• Some time later, when I was still feeling tired, strained and frustrated, I was invited by John Wren-Lewis to a party. It was 17 April 1970, the eve of my thirty-sixth birthday, and I was wearing casual clothes. The occultist Richard Gardner had also been invited to the party, and he was reading the Tarot cards (using a deck he had, after some research in the British Museum, designed and marketed himself) and doing some palm-reading as a party turn. In a spirit of fun, and with the usual feeling that there might be something in it, I asked him to tell me my fortune. He wrote down his remarks as he made them, and gave me the sheet of paper afterwards.
• As he explored my hands with a powerful magnifying glass, he told me: "Spontaneity is your best friend. An important influence enters your life greatly affecting your career. In fact completely changes it, thrusting upon you the necessity to sustain your own being - otherwise you will lose contact with your true nature. Basically you are the stuff that self-made men are. You are likely to achieve some considerable distinction or fame. Later in life you would lose your way by forgetting to be true to your nature. Not bad money prospects. Your interests and career aims will completely change as the years go by."
• Although these oracular declarations were open-textured enough to apply to a very wide range of alternative situations with equal accuracy, I felt quite impressed. Next, as Gardner spread the Tarot cards out before me on the table, he said: "Shows indecision over a journey which involves a gamble. Shows an influence around you holding you back. Suggests that you do not get clear with your major changes. An opportunity for greater freedom presents itself. It is wise to take it. Otherwise the safe way comes to an end. You stand a good chance of freeing yourself from a too strong female influence. Decision seems to be what you need to aim at."
• I considered these words carefully. I remembered Saint John Bosco's saying he would take good advice even from the devil, and, therefore, saw no reason for dismissing Gardner because he was reading cards. My mother was a very strong female influence. She had brought me up a Roman Catholic, saved and scraped to feed and clothe me, taken me over a mile each day to attend the nearest Catholic primary school, instead of sending me to the state school, which was only ten yards away. She had followed my career closely over the years with her interest, her love, her money to help me achieve my present position as a Catholic priest, becoming in her eyes an important and G-d-like figure in the world to which she belonged, and in which she had been almost a slave to a life of drudgery. To leave the Salesians and my ministry in the official Church would blow our shared world to pieces once and for all, and it would give me greater freedom.
• My psychoanalysis was by this time approaching its natural termination, with myself analysing the counter-transference, and I saw little point in unnaturally prolonging it just to satisfy the superiors' feeling that I was not "normal." I wanted to be free to organize my time, instead of having to hang everything else around three fixed hours in Harley Street each week, however agreeable I might find my analyst's company.
• I did not seem to have any realistic grounds left for thinking I would have much scope for my activities as a Salesian in the second half of 1970, and I felt it was only an unworthy escape from the personal responsibility of decision that was making me hold on in what had become an increasingly impossible situation.
• Moreover, it was increasingly obvious to me that the more I agitated for change - change that I saw as progress - the more those disinclined to such change hardened in their opposition to the positions I was trying to stand for. Thus, not only for the sake of peace in the house, but, more importantly, not to hinder the efforts of those promoting change at a slower pace than I but yet along lines I approved, I decided I should, in Paul's phrase, become anathema for the sake of Jesus, and seek to leave the Salesian Congregation and to be freed of the legal obligations of my priesthood, at least for the time being, so that no one could mistakenly think I was trying to say in the Congregation's name what I was putting forward solely as a personal view.
• My recent experience had taught me that psychoanalysis and training in group-dynamics, even when allied to my academic attainments, were insufficient tools for the task of community renewal. I was, therefore, extremely interested by an article entitled "The Religious Revival" in New Christian for 5 March 1970 in which Ann Faraday had drawn attention to the work of the Esalen Institute at Big Sur, California, which seemed to have become the focus of a major movement in the United States for intensive psychological and spiritual training.
• This movement, the human potential movement, seemed to have an encounter movement as its spearhead. The movement aimed to draw out new "super-normal" potentialities in healthy people rather than to adjust people to society's present norms or institutions, and it emphasized the need, in modern industrialized life, for reawakening bodily sensitivity as a complement to the achievement of psychological insight. Its training courses included yoga exercises and meditation, as well as straightforward psychological techniques like psychodrama and dream interpretation.
• Whether or not my future association with the Salesian Congregation and the Catholic Church developed within the context of an official priestly ministry, and even if some Church authorities might be slow to accept my collaboration in the task of community renewal once I had left the official ministry, I felt I should like to learn all I could about the encounter movement, and was delighted when, on 4 May 1970, Lord Beaumont of Whitley wrote to invite me to meet Michael Murphy, the founder of Esalen, and his team of leaders, for an informal discussion during a garden-party at his home in Golders Green, which Malcolm and Ruth Stewart also attended, as well as Monica Furlong, the Bishop of Woolwich, and several other London-based leading-edge personalities.
• The actual occasion of my final decision to leave the Salesians came a little later, when Mary Doohan, the organizer of the Little Way Association, complained to the Rector of Battersea about some perfectly orthodox remarks I had made one Sunday in a small chapel in Cedars Road, Battersea.
• The Roman Catholic Church, I said, had, perhaps, millions of years ahead of it, and from an evolutionary point of view, it was barely beginning to cut its first teeth, and to waken up to the implications of its own mission in the world. Growing teeth was something a developing child found painful, but it was a necessary stage in human growth.
• Roman Catholics in England had hardly recovered from the upheavals and wranglings that were a real, though a marginal accompaniment to the translation of the Mass into English a year or so previously. Any change in the celibacy ruling, although a marginal matter from the theological point of view, would lead, because of its emotional importance, to an even more perplexing and potentially explosive state of confusion.
• It would, therefore, be misleading to stress the marginal character of liturgical changes or of modifications in the celibacy rule. Such matters were, indeed, marginal to Catholic faith in the sense that one's attitude to them did not necessarily have any direct effect on one's decision to believe in G-d or not, to believe in the Trinity or not, to believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ or not, and so with the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the teaching on supernatural life and grace, the place of the Virgin Mary in the Church. Yet, despite all this, celibacy and liturgy stood at the very heart of the daily living out of the Catholic religious commitment.
• Mass in English instead of Latin had been a big change. To admit women to the priesthood would be a great novelty. To expect parishioners to provide financial support not only for their priests, but for those priests' wives and families; to hope they would adjust smoothly to having as their religious leader no longer the familiar paradoxical combination of unassuming simplicity, benevolent genius, and mystical prayer, or, alternatively, of blundering arrogance, smug complacency, and belief in the magical power of the Church's ceremonies, but instead a witness to the value of Christian family life at their own level, was not presumption, but it was a very large expectation, even considering other parallel modifications of parish structure, and it was always unwise to make changes of that sort too hastily.
• People tended to approve of the rules and regulations they were used to, or found convenient, or believed to be in accordance with their private picture of the ideal state of affairs. Yet for many in 1970 the ideal state of affairs was incapable of legal definition. It was right and proper that human beings were left free to live their own lives in their own way to the greatest extent possible. To presume to legislate for others was a big step to take. Some laws were needed, but good laws showed no favouritism.
• It was time for Catholics to be thinking of their responsibilities in society at large. As Christians they were committed to serve the interests of all their fellow men, and could not be inward-looking with an easy conscience. Although only responsible for themselves, they were responsible to everyone else as well, i.e., if they really believed in the doctrine of the people of G-d as the one mystical body of Jesus Christ.
• In the Second Vatican Council the Church had acknowledged that her mission was essentially a mission to the world, and all Roman Catholic theologians admitted that the ruling on priestly celibacy could be changed. The issue was in some ways a sociological one. The Church had freely imposed this law upon her priests in circumstances different from those of the present day. Just as the Church was still free to change her own laws, so she remained equally free not to change them.
• For the greater our freedom, the greater our responsibility. It was this sense of responsibility which made me very much aware of the urgent need to discuss the question in depth, giving it all the time and attention it needed.
• It was no help at all to focus attention on the alleged immaturity of priests who wished to get married. It was idle to accuse opponents of change in the law then in force of being out of contact with reality. The Church had no need of a general lay-about nor a free-for-all. She should not burn out her best energies in deciphering the possibly already obsolete and irrelevant lessons of her historical experience. She would not commit herself blindly to any untried blueprints for progress.
