General Introduction
A HERMIT'S TALE
PART
ONE. Planted and Transplanted
The journey of spiritual transformation is often concealed when Providence is at work. The route-changes and unexpected diversions, the traffic jams and collisions in our spiritual journeys often reveal their hidden purpose many years after they have happened, becoming clear to us only when we make time for retrospective reflection.
Today, I would call myself ‘a Jewish Contemplative’. It took me many years to see that I had been on a journey that was designed to produce that realisation. The journey is not over—and never will be— but I am now aware that a vocational metamorphosis was being effected step by step over many years.
I was born to non-religious but nominally Christian parents in north-western England, in Birkenhead on the Wirral, in the early 1950’s. My genetic ancestry is North European, predominantly Welsh & English (with smatterings of German-French-Russian and Sudanese) and though there were family rumours of Jewish antecedents in the patrilineal line, I have never had firm evidence of this.
Most significantly, I was an only child and my parents allowed me enormous freedom to develop an imaginative interior life from a very early age. I was a sociable child and joined in all the street games of my childhood friends, but I was equally happy to play at home alone....mostly being a wizard writing spells and potion recipes (in the years before H.Potter!), or as a pioneering spaceman travelling in my wardrobe). Both of my parents held several jobs down simultaneously in order to survive. My father was thus a “Bird’s Eye frozen-food salesman/Liverpool taxi driver/Oxton Village undertaker” and my mother was a “Dashley’s Meat butcher/ Liverpool Vernon’s pools-entry sorter/Prenton sweet shop assistant”. For them, making ends meet was a never ending struggle, and so I spent a lot of time in the house without them while they juggled with the timetables of their multiple jobs. I also cooked lunch for myself from the age of ten onwards as they were both out at work.
I think I had already ‘caught’ religion by the age of six, ostensibly after watching the 1960’s BBC television series Paul of Tarsus starring Patrick Troughton. The morning after the first episode was broadcast, I was to be found preaching to the nations: Dressed in full Middle-Eastern-style finery fashioned from the family bed-sheets and towels, in the vestibule of our ‘Coronation Street’ style terraced house— I propped-up my Bible on a wooden pedestal ashtray stand and delivered my prophetic message to anyone who happened to be passing the open front door. One of my passing congregants was Mrs. Williams the local Lollipop lady. (A Lollipop Man or Lollipop Lady was a part-time traffic warden at a zebra crossing near a school. They stood beside the Belisha beacons and bore huge STOP signs resembling lollipops. Younger readers may need to perform several google-searches to make any sense of that statement. Other readers will now be aware that we are currently in one of the “frothy entertainment” sections of this story).
From that day onwards (and until I moved to Secondary school in my eleventh year) whenever I approached her zebra crossing on Borough Road, she greeted me affectionately as ‘Paul of Tarsus’. From this I assumed that my preaching as a six year old had been effective. Patrick Troughton went on to play ‘Doctor Who’. I have exchanged the towels for a tallit (prayer shawl) but am otherwise more or less the same deep down. Birkenhead seems to have recovered from the shock of my debut appearance relatively unscathed.
The house of my childhood was a musty two-up-two-down Victorian Terrace in Whitford Road, Higher Tranmere, later declared insanitary and dangerous to public health and forthwith demolished in the 1990’s. During my family’s residence there in the 1950’s and 1960’s, there were only five books in the entire house. Two of them were religious: a Masonic Bible belonging to my father and kept (in its original and pristine boxed condition) in his bedside drawer and my own (battered and bruised) Paul of Tarsus Bible. Another one of the five was an ancient and disintegrating edition of the Chambers Dictionary which had been given to me with great love by my mother’s brother, Edward Jones. I read it as though it were a text book intended to be read page by page, from cover to cover. That gift contained the fully-detailed etymological information that many other dictionaries lacked, and it provided me with a precocious vocabulary and much of my English language knowledge.
