Q: Is there a sense in which you become aware of the presence of the Spirit?

A: It's very hard to answer that. I think you can only say there can be an awareness of a presence.

The other one is an English Carmelite nun called Ruth Burrows, who in the seventies published a number of short books on the Carmelite tradition, including one called Guidelines to Mystical Prayer which for me made the same kind of sense as Abbot Chapman.

Q: How do you see yourself in relation to the reformed and evangelical side of our tradition?

A: It is something that I think became very important to me at one or two points when I needed it as a kind of corrective to what can be a slightly precious and elitist anglo-catholocism. Sometimes you just need to sing Blessed Assurance and hit a tambourine. You just need to know that there is something profoundly simple about what an evangelical would rightly call a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and that nothing substitutes for that.