Although disliking the phrase ‘born again’, which I associated with people who seemed stuck in their conversion experience, this event felt indeed like re-birth, in line with Jesus's dictum: ‘I tell you, unless someone is born from above, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.’ ( John 3.3, The New Testament, A Translation ). Then, at 27 years of age, I had an overwhelming inner experience that rid me of suicidal fantasies I had entertained since adolescence. At university I became gripped by theology, but almost as if ‘I’ were another person: real spiritual life was art, music and pleasure, with a lazy inclination toward Taoism.
At home, however, although there was no active hostility to faith, religion had not been part of life. Religious experience, faith and spiritual contextĪ conventional English private education had ensured I knew my Bible and Book of Common Prayer. Mark 8.35) that we must lose our life to find it, a maxim I return to later in this article. Pre-catastrophe faith had to engage with both a new wilderness of meaninglessness within myself and a baffling sense of transcendent blessedness ‒ experiential encounter with the teaching (e.g. Faith sustained me through physical challenges and depressive periods, return to work and early retirement, but I found myself asking age-old questions: Is there meaning to all this? What is it to ‘live’ rather than merely ‘exist’? How can life be at once so cruel, so tedious, so beautiful? Far from abstract, this questioning was visceral: gut experience (recognising the irony of the image) striving for conceptualisation. Over the following months and years, however, as TPN became normality, my memory of the trauma lost much of its emotional resonance and life began to feel as mundane as if nothing had happened.
The operation was completely successful, and physical existence felt near-miraculous as I came out of the crisis. From a side room, as she was being warned of a not very hopeful outcome, my wife Celia saw me being wheeled in an oxygen tent for a second computed tomography scan. I was revived after 6 minutes of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (for days after the operation I was puzzled why, in addition to the pain in my abdomen, my chest hurt so much). On the way from Accident and Emergency to be prepared for theatre I had a cardiac arrest, triggered, it was subsequently concluded, by disruptive electrical impulses owing to bowel ischaemia. I now live on intravenous nutrition (TPN, total parenteral nutrition, fluids and chemicals pumped direct into the bloodstream through a tube ‒ in my case a Hickman line ‒ permanently inserted into a central vein, thus bypassing the digestive system).
In 2012, while working as a vicar in Newham, East London, I suffered an ‘abdominal catastrophe’ necessitating emergency resection of most of my small bowel and a portion of colon.
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