Martin Israel did his find his way, but over his lifetime it proved to be a hard path, and in the second half of his life further difficulties, and the resurgence of the early childhood trauma returned. He writes that whilst being able to help unhappy, distraught people his intense sensitivity inevitably left him fearful of insults, misunderstandings, and hostility. He led highly valued retreats to hundreds of people, and offered many spiritual direction and healing. One person who saw him notes that in the sessions there were frequent long silences, but ‘people in their hundreds came to him for spiritual guidance … he seemed to have an intuitive (some would say psychic) understanding of them and their deepest spiritual needs’.

When it was suggested that Martin became a priest he was as he describes it, hastily baptized and confirmation was performed on one evening so that his Christian allegiance was established. He did not undertake ordination training, but was fast tracked through by church hierarchy; however, he was just as quickly dropped when he became ill with Parkinson’s and deteriorating health, and never felt quite the same about the church. He experienced an acute breakdown at this point, and an inability to walk which led to a dramatic near-death experience. He was later restricted to a wheelchair, and looked after by devoted carers.

When criticised for never seeming to enjoy himself, he responded with: ‘Both my misery and my hope are part of the universal scheme of becoming … I can only begin to be a proper person when I am no longer enclosed in myself.’ This last part served to refute the comments that he was avoiding his own inadequacy by involvement in the lives of others, as did: ‘The secret of happiness is to lose oneself in God’s business, which is the regeneration of the earth and the mending of wounded relationships.’ He believed that openness to suffering and vulnerability was the price to pay for spiritual understanding.

His beliefs rested on his personal experience, and included some outside the traditional Anglican belief system. For example, he exulted in what he describes as the mental freedom and mystical beauty of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita of Hinduism, alongside the Buddhist Dhammapada and the Tao. ‘There is breadth and tolerance in the pages of the Gita that have no equal in Western text.’

Unlike the mainstream Anglican church, he took a non-judgemental attitude to all forms of sexual behaviour, except, and quite understandably to the sexual abuse of children. His underlying belief was ‘The whole purpose of life is to know that transformation of fear to love.’

Martin saw evil as an integral part of creation – the dark force of reality; and understood we have to learn to live creatively with the whole: both good and evil. He believed that with mystical awareness and faith, God can be understood as beyond good and evil. ‘God’s grace is universal and eternal. It never fails. He is the universal creator of the bad no less than the good …’

In his book Life Eternal Martin explores what he calls ‘the great transition’ between life and the after-life. He looks at the evidence of near-death experiences, and draws from his own experiences of being alongside the dying, including after the person’s death when during sleep Martin found that he was accompanying them to the threshold of the after-life popularly symbolized as a door, but one that he could not then go through. He staunchly believed that God’s love decrees that all of his creatures, including animals, will eventually be saved, ‘the state of heaven has to include everyone because the absence of even one creature diminishes it’.