Had it not been for the onset of Covid, I would probably not have written my book! I had just retired from my Portlaoise & Ballyfin parish to live with my spouse in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand. It was 2020, when the Covid restrictions were at their most severe. On arrival, I spent 15 days in a lockdown hotel near Suvarnabhumi airport in Bangkok.
Even in Chiang Mai, the lack of opportunity to go outside, and to have contact with others, meant that almost my whole time was in our home. It’s a pleasant, spacious house and the garden is lovely. But the sense of not going out became a real focus for me to settle down to a daily pattern of writing.
Rainbows & Windmills began as a kind of memoir, but the material gradually moved from my memory and my heart on to the pages of my laptop, and eventually to the form which has now reached the shelves of a bookshop near you!
A particular focus on spirituality – strangely, outside of formal religion – began to frame the content of my personal stories and anecdotes. Only then did it become clear to me that I was developing a ‘person-centred spirituality’, a phrase which I’d never come across before! Free from the constraints of a church I’d served all my adult life.
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I grew up in a church family – my father was a priest. I worked between school and college for only a few years before I proceeded to become a priest myself. I was mostly a serious sort of Christian with quite a number of human weaknesses – and I wanted to belong to a community which could generate change in the world.
Rainbows & Windmills gives you an insight to some of my confusing childhood experiences, and also an idea of how I became a more open person due to the influence of working in a prison community. It wasn’t that I needed to become a prisoner in order to grow deeper – I needed to stop preaching and listen to other people’s pain. In turn I began to understand some of my own (albeit white, male, middle-class) pain.
My challenge in prisons was to hold that spiritual space safely while being immersed in the culture of an organisation which, in many ways, was just as oppressive for staff as it was for inmates. I managed that – just about – by having regular sessions of psychotherapy where I could dump my own distresses. Gaining some personal ‘inner space’ meant I could offer prisoners a non-judgemental ear that might resonate with their own particular needs.
Having moved from Ireland where Catholicism was the de facto established church, and I was in a small minority, I was now a priest in the established Church of England which afforded me a certain leadership responsibility – in that I was deemed to be the co-ordinating Chaplain for all the churches, and other faiths.
This was ecumenism plus. There was a need to ensure that each faith representative had a role which contributed to what the whole ‘team’ delivered. Not only inmates, but staff too, could see this as a healthy progression from where each looked after ‘their own’. For instance, when visiting the segregation unit, the Methodist chaplain would see all the inmates there – on behalf of the Team that day.
This became known as a ‘generic’ task – something which could be done by a person of any denomination, and, eventually, of any faith. Obviously Muslim worship would continue to be led by a qualified Imam – and Mass would be celebrated by a Catholic priest. Such activity was identified as ‘faith specific’. This gradually led to a different emphasis on recruitment – in that candidates were now being assessed on their ability to work within multi-faith teams rather than being ‘faith specific’ only.
This process was spiritually enriching. it resonated with prisoners, many of whom had little or no religious background. Many staff, too, saw this development as appropriate and positive, regardless of their own personal attitudes to religion. Part of my job was to recruit faith representatives from mosques, synagogues, gurdwara and temples – everywhere I found new flavours of faith, as diverse and delicious as the food on offer.
Each of these faith communities was encouraged to hold celebrations of their feast days inside the prison as well as in their places of worship. This allowed many of us in the prison community to learn more about other faiths and feasts. And, invariably, the prison kitchens would respond to the call to provide appropriate fare! Can you imagine the fun that prisoners had on such occasions? Fun in prison!
And then we begin to realise how key it is for our spiritual growth to have fun – to remember that in Christian teaching it is only ‘as little children that we enter the realms of heaven’. How complex the religious institutions have made faith! Surely it doesn’t have to be wearying and repetitive – joyless? The word ‘joy’, uttered in a church context, seldom evidences any particular indication of fun at all. A serious fault, since FUN = PLAY = JOY = LEARNING = GROWTH.
Rainbows & Windmills will help you see how your own life experiences bring you wisdom and understanding. You are the author of your life. Using some well-known practices, such as silence or fasting, you can deepen your awareness of the whole of life, and grow to spiritual heights beyond your imagining.
Rainbows & Windmills by Peter Tarleton Stewart is published by Columba Books. For more on Person-centred spirituality check out the website
