The Meeting Place

Some of the team at the Culloden Meeting Place with adult learner Allen Rose

I owe my discovery of The Meeting Place to my friend Eric Cairns, the pastor of Christ Church Inverness. Eric chairs the management committee of the charity, which provides IT-based learning opportunities for adults with additional support needs. Clients at The Meeting Place’s centres at Culloden and Nairn learn how to use computers and enrich their lives in so doing, expressing themselves in new ways including through websites, photography and podcasts.

  

Gill Sutherland and adult learner Lindsay Bochel at the Nairn Meeting Place

The  charity is the dream of energetic visionary Gill Sutherland, who opened the Culloden Centre eight years ago, and its Nairn counterpart last November. The Meeting Place is not a specifically Christian enterprise – for Gill herself, ‘my training is my religion’ - although its supporters include Christians like Eric.

Nairn Meeting Place

I visited both centres last week, met Gill and Jenny Dryburgh who manages the Culloden Meeting Place together with their clients, peer mentors and volunteers. Everyone who comes through the door, it seems, is welcomed, accepted, and loved. ‘We show people how good they are to be with,’ says Gill. Jenny adds ‘We focus not on disabilities, but on abilities.’ There is no pressure – ‘Each person learns at their own pace,’ says Jenny. Clients (about 50 in all at the two locations, ranging in age from 16 to 74) continue to attend for as long as they are benefitting.

There’s also a humility about the project. There’s no demarcation between learners and trainers, rather a recognition that everyone can learn from the fact of being together. ‘Everyone who comes brings something with them,’ Jenny says. ‘We learn together, we learn lots from each other.’

Luke McGovern and Lindsay Bochel at Nairn

Of one of her clients Jenny comments ‘She surprises people all the time.’ But it seems to me that these folk share a willingness to be surprised.

And there’s humour at The Meeting Place – a lightness rather than intense, deadly seriousness. ‘We’re informal but professional,’ Jenny tells me. ‘There’s great craic and a good laugh.’ And there’s determination, on both Gill and Jenny’s account, to do their best for the clients, and to seek funding and partnerships to enable the project to grow, and thereby to enhance the lives of a widening circle of people.

This project and countless others helping to alleviate suffering and support people on their life journeys vividly display qualities which are thoroughly Christian.

Kayleigh Macdonald listerns to her favourite music supported by Jenna Morrison

And this triggers a big God-question for us as believers. When Christians show self-giving love we believe it is an expression of the God, who reaches out in love through us. So the question is this: are people who do not share our faith, but work selflessly for the good of others simply reflecting something of God in their actions while God watches approvingly from the distance? Or is God, all unbeknown to them, as present and active in their work as in the work of believers?

I believe that where love is shown, God is indisputably both present and active. God’s grace is not an impersonal mechanism, a hereditary instinct prompting people of all faiths and none to creative action. Where God’s grace is present, God is present.

Christians believe in a big God. Not a God who shrinks from the darkness of the world, or limits Godself to engagement with those who believe, but a God who is present in dark places, sustaining all of life, weeping with us, rejoicing with us, calling us to move progressively into the light. And in the words of the title of Tolstoy’s famous short story ‘Where love is, there God is also.’

We can learn from The Meeting Place, for there, as we acknowledge with the utmost respect the beliefs and convictions of everyone involved in the project we see what we interpret as yet another example of God at work in God’s world.

But there’s another Meeting Place. It’s called Church, a community where we meet with one another and with God, and determine to make a difference as God’s people in God’s world. There we seek relaxed relationships, acceptance and the love which says ‘We show people how good they are to be with’, and values what each person brings.

There we seek to allow each individual to be the person they are, to progress at their own pace. There we seek a lightness and joy, and the humility to ‘learn together, to learn lots from each other.’ There we seek a willingness to be surprised as we work in partnership with God

God forbid it should ever be the case that we as Christians are so keen to defend our traditions, our church practices, our ways of expressing belief that programmes become more important to us than people. For if we are guilty of this, folk will find more genuine love in society’s ‘Meeting Places’ than they do in church.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 21st  May 2015)

Is a little chaos a good thing?

