Mark Patrick Hederman is a Benedictine monk from Glenstal Abbey in Ireland. For many years now he has been engaging in activities that bear more than a passing resemblance to Psychic Questing. Although the wrapper around them is firmly Christian, this should not distract you from an extremely interesting exercise in living your life as a permanent quest. A full review will follow but for the moment here’s the publisher’s notes: Walkabout, Life as Holy Spirit is the biography of a Benedictine monk who not only believes but sets out to prove in this book that the Holy Spirit is alive and active in the world of the 21st century.
Coincidence is one of the ways in which the Spirit makes this presence felt without importuning or interfering with free will. For the first three years of the new millennium, the author went walkabout in the Spirit allowing coincidence to dictate the rhythm and pattern of life. Like the ancient Celtic monks who committed themselves to a small boat made of skin and set out on the water throwing away the oars to allow wind and tide to carry them wherever the Spirit willed, so this journey was guided by promptings of the whispering wind.
Seven countries and three continents later, Walkabout witnesses to the living presence of some benevolent consciousness ready and willing to guide us along the right path. Reading the signs of the times, the trail of symbols watermarked by the Spirit, requires intuition and imagination. As children we all possess these faculties in abundance. Our claustrophobic educational system has deleted these faculties from our desk-top menu. Only artists are still in possession of such powers of perception. The rest of the world is blind. In such circumstances the presence of the Holy Spirit in our world remains undetected.
This book tries to do for the reader what Anne Sullivan accomplished as a miracle for Helen Keller: translate through the linear print of these pages an inkling of the many-splendoured world of the Holy Spirit which Western European civilisation for so many centuries has been missing.