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"Cynics, of course, will smile, but I have seldom felt more like
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Somewhat improbably, Margaret Thatcher confessed to being an admirer, a fact
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Father Harry Williams
(Filed: 03/02/2006)

Father Harry Williams, who has died aged 86, was a member of the
Anglican Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield, in West Yorkshire, and
before he entered the monastic life in 1969 he spent 18 years as a Fellow of
Trinity College, Cambridge, serving as Dean of Chapel from 1958.

It was during his Cambridge years that he exerted his greatest
influence - as a teacher, preacher and counsellor in the university, and also
through his books which were widely read in Britain and North America.

Following a breakdown, not long after his appointment to Trinity,
he underwent long-term psychoanalysis. The combination of anguish, insights
received through analysis, and an acute theological mind produced a deeply
personal interpretation of the Christian message which many found illuminating
and helpful, though others regarded him as a menace.

His views often caused controversy. "Religious establishments
invariably give me the creeps," he once confided to his readers, before
informing them that: "Religion is to a large extent what people do with their
lunacy, their phobias, their will to power and their sexual frustrations."

On another occasion he declared that he had received the Word of
God from a Judy Garland film, and he complained that the Church of England's
revised services were: "Clumsy constructions in flat, tired English made from
assorted pieces of doctrinal Meccano."

His ethical views were no less startling and in his autobiography
Some Day I'll Find You, written after he had become a monk, he discussed his own
homosexuality and said of his Cambridge years, "I slept with several men, in
each case fairly regularly. They were all of them friends.

"Cynics, of course, will smile, but I have seldom felt more like
thanking God than when having sex. I used in bed to praise Him there and then
for the joy I was receiving and giving.".

He added that he had also had two other longer-term relationships
with men.

During the 1960s and 1970s Williams was something of a cult
figure. The evident honesty of his views was refreshing, even if his opinions
were not always shared, and it was plain to audiences and readers that he was
articulating something that had been hammered out, often very painfully, on the
anvil of his own experience.

In the introduction to his best-selling volume of Cambridge
sermons The True Wilderness (1965) he wrote: "What was withheld from me was the
ability to transmit second-hand convictions whatever their source. All I could
speak of were those things I had proved true in my own experience by living them
and thus knowing them at first hand."

He was in great demand as a preacher, though a 45-minute sermon
in Westminster Abbey at the consecration of his friend and former pupil, Robert
Runcie, as Bishop of St Albans was, in the circumstances, thought to be too much
of a good thing.

He conducted, more economically, some of the prayers at the
wedding in St Paul's of another friend and former pupil, the Prince of Wales.
Somewhat improbably, Margaret Thatcher confessed to being an admirer, a fact
which gave him, as a natural Conservative, much pleasure.

Harry Abbott Williams was born in Rochester on 10 May 1919. His
father, who had taken part in the Battle of Jutland, was a naval captain but
soon retired and took his family to live in the South of France. Harry returned
to go to Cranleigh School and from there to Trinity College, Cambridge, as a
scholar.

He took a First in Theology and then went to Cuddesdon
Theological College to prepare for ordination - something he had had in mind
since his early school days.

He was ordained in St Paul's Cathedral in 1943 and spent two
years as a curate at St Barnabas, Pimlico, followed by three years at the famous
West End church of All Saints, Margaret Street, where he enjoyed the fine music
and became experienced in counselling and hearing confessions.

Although he belonged to the Anglo-Catholic tradition, he became
critical of certain aspects of its beliefs and practices, especially those that
suggested a vested interest in guilt.

During the years 1948-51, when he was on the staff of Westcott
House, Cambridge, teaching the New Testament, the conflict between orthodoxy and
his personal needs intensified and it was this, as much as anything, that caused
his breakdown when he continued his work as a New Testament scholar at
Trinity.

For 18 months he found it impossible to go to church or attend
the college chapel, and when he eventually returned it was only with an
agonising effort that he was able to conduct services and preach.

But it was at this time that he gave some of his finest sermons
and changed his ministry from that of a meticulous scholar to that of a
compelling preacher and deeply sensitive pastor.

Williams's decision to become a monk in 1969 was a surprise to
many but, having become disillusioned with academic work, there was in a sense
nothing else he could do and, even before he became a priest, he had
contemplated the possibility of entering the monastic life.

Fortunately for him, the Community of the Resurrection had become
a more tolerant society by the time he joined and readily provided him with a
second home. (He always regarded Trinity as his real home).

He valued the opportunity for prayer provided by the cloister,
but he sat very lightly indeed to the monastery's formal religious observances.
Besides making himself available for preaching and conducting retreats in all
parts of the country, he still managed to find his way to the best Chelsea
restaurants.

There, with the assistance of good company, an excellent meal and
a fine wine, he continued to discern what he believed to be the Word of God in
the joys as well as the sorrows of human life.

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