It’s how we manage the times of hardship that defines us the most as human beings. In the really tough times, nurturing a faith that there will be a light at the end of the tunnel, and finding the strength to carry on despite there being no light, exemplifies what the human spirit can achieve when duty calls.
But I’ve learned something else that many others already know, in that having the capacity to care for another when our light of hope is so dim, brings a light of its own that can outshine everything else.
What follows is another true story of mine, sharing one of the many unexpected spiritual experiences of mine that, at a low time in life, called on me to care for another person, also at an all time low. It raised both of us in unexpected ways, strengthened our faith and gave us the energy to carry on.
Having said that it was also one of the most difficult experiences of my life that affected my reputation, my career and my mental ability to manage immense stresses in my life, when everything was falling apart no matter how hard I tried.
But yet, it provided answers that were more important than all of those issues and deepened my concept of my life, who I was and how I fitted into the realms of the bigger picture, whatever that was.
It is also a story about the power of prayer, something I never really believed in before this happened, but afterward the event the outcome was so destructive and widespread it was impossible to pretend that the whole episode didn’t happen.
My story starts in the late summer of 1988 in Norther Ireland, in a place called Enniskillen.
Around 10am one morning I was getting ready to fly my aircraft and crew back to RAF Aldergrove when a phone call came in to the ops room from base, asking for me in person. It wasn’t a typical question that I was used to in the RAF, but the urgency and the nature of the request was different. Rather than a Squadron boss enquiring about retasking the crew, or a low-flying incident or an unintended border crossing, this question held a different concern to it.
I was on detachment a hundred miles away from home. It wasn’t anyone military on the phone, it was my wife. She had been called into a military base, where she had never been before, at the urgent request of the Squadron Commander.
The conversation went something like this;
“Nigel, it’s going crazy here .. the Squadron has been on the phone asking about you. .. whether you are anything to do with this incident with Elleanor’s family yesterday. Everyone is up in arms, and they are asking ME for answers. I don’t know what to say”
“No one can explain it but you seem to be at the centre of it all.”
“Nigel do you know anything about this?”
I paused for a moment and recalled what I had happened the previous night whilst sat alone on my bunk bed.
“I think so” was my reply. “But I can’t explain it now.”
She said “The ministers from Elleanor’s church, the director of the Hospice, they all want answers, wanting to know where you are and WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN DOING?”.
“Something with Elleanor last night. Something happened at her house, with them. No one knows anything, but you’re in middle of it all.
“They’ve been ringing the squadron wanting to find you.
“I had a weird experince too last night.
“The squadron’s been hassling me. WHEN ARE YOU COMING HOME?”
I knew or at least had a good idea what had happened even though I didn’t have any details, but it was going to be hard to explain it.
And quietly in my heart I had a good feeling that Elleanor had made it through the night.
How could I say “Maybe its me, maybe its God, maybe it’s the universe, I don’t really know. But I prayed for the safe deliverance of a soul last night because that was all that I could do.”
I was an agnostic, a pragmatist and a Member of Her Majesty’s Services, yet deep down I had all sorts of questions that needed answering. I was on a parallel track between my career as an RAF pilot, yet trying to find answers about who I really was, what life was about, what was possible and what life held in store for me. But having kept my deeper questions so quiet for years, this sudden exposure of me and my beliefs was going to take a lot of answering to a lot of people.
I felt uncomfortable about the whole charade being exposed openly to the world. I had a persistent fear of persecution for my deeper beliefs. I knew I was also incredibly stressed out and didn’t want to loose my flying qualifications as that brought extra flying pay that allowed me to make ends meet at the end of the month for my family.
My deep rooted fear of persecution had been there for years; I had a fear of being disconnected from something important to me in my day to day life if my inner search became too public. It was about clinging on to what little respect I had left in my career, respect in the eyes of my colleagues, family, my children. In the military you’re meant to be strong, have control of your faculties and not have wishy-washy ideas about consciousness or the power of emotions.
I also still harboured a nagging shame about sin carried from the teachings of my Church, twenty years before. Teachings of how love ended in crucifixion, of everyone being a sinner and being hopelessly lost unless I supposedly surrendered myself to the cross.
This was where a deep rooted fear arose in me with the aim to try and strip me of my individual thinking and leave me exposed to shame if I dared seek my own answers. A practical lad with a scientific mind, I just could not believe in the joy of the crucifixion or the miracle of the 7 day creation and I yearned for something more wholesome, more realistic, more practical.