• It was necessary to get rid of any feelings of future shock we might have, and in a spirit of faith to cultivate a sort of supernatural emotional openness, a sense of the Church, an attunement to the voice of the Spirit. Roman Catholics, be they Popes, bishops or carpenters, believed that G-d would never abandon his Church. They had to trust him in this question, even when they felt the need to distrust themselves.
• Many things were uncertain. But if anything in Christianity was clear, it was that G-d wanted all men and women to have a frank, outgoing, creative and responsibly active love for one another. In discussing the celibacy issue each would do well to argue for his opinion, not for himself; to speak in the interests of truth, not of custom nor expediency; to appreaciate and encourage genuine growth, instead of clinging to an obsolete past or projecting himself blindly into an imaginary future.
• To leave the Salesians after twenty-four years' contact was not easy, but growth means change. Father Williams had told me that he could find no work for me within the Congregation, and that he could not allow me to seek a University appointment as a Salesian. He made it clear that this was because of his feelings about myself, not because of any opposition to the idea in principle. Some priests of a progressive turn of mind would have preferred me to remain in the Congregation and fight things out. I, however, feared violence, and felt it would have been grandiose and melodramatic of me to think G-d expected me to bear the whole burden of the Congregation's teething troubles, not to mention those of the Church, on my shoulders. I had tried my best, and now had to detach myself from one life and begin another.
• Emotionally speaking, I felt Father Williams had been putting me down, and I could have killed him. Intellectually, I harboured no grudges. Unlike the Jesuits, Benedictines and Dominicans, the Salesians are not called as a rule to theologize and philosophize. It was not really a fault in Father Fedrigotti to be uninvolved in the present theological and philosophical ferment to which Father Girardi has made so many valuable and distinguished contributions. Naturally, I felt pain over the fact that my own academic gifts had not been put to greater use. I recognized, however, that young Salesians in England when I was teaching them had needed other things as well as intellectual learning. Generations might pass before Catholic theology could really assimilate the Second Vatican Council. Meanwhile, at the pastoral level, the Roman Curia seemed content to soft-pedal and even back-pedal on its teachings. As my mentality was already in development towards Vatican III, it was hardly a strict necessity for every Salesian.
• In choosing to apply to Rome for dispensation from all the legal obligations of my priesthood, instead of merely asking to be released from my religious vows as a Salesian, I was, therefore, deliberately avoiding any action that might seem to blame the Salesian superiors for an ideological stand which was, after all, still an official line in Vatican circles, despite its conflict with the teachings of the Second Vatican Council as I had understood them. One of my motives for so doing was my realization that my vendetta against Father Williams was the dramatization of a secret need to murder my father. By his suicide my father had abandoned my mother, and I knew now that I could have killed him for it, just as she could have killed him for it. She lost her fingernails when he did it, the claws with which she would have secretly liked to tear him to pieces. My love for my mother makes me hate my father and all forms of legalism; my love for my father makes me resent diverting any of my energies away from intellectually powerful activities.
• On 15 May 1970 I wrote to Pope Paul VI asking him to release me from all the legal obligations of my priesthood. Among other things I said:
• "The present use of the non-infallible forms of the ordinary magisterium, the obtaining canonical institutions for the exercise of authority in the Church, the classical theory on religious life, prayer and meditation, the legal obligation of celibacy for the ministerial priesthood within the Latin rite, and the official doctrine on the relationship between the stuctures of the Church as a juridical institution and its charistmatic reality as a living expression of the paschal mystery, are all quite incompatible with the explicit consciousness of their Christian faith already arrived at by the more progressive Catholic theologians, although not yet officially adopted by the magisterium.
• I accept the doctrine of papal infallibility but must in conscience be free to express things as I understand them in my own context and my own situation. I acknowledge the value of positive celibacy, but cannot accept that any positive law can substantially limit my freedom to marry. I worship G-d, but cannot reject the world."
• I said I had felt it was inappropriate to evade the personal issue by asking to be transferred to some secular diocese whose bishop shared my theological vision. To avoid leading a life that was in contradiction with my understanding of the Catholic faith, to avoid confusing ordinary Catholics by simultaneously fulfilling their expectations with respect to the discharge of my institutional rôle as a ministerial priest and highlighting in public the shortcomings of the present state of the institutional Church, and to make a positive response to G-d's call obscurely manifest in the signs of the times, I felt bound in conscience to ask to be relieved of my canonical duties and obligations as a Catholic priest. I, therefore, asked to be reduced to the lay state.
• After leaving Thornleigh College, Bolton, in 1952, I had given twelve years of my life to preparing myself for the priestly ministry, and I had lived as a priest for six years, since my ordination in February 1964. As a committed Catholic, I accepted the Church's teaching - once a priest, always a priest. At no time did I have any intention of ceasing to live, and write, as a priest.
• I had found, however, that the non-laicized priest was sometimes not free to preach the Gospel. He was not free to live his priesthood. There was a lot of superstition. When a priest stood at the altar or in the pulpit, many Catholics wanted him not to ask questions, to discourage thinking, to express, possibly, some joy about the 'next' life, but certainly sadness about notable features of this one. Parishioners liked their priests to be above them. They liked to respect their way of life. They were extremely anxious not to live a fully Christian life of a priestly sort themselves.
• I felt this was all wrong. The priest had to share the life of ordinary Christians. All Christians had a priestly mission to fulfil.
• I found I had to hand a legal process called laicization. Strictly speaking, it has nothing to do with the spiritual reality of priesthood, with the substance of the priestly life, or with the religious and theological dimensions of the Church. But because the Roman Catholic Church is also a complex, institutionalized structure governed by detailed, legal machinery, ordination gives the Catholic priest economic security, a specific rôle and status in the ecclesiastical structure, and certain clearly defined rights and duties. The effect of laicization is that the priest no longer has this security, this rôle and status, these special rights and duties. He becomes like the ordinary members of the Church, save for the fact of his remaining always a priest.
• Towards the end of May 1970 I left Battersea, and after staying a few days with Nurse Joan Wells and other friends in Kingsmead, moved to a small basement bed-sitting-room I rented at Number 2, Lennox Gardens, in Knightsbridge. At the end of November 1970 I was formally questioned in his study at St. Joseph's monastery in Highgate by Father R. McConnell, CP, who had been appointed by Cardinal Heenan to conduct the canonical process in respect of my application for dispensation from all the onera of the priesthood. I stated under oath (including also an oath of secrecy while my case was still sub judice) that I had always been glad to be a priest, that I would still welcome any opportunity of exercising the priestly ministry consistent with my conscience, and that I was seeking only a dispensation from my canonical obligations for reasons of conscience felt on 15 May and still felt on the day of my official interrogation, which lasted some hours.
• The propriety and even the morality, or immorality, of the present legal process for laicization is seriously questioned by contemporary theologians, and some priests have felt it is wrong to make any official request for laicization for this reason, and have taken matters entirely in their own hands. While I have already made clear that I am sympathetic to their point of view, I personally did not find it helpful to confound into one the two distinct questions of my own individual petition and of the general nature of the canonical process. I was not given sight of Father McConnell's actual report, but I answered all his questions within the framework of the Roman Catholic systems of canon law and moral theology at that time.
• Accordingly, despite my tentative experiences with the Persian nurse and my at first mildly sexual encounter with my Swiss medical-student friend, I quite properly denied under oath that I had ever had any difficulties regarding chastity, other than the clearly sinless though unusual relationship with Carlos Alberto before my ordination. Several traditionally approved Roman Catholic moral theologians teach that the secrecy of the confessional gives every Catholic the right to deny under oath matters not publicly known which he has confessed, and for which he has received forgiveness. As regards those trivial matters which do not constitute grave matter for confession, it is equally clear both in law and in theology that what is not grave matter for confession cannot be substantially matter for detailed questioning in ecclesiastical processes of this kind. For this reason, any priest who feels a question that is put to him is designed to find out about such matters, has, I suggest, quite simply failed to understand the question as it occurs in that particular institutional context.
• At any rate, Pope Paul VI granted me my dispensation on 5 February 1971, with effect from the date of my acknowledging its receipt, which I did as soon as the settling of the postal strike allowed me to do so. Henceforth, I was forbidden to say Mass, to preach, to hold any pastoral office in the Church, to be the spiritual director of students for the priesthood, to lecture in Pontifical Faculties of Theology or in seminaries. However, I was still recognized as a priest, and authorized to hear the confessions of the dying, if they so wished - even, though the likelihood of such an eventuality's arising is not great, in the presence of the Holy Father himself. Finally, I was encouraged to continue to live as a loyal son of the Church.

