The Given-ness of things

Last week I was up on a high summit in Skye with wonderful views all around and a spectacular sight of the Cuillin Ridge.  I had actually planned to go up the previous day but it was heavy rain and I would not have seen anything.  The slope was very steep over a long time with only a faint path sometimes and loose scree in places.  I had to really pay attention to where I was putting my feet and also watch my pace on such a sustained slope so I would have energy left at the end . …Most Scottish mountains vary in their slope gradient so you get a break now and again…not on Blevan… relentlessly steep!

I mention all this because the evening before I had been listening to a talk about one of my favourite authors, an elderly American farmer who is also one of the US’s most respected authors, Wendell Berry.   One of his themes, learnt from his years working a small farm in a traditional way, is to respect the local conditions, or what he calls the given-ness of things.  He is very cautious about our modern tendency to impose our will on nature, to not respect the peculiarities and local particular details of what is there and to try apply principles and methods that may work elsewhere but are not suitable here.   

There is a certain humility in being willing to accept things as they are, to learn to work with them, adapt ourselves to them.  We can still make a difference and be part of a creative process, but it is much more in dialogue and in keeping with the grain and situated-ness of where we are.  This can apply to all sorts of things in life, relationships, workplace, where we live, our church, even our Covid 19 experience of lockdown. 

I was mulling all this over as I was slogging away step by step.  I really had to respect the mountain, pay attention to the precise details of what was in front of me…there was no wishing it away and finding an easier route, except to give up and head back down the hill. If I wanted to get to the top I had to accept my limitations of fitness and skill as well as the risks and challenges of the slope.   

It has been like that hasn’t it this long period since the middle of March?   That need to take each week as it comes, each stage of the lockdown and how we are finding things, our concerns and our limitations.  And even now we don’t know what the future holds, in some ways the slope continues upwards, but thankfully it is not so steep or hard as it was earlier.

I had no view of the summit at all until the last 30 seconds when you come over a final ridge and the cairn is there.   We also can’t see when the end of this strange time for our world is and what it will look like.  But I learned that day if we pay attention and pay respect to how things are, we can move forward and each step brings us closer.   The view as I said was spectacular and very much worth the effort.  What was an added bonus was to bump into a young friend from Aberdeen days who’d been in the school where I was chaplain and is on his own exciting journey of medical training and beyond, an inspiring young man in many ways.

So, let’s keep faith with one another on this climb out of lockdown and most of all pay attention. The climb down was a lot quicker as it involved a fair bit of scree surfing but that’s a story for another day!