Exploration into God

THIS BOOK, the third of a trilogy, follows A Vision of the Aquarian Age and Operation Redemption. As I worked on it, I suddenly knew that its title must be "Exploration into God". What presumption I thought! Who am I, who have no qualifications whatever as a theologian, to use such a title? Yet I knew it was right and fitting. The phrase comes from a passage in Christopher Fry's play "A Sleep of Prisoners". Prisoners of war, locked in an empty church at night (itself a powerful symbol) talk and banter, joke and smoke, but one after another they are taken over and speak from higher inspiration out of the spiritual world. Finally Meadows, the Sergeant, touched with the higher consciousness, says this: The human heart can go the lengths of God. Dark and cold we may be, but this Is no winter now. The frozen misery of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move; The thunder is the thunder of the floes, The thaw, the flood, the upstart Spring. Thank God our Time is now when wrong Comes up to face us everywhere, Never leave us till we take The longest stride of soul men ever took. Affairs are now soul size. The enterprise Is exploration into God. Where are you making for? It takes So many thousand years to wake But will you wake for pity's sake? I have quoted this frequently in lectures, since it gives a powerful expression of the age we live in and the hope of a change in consciousness which will usher in a New Age. While Principal of Attingham Park, I invited a distinguished theologian and Shakespearean scholar to conduct a weekend course on the work of Christopher Fry. I spoke of my admiration of the above passage and to my great surprise he responded: Oh, Christopher went badly wrong there! There can be no question of our exploring into God. All we can do is to pray and wait for God's grace to be granted to us. And then I saw that the emergence of the spiritual and holistic world view in our time was calling and challenging us to go beyond academic or traditional viewpoints and really take our own initiative in exploring into the field of God-thought. So I offer it, with due humility, as truth.