In the Mists on the Shoreline REFLECTIONS ON SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE
Chris Polhill
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Contents of book © individual contributors Compilation © 2015 Chris Polhill First published 2015 by Wild Goose Publications, Fourth Floor, Savoy House, 140 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow G2 3DH, UK, the publishing division of the Iona Community. Scottish Charity No. SC003794. Limited Company Reg. No. SC096243. ISBN 978-1-84952-323-3 Cover photo © Blyth McManus/www.freeimages.com All rights reserved. Apart from the circumstances described below relating to non-commercial use, no part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including photocopying or any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Non-commercial use: The material in this book may be used non-commercially for worship and group work without written permission from the publisher. If photocopies of small sections are made, please make full acknowledgement of the source, and report usage to CLA or other copyright organisation. Chris Polhill has asserted her right in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this compilation and the individual contributors have asserted their right to be identified as authors of their contributions. Overseas distribution Australia: Willow Connection Pty Ltd, Unit 4A, 3–9 Kenneth Road, Manly Vale, NSW 2093 New Zealand: Pleroma, Higginson Street, Otane 4170, Central Hawkes Bay Canada: Bayard Distribution, 10 Lower Spadina Ave., Suite 400, Toronto, Ontario M5V 2Z
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In the mists on the shoreline
Contents In the mists on the shoreline, by Chris Polhill
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Introduction, by Chris Polhill
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Meeting the Iona Community, by John Harvey
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Space for reflection, by Robert Stevens
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The gift of cancer, by Zam Walker
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In the present moment, by Stephen Wright
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Bouncing down the stairs, by Chris Polhill
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Meeting, by John Polhill
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Holding on, by Kathy Galloway
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Finding God in the mess, by Warren Bardsley
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Knowing Her, by Chris Polhill
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Birth to the barren, by Alison Swinfen
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A call to growth, by Ali Marshall
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When God seems absent, by Chris Polhill
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Notes
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This book is dedicated to all who explore the ‘great deep’. I would like to thank my Iona Family Group, and particularly my husband, John, for the encouragement to continue with this exploration in the many times when I felt hopelessly inadequate for the task. I would also like to thank the contributors for being willing to offer into the public space experiences that touch the deeper parts of their spiritual journey. Thanks also to Colin Ball, Christine Massey, Keith Elbourne and Elizabeth Wild for being willing to read the text and make helpful suggestions. Chris Polhill
In the mists on the shoreline Walk the shoreline and clearly see here was yesterday’s tide, there land, there sea. Firm sand built into castles, glinting, ever-moving, rippling sea. Shadows on both, litter mixed with seaweed, and the line, the fragile line between. But as I walk the shifting line my mind like driftwood moves, now present, now away. I search a different shore, dreamy, luminary, mystery sea. Light on shadows growing life from rubbish, and the mist, the silent mist shimmers. That hidden shore veiled within mist that thins apart by grace, soul’s caught, soul’s taught. Out of time, beyond words, awe-ful, tears of joyful, beautiful sea. Christ in shadows, waiting with the broken, and the Love, the healing love of God. Chris Polhill
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In the mists on the shoreline
Introduction The word ‘spiritual’ has collected around it many expectations – from the weird to the inspirational – so it is worth exploring what this book means by ‘spiritual experience’. The dictionary describes spiritual as ‘relating to spirit or soul, not to physical nature or matter’,1 and yet Christians would not separate the spiritual from the material, seeing them as one. George MacLeod, the founder of the Iona Community, spoke of Iona as a place where the veil between heaven and earth is ‘tissue thin’, and the same could be said of many holy places, yet a spiritual experience can happen anywhere, as many contributors to this book testify. It cannot be confined only to special places: and they are physical places, sometimes very beautiful. We are mind, spirit and body, inseparable, interconnected and affecting the whole. We cannot make a spiritual experience happen, nor control it: it is not a spiritual experience if we do; the best we can ever do is engage with a spiritual journey and live with the integrity of faith. It is true that our spirits are enhanced by good music, beauty, a sunset that leaves us feeling at one with everything around us, a worship service that lifts us out of the ordinary … These are all encouragements on the spiritual journey and some offer important spiritual experience as part of the journey. Sometimes they are brief moments of unity with the divine, a glimpse of the mystical, if we have eyes to see. What we are particularly looking at here is the kind of God-given encounter that changes the way someone is living their life, and the reflections on the experience, which are sometimes about an immediate situation or sometimes last a lifetime. So for me, spiritual experience is an encounter with the ‘otherness’ that Christians call God, and the test of such an experience is the effect that it has on the recipient. The Bible is full of such encounters.
