THROUGH MINE OWN EYES

This is the confessional of a ""Natural Mystic"" and it traces her pilgrimage on the via dolorosa to the vision splendid. As a descendant of this prominent British family, comfortably reared in a large and happy household in the serene years before World I, there is little to presage the unorthodox experiences to follow. She marries a German, Geo, lovelessly, because he ""overbore her remonstrances""; then after the birth of their first child she fell in love hopelessly and finally with Andreas. The Hitler years brought her back to England with her two small girls (Geo's) and after a renewal of her affair (this really is too casual a word) with Andreas, she bore his child, had a breakdown, shock therapy, and considerable psychic bolstering by Rudolf Steiner both before and after. She also had a phase in which she heard celestial music, took extraterrestial trips- all without benefit of ISD, and had other curious experiences before she joined the Church of Christ. Never wholly satisfied by its divisions, she made her own retreat-to a hut- and there, in 1958, ""just breathing in God and God breathing in me"" had her greatest spiritual revelation. Acceptance may be difficult for non-believers or conformist believers; also for those uneasy in the presence of a prose which wears its aureole of ""radiance"" without reticence. Oddly enough, the offbeat transfiguration sometimes moves books in strange and wondrous ways-- otherwise known as the shine of reflected glory.