A Year of Grace

"This is a book that sent me into religion ; a book by Victor Gollancz called A Year of Grace . I didn’t know whether all this religious stuff wasn’t just somewhere over the rainbow sort of thing, and I got hold of this book and I was introduced to it by person after person after person who said it contains the truth. A lot of religious people find books that contain the truth for them. Edith Stein found the biography of Saint Teresa of Avila and said, ‘That is the truth.’ I would say that for me this book is the truth. And I made pilgrimages to the places of the people in the book. I went to the Russian Orthodox Church in Paris to see where Mother Elizabeth had been. She was a refugee from the Russian Revolution who became a nun, and she used to look after Jewish children during the Nazi occupation and she ended up at a concentration camp with crying kids heading towards the gas chamber and she said: ‘I’ll come with you, so it isn’t so bad, and I’ll hold you.’ And she went into the gas chamber with them. When you find a story like that…Then there was a British soldier bayoneting a mutineer in India and the mutineer who was dying said to him: ‘You too are divine.’ The books is full of these stories, Christian, Jewish and Muslim. And I began to see that this was the company of heaven and I wanted to become part of it. This wasn’t a fairy story, this is reality. In a certain way, yes, but I wasn’t sure if I was a ventriloquist and my inner voice was a dummy. Then I saw in this book that people had given their lives for this and they had the ring of truth about them. This is the company of heaven. And I wanted to say that line: ‘If you get there before I do, bore a hole and pull me through.’ When we die I think time and space die with us and I can’t imagine what existence means without that. In this life we already know there’s another dimension to life. A lot of people feel it. Heaven exerts a force like gravity. You don’t see it but it pulls you towards it. Surely. And I think heaven pulls us all towards it. If we consent to let ourselves be drawn we can taste heaven in this life. That is, I think, our final home."