As an 8-year-old, a grade 2 teacher inspired me with stories of Jesus and his apostles healing the sick simply by placing their hands on them. A fourth-grade teacher spoke proudly about how the Catholic Church was the largest in the world, with over a billion adherents. I was less impressed with this because I saw no healing happening. I continued to attend church, but my enthusiasm dwindled, especially at university, where religion was viewed as a relic of a bygone, unscientific age.
My interest in Catholicism entirely disappeared when my firstborn son had a brain haemorrhage on his first day here and died on his third. The idea of having only one life made no sense to me. Why bother turning up for only 3 days of ill health?
However, eight years later, my wife was diagnosed with terminal lung disease. She was only 32. She had been born with a missing enzyme, but, like so many nurses in that era, her lunch and tea breaks were filled with coffee and cigarettes. It didn’t help that I smoked even more heavily. Medicine had nothing to offer her, so we started a search for other treatments.
An eighty-year-old patient, who was once a prominent opera singer and protégé of Dame Nellie Melba, lent me some interesting books on my monthly visits to her home. She suggested I see her friend, Mary Newton, whom she described as being powerful in her prayers and able to teach me to meditate.
Mary was in her sixties, married to a retired ex-Second World War pilot. On my first visit, she told me she had received weekly visits from Jesus over a period of six months. He called her ‘little one’ because she had been the daughter of one of his close friends in Palestine in the 1st century AD, when she was 5 and he was 30. In these appearances, Jesus explained the Gospels to her. What he told her was quite different from the conventional Christian teachings I had learned at home and at the Catholic school I’d attended.
Mary’s interpretation of the Gospels conformed with the books I’d read. They had a common underlying theme, which I refer to as the Ancient and Ageless Wisdom.
When I sent my incurable patients to learn meditation from Mary, her prayers resulted in remissions from arthritis, cancer, and terminal lung disease in three adults, and from encephalitis and brain cancer in two infants.
In 1995, I read books by Neale Donald Walsch, entitled, ‘Conversations with God.’ In frustration at the parlous state of his life, he wrote a note to God in which he had a good beef about it. When he finished, he lifted his pen. Then he felt an inner urge to put pen to paper. He wrote, “Do you want answers or are you just venting?” The result was a series of books, the first of which topped the New York Times list of bestsellers for a record 58 weeks. A few years later, I found I could do the same thing in a slightly different way by writing questions in blue, clearing my mind of any ideas of mine, and writing the answers that came through in green.
Twelve years ago, I felt an urge to bring this information together. I caught up with a schoolmate who became a parish priest in the Ballarat diocese, where clerical paedophilia featured regularly in the media. An honest and caring man, I felt for his situation. In entering the priesthood, he had put the goal of bringing God to the people ahead of marriage and children, and received respect for doing so. But in his 70s, in the fallout from the clerical paedophilia scandal, he was expected to follow his bishop’s orders to speak to women and children only in the presence of chaperones. Respect was gone.
He inspired the fictional character, Father Greg O’Driscoll, at the centre of this quartet of books. What began in a small way twelve years ago has grown into a cosmology that provides an alternative view of the nature and purpose of humanity.