MY LOVE of books goes back more than 80 years, to when I was about five years old. I had started to attend Sunday school, and received a prize that was presented by our parish priest at the morning service. I recollect my name being called out, and, leaving the pew, I marched up the aisle, swinging my arms just like the soldiers I had seen marching past our house. I couldn’t understand why some of the congregation were laughing! The book was The Three Little Kittens, and I still have it today.
Today, our house in the country is full of books, and there is one writer who, in recent years, has had a profound effect on my understanding of the spiritual life. Ian McGilchrist is a neuroscientist as well as a polymath. His two volumes, curiously entitled The Matter With Things, provide — as one reviewer puts it — “a devastating repudiation of the strident, banal orthodoxy that says it is childish to believe that the world is alive with wonder and mystery”. McGilchrist provides a rational and reasoned understanding of the spiritual life. Although the two volumes are expensive, they are worth every penny.
Throughout my life, I have also been impressed by the great Russian writers, and the rituals and symbols of the Orthodox Church. Many years ago, I presented my local parish church, All Saints’, Blackheath, with a Russian icon of the Madonna and Child. I regret that today many church services resemble a tea party rather than an act that touches the hem of mystery and opens up a new depth of spiritual experience.
MORE than 30 years ago, while seeking the release of hostages, I myself was taken hostage, and spent almost five years in strict solitary confinement. For more than three years, I had no reading material whatsoever, and it was then that I began to write in my head. When anyone came into my cell, I had to pull a blindfold over my eyes, and so I saw no one for almost five years. Eventually, I was allowed to have one or two books, and was given a small magnifying glass with which to read them.
On release, I was elected to a fellowship at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where I began to write the book that I had started in captivity, Taken on Trust. When I was freed, I managed to slip the blindfold and magnifying glass into my pocket, and I took them with me to Trinity Hall. Once I had completed the manuscript, I put the two items into an envelope, and handed them to the college. Today, they are housed in the college library as a souvenir of a time when, by some miracle, I was able to transform the darkness of captivity into the light of freedom.
IN THE kitchen of our house in rural Suffolk, there is a small oak dining table. It must have been made more than100 years ago, and is as sturdy as it ever was. It is precious to me; for this was the very table at which I sat with my brother, sister, and parents for many a family Christmas. I have vivid memories of Christmas Day when, for the one and only time in the year, a roasted chicken took pride of place. The table brings back many positive memories, and provides me with a material link to the past, and my family, where, unconsciously, I was receiving an education in values that have sustained me throughout my life.
So, there it is: a book by a writer who has helped me enormously in understanding the importance of the spiritual life and the functioning of the right hemisphere of the brain; two simple items that became symbols of transformation; and an ordinary kitchen table that brings back memories of values absorbed unconsciously, many years ago.
Sir Terry Waite is an author and human-rights activist.
