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Rev Dr Martin Israel, Britain’s most influential medium?
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 ENGLAND. The death, on 23 October, of the Rev Dr Martin Israel, 80, has robbed us of a man many regarded as Britain’s most influential medium. That is certainly the view of Leslie Price, founder of PsyPioneer Newsletter, who gives us the following account of the enormous contribution made by the pioneering Anglican priest.
The Rev Dr Martin Israel received a long and respectful obituary in The Daily Telegraph, as befitted a leading Anglican writer on the spiritual life. But it could only hint at his position as the most influential medium in Britain, by noting: “He was particularly sensitive to other people’s psychic needs and to the presence of evil. He also claimed to have contact with the dead.”
Martin’s spontaneous mediumship was present throughout his life in the sense that dead people visited him from time to time. Much of his literary work came by what he called “a kind of Spiritualism”, that is, he wrote it inspirationally.
It could often be brilliant, though a Church Times reviewer described one less successful work as sounding like sustained shouting into a basket. His most absorbing books combined case histories with original analysis.
In addition to his conventional career as a pathologist, Martin exercised a healing ministry for many years, though he was at pains to disclaim the title of healer.
Associated with this was his work as an exorcist, in which he had the confidence of the Bishop of London (Graham Leonard). By helping earthbound people to move on he scandalised the orthodox but, by recognising the role of non-human entities such as elementals and angels, he was clearly not a conventional Spiritualist.
We will never know the full extent of this work. In one unpublicised case, he made contact with a person who had died in tragic circumstances 80 years previously, and as a minister gave him absolution.
He was of some assistance to bewildered babies who had been aborted. He also had a special concern for those involved in the Holocaust, and prayed for the persecutors. Indeed, as Parkinson’s disease limited his outside work, his prayer ministry continued.
Martin once wrote a Lent Book for the Archbishop of Canterbury (a book intended for prayerful reading by the faithful during Lent) and a mark therefore of official approval. His books can often be found in church libraries as well as public ones. Those who benefited from his counsel came from many walks of life.
When I last saw Martin (on 1 July) he expressed surprise at his achievements. If he had been born in earlier times, he would undoubtedly have been in some danger from the Christians with whom he was moved to serve – being a Jew by race, a medium, and, as a believer in reincarnation, a heretic. What the Rev Leslie Weatherhead was to the previous generation – a Christian reincarnationist – Martin was to the present.
Modern TV mediums also turn out many books, sometimes, appropriately enough, ghost written. But their influence in wider society is small. By his professional work in medicine and the church, and his presidency of a variety of psychic and healing bodies, Martin Israel exercised a far wider ministry.
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Posted on Sunday, November 11, 2007
Category: Mediumship
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