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The author describes his book as a religious biography. Though it is about religion, that which binds, it is inevitably about the life of the man, Harry Williams, who in 1969 resigned his post as Dean of Chapel, Trinity College, Cambridge and lecturer in theology to become a member of the Anglican Community of the Resurrection. This biography is part of a logical progression, the clue to which is contained in his paper in Soundings , in The True Wilderness and is restated in his preface to True Resurrection : ‘I have long felt that theological inquiry is basically related to self-awareness and that therefore it involves a process of self discovery so that, whatever else theology is, it must in some sense be a theology of the self, a view corroborated in the Orthodox tradition.’ Ten years later he writes about and from this self, about change of self.
This book lay face-downwards on my table for a while with the author's photograph facing me. Whenever I set eyes on it — high forehead, large ears, half a smile—a smile spread over my face regardless of external circumstances. Imagination crowned the author with a dunce's cap and I could no longer quell the thought that this book is about a fool and his folly, a divine fool and divine foolishness, conflict and resolution. At times I felt as if the hand of the divine jester, the trickster, was at the wheel and, as I turned the pages, the archetypal theme of betrayal surfaced again and again.
His first memory, when he was three or four years old, of his image of God is frightening. It followed on being informed against by his sisters for stealing an apple from a dish of fruit, for which his mother punished him ‘playfully’. The story she read to him that night was about a boy who, not having owned up to a minor crime, was persecuted by a voice repeating over and over again ‘Remember thy Creator’. That first God image was the oak chest in the nursery. His imagination created ‘a superstructure which inclined inwards until the