Amazing Grace

There is one genre of spiritual books which has always appealed to me: the spiritual autobiography. I especially love Richard Jefferies’ The Story of My Heart. Gandhi’s The Story of My Experiments with Truth and Alan Watts’ In my Own Way. Thomas Merton’s The Seven Story Mountain and Gurdjieff’s Meetings with Remarkable Men are two other classics of the genre.

Serge Beddington-Behrens’ Amazing Grace is a new spiritual autobiography which is both highly entertaining and deeply illuminating. This is partly because Serge’s background was so extraordinary, and - superficially at least - the very antithesis of spirituality. He was born into immense wealth and privilege. His father was a multi-millionaire, a business tycoon who was a confidante of Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle. Serge’s mother was a Russian princess, whose parents had fled Russia during the revolution, narrowly escaping with their lives. During Serge’s childhood, the family had 16 servants - cooks, butlers, maids, chauffeurs, gardeners, etc. Every meal - even breakfast - was a lavish affair of multiple courses. At weekends, Serge’s father regularly held ostentatious parties at their country retreat, at which the great and good of British society would mingle.

Tellingly, Serge writes that he was glad of the servants’ company. They would often play sports with him, while his father constantly worked, and his mother was emotionally distant due to the trauma of her childhood. Despite his privilege, his childhood was unhappy. As he writes, “Despite all those servants and nannies and governesses and gold spoons; despite all that material plenty, I felt I lived in a desolate world.”

Serge followed the traditional trajectory of his class, from elite public school to Oxford, where he was a member of the infamous “Bullingdon Club” - essentially an upper-class clique of drunken hooligans - that later spawned two UK Prime Ministers. Inheriting a love of exercise from his father, Serge excelled at sports. He was a keen competitive skier, a sport at which he represented England. In fact, it was while skiing that Serge had his first powerful spiritual experience, aged 19, when he “became conscious of what I can best describe as being a soft, loving presence around me enfolding me. It seemed to lift me up and very slowly turn me around. I heard soft music and everything felt jellylike and peaceful and I observed myself land perfectly on the snow with my skis pointing in the right direction.”

After university, Serge was a dandy and playboy, who attended endless parties wearing garish costumes from hippy boutiques. He provides many hilarious anecdotes from this period, often involving his romantic liaisons (the term ‘complicated’ barely begins to describe his amorous activities). But there was a sense of growing dissatisfaction inside him. Whilst he clung to the comfort and security of upper-class society, he also felt repelled by it. As he puts it, “There has always been an ongoing battle between these two parts of me, as the very world that I despised also gave me comfort and security. As I grew up, I would find myself veering from one extreme to the other.”

When he was 23, Serge’s father died, his inheritance freeing him from the necessity to find a career. But rather than plunging into even more fervent hedonism, Serge turned to spiritual exploration, which soon became the main theme of his life. I wonder if - at least unconsciously - this was a reaction to bereavement, which often has a transformational effect, with a longing for philosophical and spiritual meaning. Certainly, by this point Serge clearly sensed that wealth and hedonism are not the route to lasting fulfilment. Perhaps this is paradoxically - at least for some people - the greatest gift which inherited wealth can bring: the first-hand experience that material wealth does not mean lasting contentment, so that one can rapidly move on to seeking fulfilment at its real source, the inner world of psychological and spiritual development.

At the age of 27, in 1972, Serge moved to California, to pursue self-exploration more assiduously. This period of his life has a good deal of historical interest, since he was at the epicentre of the burgeoning “human potential” movement and connected to many eminent figures. He remained there for 14 years, undergoing a great deal of therapy and self-development, whilst not entirely abandoning his colourful life of yore. His return to the UK led to many challenges, both financial, emotional and physical. Serge shows acutely how such challenges can generate spiritual growth, as much as any spiritual practice or path.

This book has a marvellously warm, light-hearted tone, and the reader always feels that they are being addressed directly, as if in Serge’s company. At the same time, Serge deals with his own spiritual development and experiences with depth and insight. He shows that wealth and privilege can be almost as much an obstacle to inner growth as poverty. He shows that the first essential phase of spiritual development is a process of de-conditioning, of unpeeling our false, social selves so that we uncover our authentic spiritual nature.

Serge’s book illustrates how challenging this process can be, but also the great joy and fulfilment that emerge when we achieve authenticity. I am sure that, in the future, this book will be seen as an essential book of spiritual autobiography, comparable to some of the classics of the genre.