A nest of lions

Fly high, Rebecca! Fly high!

A week ago daughter number 1 left for a fortnight in South Africa, where she’s fulfilling a dream working with lion cubs.

And last Saturday daughter number two, Bethany, left to study in Edinburgh.

Inevitably you think of the ‘leaving the nest’ metaphor. You bring up your kids, and then watch them fly. I am very proud of them both, full of respect and love for them.

In Jesus’ story, the prodigal son went to a far country as an expression of his waywardness and unwavering self-focus. Our two have left for their own far countries (one much further than the other!) with our blessing, seeking to become more fully themselves.

I’ve a mixture of reactions are their going. A little worry. A smidgeon of jealousy – Rebecca will see things I will never see. A touch of self-rebuke – should I have been braver when I was younger, more resolute in following the path to independence? But you can’t judge what bravery costs in someone else’s life, and as a young man I was as brave as I knew how.

And a sense of no longer being needed. When Bec was in Central Scotland before, there was always the reassurance that she was just down the road, but now she is on her own in another hemisphere beyond any immediate help from her parents. But of course I am still needed in a newer role – as father to a fellow-adult.

Some Christians are able to pray that God will keep their loved ones safe from any danger or harm, but knowing that bad stuff happens I don’t have the faith to pray that way. But I can and do entrust these girls to the great God who is present with us whatever happens, present in both light and darkness.

Jesus own life modelled this journey of self-becoming. We believe his father died before Jesus became a public figure. But we see both Jesus’ deep love and respect for his mother, and his resolute embracing of the mission he knew was his.

Jesus taught us to pray ‘Our Father in heaven.’ But I wonder if sometimes we live as God’s infant children, expecting God’s perpetual attention and smile on us, and never becoming the mature Christian adults God dreams of?

Jesus grew away from his parents in finding his mission, and so must each of us as human beings. But in our relationship with God it is precisely as we become more at one with God, that we become more fully ourselves. This is a paradox, but I believe it is true, and on my clearer-seeing days there have been moments when I have experienced the truth of this.

I wonder if to experience God in this deeper way it is necessary for us to go into a far country where God seems distant, where we discover who we are, the strength of our faith, and the extent of our longing for God?

Perhaps, to turn Jesus’ parable on its head, it’s the Father who goes into the far country, inexplicably withdrawing from us, so that we cry ‘How can you do this to me, Father?’ Perhaps it’s the daughter or son who stands at the roadside daily watching for Father’s return, the welcome party already prepared for this God whom we find to be more tender, more loving, and more mysterious than we had ever anticipated.

The girls will be different, and wiser, when they come home. Once boisterous cubs, they are now well on their way to becoming adult lions! And in their leaving and returning their parents will also be changed, and together we will move forward.

I wonder if the lesson the relationship of Jesus and Mary has for us is this: we may, as Mary did, see our children’s lives turning in unanticipated directions as they embrace unexpected dreams. We will serve our children best as parents if we learn both to let them go and to affirm them in the dreams they have been given. I believe parents and children best serve one another when each of them seeks that losing of self in the Father through which we are truly found.

I was sharing with a friend my thoughts about Rebecca going off Africa, and he said, encouragingly, ‘Good for you and Lorna, giving them wings to fly away with and a nest to come home to.’

There is a nest in which we will all find ourselves. The nest of the grave, from which new life will spring; the nest of heaven, from which we will spread our wings in unimagined skies; the nest which in a sense we have never left – the Father’s heart.

Fly high, Rebecca! Fly high, Bethany!  Fly high!

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 27th August 2015)

A life in letters: Toilet man

One of our best family holidays was in 2005, when we spent the best part of a summer fortnight in our new Vango tent on the Glororum Caravan Park at Bamburgh in Northumbria. We explored Alnwick Castle and Gardens, including the magical tree house, we ‘window-shopped till we dropped’ at Newcastle’s Metro Centre, we crossed the causeway to Lindisfarne. I teased the girls about the Grey Starling for which Bamburgh was famous.

It was our first and only family tent holiday, and even though the weather was coolish, something about the experience stilled and calmed me, as we sat reading in the gas lamplight in the gathering dusk, and later lay in our sleeping bags listening to the laughter and chat of neighbouring campers which seemed so close, slowly dying out as they too drifted off to bed.

I remember the afternoon we came back to find the inside of the canvas alive with minute beasties which, when we sought her advice in panic, the lady at the site office told us unconcernedly came from a nearby cornfield which was being harvested.

Regularly, sometime after midnight, our younger daughter Bethany, who was 9, would need to go to the loo. She would reach a hand urgently through the canvas door of the pod where Lorna and I were sleeping and shake my shoulder or my face and ask me to accompany her to the toilet block. I’d drag myself out of the sleeping back, find my shoes and anorak in the darkness, and unzip the tent.

Bethany and I would make our way together along the sparingly-lit tarmac. As night followed night, she got into the habit, when she needed to waken me, of hissing ‘Toilet man!’

For some reason it seemed to be, and not just in the sweetness of nostalgia, that these brief nightly trips were among the most precious experiences of parenthood, and I savoured every second of them. Hand in hand, we’d walk in sleepy silence through the small-hours chill in the hush that wrapped the campsite in sleep. We could hear the roar of waves breaking on the distant shingle and see the warmly-floodlit façade of Bamburgh Castle across the fields. I would nip into the Gents, and then wait outside the toilet block while my daughter did her business, and then we’d go back to the tent. Bethany and her dad. Together, and, it seemed to me, profoundly at one.

We’d climb back into our sleeping bags on wobbly inflatable mattresses. Silence. Until the next time. ‘Toilet man!’

A life in letters: Flumes

I have only been down a flume twice in my life. In 1992, shortly after Lorna and I were engaged, we were both at the Spring Harvest event at Butlin’s Wonderwest World in Ayr.  One afternoon, we went to the Leisure Waters facility at the site. I was at the stage of feeling that to marry Lorna would mean doing (or at least trying to do)  everything she did. And so, as she flung herself joyously down the steepest flume, I resolved to do the same, and after lingering hesitantly at the top of the flume whose gradient seemed most gradual, I courageously let myself go. It was terrifying – the rapid descent with no means of restraining your body, the knowledge that at the bottom the projectile of your body would be fired into a deep pool of water. I survived, but resolved never again to put myself through the flume experience.

A few years later we were on holiday at St Andrews when Rebecca was a toddler. At the leisure pool close to the beach, there was the very shortest of flumes. Rebecca was reluctant to commit herself to it, and I reckoned that I could face such a brief descent with equanimity and so Rebecca and I went down together. It was not a wise decision. I learned that to me even the shortest of flumes brings terror, and also that young children are quick to recognize when you’re afraid. (Mind you, as I was probably holding myself rigid, and her too, this is hardly surprising.) That episode probably put Rebecca off flumes for life!

But at least I tried, and I think there are metaphors in there for my approach to fathering, and to life.