• EPILOGUE

• Nudity can be the symbolic expression of our wish to be completely open with one another, and we feel embarrassed and ashamed whenever we feel ourselves unduly exposed to the unwelcome scrutiny of persons not related to us in ways we can recognize as appropriate. Adam and Eve both went naked and thought it no shame. King David went leaping and dancing nude in the Lord's presence. At the Naioth in Romatha King Saul stripped off his garments and stood nude before Samuel in ecstasy, and then lay on the ground naked all that day and night. Yet, when the priests went up to the altar, they avoided mounting by steps, for fear of exposing their nakedness.
• Jesus Christ was never afraid of being exposed for less than he claimed to be, and he did not want his followers to hide from the world, but to let themselves be seen, indeed, to let their light shine brightly before men. "I am not asking that you should take them out of the world, but that you should keep them clear of what is evil. It is not only for them that I pray; I pray for those who are to find faith in me through their word; that they may all be one; that they too may be one in us, as you, Father, are in me, and I in you; so that the world may come to believe that it is you who have sent me" (Jn 17:15.20-21).
• I have met with many difficulties in my life, and I feel my free enjoyment of life was sometimes restricted without this being due to any fault of my own. I saw that I could never be thoroughly free save in terms of my own personal achievement. I had to make myself. I had to choose the behaviour that met my needs. I had to decide about my own attitudes in life and form my own sense of values. This involved my exploring the approaches of other persons, and my tuning in to the general feeling with as much sensitivity and discernment as I could muster. None of this, however, could substitute for my genuine involvement in living free. Maturity is not just any sort of self-involvement. It means a life that is also self-involving.
• I have not found this an easy programme. Quite apart from the problem of evil and the question as to whether life is worth living, there was my insecurity and anxiety about my future. Life is full of unknowns. To take any definite stand in life is to commit myself to many unknowns which will only emerge in the future. Like marriage, with which it is not necessarily incompatible, my commitment to the Catholic priesthood is for better or for worse, or rather it should be always for the best. It is commitment to growth. It means setting out on a voyage of exploration. For there is nothing in this life on Earth about which I can pronounce a final and conclusive word. Like Abraham (figure4.jpg) and Saint John Bosco I have to learn to abandon myself to G-d in faith. The fellowship of the Catholic Church, like individual men and women, is always evolving. We have here no lasting city and my only security lies in G-d who strengthens me, in Christ whose body we are.
• Increasing birth control, the introduction of synthetic foods, and the growth of automation have provided more wealth and more leisure. We can plan our life together, explore new forms of sharing, move in new, relatively self-sufficient environments. The texture of our individual and social life is increasingly open to reliable analysis. A computer-linked, world-wide communications network (oxford01.jpg & oxford08.jpg ) makes us alive to our developing possibilities. Our freedom is progressively enlarged.
• The past is no longer read as a map of the future. We know nature can be changed. There is no longer any monopoly on truth. There is nowhere an exclusive claim to our allegiance. Dialogue is here to stay. The future is in our hands. We have no excuse for idleness.
• I feel that my own response to the needs and signs of our times should be greater wisdom and clarity in my Christian judgment and behaviour amidst the vortex of the changing contemporary scene. I have found dialogue difficult, but the sharp conflict between generations, or between progressives and conservatives, only leads to increased and painful losses on both sides. Christian leaders must be among the first to study the salient and more significant signs of the times systematically and in depth, but, much more than that, they must act now. The Church was not founded to crucify Christ in his mystical body, but to celebrate the joy of his glorious Resurrection. Come, Lord Jesus!

• POSTSCRIPT - 1996 + RESURRECTION I+N CHAOS
• Whoosh… Almost twenty-five years have now elapsed since that Monday morning of 13th December 1971, when, using the sleek, green Imperial "Good Companion 5" portable manual-typewriter, still in my possession, which, shortly before my first encounter in Rome with the metaphysical meditations of Don Giulio Girardi, my mother had, with characteristically thoughtful kindness, purchased for me in August 1958, I commenced writing the original draft of the first edition of Ecstasy and Vendetta in my ground-floor bed-sitting-room at 14 Queensberry Place, South Kensington, where I also successfully, as I then believed, completed it a mere four days later, at some time during the early evening of Friday, 17th December.
• That first draft, however, as I hope the short note now appended to the original Prologue makes sufficiently clear, and as I explained in somewhat more detail in the first, only privately circulated, but internationally distributed 1989 edition of The Rainbow Cymbal, differed very considerably from the text you have just read. The work, as originally conceived, was apostolic and pastoral rather than autobiographical in inspiration, and principally consisted of a systematically rather than chronologically arranged selection of mainly theological, philosophical and psychological materials, the bulk of which were, in fact, not published at all until 1977 and 1978, by which time those portions of the original typescript which Sheila Watson, my then literary agent, and Mark Barty-King, Peter Davies's commissioning editor, had persuaded me to excise from the 1972 revision of Ecstasy and Vendetta, had grown into what I then regarded as its mutually supporting, complementary sequels: Encounter Groups and Voice I+N The Darkness - An Essay in Contemporary Catholic Existentialism, revised editions of which have been incorporated in two later Books contained in the present series.
• I have no intention of writing an autobiographical sequel to Ecstasy and Vendetta, either now or at any foreseeable future date. Although I am today more than ever convinced that every person is utterly unique, I also believe that individual and community growth develop in a series of recognisable and clearly definable stages. No woman or man living today is exactly the same as she or he was in 1958, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1977 or 1978. The Church, the World and, indeed, this particular Solar System have moved on. It is also clearer to me than it has ever been that G-d is no stranger to this ever more rapidly Self-developing process, I+N wytch we are now each and every one of us so crucially involved - individually, and together.
• Nowadays, for instance, I seldom use a typewriter. I wrote, edited, and printed both the 1989 draft-text and my 1991 revision of The Rainbow Cymbal using a StarPolished version of the WordStar 3.3 word-processing program, running under the then still internationally popular 1983 version 2.11 of their MS-DOS disk-operating-system, on a twin-drive, non-IBM-compatible, Apricot PC, which I had purchased to replace my ICL personal computer, shortly after my appointment as Head of the Department of Languages & Liberal Studies at the Inner London Education Authority's Streatham & Tooting Adult Education Institute in January 1981.
• Apricot no longer markets non-IBM-compatible PCs, and the Inner London Education Authority no longer exists. The present and subsequent volumes of this series will, I trust, more than suffice to enable interested readers to appreciate the similarities and differences between my intellectual, emotional and spiritual commitments then and now - after twenty-five years' experience of living as a Roman Catholic lay-person who is also an ordained priest, involved, quite naturally and properly, in the frequently chaotic late-20th-century life of both 'the Church' and 'the World.'
• I forbear, therefore, to describe or discuss here in any detail my various experiences, e.g., as a writer and translator, as a masseur, psychotherapist and encounter-group facilitator, as a free-lance lecturer and foreign-language tutor, as a full-time prison teacher and Open University student counsellor, as a trade-union branch secretary and a Head of Department in Adult Education, as for some five years - although only in the eyes of the Civil Law, and never at all from the standpoint of Roman Catholic Canon Law - a less than satisfactory husband to a very dear friend, Ms Christine Susan Stallion-Hamer, from whom I am now very happily, in Civil Law, ‘divorced.’ However, that most emphatically does not mean that I have today any wish to deny or in the least way subtract from the importance and value of all those personal learning experiences with which G-d's Providence has graced me in preparation for my present work as Preliminary LibrArian on Planet Earth I+N the Neith Network.
• Nature loves to hide, but because books also have a life of their own, I have done my best to respect and preserve the integrity of the original text of Ecstasy and Vendetta, even though some statements and expressions of feeling no longer harmonise completely with my present mode of being. A few typographical blunders and infelicities of style have been corrected, some new notes have been provided, but I have done nothing to alter the almost tumultuously uneven quality of the writing in the last few pages, written when I was still caught up in the immediate consequences of the events there described and discussed.
• Taken together, as I read them today, Encounter Groups, Voice I+N The Darkness, and Ecstasy and Vendetta form a brilliant trilogy of objectively researched and honestly presented historical records of significant events, that can still, I know, serve some of my fellow-guests at the banquet of Life as a readily accessible and user-friendly source of personal encouragement and nourishing inspiration.
• I like them a lot, but could not myself write them today and don't know how I ever managed to write them as and when I did. I suspect the answer is simple - although my copyright, they are not my work; I was no more than an amanuensis to my Guardian Angels. Thanks be to G-d!

