Saints and Sinners by Lawrence Wright — Read

For several weeks before meeting Father Matthew Fox I had a persistent fantasy. I was inside a darkened chamber with a group of naked people. I don't know how I knew they were naked except for the fact that I was. In this darkness voices arose. People were speaking deeply from their hearts. Never had I felt so close to the souls of others. Was this some sort of new encounter group? It felt almost like an afterlife experience-not a single universal consciousness but a heaven of opened-up spirits pouring out narratives of love and truth.

I spoke to several friends about this fantasy-I'm not sure why, nor do I know what prompted me to imagine it in the first place. As it happens, this fantasy was a premonition of an actual experience, which would be very affecting to me. It was also, I realized, a metaphor for the life of Matt Fox. It wasn't until I got to this place I had been imagining, which turned out to be a remote New Age community on the northern shore of Scotland called Findhorn, in a sweat lodge with twenty ghostly Europeans, that I finally began to understand Fox's ongoing war with the Vatican, his intense but suppressed sexuality, his craving for experience, his longing for spiritual union, his doomed mission to rescue Christianity from the deadly polarity of fundamentalism and secularism, and finally his own divided loyalty between the ancient traditions of his faith and the lure of the New Age. Was he a Catholic priest or a transcendental guru? Even Fox wouldn't discover the answer until we arrived in Findhorn.