The remaining two books in the house were kept in a cupboard by the side of the kitchen fireplace, where they kept company with the building’s indigenous silverfish,Whitney blankets, and various hoarded remnants of decaying cloth that my mother had put aside for repairs. The two books were (i) a 19th century collection of Daguerreotype photographs of South East Asian culture, and (ii) an A1 size volume of indeterminate but considerable age entitled The Naval Battle Plans of Cornelis de Witt (1623-1672). Both books were brought back from the Second World War by my father (who had served in the 8th Army in North Africa) when he was in Germany for a ‘clear up’ operation immediately after the Armistice. Alongside these two books rested a (never displayed) twelve inch diameter pewter plaque of Saint Cecilia, the patron of musicians, playing a portative pipe organ.
These three items were strangely prophetic as I became a music teacher and organist and also ended up living in Indonesia with a long-lasting connection to a family of well known Dutch ethnomusicologists. (Greet Heins of Amsterdam was my second gamelan teacher and her talented daughters, Marleen and Saskia, taught my Frodsham High School students Javanese music and dance with generosity and great kindness. My first Javanese gamelan teacher was the composer Alec Roth of Preston, who kindly interrupted a busy schedule to give me tutorials in Liverpool Lime Street train station cafeteria). The connections between those items in that cupboard and the later parts of my life-story may seem to be extremely tenuous connections to you, but to me they have always felt like a revelation of Divine playfulness.
As a pre-teen child, I spent most of my free time devouring the books in the religion, history, and mythology sections of Birkenhead’s wonderful Central Library (built in neo-classical style in 1934). Thanks to the foresight of Ms. Pinches, the local historian and senior librarian, I was prematurely admitted to the enormous Adult Library at the age of ten as I had already consumed all the material on those subjects housed in the Juvenile Library. With the memory of the moment’s excitement undimmed, I can still recall the frisson that accompanied each step that I made as we walked from the Juvenile Library to the Adult Library: Ms. Pinches led me by the hand, through the magisterial marble and wrought-iron entrance arch, to the polished oak and brass-hinged gate where, with measured ceremonial formality, she introduced me to the beaming counter staff as an honorary member. I was issued with four cardboard adult tickets and ipso facto the Doors of Academia were opened to me. I walked or bicycled there each week or fortnight after school, taking my little pile of study materials home in a canvas haversack to be hungrily devoured in solitude at home.
At Primary School things were not quite so idyllic. Though he was a very kind and able educator, Mr. Oliver—the Headmaster of Woodchurch Road Primary School—did not regard my choice of studies and their obsessive intensity quite so positively. He summoned my parents to the school to tell them that unless I ‘got my head out of Ancient Greek mythology and started to focus on improving my appalling Mathematics, I would be nothing but a source of worry for them’. I cried a lot about this— justifiably in a way, as my mathematical and logical skills are atrocious to this day—but I was rescued by Mr. Donald Clutton who was the visionary class teacher of Woodchurch Road’s class 4B. He inspired me to read and write English Literature, and he encouraged me to study history with the passion he had rightly identified in the midst of my wayward daydreaming. Donald Clutton bumped into me by chance on Thurstaston Common thirty years later and despite the passage of so many years, he recognised me immediately and even greeted his former ten year old pupil by name. He later became Head of History at Gordonstoun. May his memory be for a blessing.
My parents did not attend any church except for weddings, christenings, and funerals, but they gave me the freedom to go wherever I liked, and between the ages of ten and sixteen I had been allowed to discover and attend services and Sunday Schools in: St Catherine’s Church (Church of England); St Paul’s Church (Scots Presbyterian); Maitland Meeting Hall (Evangelical); and, for one abortive session only, Grange Road Youth Group (Salvation Army).
After these early experiments in community membership, I settled for several years (aged ten to fourteen) in Christ Church, Claughton (Low Church CofE) as a choir member sitting in the choirstall of Wilfred Owen the war poet. There I was taught musical literacy and basic keyboard skills by the charismatic organist, Mrs. Dorothy Dearnley. Her inspirational tuition and her passionate performances of Messiaen’s ‘Dieu parmi nous’ on the Church’s Father Willis organ turned me, virtually overnight, into an aspiring musician and composer. Aged ten, and with emerging chutzpah, I wrote to Olivier Messiaen personally to tell him this and received in return a signed photo, a brochure on the organ of Saint Sulpice, and a sheet music score of his prayerful and uplifting motet, ‘O Sacrum Convivium’ .