CONTENTS

Listen, mediate, re+member…

Attunement       +       Education       +       Initiation

"Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge."

Psalm 19:2          

His Benevolence, The ExtraReverendDoctorColinJames Hamer
Master I+N The Sacred Page

Curriculum Vitae - Synopsis

St. Augustine of Hippo has explicitly stated that the Christian religion we have received I+N Christ Jesus crucified and risen is not a contradiction of, but rather is in some sense identical with the true religion of Adam & Eve, our first parents. Hence, it is in the best sense truly 'catholic' and not merely "Catholic".

Forty-one years have rolled by since, together with thirty-two other Salesians of St John Bosco, I was sacramentally ordained to the eternal priesthood of Jesus-I+N-Mary in the Basilica of Mary, Help of Christians, in Turin, Italy. In company with Mary I look forward prayerfully to the solemn definition of her prerogative as Co-Redemptrix of our human family, Mediatrix of all Graces & irreplaceable Advocate in all our needs. Sensitively concerned by present circumstances and keenly aware of the urgent pastoral necessities of our rapidly changing world, I am pleased to have been able to share with you at least this much information:

Profile Webmaster-Editor in Retirement + Counsellor www.hagarqim.ndo.co.uk - Preliminary LibrArian emeritus I+N The Neith Network, Master of the Rainbow Program, Director I+N Creativity House, vastly experienced, poly-qualified, professionally trained, socially matured, technically au fait, proactive contemplative, delights in the variety of life's many dimensions - available for evaluations and seeks to be of service.

Author of Previsioning Our Future (1998), Vampire Steaks & Green Kippers (2002: limited edition on CD). 1995: Doctor of Science (D.Sc., honoris causa, alternative and complementary medicines). 1995 & 2002: RILKO Lectures: The "12th" Planet - Origin of Earth & Home of Man's Creator? - Zecharia Sitchin's hypothesis: A Preliminary Evaluation and Malta's "Temples" at Mnajdra revisited - Time, Tempo & Eternity; three related articles published in The Malta Independent (7, 8 & 9 January 2002, pages 16-17). Awarded Certificate commending The Neith Network Library on-line, signed by Cheri Booth, QC, & the Lord Mayor of Exeter, 21 November 2003. Continually researching the traditions I+N Tradition and Tradition in all traditions + InciteYoga Academy for the Cultivation of the Natural Arts.

Key Skills

• Communications & Evaluations
• Consultancy to Individuals and Groups
• Works well with others - Relates Creatively with most sorts of Persons
• Linguist, Writer, Editor & Translator - revising and updating earlier publications
• Webmaster: comfortable with Numbers, Computing & Information Technology
• Multi-facetted inter-disciplinary appreciation of the simple within the complex
• Open to new learning and new modes of questioning - Problem Solver
• Maintains good health - Able to read and see fairly well with the aid of glasses
• Clean driving-license - but now prefers not to drive a car

Career Summary

2003-..... MASTER I+N THE SACRED PAGE. SCHOOL OF InciteYoga (AND METAHERMENEUTICS) ESTABLISHED WITHIN THE ACADEMY FOR THE CULTIVATION OF THE NATURAL ARTS, FOCUS ON THE SPIRITUAL FORMATION OF RAINBOW WARRIORS AS PEACE-FIGHTERS, INSPIRED BY SAINT BENEDICT OF NORCIA, PATRIARCH OF CHRISTIAN, WESTERN MONASTICISM. OFFERS COURSES IN LEARNING TO READ.

2000-…… WEBMASTER-EDITOR IN RETIREMENT & COUNSELLOR RESEARCHING THE TRADITIONS I+N TRADITION & TRADITION IN ALL TRADITIONS. AVAILABLE FOR EVALUATIONS.

1988-1999 CONSULTANCY WORK, OCCASIONALLY ON A VOLUNTARY BASIS, WRITING, EDITING AND INTERNET PUBLISHING, SKILLS-UPDATING AND PERSONAL INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF TODAY'S WORLD

1981-1987 HEAD OF DEPARTMENT OF LANGUAGES AND LIBERAL STUDIES - STREATHAM AND TOOTING ADULT EDUCATION INSTITUTE (ILEA)

1974-1980 TUTOR - BRIXTON & WORMWOOD SCRUBS PRISONS

• Author of Voice In The Darkness (United Writers, Zennor, 1978)

1969-1976 VISITING TUTOR OF THEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOLOGY - GOLDSMITHS' COLLEGE, MARIA ASSUMPTA TEACHER TRAINING COLLEGE, CITY LITERARY INSTITUTE, CENTRAL LONDON INSTITUTE

• Began to practice privately as a Psychotherapist/Masseur/Personal Consultant
• June 1975 - Associate of the Faculty of Physiatrics
• Author of Ecstasy & Vendetta - The Making and Unmaking of a Catholic Priest (Peter Davies, 1973) & Translator from the Italian of both Cesare Molinari's Theatre through the Ages (Cassell, 1975) and of Social Structure in Italy - Crisis of a System (Martin Robertson, 1976)

1968-1969 HEAD OF RELIGION AND TEACHER OF ENGLISH - SALESIAN COLLEGE, BATTERSEA, LONDON SW11

• Also tutor in theology at Cresswell Park, Blackheath, and at Maria Assumpta Teacher Training College, Kensington
• Pastoral work as a Salesian Priest in London and Home Counties & Member of Editorial and Translation team preparing The Salesian Congregation Today & Tomorrow - A Thumbnail Sketch (5 volumes)
• Day-release training with Richmond Fellowship in Social Psychology and Group Dynamics

1965-1968 DIRECTOR OF STUDIES AND PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY - SALESIAN INSTITUTE OF FURTHER EDUCATION, BECKFORD

• Completed doctoral thesis on "The Method of Metaphysics in the Philosophy of Gilbert Ryle" and compiled Christian Education in School

Second Period of Full-time Education

1958-1965 FULL-TIME STUDENT, PONTIFICAL SALESIAN UNIVERSITY, ROME

• September 1968: Doctor of Philosophy
• April 1966: Laureate in Philosophy
• June 1964: Licentiate of Divinity
• Research Paper - "The Priesthood according to the De Ecclesiastica Hierarchia of the Pseudo-Denis"
• February 1964: ordained Roman Catholic Priest
• June 1963: Bachelor of Divinity
• Summer 1961: helped translated from the Italian a new edition of St. John Bosco's The Companion of Youth, edited by Terence O'Brien, SDB
• June 1960: Licentiate of Philosophy
• June 1959: Bachelor of Philosophy

Three Years' Practical Training

1957-1958 TEACHER & LIBRARIAN - SALESIAN COLLEGE, COWLEY, OXFORD

1955-1957 ASSISTANT - SALESIAN HOUSE OF STUDIES: BOLLINGTON AND BECKFORD

Initial Period of Full-time Education

1953-1955 STUDENT, SALESIAN HOUSE OF PHILOSOPHY, BOLLINGTON, MACCLESFIELD

• June 1955: completed Teacher-Training and Philosophy course
• June 1954: London University Latin (Subsidiary) to B.A. (Hons.) French
• Acquired typing and general office-skills as Personal Assistant to Director

1952-1953 SALESIAN NOVICE, ST. JOSEPH'S NOVITIATE, BURWASH, SUSSEX

• September 1953: Admitted to Vows of Poverty, Chastity & Obedience

1945-1952 THORNLEIGH SALESIAN COLLEGE, BOLTON

• 1952: 3 A-levels (History, Latin, French) including 2 S-levels (Latin, French)
• 1952: O-level (General Paper)
• 1950: JMB School Certificate (Mathematics - Very Good; English Language, History, French, Latin, General Science 1 - Credit; Scripture - Pass)

1939-1945 ST. ETHELBERT'S PRIMARY SCHOOL, BOLTON

Date of Birth: 18 April 1934 (Bolton, Lancashire, U.K., at 4.20am GMT)

There are, of course, both lights and shades in my life history on this planet; there are failures as well as achievements, ups as well as downs, things to shout about and also occasions for tears, weeping and even, perhaps, sometimes for gnashing of teeth.

Whether or not those are correct who believe that planet Earth is Noah's original space-ship, the "Ark", and that none of us humans has ever yet, save for Jesus of Nazareth and His Mother Mary, disembarked from it in the course of our earthly life-time, it is nowadays at least increasingly agreed that we are all in the same boat together.