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In the mists on the shoreline Jesus took Peter, James and John up a mountain to pray. While they prayed, Moses and Elijah appeared with Jesus – and the three of them all shone. The disciples were filled with awe and holy fear, and didn’t really know what to say. In the struggle for words that comes with trying to explain or describe a spiritual experience, Mark 9:2–8 says that Jesus’ clothes were whiter than any washing could make them. Peter refers to the experience in 2 Peter 1:17–18 – it has clearly given the disciples much to think about long after the event itself. At his baptism Jesus comes up out of the River Jordan hearing words from God, then travels into the desert to reflect and pray. Whatever Jesus knew before his baptism, this moment is a turning point, a time of decision – and his life takes direction, though we still get glimpses of the temptations, even doubts, he lives with during his ministry. Paul struggles for words to describe a spiritual experience (2 Corinthians 12) and then talks of his weakness, but clearly has had a life-changing experience on the road to Damascus (Acts 9), where he encounters the risen Jesus and becomes a Christian: one of those people he had previously sought to kill; and has a directional vision, which sends him to Macedonia (Acts 16:9–10). Through the centuries many saints have had encounters with God that changed them in a life-giving way. Francis of Assisi leaves an affluent, carefree life to embrace Sister Poverty. This leads him to see all of nature in the intimacy of family relationship, and to found a new religious order. Julian of Norwich reflects lifelong on an encounter that heals her, and devotes her life to prayer, giving wise counsel to the many who visit her. Columbanus feels a call to take the Celtic monastic way from Ireland to Europe, and in the process profoundly alters
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Introduction people’s views of faithful living. He sees nature as God’s ‘big book’ and says that ‘those who want to know the great deep must first consider the natural world … If you wish to know the Creator, understand creation.’2 Clearly Columbanus sees the material and the spiritual as interconnected and inseparable. Are these the kind of insights and experiences that belong only to a very few, or only to history, with no relevance for the present-day? It is my belief that most people have some awareness of the ‘otherness’ that Christians would call God. David Hay, who researches children’s spirituality, expresses the concern that children today lose that sense of ‘otherness’ earlier than they did in the past.3 Some of this will be due to the way our society values experiences of this nature and encourages other ways of thinking: it is not ‘cool’ to speak of God, and religion is often denigrated openly. However, some of this loss will be due to the way adults name what the experience is (if, that is, they are trusted with being told). In this book you will find a wide variety of spiritual experiences – from the mystical to the practical, from very personal reflections, to stories with passion for social justice. For some, the significant encounter comes during one of life’s more traumatic times, such as illness or death, for others as part of everyday living. Some contributors are clergy, others are not, and there is a broad range of age and life experience among contributors. They are all ordinary, extraordinary people. Chris Polhill
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In the mists on the shoreline
Meeting the Iona Community, by John Harvey As the Iona Community has inspired all of the contributors to this book in some way, it seems appropriate to begin with an encounter where Iona and the Iona Community are very much part of the experience. Iona is a small island off the west coast of Scotland which has been a place of pilgrimage for centuries. The present-day Iona Community (as distinct from the community of people who live year-round on the island) is a dispersed group of members in the UK and throughout the world who share the Iona Community’s five-fold Rule: daily prayer and Bible reading; sharing and accounting for the use of resources, including money; planning and accounting for the use of time; action for justice and peace; meeting and accounting to each other. The Community has a base in Glasgow, and at the Abbey and MacLeod Centre on Iona where, on a weekly basis, guests, resident staff and members explore life in community. – C.P. In 1958, a month after finishing my National Service in the army, I went to Iona for the first time. In the previous year, I’d been introduced to George MacLeod at a Regimental dinner, and he’d asked me to contact him when I was demobbed, which I did – hence the invitation to go to Iona ‘and help us build a road’. I’d never heard of Iona or the Iona Community – and my experience of church up till then had been very traditional and pretty narrow. Nobody on Iona was expecting me when I turned up, one lovely May evening. The first person to make me welcome was George’s sister-in-law, Ursula, who was the cook in the Abbey. Later, Ralph Morton, the Deputy Leader, took me under his wing, and gave
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In the mists on the shoreline me a job as a Guide – which I did, initially, in supreme ignorance of anything to do with the story of the place! The road I was supposed to be there to help build was never mentioned. I spent three months there that summer – and my life was changed forever. Three ingredients contributed to the change – all, looking back, I have since seen with immense gratitude as the work of the Holy Spirit. The power of the place can never be underestimated. That almost feels like a cliché – but the experience simply can’t be denied. To someone like me, who, if I had ever thought about it, would have probably said that Christianity in Scotland really began properly in 1560, it was literally mind-blowing to become aware of the Irish and the Benedictine stories, and to live surrounded by the evidence of their influence, both in the stones of the buildings and in the rocks and hills and sea of Iona. Still today, my heart sings when I land at the jetty, or walk down the night-stair into the choir stalls of the Abbey. It was my good fortune to first come to Iona when the rebuilding was still in process. And as I joined in the daily morning service with the new members in training and the local craftsmen – all in their working clothes, the craftsmen often with their tools beside them, ready to leave straight after the closing responses to resume their work on the walls – I was brought face to face with daily living evidence of the core understanding of the Iona Community: that worship and work are both proper offerings to God, that there can be no separation of life into the sacred and the secular – that, as George MacLeod has so memorably said, ‘either Christ is Lord of everything or He is Lord of nothing’. Gone forever from my life went my narrow churchmanship – never to return.
