Francois' Story

When I was sixteen, I left school and helped my father on the farm. I enjoyed taking in the harvest in the summer, but as the winter came on I lost my motivation. My father fell ill and I was put on the farm with the foreman and a couple of hands. It was a bitterly cold day in September and I was cutting beets. I'd pick up a beet, chopped off the top and drove the hook into my leg. It was enough to wake me up and make me ask myself, what am I doing here?

I got a job working for a feed manufacturer, and then joined the regular army. I was twenty when I came out of the army. It was Christmas. My mother was going to a local hotel for Christmas and I didn't want to go with her. I wanted to play golf, but the car wouldn't start so I went with my mother after all. There I met my future wife, Ilaina, and her parents. When I got back home, the car started perfectly.

I worked in various jobs, but they didn't satisfy me. Ilaina and I got married. Her parents ran a small independent school in Norwich. They said, 'why not try teaching?' I took their advice. We moved into the flat at the school and there our first daughter was born. I went to college and studied arts and crafts, doing a special study of young children, using my daughter and the children at the school as my subjects.

Ilaina's mother went to spiritual healing. I was curious and went with her one day. I started going to spiritual meetings and received messages through mediums that were very meaningful to me. One of the healers was a very fine, elderly man, a believer in Christ. He didn't know where he got his gift from. He was the first person to point a spiritual direction for me.

I taught in state schools and then in independent schools. Although we hadn't planned this, I started helping my parents-in-law. We moved to our own house and our second child, a son, was born. Then some friends connected with the spiritual church gave me a book called 'God Spoke To Me' by Eileen Caddy, about a community called Findhorn in Scotland.

I went to Findhorn. This place has become known for its amazing success in growing plants in a barren part of Scotland, but the essence of it was the way of working from receiving. Plants were certainly part of it, but the centre of it all was God, trying to create a God-centred community, looking to God for guidance in the practicalities of everyday life.

From Findhorn I discovered that there were people who were listening inside; that there were people all over the world who felt like me. In 1969 I took over the school from my in-laws, who had reached retirement. The school needed a lot of work and I built new classrooms and extensions, employing the sub-contractors myself. I felt that in my own small way I was putting into practice what I'd seen done at Findhorn, getting a sense of what needed to be done and then doing it. Not to ignore the realities, but to be positive and go ahead.

Synchronistic events started to happen. We always had enough children in the school. If we didn't, they'd turn up at the last moment, for instance. We modernized the school kitchen and we ordered a sink unit. The company rang to say that the one we'd ordered wasn't available, but could they send another which was six inched shorter. When it arrived it fitted perfectly, cost less and was better quality. The original one would have been too long because I'd made a mistake with the measurements.

I had been told that this sort of thing happened at Findhorn and later I was to see it often with Bapak. It was as if the world revolved around him. Once a friend of mine was in the kitchen in the Central London Subud house while Bapak was staying there. Someone told him that Bapak had asked for a melon. It was night and the middle of winter, but he went out and the first shop he came to was open and had a melon. He said he had the smell of the melon all the way to the shop.

I continued to go to Findhorn and a man there told me about Subud. I went back to Norwich and within a week a cousin of Ilaina's arrived from New Zealand. She was in Subud and she and her husband had been asked by Bapak to take Subud to New Zealand. The third thing that happened was that the son of the elderly man from the spiritualist church was in Subud and I happened to meet him by chance. The forth thing was that one of the parents from school was in Subud. By that time I knew enough to take notice of these "coincidences". I looked into Subud and was opened here in Norwich.

I was also interested at this time in sufism. What I found in both Findhorn and sufism was a powerful quality of human contact which I didn't find in Subud until many years later. I couldn't understand why this was lacking in Subud. It seemed like a contradiction, but somehow I knew I had to accept it. So I went to Subud for my inner and to the others for the human contact.

I once tested about the sufis. What was their way? It seemed to me that it was reaching out towards God accompanied by a call. What was the way of Subud? No more call, only submission. I realized I had been given everything when I was opened. I no longer needed to search for God. Bapak said that when we are opened we receive the whole thing from A to Z.