His Holiness the fourteenth Dalai Lama is, therefore, very far from being idealistically starry-eyed or diplomatically naïve when, as the legitimate Head of State of Tibet in exile, he publicly states, as he has now more than once done, that it is, in truth, often one's worst so called "enemies" who actually are one's best real "friends". The wheels of life on Earth never revolve without some friction. It is the grit of sand in the oyster that enables the growth of a precious pearl. Often it is our "worst enemy" who best teaches us patience…

I am trying my best to accept and remain true to the vocation I have received from G-d. I exercise my own function, as I see it, by endeavouring increasingly to be a worthy director I+N Creativity House, the largeness, or greatness or grandeur of which derives from the wonderfully simple fact that Creativity House just happens to be the name that primarily designates the totality of all G-d's created worlds throughout and within all the galaxies, known or unknown, visible or invisible and, first and foremost, all persons any of them inhabiting whether or not in an embodied form, male or female or of both genders or none, white, yellor or brown, red or black or impalpable and invisible - only derivatively and secondarily, therefore, have I also designated as "Creativity House" my present home at 9 Oxford Street, St. Thomas, Exeter, Devon, U.K., and arranged for the local branch of the NatWest Bank to operate a "Creativity House" current account for me personally and individually, just as I had already, in 1977 and when still residing in South London, published under the "Creativity House" imprint my still available small monograph on Encounter Groups (ISBN 0 9506127), which is based on a talk I had earlier and by invitation given in Somerville College, Oxford, to various members of the International Association of Social Psychiatry then there assembled in Conference.

I have, thanks be to G-d, many trusted, loyal and excellent friends and, the world being, as Bradley defined it as being in his still useful Philosophical Dictionary, "what it is, and not another thing", no doubt I have some enemies, too.

Crazy some of those friends may think me, but mad, I suggest, I am not - and for that very reason about any other individual's personal condition, as distinct from his or her publicly expressed position and related social posturings, I am still somewhat reluctant, and even very hesitant here to pronounce.

Character assassination has never been one of my hobbies, and neither am I, at this stage of my life, spontaneously given to ruminating about the more probably correct or likely way of categorizing any other individual person's native characteristics and acquired set of personality traits in terms of this or that psychological or sociological theory of types. There was, however, a time in the past when I was very deeply interested in research into the question of what it is that makes people tick.

What are you doing, when you know? Why is doing that, knowing? What do you know, when you do it? Philosophical questions of that sort engaged my close attention for some eighteen years of my life at least. Why are some men and women friendly and helpful and polite? Why are some others almost invariably hostile to strangers?

For thousands of years other humans have contemplated and researched and discussed and fought over questions of this sort, with all their baggage of related and still very much controverted issues.

Yet, although Tony Blair and his colleagues in Government deservedly enjoy our entire nation's at least theoretical support in their official proclamation that this country's present top priority is "Education, education and education", those citizens who are working at the chalk-face in our classrooms up and down the length and breadth of England, Wales & Northern Island are still far from satisfied that the present Government's achievement has so far any more matched its promises than did that of the previous administration.

That is one reason why for the last few years, for the benefit of those who, in addition to being able to speak and understand the Queen's English, have at least begun to learn how to read and think for themselves (cf. Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book - a Guide to Self-Education, London: Jarrolds, 1939), I have consistently been attempting on all of my webpages (which are meant to be taken little by little, studied carefully, yes, but also, naturally, played with and enjoyed) to offer a good example of authentic education at its best.

Just as a single acorn, if placed in an appropriately healthy and congenial environment and allowed to take root at it own pace without being prematurely or needlessly disturbed, will grow, flourish and, in due course of time, become a whole forest of oak trees, so, too, history teaches us, will all the various thought-seeds that are planted in the fertile soil of the human mind, if suitably nurtured and nourished, in the One G-d's own good time, germinate, grow, mature, flourish and eventually bear fruit.

Planet Earth is not Heaven, of course, nor is it meant to be, but, as Saint Julian of Norwich has mentioned, our world is, in its own way, a perfect world for all that - a still unfolding and ever developing, shared, personal and interpersonal adventure, a self-correcting process of learning in which, like it or not, we are each and every one of us, though not all of us at this particular moment in precisely the same way, ineluctably caught up.

I welcome invitations to help open-minded and good-hearted individuals further to explore these issues for themselves, either singly or in groups. I also welcome, and very much need, the support of your Prayer. Thank-you. May G-d bless you. Shalom!

Profile

Webmaster-Editor in Retirement + Personal Spiritual Advisor & Preliminary LibrArian emeritus I+N The Neith Network ( www.beautytruegood.co.uk ), Master of the Rainbow Program and Director of Creativity House - vastly experienced, poly-qualified, professionally trained, socially matured, technically au fait, alive and awake, sensitively attuned, proactive contemplative, delights in the variety of life's many dimensions, - available for evaluations and seeks to be of service. Nature-Lover Growing in the Way of Presence. Interested in altering human states of consciousness for the better, and in all dimensions of Primordial Experience. Nuptial Theologian seeking to mediate the Light I+N Darkness of Tradition, wisely to integrate all forms of human being-and-knowing, theoretical and practical, whether exoteric or esoteric - artistic, scientific and religious, and so to BE within the context of today's world.

Author of Previsioning Our Future (1998). 1995: Doctor of Science (D.Sc., honoris causa, alternative and complementary medicines). 1995 & 2002: RILKO Lectures: The "12th" Planet - Origin of Earth & Home of Man's Creator? - Zecharia Sitchin's hypothesis: A Preliminary Evaluation and Malta's "Temples" at Mnajdra revisited - Time, Tempo & Eternity; three related articles published in The Malta Independent (7, 8 & 9 January 2002, pages 16-17). Awarded Certificate commending The Neith Network Library on-line, signed by Cheri Booth, QC, & the Lord May of Exeter, 21 November 2003. Continually researching the traditions I+N Tradition and Tradition in all traditions.

Key Skills

• Communications - Catalytic Converter - Available for Evaluations
• Consultancy to Individuals and Groups
• Works well with others - Relates Creatively with most sorts of Persons
• Linguist, Writer, Editor & Translator - revising and updating earlier publications
• Webmaster: comfortable with Numbers, Computing & Information Technology
• Multi-facetted inter-disciplinary appreciation of the simple within the complex
• Degree of Mastery of the Rainbow Program
• Instinctive Love of the Boundless Mistery in Variety of the Rainbow Programme
• Open to new learning and new modes of questioning - Problem Solver
• Appreciates the Other as Other
• In-depth Individual Personal Counselling
• Maintains good health - Able to read and see well with the aid of glasses
• Clean driving-license - but now prefers not to drive a car

Career Summary

2003-…… MASTER I+N THE SACRED PAGE. SCHOOL OF inciteYoga ESTABLISHED WITHIN THE ACADEMY FOR THE CULTIVATION OF THE NATURAL ARTS, FOCUS ON THE SPIRITUAL FORMATION OF RAINBOW WARRIORS AS PEACE-FIGHTERS, INSPIRED BY SAINT BENEDICT OF NORCIA, PATRIARCH OF CHRISTIAN, WESTERN MONASTICISM. OFFERS COURSES IN LEARNING TO READ.

2000-…… WEBMASTER-EDITOR IN RETIREMENT & PERSONAL SPIRITUAL ADVISOR RESEARCHING THE TRADITIONS I+N TRADITION & TRADITION IN ALL TRADITIONS. AVAILABLE FOR EVALUATIONS.