‘Heaven shall be here!’ says French monarch Louis XIV in the trailer for Alan Rickman’s new movie A little chaos. He’s talking about the gardense he's developing at the Palace of Versailles under the management of head gardener André le Nôtre, a historical ficgure who in the film appoint a fictitious assistant, Kate Winslet's toubled Sabine de Barra.

Heaven shall be here? Gardens seem to be close to God’s heart. ‘This is your Eden?’ says le Nôtre to Sabine of a garden she personally tends. He’s referring of course to the story of the garden at the very beginning of the Bible where man and woman walk with God. The Bible ends with a vision of heaven, seen as a garden city of life and joy. And the fulcrum on which the Christian story centres is Jesus’ return to life in the resurrection garden.

Gardens are powerful symbols. Our lives are gardens – what actions and attitudes do we allow to flourish there? How zealous are we about weeding? The church is a garden – each of us, with our distinctive qualities planted together to create an environment of peace and healing.

 Louis XIV was an autocratic king. He had le Nôtre create the garden for his own pleasure and delight at vast expense, and at the cost of hundreds of lives This colossal arrogance was typical of the man who took as his emblem the Sun, the source of all life

How different from God’s garden which we experience both as a spiritual dimension and as the material universe we live in. It was not created to make God appear wonderful, but because God is wonderful. It was not created for an elite but for all. And we are all gardeners helping in our lives and actions to tend and nurture, develop and heal the garden.

But is there room in the garden for a little chaos? That’s the question facing André le Nôtre in the film. The gardens he has designed have hitherto been formal in design, based on geometric patterns and shapes. Sabine has a different approach – on her way to her interview for the post as his assistant, she moves one of le Nôtre’s flower pots out of line in a spirited reaction to his rigid formality. It’s her view that the greatest beauty will be seen when freedom and randomness and unpredictability play their part in the creative process.

When he sees Sabine’s own ‘Eden’, le Nôtre describes it as ‘an adundance of chaos.’ Certainly she brings more than a little chaos to his ordered personal world as under the nose of his wife André feels, and acts on, a growing attraction for Sabine.

We would be well to be rid of moral chaos in the garden. I believe every problem we mourn in our world has as its root moral ambivalence and moral chaos as, Louis XIV-like we seek our own flourishing at the expense of the flourishing of others. Grief and sadness blight the flower-beds of our world.

But there’s another kind of chaos in the universe as scientists have discovered in the last 60 years. God’s universe is not a great orderly machine, utterly formulaic, completely predictable. Flexibility and randomness and sheer chance play their part in the on-going development of  the universe and life.

God likes the joyful unpredictability of this kind of chaos. God works with chaos and chance. One Christian, D. J. Bartholemew has written ‘Since chance is such an integral part of creation, it must be part of God's plan.’  Chance should be seen as ‘grist for the providential mill rather than as an obstacle to providential action.’

There must be a lesson here for those of us who like to run our lives and our work and our churches like le Nôtre ran his gardens – with total control. Perhaps we need to lighten up, to relax, to make room for a little chaos. Perhaps we are so intent on our own plans for God’s garden that we do not listen to the whispers of the Holy Spirit who keeps moving our plant-pots out of line, or hear the Spirit’s playful laughter when we push them back into place.

In real life, le Nôtre came from a humble background, and yet was close to the Sun King. It was said of him ‘the king liked to see him and talk to him.’ Jesus Christ is the true Sun King, the source of all life. He likes to see us. He likes to talk to us. Yet we are too busy to notice him sometimes, too busy to put our tools aside, and let the peace of the garden reign in our hearts, as we walk with our creator in the cool of the day.

(Christian Viewpoint column in the Highland News issue dated 23rd April2015)