Flying back that day I did feel that maybe, at last, aircrew and colleagues around me might understand my slightly different ways if they just took the time to understand what had gone on. They might be more willing to accept me, understand me, and let me rest in peace with my intriguing investigations into the world of psychology, personal growth, spirituality, healing and art.
I thought I would at last gain some credibility for being a person who saw more into life than most others did; a person who believed in empathy, the greater good and the capability for healing to come in many different forms.
I felt a relief that my life was about to turn around, and that I would at last be able to wear a humble credibility for being able to touch people’s lives in a fundamentally positive way. That my search wasn’t embarrassingly futile. That I was a person who had a truer insight into life embedded into his psyche. That I was a person with a more profound connection in the intangible that could, almost, be tested. And here was the evidence, just about to arrive as “The Thing”, the event, got unpacked and understood.
Sadly it wasn’t to be the case.
I wasn’t aware, but I was soon to discover that I would be seen as the devil himself. Cursed with more shame than I can ever consciously remember in my life. Shame building on my already burdened life of toxic shame and unworthiness.
Northern Ireland wasn’t the place to expect religious empathy if one didn’t belong to the right church. Protestant and Catholics have their own gods and each other’s God is merely the devil in disguise. There is only one thing worse than being in the church of the opposition and that is to not to be a practicing Protestant or Catholic at all and yet still be seen to be dabbling in the world of spirituality. I worked as a volunteer in the Northern Ireland Hospice and secretly in the Belfast Samaritans. Both as a non-practicing Christian, but probably with a slightly more Protestant leaning rather than a Catholic leaning. My work in the Hospice was open and public, passed by the security forces as safe to participate as long as I followed the basic rules. My duties with the Samaritans were different. That had to be secret because it lay outside of what was permitted by the military. Security Forces considered there was an exposure to potential threats and my personal safety if my military background became known. I just saw this threat as another hurdle to overcome and did it anyway.
Despite working so hard to find some sense in the mess of life that I found myself in, I got no respite. An officer, in his middle-age, with family problems, career problems, terrible money worries and a chronic sadness stemming from a lifetime of struggling with his own identity, it left a future that seemed colourless and filled with pain. Furthermore, in the Forces in Northern Ireland we were all experiencing the constant, underlying, anxiety of distrust and fear that was commonplace in the 80s. It was an alien feeling for a family used to peaceful surroundings, of not being able to go shopping or the play park or a pub without fear of who was watching and listening. We got silent phonecalls and never knew the caller. For me burnout was fast approaching breakdown and it wasn’t going to get better quickly. I was that unwanted goldfish in a bowl of dirty water that had so many eyes on me. I represented the weakness and vulnerability hated by men in the military. I met so much cognitive dissonance in those days; that scenario where despite there being overwhelming evidence for one reality, the mind just cannot accept it and disregards it.
But despite the drama, confusion and rejection I experienced, there was the warm knowledge that in all that darkness, that an intervention of mine had touched a soul that deeply needed it. A connection had happened that brought light, and peace to someone. It moved a soul from contemplating suicide to wanting to live life again in an unmistakable event, witnessed by many others, in an event unhampered by time or space. It was a little miracle, a little bit of love happening where it needed to happen. A gift that touched the souls of those were ready for it and needed it. It also finally gave me an answer that I had been asking for years; that if I rejected the God that I have been taught as a child, is there anything else at work, that is good, that I can relate to, accept, believe in and actually experience myself? This spiritual experience was my answer.
So what happened?
Well, besides work with the Hospice and the Samaritans I had a keen interest in psychology, psychotherapy, personal development, the methods of healers, and the growth of alternative communities. The interests nourished my soul and gave me answers like nothing else I had done in my life. During this year of personal study I attended a weekend Transpersonal Psychology Workshop in Belfast. To my surprise and shame I discovered how close I was to burnout and exhaustion. I thought, as many men do, that I was invincible. This wasn’t the case.
On this course I met a number of people including a woman called Elleanor. I judged her as an interesting, but slightly reserved thirty year old upper/middle class woman who had a good sense of humour and a zest for life, but someone that that kept her distance from me, and other men. Nevertheless we spent two days on course, going deep into our individual personalities, separating and identifying our subpersonalities and the interpersonal relationship between each.
The final exercise turned out a big surprise for Elleanor and me. In our group of five we had to go deep into meditation and draw an image of what our life purpose was.
It didn’t take me long to see that I was stuck on a beach. Out to sea I could see an island, and that was where I needed to be. Where I could start to heal myself, get away from the noise and confusion of life. Find peace. But I have no idea how to get there. I was stuck. I drew my picture of it on a A3 sheet of paper.