• Has developed a growing family of mutually complementary websites, all of which are placed under the protection of the Lady of All Nations and dedicated to the Shipwreck of St. Paul (Apostle of the Nations). It has been argued that, had this providential shipwreck never actually taken place, the Christian Church as we know it today might never have come to birth. Largely on account of this, Colin is a frequent visitor to the Maltese islands where, in January 1999, he specified the precise near-Malta offshore latitude and longitude of what undoubtedly appears to him to be one of planet Earth's largest surviving prediluvian stone structures and so, according to Foster Bailey, a most important Masonic landmark.
• Published the complete text of Joseph S. Ellul's closely related authoritative study of the ĦaÄ¡ar Qim and Mnajdra temples, in both English and German enriching their presentation with numerous additional and important illustrations, many of them never before published.
• Published a likely account, illustrated with maps, of St. Paul's Shipwreck on Malta in A.D. 60 - but for which, historical Christianity might never have developed in its present form.
• As his sole appointed literary executor, completed the Internet publication of all of geologist-musician-philosopher John David Solomon's books, essays, book-reviews and other academic papers currently housed in the J. D. Solomon Archive I+N Creativity House.
• Within the context of our post-11/09/2001 human life on this planet and of the increasingly problematic relationships currently prevailing between Church & State on the one hand and the War Machine on the other, sought to clarify personal and group situations, conflicts and their potential for self-improvement by exploring the myths, legends and history of both Glastonbury & Robin Hood.
• Published a series of three articles in The Malta Independent (7, 8 & 9 January 2002, pages 16-17): The Mnajdra Temple alignments - Harbingers of peace on earth; Is Mnajdra truly a calendar in stone? and Mnajdra is a Moon-dial, not a Sundial.
• On 22 March 2002 delivered the RILKO lecture:Malta's "Temples" at Mnajdra revisited - Time, Tempo & Eternity, and on 27 July 2002, while attending a Cambridge University related Marian Summer School & Seminar in the University of Wales at Lampeter, discussed the Glastonbury Mariophany in its relationship to the May Day Line and the brothers Van Eyck's painting: "The Mystic Lamb".

1989-1999 CONSULTANCY WORK, OCCASIONALLY ON A VOLUNTARY BASIS, WRITING, EDITING AND INTERNET PUBLISHING, SKILLS-UPDATING AND PERSONAL INTERVENTION IN THE LIFE OF TODAY'S WORLD

• Sought to identify the roots of the present crisis in the 'achievements' of the Ancient Greek General Alexander the Great, and began to research the very much earlier Eridu & pre-Bolivian Tiahuanaco Connections
• Explored Shamanism, Druidism, Homeric Britain, and Celtic Christianity
• Prepared chronological notes: St. Boniface of Crediton (675-754), locating his life and work in the context of world development generally
• Became increasingly convinced that consciousness-raising and awareness exercises are valuably complemented by allowing ourselves much more time to feel Life's Mystery, nurture a deeper respect for silence and rhythm, freely giving a more generous opening to the Spirit, rejoicing in the variety of goodness, and taking Chaos Studies seriously, playfully and prayerfully into account
• On 31 March 1995 delivered the RILKO lecture: The "12th" Planet - Origin of Earth & Home of Man's Creator?
• As a Director of Creativity House, offered a completely confidential, worldwide, postal, personal-growth and career-development service
• Contributed Letters to the Exeter Herald
• Investigated the neo-Gnostic claims of Samæl Aun Weor
• Publicised and (together with Harvest Spearmint and Tapioca Jones) served in free time as Preliminary LibrArian I+N The Neith Network
• Prepared 285-page Preliminary Volume plus another 12 Volumes for eventual publication in the Neith Network Library series of books
• Supported friends overseas within the process of refashioning today's world
• Cooperated with a number of U.K. citizens initiating or developing some worthwhile projects, including the Crediton-based Imûlè Theatre Company, the Michæl Trust and, more recently, the Energy Spheres Rejuvenation Foundation (ESRF)
• Became a Fellow of the Theosophical Society in England
• Notwithstanding increasing momentary forgetfulness and 'absent-mindedness', vastly improved personal memory and grew in psychic sensitivity
• While using a stand-alone desk-top computier acquired familiarity with MS-DOS 6.22, WINDOWS 3.11, WINDOWS-95 & WINDOWS-98, and created and developed the Neith Network Library on a Freeserve website with the help of Microsoft's Internet Explorer-5 and Outlook Express-5 packages
• Set up and for some time maintained an electronic information data-base in ALPHA-FIVE format
• Studied the French text of The Catechism of the Catholic Church and drew attention to certain lacunæ in its otherwise excellent Index
• Translated the Latin texts of Masses in honour of the Blessed Virgin Mary
• Distinguished 'objects', SIGNATURES, "speech", [sign-patterns], (ideas), realities, Actualities, {Possibles} and pseudo-{possibilities}
• Author of 'David Hume's "Impressions" and the Wisdom of Chaos and Confusion', and of 'J. D. Solomon reflects on our Use and Misuse of Language and Logic' - both publicised in Scientific & Medical Network Newsletter (no. 45 & no. 46, April & August 1991)
• Author of 2260-pages text of The Rainbow Cymbal and Mirror of Justice
• Edited Levi Hamer's posthumous "God"
• Edited and privately circulated The Creativity Chronicle incorporating The Neith Network Orbital Report
• Compiled detailed indices to Meditations on the Tarot, and to the five published books of Joan D'Arcy Cooper (1927-82) and attended a meeting of the Culbone Trustees
• Produced 2-page aide-mémoire "Just Is" and a select reading-list
• Wrote "Truth" in response to Pope John-Paul II's Splendor Veritatis
• Revised the text of my Ecstasy & Vendetta (1973), prepared indices to it and to both the English and Italian versions of Voice In The Darkness and began to prepare a collected edition of all my more significant writings - initially as word-processed documents (not all of them professionally bound into volumes) and more recently as web-pages within The Neith Network Library on-line
• Sought to limit the Iraqi Conflict and to terminate the Gulf War
• Focussed and sharpened my own job-seeking skills in today's market-place
• Reaffirmed my willingness to take up any appropriate form of official Roman Catholic ministry as an ordained Priest
• …

1988-1989 SELF-EMPLOYED COUNSELLOR IN EXETER

• Benefitted from the British Government's Enterprise Allowance Scheme
• Directly experienced the current difficulties in the private sector
• Installed LocoScript-" on a 8-bit Amstrad 8512 computer at Yoga-Kutir, Selsey, and advised on related office procedures
• Became much more thankful for helpful synchronicities
• Grew to appreciate both the importance and limitations of Chaos Studies
• Sought to define the boundaries of a feasible Rainbow Program within the Growing Mistery of Nature's Rainbow Programme and embarked on a related Research and possible Teaching Project
• Participated in the professional training of students of Crystal Healing
• Assisted in the development and marketing of the Electronic Caduceus
• Compiled, revised and circulated The Creativity Machine - A Preliminary Report (24 May 1988)
• Contributed a Letter to the Catholic Herald
• Edited Jon Whale's The Cosmic Ray Machine Workbook - Release 2.0
• Edited John Allcock's Nature's Power is Love and Light (unpublished)
• Elected to membership of the Scientific & Medical Network
• Participated in leading-edge explorations into the quantum frequency-intervals and morphic resonance of human and other bio-electromagnetic energy fields

1981-1987 HEAD OF DEPARTMENT OF LANGUAGES AND LIBERAL STUDIES - STREATHAM AND TOOTING ADULT EDUCATION INSTITUTE

• Diversified and expanded the quantity and quality of the Department's work
• Academic and administrative oversight of 140 tutors and 2100 students
• Directed and/or facilitated courses in Stress Management, Staff Development, etc., and encouraged a greater student participation in the life of the Institute
• Taught myself to use an ICL 64K 8-bit CPM computer, an Apricot 256K 16-bit MS-DOS 2.11 PC, and a Commodore-64
• Introduced computers to the Institute for both teaching and administration
• Word-processed the annual prospectus using WordStar 3.30b
• Taught hands-on courses in Logo, MS-BASIC & dBase-II
• Secretary General of AHEAD (ILEA) and in that capacity prepared and submitted Report on Present and Future Needs in and for Adult Education (May 1984)
• October 1984: Cooperated in production of second revised edition of the AHEAD Discussion Document: "The Rôle of Head of Department in AEIs"
• Member of Italian Sub-Committee of AEB Languages Umbrella Group
• Branch Secretary of NATFHE
• Member of Adult Education Sub-Committee of ILEA Advisory Group
• Academic oversight of some classes in Wandsworth Prison
• Researched the Cosmology, Logic & Philosophy of J. D. Solomon's The Mind's Ear (1979) and wrote Solomon's Wisdom - The Philosophy of J. D. Solomon (limited edition, 1986). Doctor Solomon (1906-1998) believed that no other human being known to him had ever achieved any comparable degree of understanding of his work.
• Contributed Letters to the Guardian, the Catholic Herald, and Streatham News
• Published three articles in New Acropolis Bulletin
• Prepared The Tarot Cards Unpacked (manual for adult students)
• August 1983 - elected to membership of the Egypt Exploration Society
• Author of Four Seasons Massage (originally a privately circulated handbook - later published electronically on the Internet)
• Edited and revised Robin Hood - The Man behind the Mask
• 14 July 1984 - enrolled in the Fellowship of Isis
• Christmas 1984 - visited Egypt and fell off a donkey in the Valley of the Kings; visited the Coptic Museum in Old Cairo
• Further explored the relationship between Celibacy, Androgyny and Married Life
• Read a Paper to the Christian Philosophy Group on "Divine Actuality, Theological Realities, Catholic Truth, and the Ontology of Language" (1985)
• May 1985: Large Arabic, Greek, Hebrew & Roman alphabets I had designed to extend the multi-ethnic capabilities of the WordStar 3.30b word-processing package were published in Practical Computing
• Saved Dr. Peter Bärtsch, the medical member of the Swiss team climbing Shisha Pangma (26,400 ft.) in 1985, another twenty years' work in his own research into high-altitude medicine
• Participated in an initial Micro-Massage training workshop with Dr. Hubert Bacia of Berlin
• Took part in a series of Continuum Process events with Kathleen O'Shaunessy of Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California
• 13 June 1987 - Purchased freehold terraced house in Exeter
• August 1987: attended intermediate and advanced residential tantric Yoga courses with Mitsou Naslednikow (Margo anand)
• November 1987: completed Half-Marathon at Crystal Palace to raise funds for the charity Crisis at Christmas, wrote to Margaret Thatcher, and resigned from ILEA post

