Oliver Essame, Brackley, Northamptonshire I may not be properly qualified to contribute to this column as I don’t feel as though I have been on a quest, and I can’t recall that I ever did.
Perhaps I was discouraged by an early acquaintance with King Pellinore's tireless search for the Questing Beast, sometimes heard, occasionally glimpsed, but always just out of reach. The SOF sieve is a more arresting image. If only I could be sure about what we were supposed to be sifting and where lies the value, in what falls through, or in what is retained? A gold prospector would be hoping that when everything else has fallen away a few bright nuggets will remain. I suspect I am more like a gardener, sifting out stones in the preparation of a seedbed.
My mental sieve fills up pretty quickly and needs to be regularly shaken. First into the mix was my education. Initially, a little Sunday school and an occasional evensong. Then, two boarding schools. The first was austere and disciplined with chapel twice a day, unaccompanied plainsong and lots of exercise. The second was a traditional public school, but one that was embedded physically and spiritually in the precincts of a great cathedral. From the age of eight I had spent very little time at home, especially as my parents were doing some sifting of their own at that time and I went with them to summer schools at Combe Springs where I was introduced to the works of Gurdjieff and JG Bennett.
Nevertheless, I briefly succumbed to the charms of Anglicanism and decided to read theology at Oxford. On the way to my interview I re-read John Robinson's Honest to God, which was published earlier that year, and I was looking forward to being part of that discussion. But it wasn't to be. Apart from a happy term with David Jenkins as my philosophy tutor, it was all pretty dull stuff. Much of it valuable, but hardly inspirational. The sieve was already pretty full by this time, but mostly with stones. Time for a shake.
Armed with a theology degree I became a theatre stage manager for a while, but after a chance meeting at a yoga class, I found myself teaching at a school in central India and became acquainted for the first time with the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Gita. The life we led there was quite monastic and the discipline of doing practical work, taking on an unfamiliar role, developing one’s capacity for attention and for controlled physical activity was very similar to that advocated by Gurdjieff. I found that the practical life suited me and when I came home I retrained as a furniture maker.
In my family we had talked endlessly – an almost continuous conversation with my parents about religion, philosophy, the arts, and the good life, well lived. We read many of the same books and admired the same people. In 1981, they gave me Taking Leave of God for my birthday. We joined the SOF conversation at the annual conference in 1995. My mother, who had become a Quaker and was then well into her 80s, was keen to go and had asked me to keep her company. Up to that point I had never been to a conference of any kind and I had managed to avoid becoming a member of any organisation, but two days later I was a member of SOF and had undertaken, with others, to form a local group. I have been to all but one of the annual conferences since then.
I need my sieve to relieve me of the accumulated debris, the mental bindweed, of a lifetime of reading, thinking and talking about religion. The good stuff falls through and, with luck, becomes fertile ground for different ideas and new ways of expressing them. Any gardener will tell you that soil will get compacted and unproductive over the years, you need to dig it over, remove the stones and weeds, give it a little nourishment and let the air in. For seventeen years SOF has been an important part of this process for me; it will be for years to come.