In the midst of a burgeoning and stormy adolescence,
I surprised everyone (except G-d) by concluding my search for a Christian home
by becoming a Roman Catholic, setting up a new religious base at St. Joseph’s
Church in North Road, Birkenhead. The church had a remarkable pipe organ (Two
manuals and pedalboard) which was often played by one of the parish priests,
Fr. James Molloy, and I was delighted to
be invited to act as his page-turner
during his twice-weekly practice sessions.
On his passing, I inherited his complete organ-works library and, not
having a piano or keyboard at home, I was fortunate enough to be granted permission to practice
regularly on the church’s pipe organ myself—something I did every weekday on
the way home from school. Armed with Fr.
Molloy’s legacy and a fair amount of zeal, I proceeded to teach myself to play the organ.
Fr. Molloy’s library included the principal organ works of J.S.Bach and Josef Rheinberger. Using the money I earned playing at Church weddings at St. Joseph’s and across the Wirral, I added scores by Charles-Marie Widor, Karg Elert, Louis Vierne, and Flor Peters, together with the slower and blissfully ecstatic movements of works by Olivier Messiaen.
The many hours of organ-loft observation that I had spent as a page-turner for both Dorothy Dearnley and Fr. Molloy proved to be valuable free tuition for me, and I served as parish organist at St. Joseph’s Church for the following four years.
To this day I would claim that playing such an instrument is one of the most satisfying performance activities available to a musician. In the world of instrumental music, nothing can match the challenge and exhilaration of controlling multiple keyboards, a pedalboard, swell pedals, draw-stops, tabs, manual and foot piston buttons, and written scores simultaneously—the experience is like being composer, conductor, orchestra, and audience at one and the same time in each intense moment of performance.
Music and spiritual experience often go hand in hand. R.Nachman of Breslov assures us that it can that it can act as a foundation of true attachment to G-d. and he went so far as to claim ( in Likutey Moharan I:3 and Likutey Moharan I:54) that it can even lead to a level of prophecy. In the light of this, it was not accidental that it was also at St. Joseph’s, at the tender age of sixteen, that I first discovered the mystical writings of Teresa of Avila and Juan de la Cruz, and simultaneously began the regular practice of contemplative prayer in earnest.
oooOooo
I set up a personal connection with the Discalced Carmelite Convent in Oxton and began serving Mass there and doing small gardening jobs for the nuns each Saturday morning. In return, I received the spiritual encouragement and personal support of Sister Mary Immaculata O.D.C. She called me ‘her little brother’ in the spiritual life, and we met—on either side of the parlour grille— for a spiritual stock-taking/progress review, several times each year for many years.
I had decided when I was child of seven or eight that I wanted to be a vicar (Anglican minister) when I ‘grew up’ and that original aim was simply transmuted into its Catholic format after my going over to Rome as an adolescent. To the enormous grief of my dear parents, I announced that I intended to become a Roman Catholic priest. My parents would have preferred it if I had remained CofE and married to continue the family line, but they did not stand in my way and they eventually accepted my decision with love—and so I left home shortly after A levels to become a Discalced Carmelite monk. I was eighteen: full of self-regarding religious zeal and almost oblivious to the searing pain I was causing them.
The Order of Discalced Carmelites is an order of friars and nuns whose rule of life originated in the mediaeval Christian hermit community on Mount Carmel near Haifa, a community which was given its official status by the giving of the Rule of St. Albert of Jerusalem in the early thirteenth century C.E. From that that date onwards it spread throughout Western Europe until it split into two factions: the Calced Carmelites and the Discalced Carmelites. The Discalced [i] branch is the more contemplative and eremitical of the two branches and has its form from the hands of two sixteenth century Spaniards of Jewish ancestry: the aforementioned Teresa of Avila and Juan de la Cruz.
Interestingly, the tradition within the Order claimed that there were also Jewish and Islamic hermit communities living on Carmel who were hermits following the tradition of Elijah the prophet. But I am unaware of any archeological evidence to support this conjecture. To this day, near the ruins of the original Carmelite monastery at the seaside base of the mountain, there is a ‘Cave of Elijah’ which is a place of worship frequented by Jews,Moslems, Druze,and Christians.
