London

I was born and brought up in London and lived there for the first 23 years of my life before leaving, vowing never to go back. However 21 years later I did go back and here I have been, living and working, ever since.

The reason I left was that I had become aware of the spiritual path and London epitomised worldliness to me at that time. The people and the place, their goals and its atmosphere, were materialistic through and through or so it seemed to me in the light of my new approach to life.

I spent the next 21 years leading what I suppose I have to term a contemplative life though that description does seem a little grand. But it was a quiet life largely centred around prayer and meditation and the attempt to lead an existence dedicated to the spiritual quest. I was a vegetarian and had no social life to speak of. I lived on not much and was without a proper job though I was not idle doing occasional part time work in museums and teaching English, depending on where I was.  I read, wrote a bit, walked a lot, gardened when I had a garden and so on. But I allowed nothing to interfere with my main purpose. Sometimes I felt a little concerned that I should be doing more but when I asked my spiritual instructors about that was told that for now this was my task.

As implied by that statement this period came to end and many years after I had left London I found myself back there again, living and, for the first time in a while, working full time. It was quite a change, I can tell you. If London had seemed worldly before now it was a veritable Babylon. It hardly even felt part of England, such had been the enormous demographic changes over the past couple of decades but the cultural and political changes had eaten away at it too. Babylon was presumably a city without a heart. London has surely become that now.

Let me come to the point. Actually I have two points.  Point one is that sometimes God puts us in a decidedly unspiritual environment either to test us or perhaps to see what we can put back, in however small a way it might be. 

Point two concerns London itself. In many ways I had been very attached to the city in the way that anyone is attached to where they are born and bred, but also because certain parts of it did seem rather magical to me when young. Most particularly some of the parks and gardens but there were also little areas full of character all over the city. These seemed far fewer to me on my return, partly no doubt because I was older but also because modernism and modernization had done their best to destroy much that was individual. 

When I was at school I had the good fortune to attend a service at Westminster Abbey six days a week every morning for four years, getting there by walking through the East Cloister. For one year I even sat in the Choir, and probably the most terrifying moment of my life was when, aged about 13, I had to read a lesson to about 400 people from a lectern up by the High Altar. Inevitably as a schoolboy I took all this for granted but now, looking back, I am very grateful for the experience and feel that Westminster Abbey is the spiritual heart of London and has deep national significance.

And here (not before time) I come to my reason for writing this piece. I believe there are important places, spiritual power points if you like, all over the planet and London is one of them. It is for this reason I think that the demons who seek dominion over this world have done their best to destroy it. They have done the same with England as a whole and they are currently hell-bent on doing the same to the United States. Of course they do this everywhere but their primary focus is always on undermining those places where there is most potential for good. It is just so obvious that certain places have been marked for attention and that they are being brought low and corrupted so that their spiritually leavening effect is diminished. It is not chauvinism to recognise this but plain common sense. There's not much we as individuals can do about it other than to point it out and try, as best we can, to stand against the spiritual degradation of those places in the Western world that have the potential to awaken humanity to higher ways of being. Both Great Britain and America (though not only them, of course) have, however imperfectly, played that role in the past, and the fact that so much energy is expended on trying to destroy them rather indicates that they have the potential to do so again in the future. (See here for a prophecy saying as much.) 

I have no idea what the future holds but one thing I do feel sure about is that both Britain and America stand for real freedom and it would be to humanity's great loss if that were allowed to be overwhelmed by a kind of internationalism that pretends freedom but is really about conforming to a bland secular uniformity in which control, though disguised, is everywhere.