Echoes of courage.
We’ve just come back from a wonderful couple of weeks in Wester Ross, enjoying the varied weather, spectacular combination of mountains and sea and the time to explore, wander and wonder in God’s good creation. We were as far removed as you can possibly be in Britain from the political events in London and the uncertain days now ushered in as we head towards Brexit one way or another.
One thing I have discovered is that a wild and grand landscape somehow has even more power and drama in it when there is some evidence of human habitation, past or present. It is as if a ruined shieling, or light in a cottage, a crumbled field wall or roof peering above a shelter belt of trees somehow frames the waves battering on a cliff, or the clouds pouring over the mountain ridge. The untrammelled wild of the northwest is gifted a poignancy and history by these edgings of human presence which, in my view, enrich rather than spoils. Such a life is not for the faint hearted though, and the history is one of much tragedy and injustice and the hard choices of living on the edge of what is possible. I try to capture some of this in these few lines I wrote one evening as I looked onto the forbidding Applecross pass where the old drovers brought the cattle. In my immediate foreground was a group of young stags.
Bealach na Ba (Pass of the cattle)
Car lights pierce the gloom, momentary glows gifted
by the road that bends tentatively below the looming crags
as the day draws to a close.
The young stags stand resolute in the rain, wild harbringers of
the eternal hills while
mist, like a curtain conceals, then reveals, glimpses of the past.
There is a history in this place, alive in the ancient cemetery,
the winding road and a landscape that
discloses reluctantly the tremulous evidence of human presence, won
with great courage.
For the empty glens and their scattered relics of moss smothered walls and
heather shrouded stones speak in
echoes of brave lives that once wrested a
destiny out here on the
edge of the world.
For such folk, the world was full of uncertainty, and the many Scots place names and descendants in far flung places testify to the centrifugal forces that scattered so many all over the globe. I was reading that as one group departed, the older people left behind, knowing they would never see their loved ones again, began to sing the Great 100th, which was sung back across the water as the boat departed. Their deep roots in the Psalms allowed them( like the Jewish people, whose Psalms these are) to face such trying times and find a security beyond the circumstances. This Psalm 100 includes these lines:
Know that the Lord is God indeed; Without our aid he did us make: We are his flock, he doth us feed, And for his sheep he doth us take.
For why? the Lord our God is good,
His mercy is for ever sure;
His truth at all times firmly stood,
And shall from age to age endure.
In the uncertain times facing us as a nation now I take great inspiration and also a challenge from our spiritual and national ancestors
Audio: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1O9YU8EQfDh3GZudLv5AMxFkohDOA1SfY/view?usp=drivesdk
Thanks Paul. My school Depute-Head always chose "Couarge, brother, do not stumble..." at the start of the exam season. He clearly had a sense of humour.
ReplyDeleteYoiur post prompts me to say: As a nation, we Scots have plenty of courage for the future as an independent nation— not too small, too poor, or too daft! Certainly not too 'feart'!