Speaking very generally, there are two principal forms of Christian monasticism. Eremitic (individual reclusives living in isolation) and Cenobitic (groups of celibate devotees living,eating,and working in common). Three monastic orders combine both forms: the Carthusians,the Camaldolese, and the Discalced Carmelites. The Discalced Carmelites are communal hermits whose life consists of simple community services recited in church, two separate hours of silent ‘mental prayer’ in common each day, and a great deal of time spent in one’s solitary cell in silent work, study, or contemplation. Liturgy is simple and spartan. The two hours of ‘mental prayer’ usually take place in the church with all the friars sitting or standing for each of the two hours in silent free contemplative prayer.[ii] Though their emphasis is clearly on contemplative prayer, in recent years the Discalced friars have undertaken a more active ministry as well, but the nuns—to their great credit— have zealously maintained the purely contemplative lifestyle to the present day.
Looking back on my time as a Carmelite, I can now see that I was too young—in experience as well as in years—to have realised what I had taken on. I am ashamed to say that I lacked perseverance and felt the call of the secular world more than I ought to have done. Though I was observant of the temporary vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience to the letter, I found observance of the latter two almost unbearably difficult to maintain. After a few restless but deeply formative years in that Order (in Oxford, and then at Ushaw College Durham) and before taking permanent vows[iii]—I decided to leave the community, and to return to secular life. It came as a shock to Fr. Bede Edwards O.D.C. who had plans that I should become a historian under his mentorship at the Teresianum in Rome, and to the community who had expected me to stay for life.
There is also a part of me that still views my decision to leave as a shameful rejection of the intimate relationship that was being offered to me. In recent years, as I age and can look back on my life, I can appreciate just how selfish and short-sighted that decision was. In Christian monastic circles, Solemn Profession as a monk or nun is regarded as marriage with the Divine.
Ditching a Divine Partner is never an insignificant matter and it has far-reaching consequences.
When I left the Carmelites in 1976, my Novice-master, Fr. John Bernard Keegan O.D.C. told me that he was absolutely certain that I would one day return to what he believed was my true calling—a dedicated contemplative lifestyle. He was right. But it did not happen quite as he might have envisaged it.
oooOooo
During my time as a Carmelite monk two events helped me to see that my technicolour helter-skelter tour through Christianity was only the very beginning of a return journey to my true spiritual home. The first event was reading a book entitled “Jesus the Jew” written by Geza Vermes in 1973. The book had been written only a few miles away from the Chilswell Priory (on Boar’s Hill) that was my monastic home and had been donated by the author to our community library. This scholarly book opened up a criticical study of early Christianity which gave me a good intellectual shake up on the mythology vs history plane, and it helped to pave the way for me to begin the move out of Christianity.
The second event was a providential meeting with a visitor to the monastery: Reform Movement Rabbi, Lionel Blue. The meeting was highly significant as it led to my conversion to Reform Judaism in 1992 and ultimately to my conversion ki halacha as an Orthodox Jew in 2016.[iv] It was also the beginning of a lifelong friendship, and his practical support for my work as a composer and religious writer was unconditional and unfailing. (It was his advice on publishing this very text that is referred to in the General Introduction above).
My debt to him is beyond measure.
Lionel’s version of Judaism was never my own, [v] but despite profound and fundamental differences in our conflicting approaches to the halacha, and despite the fact that we eventually ended up on opposite sides of the Orthodox/Progressive religious divide—we were nevertheless in perfect agreement in holding that
- (i) prayer is a two-way conversation with G-d,
- and (ii) that compassion and respectful consideration for others are the hallmarks of the truly righteous in all denominations or religious groups.
In 1974, when we first met, he gave my group of Carmelite novices a lecture on the Pesach Seder and when he sang the Ha Lachma Anya with quivering kavana, my world stopped and was transformed. Quite simply: in the deepest conscious level of my soul, I already knew and recognised what I was hearing, and as the room seemed to fade and give way to another world hidden just behind it, I was given the first glimpse of my true home.
I left the Carmelites and the contemplative lifestyle in 1976. Both my parents died shortly after that date. After several months of disheartening unemployment (and four weeks of hard labour as a cowherd in Storeton Hall Farm on the Wirral) I began a degree course in Music and Educational studies at Hope University Liverpool.