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Meeting the Iona Community And this new – and for me life-changing – awareness was reinforced as I listened to George’s prayers, heard Ralph’s reflections, and sat in on the daily meal conversations amongst the ministers and the craftsmen. All my previous vague thoughts about the faith were challenged and changed – George even persuaded me to resign my commission in the Territorial Army! I had to rethink my views on politics, on the nature of the church, and on my own future. I had already begun to think tentatively about eventually training for the ministry – but had no clear idea of what that might eventually mean in practice. Now, as a result of these three months on Iona, everything had to change. And so it did! I left Iona at the beginning of August 1958 – having been a guide, a cook at Camas (!), and a Guestmaster – and in the autumn began to study for a history degree, followed by three more years at another university studying Divinity and training for the ministry of the Church of Scotland. Throughout these six years, Iona was a constant in my life. I returned every summer: as a guide, as a helper in the bookshop, and then as a youth camp leader in the last of the north end tented camps and the first of the hutted camps, where the MacLeod Centre now stands. Listening and learning on Iona helped to inform my academic studies, especially when it came to Divinity – and led me first to youth work in Govan at the Pearce Institute, and then to join, after Molly and I got married, the Gorbals Group ministry. Iona and the Iona Community also led me into action in politics – I became a member of the Labour Party (being elected as Treasurer at my very first ward meeting) – and making me rethink my understanding of the relationship between prayer and politics, a relationship which I still have to struggle with today. The impact of Iona and the Iona Community on my understanding of spirituality has also been profound. George MacLeod once said that ‘spirituality is a most dangerous word’. It’s
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In the mists on the shoreline taken me a long time to understand what he meant, and even now I’m not entirely sure. I know I’ve abused it in the past, allowing myself at times to slide lazily into the dangerously divisive thinking which so often attends the church’s pronouncements on the matter. Kathy Galloway’s definition of spirituality as ‘that which ultimately motivates you’ has helped me enormously, in part because it frees the concept from its imprisonment in the religious sphere. I now see that just as we all have a materiality, so we also all have a spirituality. The ‘spirituality’ of the Nazis, for instance, could be seen to be their belief in the so-called superiority of the Aryan race; and I suppose you could equally say that the spirituality of many of our leading figures in the West today could be said to be their belief in the almost divine right of economic growth! This has led me to reflect that our spirituality, every bit as much as our materiality, needs to be redeemed. The medieval theologians, with their understanding of the three-tiered universe, pictured the crucified Christ descending to Hell, and then, as He rose on the third day and ascended to Heaven, putting back into proper order everything in creation that had been knocked askew by Lucifer’s fall from grace at the beginning. To my mind, what Jesus has also done is to reorder our whole being, material and spiritual, so that we have the chance, if we are enabled by grace to walk with Him, to become whole people again, with both our bodies and our spirits reordered in His likeness – a reordering which takes a lifetime and beyond. And so I go on – a person profoundly grateful for the gift of Iona and the Iona Community, and continually challenged to review my whole life in the light that they have given me. As one of our prayers puts it: ‘Help us to follow the light that we see, and to pray for more light.’ I’ve always been grateful for the insight of Abbé Michonneau, the inspirational founder of the French worker-priest movement in
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Meeting the Iona Community the 1940s, who once wrote that the light that God gives us is much more like the headlights of a car than like the illumination of a city street. In other words, we need to keep moving if we are to see the way ahead. Since my first encounter with Iona and the Iona Community, I have always felt I’ve been on the move – uncomfortably so at times, but ultimately, I still believe, a movement that is both redeeming and transforming. I don’t really expect the movement to end! ‘Idleness is the enemy of the soul; and therefore the brethren ought to be employed in manual labour at certain times, at others, in devout reading.’ 4 From The Rule of St Benedict Saint Benedict of Nursia (c.480-547), father of Western monasticism, developed a Rule of life that is credited with saving Christianity after the Dark Ages, and which is still followed by many around the world today. It is not a harsh Rule, but one intended to lead to a ‘full and abundant life’.
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