POST TENEBRAS LUX

BY CATRIONA MURRAY

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness it may well be elsewhere, but in the Hebrides, autumn has a tendency to be wet and windy. Ourgeneral dearth of trees means that we are largely lacking in the multi-hued beauty of a Highland woodland, so beloved of tourist brochures at this time of the year.

There is, however, one place that I can go to experience fall and that is the Lews Castle Grounds. If you’re not familiar with the place, it is a planted Victorian woodland, in the environs of a 19th century hunting lodge (somewhat ostentatiously referred to as ‘Lews Castle’), built by the then proprietor of Lewis, Sir James Matheson. These pretty acres have been under community ownership since 1923 and are beloved by local people who go there to walk with dogs, pushchairs and even sometimes just their thoughts.

Thanks to the many trees and shrubs growing there, the Castle Grounds are a joy for the senses at any time, but a positive symphony of colour and scent as the days shorten. Light has a particular quality as it filters through the canopy of leaves, rendering everything somehow magical. Walking there with my own dog, it is hard to resist taking photographs of everything I see whenever he stops to sniff insistently at the ground (which is often). A quite ordinary boulder, half-covered with moss becomes an objet d’ art in the October sun; a mouldering pile of leaves is suddenly glowing and golden; the river Creed bubbles melodically over stones and discarded branches. Everything is transformed under an autumn sky.

I am fortunate enough to work on the Outer Hebrides campus of UHI, which is situated in these very grounds. Two minutes beyond my office window is a road which runs along the back of the college, lined with bramble bushes and picturesque trees. Recently, I took a stroll there and listened to the mellifluous tones of David Suchet, reading from Corinthians and in particular, ‘He made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him’.

It’s certainly not that I doubt this in any way, but I found that the idea of substitution made more sense in a place I have seen transformed by seasonal light. I know my own heart, though even I can’t fathom its depths of wickedness. At times, I have found it hard to believe that a God so holy that he cannot look on sin would see me as anything other than I am — a sin-ravaged wretch.

But, as the song says, he has made a wretch his treasure. How, though? Well, in the same way that October sun transforms the mundane into the magical.

God looks at me through the filter of his Son’s sacrifice. Like seasonal light, this purifies and elevates. My sin is covered and his perfection is highlighted, imputed to me through nothing I have ever done except acknowledging my need of this Saviour. Like so many other things the mysteries and complexities of the redemptive plan are made simple in the natural world. In the Lews Castle Grounds, we have a planted woodland, laid down by human hands and designed to please Victorian sensibilities. Yet, it is elevated in beauty when God shines his light upon it. Creation accepts his light and is beautified by it.

It occurs to me often how much we have complicated the message of salvation: doctrine, denomination and dogma obscuring the simple, beautiful truth that God so loves the world that he gave his only begotten Son that we should not die but have everlasting life. When I think of my own road to assurance, I wince at the number of obstacles I placed before myself. Did I have the tools to finish the job? Would this be yet another thing I began, but couldn’t finish? Was I really ready to profess faith ahead of that person, and this one, and those people?

I don’t doubt that doctrine is necessary — but it seems to become a greater imperative the more we try to complicate the central message of Christ’s free offer. If we didn’t make his simple, beautiful sacrifice obscure and unattainable with so many words and rules and man-made add-ons, perhaps doctrine would not have to work so hard.

The unsaved have questions and doubts; they think that something this wonderful is highly improbable. That being the case, those of us who have walked the path before them, suffused in his marvellous light, must let them see that, actually, it is very straightforward indeed: God is not willing that any should perish, and he has given us the means to make it so. •

Photo by Dorothea Witter-Rieder on Wikipedia Commons