There I was fortunate to have the composer and professor Stephen Pratt as my composition tutor and personal mentor, and the concert pianist, Michael Young, as my long suffering piano tutor for four blessed years.
Michael Young is the only pianist I have ever heard who could make the piano sound like a legato instrument (in the Berg’s PianoSonata ), and also like a symphony orchestra in full Mahlerian expansiveness. At my first lesson with him and on hearing that my favourite composer was Mahler, he immediately broke into an electrifying impromptu performance of memorised extracts from Mahler’s Symphonic works.
Stephen Pratt was perhaps the most gifted educationalist I have ever encountered. He was endlessly supportive and helped me produce my first composition (entitled ‘SINAI’) which was a setting of the Sh’ma for vocalist, orchestra, percussion and a shofar solo—and he inspired me to go on writing for many years to follow.
In private conversation Stephen Pratt had declared me to be a ‘cultural hermit’ and to expand my experience he (literally) sent me to an Albert Hall Prom Concert on 24 August 1979 that was to change and re-direct my musical career for ever. He had noted, in my own compositions, certain similarities to the gamelan music of Java, and the Promenade concert in question featured a gamelan performance by the Akademi Seni Karawitan Indonesia of Surakarta under the direction of Sri Hastanto, coupled with a performance of Messiaen’s Trois Petits Liturgies that featured Jeanne Loriod on ondes martenot under the baton of Simon Rattle.
(Gamelan is South East Asian percussion music performed on large sets of bronze or iron metalophones and gongs. Vocal solos and choruses,bowed and plucked string soloists are sometimes added. The ensemble has no conductor but is “directed” by the drummer and/or the bonang or rebab player.)
For me, that concert was Earth Shattering beyond words.
I stood on tip-toe through the entire Gamelan section of that concert, straining to get a view of the performers, utterly paralysed in musical ecstasy and frozen in a trance outside of time on hearing this music for the first time: and from that day on, I became a gamelan student and teacher.
After obtaining a B.Ed hons. degree in Liverpool, I turned my energies to the forging of a career in music teaching and educational management. I spent over twenty ferociously workaholic years doing that in Primary and Secondary schools in UK and in South East Asia—and made a good and secure living doing so.
I taught the usual spectrum of Western
serious and popular musical genres, and
managed Music departments in Stanney
Comprehensive School in Ellesmere Port and then at Frodsham High School near
Warrington. My special area of focus became the teaching of Javanese Gamelan in
British schools, and this was the case
for the rest of my teaching career.
I was involved in the introduction of Javanese Gamelan into the English National Curriculum in the 1980’s, and my childrens’ Gamelan group from Frodsham High School performed on British television, in the Queen Elizabeth Hall and in the Albert Hall during the national Schools’ Prom in 1984. The students had built the entire set of instruments themselves and students Jonathan Clark, Sorelle Kane, Alison Kaye, Gary Barlow, Kitty Prisk, Julie Cowin, Penny Argust, and Andrea Julyan[vi] produced new gamelan compositions and lyrics in traditional style to extend its repertoire. Here are some of the beautiful lyrics written by Sorelle Kane in 1984.
"Seized by the eyes. Its pallor taking me higher. From shining skies eternal. Spread the Wings of Peace. Penetrate the mist. Like sun inscribed on shadow. The sharpest point of Talon. Unclasp the Golden secret. For a glimpse everlasting. My veins run pure with gold. Lift me higher. You carry my soul. I have at last the key. Then falling...falling...falling........ "[vii]
Although I was working in Frodsham which is near Warrington, I lived some distance away in rural Storeton Village on the Wirral. After my parent’s death, I had bought a stone-built cottage on a mortgage which I soon realised was totally beyond my means. Most seriously, I found that I could not afford to heat the place in winter. The second-hand car in which I commuted to work was on its last legs and I could no longer afford to run it and pay the utility bills. It would seem that Mr Oliver’s concern over my mathematical innumeracy was not so misplaced after all. To this day it is still my area of particular incompetence.
In December 1984, one of my fellow teachers at Frodsham spotted an advertisement in the Times Educational Supplement for a teaching post in Jakarta, Indonesia and joked that it might solve my financial and heating problems in one blow—giving me some hands-on and indigenous gamelan experience into the bargain.
