Part of me still can't believe she's gone - especially when I saw her face gazing sagely and benignly out of the photograph in her obituary in The Independent the other day.

I'm not in a position to write an obituary with any authority, since I only became friends with her in the last seven years of her life; however, I'd like to pay tribute to some of Monica's many gifts and qualities.

Monica Furlong: religious writer, journalist, novelist, campaigner, feminist, biographer, poet and one time trustee of the British Stammering Association. There were many facets to her career. She led a very rich life - rich in experience and exploration, in wonder and awe - impressively rich, I feel, for someone who knew the devastating effects of stammering and had not let her speech defeat her. She wouldn't wish me to talk of stammering 'defeating' her anyway; rather stammering was an unmistakable part of the extraordinarily sensitive, perceptive and wise person Monica was. She once said to me that she sometimes felt that stammering was the most truthful thing about her. The search for truth, or better, for a truth/her truth was one of the abiding preoccupations of her life. Coupled with a brilliant facility with words, it led her to write some profound and original religious works, including biographies of Alan Watts and Thomas Merton, her autobiography Bird of Paradise, and recently her thoroughgoing dissection of the current crisis besetting the Church of England, C. of E.: The State It's In.

Monica was an unstinting supporter of the cause of women in the Anglican Church. She campaigned for the ordination of women, and latterly for the revocation of the Act of Synod which still creates a special ministry and other privileges for those who refuse to accept female priests. She believed in an inclusive, loving and forgiving Church and instinctively sided with the oppressed and the outsider. Hers was a faith for the questioner, the doubter and the experimenter. Monica loved to puncture the pomposity and grandiosity of religious attitudes, whilst remaining alive to the sacred to be found in the most unexpected places.

Her obituarist in The Guardian wrote: 'she became to many women - and to many men as well, especially homosexuals - not just a beacon of light, more a flaming torch.' May I add people who stammer to that list as well, please?

St John Harris

From the Spring 2003 edition of Speaking Out