NEAR DEATH

During the spring and early summer Buchman steadily recovered strength, staying with different friends in the warmer states of the East. Though from this time he was never robust physically, he was mentally and spiritually as active as ever. He followed the activities of his colleagues, which included adaptations of You Can Defend America in Canada, Britain and Australia, with the keenest interest. In Australia the Prime Minister, John Curtin, adjourned Parliament early so that the revue Battle for Australia, could be seen in the Members' dining room, which was converted into a theatre for the occasion. The Minister of Navy and Munitions cabled Buchman, 'There is new light coming to Parliament through your vision.'9

Buchman was particularly interested by the findings of an intelligence analysis for the Selective Service Administration. It noted that Moral Re-Armament drew the fire equally of Nazis and Communists, of the extreme right and extreme left in politics, of aggressive atheists and narrow ecclesiastics. It had been charged by radicals with being militaristic and by warmongers with being pacifistic. Certain elements in labour denounced it as anti-union: certain elements in management as pro-union.

In Britain, the report went on, MRA was accused by some of being a brilliantly clever front for Fascism: in Germany and Japan of being a super-intelligent arm of the British and American Secret Service. One day a section of the press would announce that MRA was defunct: and the next that it numbered nearly the entire membership of the British Cabinet at the time of Munich, and was responsible for engineering Hitler's attack upon Russia.

'Nothing', concluded this analysis, 'but a potentially vast moral and spiritual reformation of global proportions could possibly be honoured by antagonisms so venomous and contradictory in character, and so world- wide in scope.'10

Meanwhile Buchman was grateful to have time to think of the meaning of his struggle and of life itself. Carl Hambro and his wife Gudrun were now in the United States, and he wrote from Florida to her, 'We have come to the Southland to recuperate. The warm balm of summer is on us and we are enjoying a wealth of honeysuckle, laurel, iris, dogwood and roses, and it is real country like your own Norway. It brings us closer to eternal truth - the thing that matters. There are so many real truths we want to learn for which we never seem to have time. Since this illness one has more time.

Thou, O Christ, art all I want;

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