I appreciated the joke (and her concern) but replied that I was happy in my job and lacked any desire to go abroad. I was never a keen traveller and have usually settled in one place without leaving its close environs for years at a time, but relocations have often happened against my will, out of the blue, or by ‘coincidence’. To me, it has always felt as if there was a 'Pillar of Cloud' at work.
Moved more by the freezing cold of that December evening in Storeton than by any cultural or career considerations— I applied on impulse for the job in Jakarta and was interviewed in London. I was woken up a few days later by a telephone call from Geoffrey Tomlinson, the school’s Principal, offering me the post—and I surprised myself by accepting. I was still half asleep at the time and as I put the phone down it suddenly dawned on me what I had done. I had set a process of enormous change in motion: I was about to leave my much loved native Wirral and go to live in an unknown country on the other side of the world; in a type of school which was totally beyond my experience. I need not have worried. Mr Tomlinson turned out to be yet another one of the charismatic teachers I have been so fortunate to know, and I had the happiest years of my teaching career under his benevolent leadership.
I moved to South East Asia in 1985 as the principal Music Specialist at the British International School Jakarta and soon after, I became Director of Music during the ambitious and enormous expansion of that school under Ronald Stones. He was to become my long-term and highly supportive employer as I later moved on to become his Director of Music at the Tanglin Trust School in Singapore where I was responsible for the general music education of thousands of expatriate children.
In both Jakarta and Singapore I was fortunate enough to teach children—from Nursery to A level age—in two educational environments that could only be described as ideal. They deserved that epithet because of good leadership; dedicated and highly competent teaching colleagues; and because the children taught there were totally motivated to enjoy and derive the maximum benefit from a happy time at school. Good schools are always more about people than equipment and facilities. Fulfilled and appreciated staff will always be found in a classroom of happy children—and vice versa.
The students that I taught are
the children I never had, and many of
them are still in touch with me to this day. As is so often the case, they don’t
realise that they taught me much more
than I ever taught them.
If you made it this far...congratulations. I realise that this part of “A Hermit’s Tale”
is purely background and much of it would only interest people who are either
Scousers, or personal friends, or musicians........but it was necessary to state
much of it if readers are to make sense
of the more spiritual parts of the tale which will follow in later installments
of the tale. Hope you enjoyed reading it.
©Nachman Davies
Safed 2023
ENDNOTES
[i] So called because the ‘barefooted’ branches of monastic orders were newly reformed and stricter communities, often embracing signs of religious poverty. In fact the original Discalced Carmelites wore alpurgatas (rough espadrille sandals made of dried grass-fibres).
[ii] Nevertheless, Juan de la Cruz recommended that these two hours of what we would call silent hisbodedut were spent in the fresh air in a natural environment where possible.
[iii] A Roman Catholic monk or nun usually takes Simple Vows (in a ceremony of Simple Profession) on an annual basis for several years, and then makes a Solemn Profession of Permanent Vows after which they are considered dedicated for life. The two states resemble an engagement followed by a marriage.
[iv] Progressive/Reform Jewish conversions are not recognised by Orthodox religious courts. For Orthodox Jews, the only valid conversions are those conducted “ki-halacha” (according to traditional Jewish Law) by the court of an Orthodox Beis Din.
[v] Orthodox Jews insist that the oral law (halacha) is authoritative and binding. Reform and Progressive Jews frequently make community and individual choices which do not adhere to the traditional codes of Jewish Law or the directives of contemporary Orthodox halachic authorities.
[vi] Under the tutelage of the Heins sisters, Andrea also performed
as principal dancer, taught some of the other dancers herself, and designed
and made many of their costumes. Jonathan was a creative genius in both the
arts and craftsmanship, but sadly died very young. Julie
became an Anglican minister, Sorelle a
gifted poet and visual artist, Alison
became a professional composer and a professor of composition at the Royal
School of Music, Penny a lawyer. Kitty
and Gary went on to become practical musicians, Gary as leader of the pop group “Take That” and Kitty as a Gamelan
musician and ethnomusicologist to this day.
These were the “builders” of the gamelan, but actually each and every one of the Frodsham group was a star.
[vii] The 1983 Queen Elizabeth Hall performance can be viewed HERE and the 1984 Albert Hall performance HERE