I was the third to share my picture. We discussed it. I could sense Elleanor closing off as I talked about it, so I didn’t share too much, feeling a little embarrassed that I was making her feel uncomfortable.
Elleanor chose to go last. She didn’t really want to share her drawing. She remained in her seat for a while until being encouraged by the group to take the plunge. It was important to the group as this was the last exercise, involved trust within the group, and was the culmination of the weekend which had been quite a lot about defining life purpose. So she opened her sheet of paper and started to talk about it.
Her picture was of a small boat, with an outboard motor, sitting on a shoreline.
She was clearly feeling vulnerable. She pointed to her picture and said slowly
“I am here on the shore.”
“With a boat. With an outboard motor”
“And I need to go somewhere, but I don’t know where”
Her picture was on the floor beside my picture.
She shrugged her shoulders in disbelief and extended an open hand to my picture saying “There is your boat, Nigel”.
And emphatically
“With… a … motor.”
There had been no collusion or discussion between us whatsoever. The exercise had been in silence and we had been at opposite ends of the room.
To this day I don’t understand why I chose the symbology of an island, a boat and a journey. I would always have picked flight as a metaphor for life purpose. But this was after an in-depth, lengthy exercise, at the end of a two day course.
It was more than coincidence, particularly now with the benefit of hindsight. It was an undeniable unconscious handshake between the two of us. Two unique pictures sitting side by side, with a unified purpose. I was to get into that boat and make my journey. Evelyn was that boat. The motor was the energy of compassion and love that was to surround us.
After the course we still didn’t gel too well, but the symbology was too strong to ignore. We stayed in contact, bound by our individual pressures of life. Bit by bit over the next months we shared our individual stories over the phone and discovered that indeed there was a growing spiritual connection between us. Friends, soul mates, not lovers.
She came to explain that at home she was enforced to live a typically strict protestant life , where she was expected to be the homekeeper, the dutiful and faithful mother and wife. I came to know that Elleanor was tired of life. Tired of the demands of her. With two sons grown up and left home and she didn’t know what life held for her in this version of it. Or rather she did, but her protestant surrounding trapped her. She was intelligent, had spirit and fun, and a longing for a life. But her attempts to step out into a more interesting life brought condemnation from her husband and from her church.
Over a period of months her demeanour became increasingly frustrated then angry and then eventually defeatist. As I spiraled into my own maelstrom of life, I lost touch with her apart from a phonecall that we tried to make on a Tuesday evening. The last ever such phonecall happened whilst I was on detachment in Enniskillen
I was exhausted myself. Mentally physically and spiritually. The job, my marriage and money were all taking a huge toll on me. My event horizon was at an all time low. The door to oblivion was just a minute away and I was living on borrowed energy. The high level of attention and energy needed to fly the aircraft safely, undertake a large number of continuous tasks and always be on a high alert significantly draining. Night flying multiplied the stress many times and before the call to Elleanor my crewman and I had completed two hours of night flying, and six hours of day flying all with multiple landings in hostile territory. I was exhausted. I couldn’t even make it to the bar or restaurant for food. I just lay on my bed for half an hour before I found the energy to make the call.
The phone was on a wall phone outside my block. It was dark, cold and damp. I leant against the wall as I started dialing. I felt empty, but I was looking forward to hearing a voice of someone that in part shared my place and stress in life. The pips went, a man’s voice answered, I asked for Evelyn and she came to the phone.
“Hi”
“Hi”
“how you doing”
Silence. A long silence.
“Not so good Nigel”
“Uh?”
Silence again
I knew that something was wrong. This was not like her. She would normally be full of life and chat telling me about what she was discovering about herself, the next crazy idea she had or how she would try and upset her husband’s golf aspirations.
“They are all here”
“Who is?”
“the minister, the laymen from Church. She listed some names including Peter (her husband) and her brother, John”
“ They just won’t stop arguing. Questioning me like I’m a child. Pushing me.”
“What’s it about” I asked. Though in my heart I already knew.
Silence. It was hard for her to find the energy to talk.
“ They don’t even know themselves. I’m tired. So tired of it all. It’s like the Spanish Inquisition”
“I can’t do this anymore Nigel” I’m sorry, I’ve tried so hard, but I can’t do it anymore” Her voice trailed off.
Silence.
“Evelyn?” I tried to get her attention. But it was impossible.