1976-1980 TUTOR IN GENERAL EDUCATION, LECTURER IN ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE AND MODERN LANGUAGES, AND OPEN UNIVERSITY TUTOR - WORMWOOD SCRUBS PRISON

• Individual counselling and tuition as well as class-room teaching to all categories of prisoners, including alcoholics, drug-addicts, pædophiliacs, professional criminals, and senior members of the IRA
• Educational and psychological interviewing, testing and assessment
• Taught English Language to Prison Officers
• Helped edit Management Manual for Prison Hospital Staff
• Author of Encounter Groups (1977)
• Author of Voice In The Darkness (United Writers, Zennor, 1978): "One of the most beautiful books I have ever read. A sensitive book. Offers a new spiritual vision to anyone whether agnostic or atheist, a follower of the Church or not. Should be compulsory reading for all" - Writers' Review
• Prepared the now electronically published Italian translation of Voice In The Darkness entitled Voce nel deserto - saggio di essistenzialismo cattolico contemporaneo
• Author of a series of articles: "On Being A Writer", "Writing To The Point" and ""Writing Between The Lines" in Writers' Review (August-September 1978, April-May & June-July 1979)
• Attended Home Office sponsored Racism Awareness in-service training course
• Helped to secure better conditions of service for several of my fellow teachers
• August 1978: acquired from Jon Whale the first Epsom-Salts Floatation-Isolation-Relaxation-Samadhi Tank in Europe, and helped him and others develop and promote several mainly British-made improvements on this early American model
• Contributed related Letter to Psychology Today (March 1979) and several Letters to the Catholic Herald
• Researched how qualitative human Character Type differences help us to understand the rise and fall of all known civilizations, class-differences within societies, religious, sexual, deviant and criminal behaviour, and also the more humdrum and commonplace features of our daily lives
• Translated and edited Italian text of Tipologia Cibernetica Umana into English as Seven Rules for the Guidance of Genius
• Edited a small personal collection of my own poems and verses
• October 1979: wrote to Pope John-Paul II seeking to be readmitted to some appropriate form of official ministry as an ordained Priest
• Divorced 14 February 1980
• Wrote Moon in Gemini as a contribution to my and my ex-wife's ongoing review of our mutual relationship and joint contribution to life today

1974-1976 TUTOR IN GENERAL EDUCATION - BRIXTON PRISON

• First tutor appointed to teach one-to-one in cells those unable to attend class
• Invited to write and submit a related report to the Home Office
• Member of a panel advising on legislative reform regarding homosexuality
• Civil marriage in Lambeth Registry Office, 4 July 1974
• Contributed Letters to The Tablet and to the Catholic Herald
• Invited to lecture on "Ethical Feeling" at Conway Hall (1975)
• Read a Paper to the Christian Philosophy group on "Opposition or Complementarity? - Therapy & Education: A Personal View"

1969-1976 VISITING TUTOR OF THEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOLOGY - GOLDSMITHS' COLLEGE, MARIA ASSUMPTA TEACHER TRAINING COLLEGE, CITY LITERARY INSTITUTE, CENTRAL LONDON INSTITUTE

• Also taught Religion at Crown Woods and Kidbrooke Schools
• In May 1970 sought, and in February 1971 was granted by Pope Paul VI release from all the legal obligations flowing from my Religious Vows and from my canonical status as an ordained Priest
• In 1971 also taught English as a Foreign Language at St. Antony's SW7
• Author of "Encounter Groups" in The Counsellor - Journal of the National Association of Educational Counsellors (June 1971)
• Author of "One Man's Quest - Bernard Lonergan's Achievement" in Catholic Education Today (July-August 1971)
• Author of "What do we mean by Education?" and "The Nature of Self" in Ethical Record (June 1971 and July 1972)
• Contributed a "Letter to the Reader" to Fran¸oise Strachan's Casting out the Devils (1972)
• Author of Ecstasy & Vendetta - The Making and Unmaking of a Catholic Priest (Peter Davies, 1973): "Will certainly enlighten everyone concerned with the future of the Church and with training for the ministry" - Times Literary Supplement. "A painful, profoundly honest and instructive spiritual autobiography by a distinguished former priest and theologian" - The Sunday Times
• Began to practice privately as a Consultant Nuptial Theologian, Growth-oriented Psychotherapist, and Encounter Group Facilitator
• June 1975 - elected as an Associate of the Faculty of Physiatrics and licensed to practice as a Physiatrist after obtaining an Arnould-Taylor Therapy College Diploma in Anatomy, Physiology & Massage
• Reviewed Ann Faraday's Dream Power
• Invited to address the International Association of Social Psychiatry in conference at Somerville College, Oxford, on The Future of Therapy
• Translator from the Italian of Cesare Molinari's Theatre through the Ages (Cassell, 1975): "Superbly stimulating and provocative" - Scottish Field. "Vibrant, exciting and eminently readable" - Municipal Entertainment. "An essential addition to any theatre library and a pleasure to look through again and again" - Times Literary Supplement. "Molinari and his translator convey sophisticated insights in clear language, and the result is fascinating on every level" - School Library Journal. "It contrives wisely, and in a style literate and swift - Colin Hamer's translation - to chart the entire progress of an ever-developing art" - Birmingham Post
• For some months assisted Penelope Lady Balogh in the professional training of student-psychotherapists
• Attended in-service training courses in Encounter with Paul & Patricia Lowe, Bill Grossman, Jay Stattman, in Gestalt with Ed Elkin, in Psychosynthesis with Barbara Somers, Ian Gordon Brown and Roger Evans, in Transactional Analysis, in Bioenergetic & Holistic Massage with Mona Lisa Bayesen, in Rolffing with Ray Garner, and in Sexology with various specialists
• Refined my career-development skills with the help of Willet Weeks and Paul Brown
• Affiliate of the Institute of Linguists
• Translator from the Italian of Social Structure in Italy - Crisis of a System (Martin Robertson, 1976) - "Demonstrates that twentieth-century social stratification and the distribution of political and economic power in Italy cannot be properly understood without carefully analysing the historical development of Italian society"

1968-1969 HEAD OF RELIGION AND TEACHER OF ENGLISH - SALESIAN COLLEGE, BATTERSEA, LONDON SW11

• Participated as a Theologian in a symposium convened to discuss the pastoral implications of Paul VI's encyclical Humanæ Vitæ
• With John Marshall and Jack Dominian was invited to discuss questions arising from this encyclical with members of the London University Students' Catholic Society
• Also tutor of Philosophy & Divinity to the Crusade of the Holy Spirit, Cresswell Park, Blackheath
• For students' benefit compiled sets of lecture-notes on "Logical Foundations", "Understanding and Lonergan's Insight", and "Method in Theology"
• Also tutor of Theological Methodology at Maria Assumpta Teacher Training College, Kensington
• Pastoral work as a Salesian Priest in London and Home Counties
• Guest preacher during the Church Unity Octave 1969 at a High Mass celebrated by Bishop John Leonard in the Church of St. Mary Magdalen, Munster Square
• In-depth Personal Freudian Analysis and detailed research into the relationships between Authority and Language
• Day-release training with Richmond Fellowship in Social Psychology and Group Dynamics
• Elected to membership of the Guild of Pastoral Psychology
• Translator from the French of part of new Life of St. John Bosco
• Member of Editorial and Translation team preparing official English edition in 5 volumes of The Salesian Congregation Today & Tomorrow - A Thumbnail Sketch

