matters affecting things like careers and moving into a fresh job, getting married I suppose (though I have never tried that!) there are very often quite considerable periods of time when you have got to go along quite a long way and God sorts things out for you and you don’t always see immediately what you have got to do. For me personally the way God sorts things out of that kind of situation is largely by showing me what my real motives are and making it clear to me why I want or don’t want to do a thing. Once I have really seen that I am generally fairly sure what I ought to do.
I remember just at the end of my student time at Oxford, I was offered a particular job which I very much wanted to take but the Principal of my theological college was equally clear that I ought not to take it or that I ought to do something else. I had a dreadful time for about a week or perhaps even slightly more about all this and I thrashed this thing to and fro’. I prayed about it, I tried to listen to God about it but it really would not get clear. It was becoming rather important because I had a very important exam coming in a few weeks’ time and this was stopping me working. Finally, I went along and was talking to my Principal one evening, we prayed together and then I went out. I walked up Woodstock Road, in fact I was crawling along the Woodstock Road feeling most depressed and upset about all this and could not see what I ought to do. I remember exactly where the thing happened - I was just passing St Philip & St James Church and I just had a flash of insight, ‘The reason you want to take that job is a wrong reason’. And I saw why it was wrong. I turned straight back - I had been walking at the rate of about one mile an hour and walked back as fast as I could to my rooms. I wrote the letter, posted it off and refused the job. I have never had the smallest doubt ever since that it was entirely the right decision. God is very patient, and he does have to give one time. Then very often I find that one needs the help and wisdom too of other friends who are similarly believing in the guidance of God and believe that God does guide you. They need to be there to sort out all these things involved. There are practical things very often - some of the things may have to do with practical things like pounds, shillings and pence and job prospects, all this kind of thing - that kind of advice comes into it.
I think the deeper spiritual issues of pride and fear particularly about decisions, why you want or why you don’t want to take a particular decision and so on, those are more important and you often need the help of friends about that.
I think it is also very important to bear in mind ‘Well in the last resort it has got to be your decision and you personally have got to take responsibility for this. We will help you all we can to sort out and see what it is, but finally in the last resort this is between you and God and you have got to decide what to do and do it.’ This I think is vitally important. One’s reference to the bible - not, as I see it in the form of opening the book and putting a pencil down with your eyes shut on a verse in the Psalms - but a more informed and understanding study of the bible. The more you study it the more likely you are to see what is involved and things like summaries of bible teaching like the 4 absolute standards can help one again to see what is involved in all this.
I was Head of St Peter’s College, Oxford for 13 years, the second time, and, putting it slightly paradoxically, I think my most important function really was just to be about in the quadrangle. By which of course I mean to be really accessible to people to come and talk to me about anything at any time. This applied both to students and to my colleagues. They didn’t always come.
RAEH: My picture of the head of a college would be someone who had a massive amount of paperwork and had his head down over a desk grinding away a lot of the time.
Julian: It is of course quite true, there is a lot of paperwork to do. I personally had a very good secretary, who helped me very much over all that and it made all the difference that she had a good memory. But the really vitally important thing is your relationship with people and it is what I think is so lacking very often in modern university life - people have got so much more into a kind of 9-5 mentality and that you go home at the end of it. I was blessed with tutors when I was an undergraduate myself who didn’t live like that but who cared for the college and cared for you 24 hours a day. It didn’t make them love their wives any less, probably rather more, but it did mean that you were being properly cared for. These things about generation gaps and so on, they all come very much out of this - a lack of personal caring, that you think of education as something that you put across people, that you give them a lot of facts. It is very important and it is extremely important that people should be taught to work and work hard, and intellectual standards ought to be extremely rigorous. Of this I am quite clear. But what matters in the last resort is that people should feel you care for them and you can only do this by doing it. There is no other word for it. It takes time and it takes thought. But it is so supremely worthwhile.
Time and time again you find that differences between people get resolved if there is somebody who cares enough for the protagonists in the row concerned to care for them both and talk to them both and if and when the right moment arrives, to talk to them both together. So frequently they need this kind of thing, and it wants somebody to be there to give time for this sort of thing to happen, and I am sure this is what the best teachers always did. I am sure Socrates did it, for one! I am sure Christ did it, unquestionably. There are lovely little humourous touches in the gospels about this sort of thing. We are told that Christ nicknamed the two sons of Zebedee, James and John, Boanerges, which is an odd word which is supposed to mean ‘sons of thunder’. I am pretty sure that this was really Christ’s way of laughing a couple of bad-tempered young men out of their bad temper and showing them how silly they were.
You can do such a lot when you help people to laugh at themselves. You mustn’t laugh at them yourself but, if people can be taught to laugh at themselves, they are nine-tenths of the way towards salvation. In all sorts of ways this can happen. I found this with my Arab boys in Palestine. Arabs have a great sense of humour if you can approach it in the right way. It is very British, as a matter of fact. They are very like us in this respect. You can very often find great points on this but they have got to know subconsciously that you care for them, otherwise the situation is hopeless. That I think is what lay behind the remark that Frank Buchman once made to me, ‘He said “Don’t you like those people? It never occurs to me not to love people”.’
So much of education today suffers from facelessness and we do so much that is unfair on people - particularly scientists suffer from this. We keep demanding that they should produce paper after paper if they are going to get on, get promoted, get the position of Chairs and this kind of thing. The result is that we keep them so tied down to their research they haven’t any time to care for their pupils as people and the whole thing suffers terribly as a result. It is very important for the research to be done or the teaching will be bad, but somehow people have got the find the balance between these two things, which is very much lacking at the present time.
About the most important thing the head of a college has to do is to preside at meetings of the governing body. This certainly does call for caring for people and guidance from on high. I recollect my last governing body, just before I left St Peter’s. After the end of term, we were all very tired, a dreadful hot thundery, humid day, Oxford at its worst, and everybody in an extremely bad temper including me. We were discussing new buildings for the College, which involved operations with our Methodist neighbours next door, with whom we had had excellent relationships and great friendships for many, many, many years. But upon this particular point we were at loggerheads and it did seem as though we were on a collision course that was going to throw away all the good relationships of the past years. I had the thought as I sat presiding at the meeting to ask the College to let me have one more shot, personally, to see whether I could sort things out and find a solution with the neighbours. So, I put this to the College and they agreed that I should go and talk to the people next door about it all.
I had gone before the solution was finally worked out, but the actual meeting that I had with them then, we were able to get the thing moving along the right course and finally a solution was worked out which I think actually greatly improved our building plans and which entirely satisfied our neighbours next door. The result to look at now is extremely nice.
The point of issue about it all was the matter of ancient lights - what we wanted to do was going to make the Methodist church darker in certain ways and they, not unnaturally, objected to this. If I remember rightly the final solution was that we modified our plans and the modification improved our things and we also paid for the Methodists to make another window in their church - something of that kind - a fair and proper arrangement. If you have enjoyed light coming through your window for some particular period of years, it may be 20, then that cannot be interfered with by anybody else without rendering them liable to legal process. If you want to do this you have then got to reach some agreement with your neighbours because ancient lights were violated otherwise.
With special thanks to Ginny Wigan for her transcription, and Lyria Normington for her editing and correction.
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