Back in Oslo Sparre, who had put down his paint brush for two years in order to travel with Buchman, told of his travels in India. A Bohemian friend of his spoke enviously about them and asked, with a bit of a sneer, 'Can't you get me a job like that?' 'I explained', Sparre writes, 'that on such journeys you lived very much like a medieval begging monk: owning nothing, living on what you were given, staying where you were offered a bed, totally abstaining from alcohol, tobacco and womanising. In those days, too, it was de rigueur to dress neatly like an Englishman in every detail down to the polished shoes. My friend's interest cooled off. ..

'I had not joined a movement or organisation. I had found a new life, as an artist and as a man; basically it was an anarchistic way of life, since rules are superfluous when people live openly and care totally for one another. It was a free life led by an invisible mysterious force, the Holy Spirit; each and all followed the inner voice, with no fixed jobs, no salaries, no chains of command.'

'Idealistic movements have a typical pattern of development,' Sparre adds. 'What begins as something liberatingly new and alive becomes rigid and dead behind the prison bars of theory and organisation. Frank Buchman used to shake his head when anyone wanted to state too definitely what MRA was. Let it be a lake where the elephant can swim and the lamb can wade, he said. Of course, there were always a few would-be sergeant-majors who wanted to drill us in what they took to be MRA's ideology, but even they helped the individual to find his own way, through learning to withstand them. For me MRA was always a school for standing on one's own feet, not for leaning on other people, but for reaching out to the firm reality that transcends us all.'10

Most - and the number still increases - came through to this independent freedom under God. But it is all too easy in any large association of people, civil or spiritual, to become a 'sergeant-major' or, which is equally wrong, to become dependent on a 'sergeant-major' and conform to a decision taken by others, not because so commissioned by God but in order to take a momentarily fashionable step. When this happens, life and divine guidance dry up. Some couples, after the time in Kashmir for instance, felt called to take a resolution of abstinence in marriage, somewhat similar to that undertaken by Mahatma Gandhi. To those who took this - and other steps of self-denial - out of genuine calling, it brought not strain but greater freedom. Buchman's aim was always that of which Sparre writes: that Moral Re-Armament should be 'a school for standing on one's own feet, not for leaning on other people but for reaching out to the firm reality that transcends us all'.

475