Jonathan Aitken

 

In the eighties I was a dutiful external Sunday Christian. That is very different from being a Christian of the kind I believe I now am. In the past my commitment was flawed. It was to go to church with my family once a week, and to do right things with my lips, but to go on doing wrong things in my life. I was on the move towards spiritual searching before my troubles began. In 1995 I remember surprising my civil servants when I carved out time for the Parliamentary Retreat. This was a series of one to one sessions throughout Lent with a man who has had a tremendous influence on me, Father Gerard Hughes, the author of God of Surprises.

My searching was partly prompted by life’s success and finding it more empty than I had expected. We don’t always know ourselves when spiritual seeds are planted. I am sure that among the crucial milestones was spending three years in a Dublin hospital from the age of four and being nursed through a period of tremendous medical danger by a wonderful nun, Sister Mary Finbar. Being a choir boy and leader of the choir at an old Suffolk church and confirmation at public school, were also seed plantings that I had forgotten about until I looked back and realised what a debt I owed to people like my school chaplain and Sister Mary Finbar.

If you have had as much time as I have had to examine past mistakes, it’s not too difficult to makes some reasonably accurate judgements. I think that where my relationship with God was concerned, I rather treated God as though He were my bank manager. I thought He was important enough to visit in His premises quite regularly and that He was a kind person willing to forgive the spiritual equivalent of over spending on the credit card. But I thought I was in charge of the account so I could get away with what I wanted, and that is not a Christian life, but a self centred and proud life.

I had a painful, but also a particularly fruitful period, which ran from the collapse of the libel case in June 1997 until waiting to go to prison in June 1999. One of the key steps were prayer partners – people who came alongside me most unexpectedly, and said ‘we would like to pray with you’. It was a group of half a dozen people, some like Michael Alison old Parliamentary friends, and we met once a week and from that I was steered to the Alpha course at Holy Trinity Brompton.

But the journey was essentially a private journey of prayer. Gradually the inside and the outside of my life started to match up. I went through a long period of what Psalm 130 calls ‘the depths’ which encompassed defeat, disgrace, divorce bankruptcy and jail – a royal flush of crises, especially as they all took place within the public eye. I think it was Luther who said in our pain and our brokeness we come closer to God and that has been my experience.

Against all the forecasts nothing bad happened to me in prison. I am sure this was because I was protected by an invisible wall of prayer. I used to receive an embarrassing amount letters and the vast majority ended up ‘I am praying for you.’ A prison cell can be a great place to pray in. I can understand why monks like cells so much. When you are in a tiny space, with nothing but a chair and your bed it is very simple. A prison is a very quiet place in the early morning and I found I had wonderful quiet times with no distractions. I also became involved in the formation of a prayer group. Paddy, my prayer partner, had the qualities of a recruiting sergeant and within no time we had a very strong prayer group, which developed into a Bible study group. A third of prisoners can’t read or write and I used to have a long queue outside my cell I because I was willing to read peoples intimate letters from their wives and girlfriends and write back for them. There was a joke that the quality of love letters coming out of Brixton prison suddenly shot up!

I had wanted, as part of my spiritual searching, to see if I could do a correspondence course in theology. Then someone said I should go to Wycliffe and I was offered a residential place. A week before my interview I would have said I could not accept that because after leaving prison I would be under an obligation to get a job to help my family and so on. But unexpectedly my creditors refused to accept any settlement of the debt and four days before I went to Wycliffe I knew I was going bankrupt. So the one thing I couldn’t do after prison was earn money.

I don’t envisage being ordained. I don’t think I am worthy of that. In fact I don’t have any plan for the rest of my life. It reminds me of a line I heard in a sermon: ‘What makes God laugh? People who have plans’. I do want to devote the rest of my life primarily to the service of God. I am not interested in going back to business or making money. I am joining the board of Prison Fellowship and I am going to write Chuck Colson’s biography*.

My evangelical friends would say my friendship with Chuck is not a coincidence but a God-incidence. We have both gone from political power to a crashing fall from grace and then come to Christ, going to prison and then afterwards throwing ourselves into Christian service. He has been mentor, friend and prayer partner and has shown me that you can turn disgrace to something useful to your neighbour and pleasing to God.

God is a God of new beginnings. We can all have little resurrections in our lives. This dawned on me in a police cell waiting for a decision whether they were going to charge me. For the first time I read Mark’s gospel from beginning to end, and I remember being overwhelmed by the power of the narrative and the Passion chapters. I began to see dimly there my own story. It is a story of hope and trust and in the end of great contentment.

*Chuck Colson went to prison for his part in the Watergate affair.