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     I will tell you about an old book, that is, a book from and about WWII. The author is Grace A. Wood who gave her name on the first edition as ‘Ancilla’ which meant in the early Christian years, ‘handmaid of the Lord’.

      Wood’s life journey is recounted in The Following Feet, her autobiography which tells of her life in London during WWII, (Those times, by the way, were terrible. You’ve heard of the German bombings, the V-2 rockets, the evacuations which led to Narnia, the sirens, the searchlights.) Woods tells of her life as a school teacher before, during and after the war, and the experience before the war as a chaperone to a group of English school students who were touring Germany.

       It was during that tour that Wood had the experience which provided the title of her book and changed her from an agnostic humanist to a member of the Anglican Church. There is much in the book about that journey but I want to focus on that experience.

        On one occasion, Wood had taken a break from her chaperone duties and was sitting in an old Medieval church looking at the beautiful woodwork. All was quiet; she was at peace with herself, she tells us.  Then something happened:

“I saw nothing, not even a light. I heard nothing. no voice, no music, nothing. Nothing touched me. Nor was I conscious of any Being, visible or invisible.

But suddenly, simply, silently, I was not there. And  I was there. It lasted for a moment, yet it was eternal since there was no time.

And I knew, as certainly as I know I am trying to write it down, as certainly as I know that I live and eat and walk and sleep, that this world, this universe, is precisely as we see it, hear it, know it, but is at the same time completely different. It is as we see it because we are of it; it is also and at the same wholly other."

“. . . I had no vision of God, or of any other person, no vision of Christ, or any other spiritual being. yet it was all that is, and there was no God, and equally no Not-God. It was whole and of the spirit. No words can make it clear.  All I can say is that the wholeness seemed akin to that part of me that I should call spirit, as if my spirit were part of it and could not be separated from it.” —Ancilla

     There is more, much more in Grace Wood’s  story. but what interested me most about this book was Woods’ timeless-all time experience in that Medieval church. That experience is foreign to me as I clump around in this world because all I know is the here and now, up and down, right and left, but I believe Grace Wood.