The Bright Gold Tornado (ePub)

Rev Mac grew up in a relatively affluent suburb of a city, where beaches, pleasant surroundings, good friends and censorship guaranteed a leisurely, luxuriant life. This lasted until attendance at the excellent distant high school, whereupon the discipline of learning at an unnecessarily hard institution, left only weekends and holidays to gather hyacinths for the soul.

Church reinforced the cordon sanitaire that unrealised wealth and polite society, had created for Rev Mac. It began with immensely tall, robed, god-like priests who swished as they glided around in smartly pressed linen. Candles, flowers and organ music aided gentle reflective monotones, and when he was old enough, the body and blood of Christ released Rev Mac, spiritually satisfied, back into the new week.

Rev Mac went to a good University. Confused, and without any reason other than familiarity, he learned Science and Mathematics. Much to his surprise this required an immense imagination: something he had hoped he would never need again when he dropped English. University opened Rev Mac’s eyes and closed his mind. By the time he left, Rev Mac promised himself he would never study again. Science ruled and the need for faith was unrecognised.

However Rev Mac’s life did not turn out to be a rational progression. Events while on holiday after graduation, turned him back to the Christian faith and opened his mind again. Travel, an Anglo-Catholic marriage to a highly intelligent woman, having a son, an evening lecture at Oxford, lecturing at a University summer school, co-inventing a board game, ordination and finally a colleague at work, forced Rev Mac to rethink everything, and allowed him to hypothesise for himself.