"SOME DAY I'LL FIND YOU"

Over twenty five years ago, a friend who was trying her vocation in a religious community gave me some of her theology books. Amongst the Commentaries and Systematic Theologies was a little paperback of Sermons, entitled "The True Wilderness" – it was much thumbed and about to fall apart. As I read them I was introduced to the spirituality of a man called Harry Williams, a priest with a remarkable Christian story, and who under God had had a remarkable influence on many Christians of my generation. He died earlier this year aged 86.

Harry's journey of faith was not easy, though it began with relative certainty – the child of an evangelical home, who had discovered the Catholic tradition of Anglicanism, and served as a Curate in one of its best-known churches, All Saints, Margaret Street in central London, and then as a Tutor at Westcott House Theological College in Cambridge, before moving in the 1950s to be Dean of Chapel at Trinity College. During his time there he was Tutor to Prince Charles, and assisted in conducting his marriage to Lady Diana Spencer in 1981.

The Cambridge years were, however. a time of great turmoil and un-making, when old certainties crumbled and he suffered a prolonged breakdown. In his autobiography he was quite honest about the major causes, his repression of his sexuality, and the way in which his religion had become life-denying and a flight from self-awareness, rather than life affirming and life-accepting. By the grace given to patient friends (including the poet John Betjeman), and a psychiatrist (who was not a Christian, but who was recognized as God's agent of resurrection) this wilderness experience became slowly and gradually a point where new life began, and where there was healing, wholeness and acceptance. Many of the Sermons in the book date from this time, and, whilst not autobiographical, reveal how real in his experience their themes had become. He wrote later that until this point his preaching had been rather "like someone unmusical, but who enjoyed a good tune, who had tried from books he had read to describe the quality of Beethoven's quartets" But now there was reality and connection.

So much of his journey thus far had been with false and inadequate images of God; much of his life from this point on was a discovery in experience as well as in the mind of the living God, who in Jesus promises that we might have life abundant. The journey continued, and his autobiography, entitled (from the title of a Noel Coward song) "Some Day I'll Find You" – spoke of the journey into fuller knowledge of God, which is not complete this side of physical death.

All this was an experience of resurrection – dying in order to come to fuller life. His later book "True Resurrection" talked of the experience of resurrection in our lives in the present, as well as in our future – again it clearly comes from personal experience of the power of God to reach into our depths and make us new.

In being made new, his life changed quite dramatically, and in the late 60s – already a popular spiritual writer, as well as a perceptive and challenging theologian – he discovered a vocation to the Monastic life, entering the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield in West Yorkshire, where he remained for the rest of his life, sharing the daily round of prayer, scripture and sacrament until ill health limited his contribution.

Harry was not the typical image of a monk, and it is to the credit of the Community of the Resurrection that they could contain him and provide a stability in which he could write, think and pray. Though increasingly he retired from the public stage his books remained in print and have been an encouragement to many, especially those despairing of institutional, managerial religion and feeling themselves banished to the margins of the churches. He gave them a vision of a truer, more authentic Christianity. Bishop Michael Hare-Duke in Harry's obituary in "The Guardian" wrote this: "Had he been able to compose his own funeral address, he might true to form, have taken its theme from Edith Piaf's 'Je Ne Regrette Rien'. But there must be many thousands who regret that we never found the opportunity to tell him how much we owed him and how much we loved him."

With all God's faithful people he shares in the fuller resurrection life which he had already begun discover in this life, and of which he was an agent by grace to many he had never known or met. May he rest in peace and rise in glory !

Roger Clarke