Breathing spaces

The other Saturday, my wife and I helped our daughter Rebecca move into a flat with friends in Garnethill in Glasgow. As soon as we arrived after our trip south, I took Mollie our Yorkshire Terrier for a walk down Hill Street. And that’s how we came across Garnethill Park.

This is no ordinary city-centre park. It has been carefully designed in collaboration with the community. There are murals and mosaics, knee-high lighting, an informal amphitheatre, stone water-channels. And some local people’s recollections are carved in imitation stone slabs – like those of the woman who went to the nearby St Aloysius Girls’ School in the early 1970s and recalls looking though the window at pupils from the nearby boys’ school – to whom the girls weren’t allowed to speak!

There are few green spaces in that part of the city, spaces where local people and visitors can chill and draw breath. The only other park visible in an aerial photo of the area is Blythswood Square, five blocks away. Mollie went wild in the park – the grass heavy with the scent, it seemed, of every dog in central Glasgow.

Last Wednesday I went, as I sometimes do to the 12.30pm Eucharist at St Andrews Cathedral in Inverness, just along the road from my office. I didn’t particularly feel like going – my presence there was, I think, a way of indicating to God that I was serious about faith and not just playing games. But I’m glad I went, as the old familiar words of the liturgy brought me a quiet sense of joy and wholeness.

We were in a side-chapel, but on the way out I saw that the doors of the Cathedral were wide open. Holiday visitors were walking round; someone was peacefully meditating, their face bright-lit by a forest of candles; a woman sat at the end of one pew with a quiet baby in a pram beside her.

I was so glad to see everyone there, and glad of the Cathedral’s open door, one of few ‘breathing places’ in Inverness city centre where you can come as you are into sacred space, perhaps to reflect on God, to be reminded that we carry within us at all times the oasis of God’s presence.

Just along Hill Street, within sight of the front door of Rebeca’s tenement, stands an early 20th century building with deep personal relevance. Back in 1910, when it was the McAlpine Nursing Home my great grandmother Catherine Brackenridge died there following an operation at the age of just 50.

I stood in Hill Street and looked around me, and across at the towers in the Park district of the city – buildings Catherine would have seen as she was entering Miss McAlpine’s care – and felt a sense of connectedness with her.

What particularly struck me last week in the Cathedral, through participating in the Eucharist and sensing the love of other worshippers in the sharing of the Peace was a sense of connection with the whole Christian family of God. I’ve always known that there is one Church, but my thinking has also been coloured by my experience of fracture and division among Christians, many denominations, many ways of worshipping, many different nuances of belief.

But during the service I felt connected. The liturgy has roots deep in history. The format of the Eucharist makes few concessions to modernity. There is mention of those who have gone ahead into the dimension beyond. I experienced something of faith’s timelessness, the power of the old foundational convictions shared by all Christians, who believe that the years have shown them to be true, the security of being, along with all believers, part of the Church of God. A Church which, like Garnethill Park, bears the mark of those who have helped God make it what it is.

I love the view from the kitchen in Rebecca’s flat. You look across Stow College and the M8, over Hillhead and Maryhill and beyond. Your realise looking down that there are more trees in the city than you’d imagined. That Saturday morning there was mist on the horizon but as the day went on it lifted, and rising high on the skyline I could see the Campsie Fells, green in wild beauty.

Since I discovered, just a few months ago, that Catherine Brackenridge passed away there, Garnethill has assumed a family significance, although until then I’d barely been conscious of its existence.

The good news of Christianity is that there is a spiritual place with which we have a far more than tenuous connection, a home which we do not know is ours until we seek a breathing space, and realise how many trees there are, and watch open-eyed as the mist on the horizon lifts.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 29th August 2013)