Waterloo Station in the early 1970s

Harry Williams describes some of the times when he experienced glimpses of glory. He defines this as a meeting between himself and ‘some other which was alive – a living reality’. He discusses how the sceptical can reduce such experiences, ‘explaining’ away such moments with this or that theory, but how for him, the experiences were enough to convince him of the power of the truth.

He sees how what he calls ‘the encompassing mystery of Godhead’ revealed itself to him as a living mystery because it refused to leave him alone. In one experience, when he was a curate in London, Williams walked in Regents Park where with snow on the ground the park was amazingly beautiful – he sums the lovely scene with the frost lit by late afternoon sun. All should have been beauty and love, but the feelings aroused were of despair, and a deep anguish that he was somehow excluded from this glory that surrounded him. He felt a huge gulf between himself and what he saw: as if exiled from Eden. The glory revealed to him an inner emptiness and dispossession. This contrasted with an experience some years later, when swimming in a warm sea, he had an experience of union with the natural world, and so could say to himself: ‘Whatever life holds for you, nothing can take away the bliss of this moment.’

Discerning how glory can be present in ordinary things, such as a walk in the park and swimming in the sea, but in both these there was a need for discernment. Four years after the swimming experience, Williams was on a bus in Trinidad- a journey of about two hours, but as he writes he was unaware of the time:

I was caught up in a bliss which it is impossible to describe. It was an experience of the ultimate reconciliation of all things as Love, a living presence, flooded over me and swept me into its own radiance, combining in itself an infinite grandeur with a tender personal intimacy.

Another time Williams was in a crowded cafeteria at Waterloo Station, the glimpse of glory came with the force of a revelation that the place was Emmaus.

The tea and buns being consumed by the crowd was the broken bread in the midst of which Christ’s presence was revealed; and I had once again the immediate certainty of some ultimate reconciliation in which everybody was caught up because they were all filled and alive with God’s homely but surpassing glory.

At the heart of these moments of awareness there was a rich reality of redemption – and the deep knowledge that ‘all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.’

One of the less likely occasions when he experienced a glimpse of glory was in a cinema watching A Star Is Born. He’d gone feeling depressed and defeated, but then in the film an older woman character spoke of the necessity of perseverance, and how you had to be tough and believe in yourself and so get up after failure and try again.

The words of this matriarchal figure came to me as the voice of God. They thrilled me. And in the thrill I was aware of God’s presence with me in the cinema giving me new life and inspiring me with fresh courage…. The matriarch’s utterance undoubtedly verged on the corny. To speak to me deeply and powerfully by means of it seemed to me grotesquely funny. I couldn’t deny the reality of the experience, but it was precisely its reality which made the occasion of it so hilarious. There was no knowing where God would explode next. … God does indeed make himself known to us by means of what we feel, and that our emotions can often be the angels of His presence.