1965-1968 DIRECTOR OF STUDIES AND PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY - SALESIAN INSTITUTE OF FURTHER EDUCATION, BECKFORD

• Overall updating of entire programme of studies and students' regime
• Successful negotiation of various government grants
• Completion of doctoral thesis on "The Method of Metaphysics in the Philosophy of Gilbert Ryle" and subsequent publication of a revised extract "Why Ryle is not a Behaviourist", together with "Gilbert Ryle's Wisdom" and "Meaning Things in Words" in Philosophical Studies (Maynooth, volumes 17-19, 1968-70). After reading my thesis, Professor Ryle told me that I had clearly given much more thought to his thought than he himself had ever done.
• Translation of various official documents from the Italian
• Translated from the French for the Clergy Review "Serving a Church in Dialogue with Non-Believers - an interview with Don Giulio Girardi SDB"
• Author of "The Real Meaning of Words" and of "Dialogue and Unity in the Teaching of the Second Vatican Council" (parts 1 & 2), as well as of several book reviews in the Clergy Review (1968-69)
• Author of "God and Professor Flew" in Downside Review (April 1968)
• Author of "Marxism and Christianity" in New Blackfriars (Dec. 1967)
• Compiled Christian Education in School (1968) - a basic introduction to Catechetics

Second Period of Full-time Education

1958-1965 FULL-TIME STUDENT, PONTIFICAL SALESIAN UNIVERSITY, ROME (THE FACULTY OF THEOLOGY WAS, HOWEVER, AT THIS TIME IN TURIN, WHERE I STUDIED 1960-1964)

• September 1968: Doctor of Philosophy
• April 1966: Laureate in Philosophy
• Research Paper - "La Prova ex desiderio naturali: C.G., II, 55"
• December 1964: granted the Faculty to hear Confessions in Rome
• June 1964: Licentiate of Divinity
• Research Paper - "The Priesthood according to the De Ecclesiastica Hierarchia of the Pseudo-Denis"
• February 1964: ordained Roman Catholic Priest
• June 1963: Bachelor of Divinity
• Summer 1961: helped translate from the Italian a new edition of St. John Bosco's The Companion of Youth, edited by Terence O'Brien, SDB
• June 1960: Licentiate of Philosophy
• Research Paper - "The Method of Metaphysics in Lonergan's Insight"
• June 1959: Bachelor of Philosophy
• As well as Philosophy and Divinity, courses included Biblical Greek, Didactics,German, Graphology, History, Latin, Law, Logic, Methodology, Physics, Psychology, Rhetoric, Sacred Archæology and Social Economics.
• During this period I also served as interpreter to H.M. the Queen Mother, as a Vatican Delegate to the U.N. Food & Agricultural Organisation, and as an International Conference Interpreter. I taught English in a boys' school, preached and directed retreats, heard confessions, baptised, and was also responsible for the revision of an English-language Archæological Guide to the Catacombs of San Callisto

Three Years' Practical Training

1957-1958 FULL-TIME TEACHER - SALESIAN COLLEGE, COWLEY, OXFORD

• Also College Librarian
• In Cowley also taught English to visiting teachers from Italy

1955-1957 FULL-TIME PARTICIPATION IN FULLY INTEGRATED TRAINING-PROGRAMME FOR FUTURE TEACHERS-PRIESTS-MISSIONARIES - SALESIAN HOUSE OF STUDIES: BOLLINGTON AND BECKFORD (RELOCATION FROM BOLLINGTON TO BECKFORD 1956)

• Taught Ancient Greek & Roman Philosophy, French, Latin, Logic and New Testament Greek
• Supervised upkeep of pre-Conquest house with large lawns and gardens
• Also Personal Assistant to the Director
• Translated various educational booklets from Italian into English

Initial Period of Full-time Education

1953-1955 FULL-TIME STUDENT, SALESIAN HOUSE OF PHILOSOPHY, BOLLINGTON, MACCLESFIELD

• June 1955: completed Teacher-Training and Philosophy course - studies included Italian, Latin, General Science, Empirical Psychology, the Spirituality of St. Francis de Sales, and the Life & Dreams of St. John Bosco
• June 1954: London University Latin (Subsidiary) to B.A. (Hons.) French
• Acquired typing and general office-skills as Personal Assistant to Director in his development of the Guild of St. Dominic Savio

1952-1953 SALESIAN NOVICE, ST. JOSEPH'S NOVITIATE, BURWASH, SUSSEX

• Admitted to Vows of Poverty, Chastity & Obedience as Salesian of St. John Bosco
• Introduced to the Italian Language and to the History and Life of the Order
• Initiated into Silence and Meditation

1945-1952 THORNLEIGH SALESIAN COLLEGE, BOLTON

• 1952: 3 A-levels (History, Latin, French) including 2 S-levels (Latin, French)
• 1952: O-level (General Paper)
• 1952: Inter-Collegiate Religious Higher Certificate (Credit)
• 1950: JMB School Certificate (Mathematics - Very Good; English Language, History, French, Latin, General Science 1 - Credit; Scripture - Pass)
• 1950: joined the Society of St. Vincent de Paul
• 1949: joined the Sodality
• 1946: learned to swim, and became active in the Rambling Club
• 1946: introduced to the practice of making an Annual Retreat

1939-1945 ST. ETHELBERT'S PRIMARY SCHOOL, BOLTON

• Confirmed, 30 April 1944
• Altar-Server in the Parish
• 1939 - began to help my father in his outdoor work as a Milk Delivery Person

Pre-School Life

• Baptised, 20 May 1934
• Date of Birth: 18 April 1934

His Benevolence The ExtraReverendDoctorColinJames Hamer's only surviving sister is Sister Dominic Savio, CP (Doctor Edna Hamer); Sisters of the Cross and Passion. Born 31 May 1937; Parents: Levi Hamer and Edna Hamer Birch. Professed 1957. Education: Mount St. Joseph Grammar School, Bolton; University of Manchester (BA Hons History); University of London (Dip Ed), University of Glasgow (M Litt); University of Manchester (Ph D). PUBLICATIONS: Elizabeth Prout 1820-1864: A Religious Life for Industrial England, 1994. Booklets on local hstory, Ayrshire. Articles in North West Catholic History, Catholic Archives and Recusant History. Clubs and Societies: Secretary of the Diocese of Galloway Commission for Christian Unity 1968-89; represented the Galloway Diocese on the Secretariat for Christian Unity under the Scottish Bishops' Conference, 1980s. Secretary to the Parish Council, St. Mary's Irvine; Secretary or Chairperson of the Pastoral Committee, St. Mary's, Irvine, and also of the Liturgy Committee. Member of the Scottish Mediævalists' Conference. Member of the Ecclesiastical History Society, the Catholic Record Society and North West Catholic History Society. Recreations: Crafts, walking, visits to historic houses, detective stories, gardening. Career: Taught History, St. Michæl's, Ayrshire 1961; principal teacher 1965-89. Lectured in Diocese of Galloway on Ecumenism. Taught senior classes in Religious Education 1961-89. Organised retreats and pilgrimages. Member of Historical Commission for the Cause for the Canonisation of Elizabeth Prout 1994-to date. Visiting mountain-village school-teacher of English as a Foreign Language to Hungarian-speaking Transylvanian pupils Romania academic year 1998-99. Archivist-Historian 1999-date. Address: Mount St. Joseph Convent, Willows Lane, Deane, Bolton, Lancs BL3 4HF. The main sources relied on for these details are Who's Who in Catholic Life 1997 and The Catholic Directory of England and Wales for the year of Our Lord 2000 (both published by Gabriel Communications Limited, Manchester; ISBN 0-949005-93-2 and 0-9534844-2-4). Their inclusion here as well as that of any other references to Sister Dominic on this or any other pages within this website does not, save where the contrary is explicitly stated, imply that either she or her and Colin's stillborn elder sister either reproves or commends in whole or in part his own personal life-style, past or present behaviour, public and private utterances and writings, whether so far published or not, and vice versa. Each individual is unique.

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