After another silence she said “tonight”
After a year in the Samaritans I knew that tone of voice. She was past hope. Drained. Exhausted. Harried by the never-ending persecution of her Church. Lost in depression. No fight left.
A long, long silence continued. The pips went, I put more money in.
The silence continued. I could hear voices in the background.
I had nothing to say myself but I could feel the blackness surrounding her. The pointlessness of existence. Worryingly, I knew she had the strength to take her own life. She had more personality than everyone else in that room and she was not going to be made a victim anymore. But she was well and truly at the end of her road. And tonight was the night. She was scared, but ready. She just had to put her hand into her handbag when no one was looking.
The muffled voices continued.
Another silence
“I have to go.” “I’m sorry” Her voice trailed away and the phone clicked off. She hung up.
There was silence around me. Darkness. Coldness.
The emptiness around me was colossal.
I knew that this was about to be a defining moment in my life but I had no knowing of which way it would go. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t send anyone to help her, I was over a hundred miles away behind a huge steel fence in a bunker that was mortar proof and bullet proof.
Imprisoned by circumstance. Penniless. I couldn’t call her. I had no money left. I couldn’t do anything to raise her spirits because I was so exhausted myself. It took me ages to walk the fifty metres to where my bunk was and sit on it, dazed, worried, so concerned for her. Feeling out of touch with the world. My own world closing in on me, minute by minute.
In my exhaustion I felt a tremor coming on. A shaking.
I really felt for this person and I knew I really needed to care for her. No one else was. Not in the way that she needed.
In retrospect it was unconditional love that she needed, but I didn’t see it that way. I just saw it that she needed such presence from another human being to do whatever she needed to do. And if it was the end that she chose, then so be it. But her passing would not go without me giving every last bit of energy that I could to embrace her soul, even if it pushed me passed my door of oblivion.
My shaking got worse. I found that I needed to breathe deeply and fast. My focus, my prayers, my wishes were for her safe deliverance and to know that she was loved, loved, loved. Loved as a bright and beautiful person who had done her very best in life and who deserved more.
But if it wasn’t to be, then free will was her choice. If she chose to leave, then she was loved just as much.
I just breathed and shook. The intensity grew.
There was nothing else for me to do. Just me, the darkness, my bunk, my breathing, and my intent to bless this soul. It went on for some time, I guess fifteen to twenty minutes.
Eventually it slowed down. And as I slowed down I sent good wishes to my wife and to another friend in hospital.
I wasn’t in the habit of praying, but this seemed all that I could do. When it all stopped, I fell back on my bunk and dropped into an exhausted sleep.
It took me a while to find out what had actually happened. It eventually came from a phonecall I had with Elleanor a few days after I had returned from the detachment in Enniskillen.
“God, it was amazing Nigel” she said.
“ It was crazy, beautiful”
“I don’t know what happens next, but I’m here! How are you doing? I hear its been pretty hard for you. ”
Timings were important to me. We discovered an indisputable synchronicity. Whilst I was on my bunk Elleanor was going through her experience at exactly the same time.
Elleanor gave me the story bit by bit on the phone, happily and in the upbeat manner I had come to know her.
She said she was in a room full of “those horrible men” from the Church. She was a pawn as far as they were concerned and a pawn that wasn’t acting as they thought she should. They thought her depression was the work of the devil and other people (hinting at me) and she needed to get back to a proper life of being a dutiful wife and faithful churchgoer. How that was to be achieved was the big, misogynistic discussion that surrounded her, but didn’t involve her.
She said “It” all happened after she had taken the phone call from me. Thoroughly depressed she went and stood in her favourite French windows and looked out onto her gardens and the fields beyond.
Her brother, an ally and a confidante to Elleanor, was standing beside her.
She knew that he knew there was something wrong. He didn’t take the Churches side, but felt it hard to manage the conflict in the room and tried to keep out of the discussion, so he did and stood by Elleanor instead.
He knew his elder sister was quiet and sad. He talked to her, but she was just too far into her own thoughts to communicate with him .
Elleanor had indeed decided that enough was enough. Years of coercion, control and depression had taken its toll. There wasn’t a light at the end of this tunnel. It was just a case of waiting until the furore had ended and she was left on her own. It was a given to her that it was time to bring her life peacefully to an end.
But whilst staring out of the window feeling empty and grey, she started feeling a buzzing.
An energy starting above her head. And a light. A nice feeling starting to glow around her head.
She said “This amazing feeling of love grew and grew. It got brighter. Started to surround me. From my head down coming down to my feet. Encasing me. All around me. It was light. Bright colours like I’ve never seen before. Lovely light. Amazing rainbow colours. Never known anything like it before.”
