Skip to main content

Michael Graham Jones a friend and mentor

Today was Michael's funeral, held in the beautiful and simple Anglican Church at Northmoor where he worshipped. He died this month at the age of 91. It was an occasion both celebratory and moving.

I met Michael when I was at The Abbey, Sutton Courtenay. I was a young man pondering what to do with my life and spending it in a fruitful and exasperating lay religious community with which Michael was intimately associated (and on the Council).

I recall cycling from the Abbey to his home at the Limes for tea where in customary fashion Michael's hospitality went beyond tea and cakes to an attentive listening, accompanied by probing intelligent and compassionate questions of some project or other that I had conceived and long (wisely) abandoned.

It was a style of encounter that multiplied over the years, and led to diverse introductions to others. He had a particular and precise mind that made good connections. If he could stray into pedantry, it was always subsumed into a wider, more generous purpose.

It was through him that I acquired my first 'real' charitable sector job, following a phone call from him that was so discrete as to leave its actual purpose unrevealed! He introduced me to a second Michael (Feilden), whose widow and children I saw today, who was to be my much treasured chairman with whom I launched Opportunity International UK.

Michael GJ was a man of catholic tastes, wide interests, with passions both musical and theological. He was a man of broad and intense sympathies. He was the first 'public' figure I came out to.

I am and will always remain deeply grateful for his friendship, his confidence in me, and his love.

I will always recall him telling me that he grew more, not less, radical with age. It is a position I can identify with; and, as more than one person remarked today, it was difficult to imagine him as old - frail yes, in his last months terribly so - but always opening into the world, continually inquiring, always growing in a stature carried with great modesty.

Comments

  1. AnonymousSeptember 25, 2014 at 11:24 AM

    I was glad to find your words, I used to live in Northmoor and knew Michael from singing bass in the choir with him. I always looked forward to him coming, a proper gentleman, I was sad to hear of his passing but glad he went on for a good few years able to bless a large number of people after he had for me.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

Luminous Spaces - the poetry of Olav H. Hauge

Don't give me the whole truth, don't give me the sea for my thirst, don't give me the sky when I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt. It began with a poem, this poem, in Mark Oakley's 'The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry' - a wonderful series of meditations on particular poems, one each chapter. The poet is the Norwegian, Olav H. Hague (1908-1994). I immediately ordered, 'Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals' and was enjoying dipping until, at the weekend, recovering from a stomach bug, I decided to read them through and fell wholeheartedly for a new friend. Hague was born on a farm. His formal education was brought short by a combination of restricted means, an inability to conquer mathematics: and, a voracious diet of reading ranging beyond the confines of any confining curriculum. He went to a horticultural college instead an...
1 comment
Read more

Richard Hauser and the evils of Marx

Richard was a distinguished Austrian sociologist who had contributed to the Wolfenden report that led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England, Wales and Scotland in the late 1960's. I was remembering him on the plane today because I saw a reference to his wife, Hephzibah Menuhin, pianist sister of the violinist Yehudi and human rights activist. I met him after responding to an advertisement in the New Society. He lived in a house in Pimlico, a widower, with a clutch of young people, running an ill-defined (for me) social research/action institute, that I visited several times and to which Richard wanted to recruit me. I was never clear as to what my responsibilities might be and resisted co-option. He was, however, extraordinarily charismatic and as a Jew had fled Austria in 1938 not without receiving permanent damage to his hearing, courtesy of Gestapo interrogation. I vividly remember one story he told me that gives you an idea of his character. He was invit...
17 comments
Read more