An introduction to religious and spiritual experience

Chad Varah (1911–2007)
Rev. Chad Varah was the founder of the Samaritans, an organization to 
listen and support the suicidal, the lonely and the depressed. He tells his 
story in
 Before I Die Again,
a reference to his belief in reincarnation. 
The son of a vicar, Chad Varah had no intention of following in his father’s 
footsteps. However, at a loose end after Oxford University, he worked 
with the Anthroposophists. His father disapproved, brought him home 
and Chad Varah found himself at theological college, on the understand-
ing that he need not be ordained at the end of it.
He finished the course and the dreaded ordination loomed. Varah tells 
how he made a last desperate attempt to escape by going to see the very 
old and extremely ill Bishop Hine. Three times he tried to explain to the 
bishop his reasons for not wishing to be ordained. Chad Varah feared 
ordination because he couldn’t face being lumped with vicars and maiden 

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Spiritual and Mystical Experiences
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aunts. The bishop merely said ‘Scruples’, by which he meant avoiding 
doing one’s duty by pretending that something is against one’s convic-
tions. Varah felt unable to argue, found himself accepting ordination and 
left the room. Within minutes the bishop died. As Varah put it:
So what chance did I have, being press-ganged by a saint on his death-
bed? I felt that I had just received a life sentence, and that, of course, is 
what it was.
196
The next significant event for Chad Varah followed soon after. His first 
duty as a curate was to take a funeral service. To his distress he found that 
not only was he was burying a 13-year-old girl, but that it was to be in 
unconsecrated ground, because she had committed suicide. Apparently 
she had taken her life because she was bleeding and thought she was 
dying of a venereal disease. In fact it was her first period, and she had had 
no idea what had happened to her. She had no-one she could talk to 
about it. Such ignorance was, unfortunately not uncommon in 1935 and 
Varah was so moved that he made a vow:
Little girl, I never knew you, but you have changed my life. I promise 
you that I, who was taught about sex by a saintly old man when I was 
younger than you, will teach children your age what they need to know, 
and be someone they can ask, even if I get called a dirty old man at the 
age of twenty-four.
197
This is what Varah then did. At his own youth club he established a pat-
tern of answering any question put to him. At first, of course, all the ques-
tions were about sex, but gradually bigger issues were discussed. Varah 
established a good relationship with the youngsters and later wrote for 
the popular comics 
Eagle
and 
Girl
. Through his counselling work, he 
became more and more aware of the high rate of suicides, particularly in 
Greater London, and he also realized that many of them could be pre-
vented by simply talking to someone. He was, however, extremely busy in 
the parish and had a young family, including triplets. So while he felt that 
there was a need for a telephone service for suicidal people, which would 
have to be available day and night, he 
said to God, ‘Don’t look at me. Surely you can see I’m busy? This 
mission to save people from suicide, if it’s done at all, will have to 
be done by one of those parsons who has a church in the City with 
no parishioners to speak of, and the possibility of spending the whole 
time in some specialization.’ And so, having kindly instructed God how 

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Religious and Spiritual Experience
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to proceed further if He wished to do so, I set off for my holiday in 
Knokke.
During the holiday, which was in fact a period in charge of a church on 
the Belgian coast, a cable arrived, offering him the benefice of St Stephen 
Walbrook, right in the heart of the City of London. The job exactly met 
the requirements he had spelled out as necessary for a telephone service 
for the suicidal. He took it and his course was set. The telephone exchange 
there was MAN and Varah wanted a number which was easy to remem-
ber for the suicide line. He had decided on MAN 9000, so he dialled the 
operator to ask if his number could be changed to that, fearing, however, 
that it would be too expensive. The operator asked him what number he 
was calling from and so he wiped the grimy telephone dial clean – to 
reveal MAN 9000.
Chad Varah had accepted that he was to set up the Samaritans and 
from then on, he worked tirelessly to provide the service staffed by volun-
teers, which is now established all over the world.