Living in the Spirit

This is a story of energy, conflict and danger, defeats and triumphs in 16th and 17th century England and Spain. It is told from the inside, through the thinking and feelings of five protagonists, using contemporary culture and their own writings. They write of their visions and inner voices, their miracles and meditations, of spiritual transformation, of love, joy, hope and manifestation. Their lens is the dominant controlling text of the time - the Bible.They are a mixed group. Theresa of Avila was from a prosperous Spanish Catholic family, a woman who faced the Inquisition and whose grandfather was a Jew; she radically reformed the Carmelite community of nuns. John of the Cross, her spiritual protege and fellow-reformer, was also a Spanish Catholic, child of a poor working single-parent mother. Mary Ward, a genteel Catholic in Protestant England, founded the Congregation of Jesus, a female version of the Jesuits. Gerrard Winstanley, the radical writer and Digger on St George's Hill, and George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, were English Protestants, married men of middling rank. They all faced powerful life-threatening opposition from authority and peers, all inspired loving and loyal support from people from the top down, and their lives and writings were all driven by intellectual, spiritual and emotional intensity and ferocious energy. They changed the world for the better as they knew it should be. They advanced their truth.This tells their story as they saw it.