“It was beautiful. It Just stayed there for ages. Like Shimmering and pulsing. Lovely”
“Oh .. John was beside me and he got it too.
She laughed.
“He got a right shock and he kind of jumped back and looked at me and said “what’s going on?” It really confused him. He said he got a shock like electricity. “
“He had the lovely feelings too but no colours, it was in black and white for him.”
“You know John, he’s skeptical of this kind of stuff, but he is also, well he doesn’t believe everything the church tells him. He has his own mind, just keeps it quiet. “
“It confused him. Yes. He didn’t know quite what to make of it. But he said it felt loving and he could trust it. It stayed with him for a while. He kept on asking “whats going on? What’s happenning”
She continued “I think all I said to him was “its okay, it’s alright”.
“I didn’t know myself what was happening, but, you know, I didn’t care, it felt good, like a message. Like was loved, completely. And it was okay”
“The lovely feelings just went on and on. I wish I could describe it better. Colours. Lovely colours. Love. Yes the love. “
“It changed how I felt. Showed me what’s important. Better perspective. And those guys … pfffffffff!
“God, Nigel it was sooo lovely, so loving.”
“those men started kicking off when they noticed something going on. Pushing for answers.“
“John couldn’t explain it to them very well, and boy it all went crazy after that.
“Bloody hell I’m under pressure now. Heaven knows what they are up to. I’m not interested but they have got the bit beween their teeth. They’ve taken your bowl of stones away and all your psychology books. They are saying it’s the work of the devil.”
“Nigel. Oh gosh, sorry its been so hard for you. Have they been in touch again? ”
She didn’t know that my world had since collapsed. However, we laughed about egos and me being the evil monster that was consistently thwarting their plans, them seizing my belongings and my books. The conversation was heavy and sad, but at the same time underneath there was a joy that things had turned out well. The terrible thing that hadn’t happened to Evelyn didn’t need speaking about, and what had happened kind of needed to be mostly left unsaid too. It was too precious to dissect with words.
After that episode it was uncomfortable enough for Evelyn to integrate her new awareness into her old situation and work towards a healthier relationship with herself and her family. For me it was hell.
But, for the first time it brought me something firm to stand on. Deep down it made sense. Even if it gave no one else a clear message, it gave me a clear message about life. Life no longer was only just what I could touch and see. There was more, and it was fundamentally good; unconditional love, sent truly selflessly, had no boundaries. The power of prayer.
Coincidence or not? There is something else. At exactly the same time that Evelyn was in her time of bliss, two other people reported having warm, loving, spiritual feelings that came out of nowhere. They were the two other people that I prayed for and sent loving thoughts towards. My wife and my friend in hospital.
In retrospect it touched the souls of more than I expected in so many different ways.
Everyone knew that something was afoot on the Squadron before my feet even touched the ground. As the story unfolded and the Chinese whispers expanded, I was the centre of a dark , mostly unspoken attention as though I had some guilty secrets to hide.
From that murky goldfish bowl of confusion, with so many eyes peering at me, I think I brought into question for many people what they believed about their inner life, about fate or destiny, about. “Is there a God, or not” or “Is there something outside of us that we can’t see or touch, but is there”.
For most people I think I represented something fearful, occultish, weird. Someone to be avoided. Of course there were no tangible answers for them other than a host of civilians up in arms, but I had the certain belief that the event brought about difficult questions for many people around me. Something brought new information which challenged the old, comfortable security of people’s former reality. The issue of Cognitive Dissonance: holding onto old beliefs despite there being new information that conflicts with old beliefs.
I was left in disarray. That something so good could turn out so punishing and demoralising, added more fuel to the fire of my utter unworthiness of existence.
A few accepted me, many looked awkwardly at me, and some distanced me. It was a very, very hard time for years for me and my family that eventually led me to the cliffs in the Antrim mountains, and to consider ending it all.
In hindsight it was a tragedy only for my ego and for my ego. Yet as destructive as it was for my old self it was part of the birthplace of a new, more enlightened soul, even though I didn’t have a scooby about the Hero’s Journey or the Bridge of Fire or whatever at that time.
And it answered wholeheartedly and once and for all, the great big question for me. “Is there something more out there that I can’t necessarily touch or see, but exists, that is God or maybe not God, but that is good and loving and kind?”
You know my answer already. I hope it instils something similar in you too, that there is indeed more, everywhere, and it’s a belief worth hanging onto.
Love is an Action 
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