Living at a thin place

This week I came across a book published some years ago about a crisis faced by a family I knew when I was younger. In Down, but not out Dr Eric Fischbacher describes a catastrophe which afflicted one of his daughters during a family holiday in the north of Scotland in 1975.

16-year-old Esther, the second of Eric and his wife Mary’s four teenage children suffered carbon monoxide poisoning due to defective equipment in a camp-site shower block and lay in a coma in hospital in Inverness for almost two weeks.

The story of this profoundly Christian family’s reaction to the crisis illuminated a couple of things I’d been reflecting on this week.

At church on Sunday we began by singing ‘Lord I lift your name on high’. This ‘lifting up’ of Jesus involves acknowledging his greatness as the one who sustains the whole cosmos. My immediate thought as we sang was that just as we lift Jesus up, so he lifts us up.

He comes to us, like the Samaritan came to the wounded traveller, when we feel guilty, crushed, defeated, despairing. He reaches out his hand to us, and with forgiving tenderness sets us back on our feet.

I mused about the connection between lifting Jesus up, and being lifted up by him. Is it when we commit ourselves to praising Jesus that we experience his uplifting? Or is it the touch of his hand, outstretched to restore up which draws our hearts out in worship?  Or is it both?

Eric Fischbacher recalls words from the Bible which as Esther lay in Raigmore Hospital spoke into the family’s pain with a sustaining intensity, bringing hope that despite the grim medical prognosis, Esther would be restored to them.

Some of these words were words of encouragement and comfort as they, and many others prayed for Esther, but one sentence from the Bible brought challenge rather than immediate comfort: ‘In your hearts reverence Jesus as Lord.’ In other words, acknowledge the authority and majesty of Jesus, and his victory over the powers of darkness.

Eric wrote ‘These truths moved from being known doctrine to being vital experience for our everyday lives, and became the bulwark of our defence against fear and despair.’ In the Fischbachers’ experience at that time, it was when they lifted Jesus up that they sensed his uplifting.

The other thing I was thinking about this week is the significance of holy places. On New Year’s Day the former Archbishop of Canterbury presented a documentary on BBC2 on Canterbury Cathedral, for many centuries a spiritual home for the community and nation.

Many of us are drawn to locations where others have met with God, to ‘thin places’ where the boundary between material and spiritual comes close to dissolving.

After 12 days in Intensive Care at Raigmore Esther Fischbacher remained in a coma, but as her condition had stabilised she was moved to Culduthel Hospital, situated in woodland on the outskirts of Inverness.

The following day, Esther emerged from coma. It was the beginning of a long struggle first to recover full mobility, and then to re-learn concepts which had been lost due to partial brain damage.

That first day at Culduthel was like a resurrection. Eric describes Esther some days later, able to stand on the hospital veranda looking across the garden into the Culduthel Woods.

Last year, my family moved to a house close to the site of the old hospital, long since demolished.  The spot where Esther was restored to her family must only be yards from where I live surrounded by the same enduring woodlands. It seems to me to be a holy place, a ‘thin place’, a place where God has been active.

No doubt other miracles took place at Culduthel Hospital. The point is that every place is a holy place when God is there, when it is ‘heavened’ (as the old poet Henry Vaughan puts it) by God’s presence.

Eric Fischbacher was a friend of my dad’s, and I had some contact with the family a couple of years after Esther’s accident. I was at that point travelling daily from Carluke to Falkirk, near where the Fischbachers lived, a hazardous commute in winter.

Invariably on days when snow threatened, one of the family would phone and invite me to stay over. Spending time with them, I saw the exceptional quality of their love as a family. I’d lie in bed thinking I had never before felt so loved, so secure as I did under the Fischbacher’s roof.

It was another holy, heavened place. For this courageous family, who knew much about lifting Jesus up, much about being lifted up by him, had heavened hearts, committed to lifting up others through embodying the love of Jesus.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 10th January 2013)