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By Root 306 0

her audience rapt until her final blessing. There is little point in presenting her homily in its entirety, because in print, without the dramatic pauses and husky thrill of her voice, the words lose their fizz, like warm champagne. Indeed, even as she was saying the words I found them absolutely maddening, an often ill-suited amalgam of personal sophistication and scriptural superficiality, mixed metaphors and rambling thoughts held together only by the force of her personality and pierced at a handful of unforeseen points by bolts of blinding perception. Her theology was rustic in its training (if training it could be called), sporadic in its development, and often wildly unsuccessful in its attempts at exegesis or midrash. For someone like me, with my background and my own careful passions, it might have sent me gibbering away into the night, but for one thing: Despite her unread, unsophisticated, raw, rude, and unlettered approach to Scripture, when it came to zeroing in on her target, she was dead-centre accurate.

It hit me about halfway through her talk (talk?—what an inadequate word for the woman’s passionate display of exultation, despair, pity, joy…) what it was that I was hearing, and with that awareness I sat back in my seat with a jolt that startled my neighbours.

The woman was a mystic.

What I was hearing was an untutored woman singing to God in the only voice she possessed: a simple voice, unsuited to high opera, but not without beauty. With training…

I was disturbed. I was excited. I had told Holmes that I wanted Margery Childe to be someone who talked with God, someone actually doing what I and countless others had spent lifetimes scrutinising, and at that moment at any rate I was convinced that this was what I was witnessing. It was galvanic. Electrifying. I wanted to take notes. Yet it was also troubling, to see before me living evidence that the limpid stream I studied could become this crashing, unruly, primal force. It had the brutal effect of making me feel a trivialiser, as if I had confidently set out to analyse a minute section of a wall and stepped back from my completed work, only to find myself in the Sistine Chapel. It was depressing, but salutary. And quite fascinating.

She leapt and slithered through her discourse, losing her train of thought, shooting off into tangential metaphors, painfully misusing what I thought of as technical terms, and then, when all seemed lost, letting fly with the casual flare of illumination that left me stunned with its brilliance.

I have no great ear for music; I have only a degree more for poetry. What I do possess is a powerful and unerring sense for truth, particularly theological truth, and that night I heard it, ringing out clear and sweet in that unlikely hall from a woman who was working herself, and her audience, into a state that verged on erotic excitement.

She came back time and again to the concept of thirst, imbuing the word with a yearning that became ever more urgent. She called upon, inevitably, Canticles, but only obliquely, teasingly, and she shied away before committing herself to a full-blown orgy. (The Song of Solomon does become inordinately stimulating: “You are stately as a palm tree,” it croons, “and your breasts are like its clusters. I say I shall climb the palm tree and take hold of its branches… your kisses are like the best wine, going down smoothly, gliding over lips and teeth.” And: “My beloved put his hand to the latch, and my heart thrilled within me.” It is regarded as an allegory of the soul’s desire for God, but the rabbis were forced to make strong injunctions against those who would sing it in taverns. It is, in a word, bawdy.)

She ended her talk, abruptly as before, with a phrase from Canticles: “ ‘Eat, O friends, and drink: drink deeply, O lovers.’ ” She smiled and gave a small bow. “Until Saturday, friends.” And she was gone.

There was a certain breathlessness to the wave of voices that broke over the hall, and the Inner Circle around me, though they must have heard her any number of times already, stood up flustered