On a Huge Hill

During his sixteen years as Vicar of Lyme Regis in Dorset, Murray Dell kept a diary. It is not so much a diary about what he did day by day but about his pursuit of truth. The 'huge hill' where he sought it had taken many forms -Table Mountain and the Drakensberg in South Africa, where he lived formerly; and Blackford Hill and Golden Cap. And above all it has been there below his parish church, on Church Beach. This setting is important, since for Murray Dell God is greater and more ubiquitous than the God who so often seems to be confined within the walls of a church. As he continues his pursuit of truth, he is led into the tensions between the institutional church which he is there to represent and the call of the wider world - human, animal and natural. This tension has a focal point, and a resolution, for him in the eucharist, when the walls of the sanctuary seem to fall away, revealing yet other hills, and the Sea of Galilee. Here is an especially moving work of twentieth-century spirituality, which will speak especially to those who, like its author, have many questions and often feel themselves on the very edge of the churches. Before his retirement, Mu