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)

The River we travel

‘I’ve seen them now, and I will never be the same.’ These are the words of Malcolm Gladwell, a best-selling non-fiction writer based in New York.

Reading about him has focussed my thinking on two events in Inverness – the on-going commemoration of the first visit to the city 250 years ago by the founder of Methodism, John Wesley (he preached in the High Church on Sundday 10th June 1764), and the recent service at the Cathedral where the Bachuil (or crozier) of St Moluag was on display. St Moluag was a contemporary of Columba: like Columba he met King Brude at Inverness and established many monasteries.

The Bachuil in the hands of its current custodian, Niall Livingstone of Bachuil, current Baron of Bachuil

What did Gladwell see which he claims changed his life? It was, he tells us, ‘the weapons of the spirit.’

Born in England, Malcolm Gladwell was raised in Canada where the family joined the Mennonite Christian community. His two brothers retained their Mennonite faith in adulthood, but though Malcolm continued to believe in God and to view Christian faith as logical, he admits ‘what I have had a hard time seeing is God’s power.’

He told an audience in 2009 that he was ‘truly sad’ he didn’t share his parents’ faith. He described a communion service he’d been present at as one of the most beautiful things he’d experienced, and was sad that nothing out-with faith affected him in quite the same way.

John Wesley preaching

And then he began researching his latest book, David and Goliath: underdogs, misfits and the art of battling giants. One of its themes is that sometimes people with no material advantage, and indeed with severe disadvantages are much more powerful than they appear. They have an inner strength and resilience which (in a recent article) Gladwell describes as ‘weapons of the spirit.’

The book includes many personal stories, two of which are explicitly faith-driven. There is a Mennonite couple who find a way to forgive and express love to the person responsible for their daughter’s death. There’s the French Alpine community which, led by the local pastor, quietly resisted the Nazis during World War 2 and helped many Jewish people to escape to Switzerland.

Exploring these stories, Gladwell was amazed by the persistent courage people showed.  Their behaviour was, he said in an interview ‘very hard to account for other than by the particular kind of strength you get from faith.’

As a direct result of this evidence for the power of God in human weakness he says ‘I am in the process of recovering my own faith.’

One of the key points he makes in interviews is that the Mennonite tradition of forgiveness helped prompt and shape the bereaved couple’s willingness to forgive. And the history of the Alpine village standing firm in the 17th and 18th centuries s against state oppression of Protestant faith inspired the villagers’ resistance to the Nazis.

Which is why I got thinking of St Moluag and John Wesley – just a couple of the many Christian leaders who have visited the Highland across the centuries. The tradition we inherit in Scotland is a tradition of faith – of mission, of iconoclasts like Wesley challenging the status quo, challenging us when our faith becomes a veneer rather than a soul-deep reality.

Wesley acknowledged the importance of tradition when he noted on 10th Juen 1764 ‘the remarkable behaviour of the whole congregation after service’, their serious reflection on what they had heard. Wesley attributed this to the fact that Inverness has ‘for at least a hundred years had such a succession of pious ministers as very few in Great Britain have known.’

Malcolm Gladwell challenges us. To some the challenge is to understand the tradition before we reject it, to assess with unbiased eyes the evidence of God we see in lives around us. To others the challenge is to live, uncowed by injustice and adversity, lives in which weapons of the spirit are evident, 

To some the challenge is to rediscover in faith the beauty we have found nowhere else. To everyone the challenge is to recognise that ultimate power does not lie in the hands of those who appear most powerful.

I held the 34” long Bachuil of St Moluag that day in the Cathedral. As my hand encircled the fragile wood I sensed a stillness and continuity. It was as though I’d entered a glass-walled, peace-calmed cubicle. We hold to an ancient faith, fragile but resilient.

Yet what matters is not so much what we hold, as who holds us – the God of St Moluag, the God of John Wesley, the God of Christians across the centuries, the God who isn’t a visitor among us, but a perpetual presence, the God who wills us to seek that vision which will so change us that we will ‘never be the same.’

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 5th June 2014)