A life in letters: Scripture Union - Camp

I vividly remember attending the boys S.U. camp in Meigle during the Easter holidays in 1965, which was led by J. W. (“Boss”) Meiklejohn, who was a stalwart of Scripture Union in Scotland. We went by bus from outside S.U.’s Glasgow offices in St Vincent Street to ‘Belmont Camp’ where we lived not under canvas, but in long wooden dormitory blocks each named after a local place – I was in Eassie. Each morning, the whole camp met together, and I remember my acute embarrassment each day when the letters from home were handed out, and my mother (bless her!) had never failed to send me a comic, rolled up in a tube and wrapped in brown paper, which I had to walk to the front to receive. “Boss” organised a camp quiz, and I was on the winning team, although I rather think we cheated. Each of us received as a prize a book inscribed by “Boss” – mine was Some want it tough, by Leneord Moules, a Christian who, if I remember correctly, had made it to the top of Everest.

My other public activity at camp was reciting a camp alphabet which the boys and leaders in my dorm had helped me compose. S.U. camps at that time were still run on rather military grounds – the leader was known as the Commandant, and his assistant the Adjutant – the latter would come round each morning, assessing the tidiness of the dorms according to what we felt were excessively pernickety standards.  And so my alphabet began

A is for Adjy, his head is so bust

  That he’s always looking for small bits of dust

and continued through the alphabet until it reached V, which was the gloriously anarchic

V is for vomit which means the same as spew

  And after you’ve heard this, is that what you’ll do?

Thereafter, our inspiration exhausted, we concluded with a conventional

W, X, Y and Z

  We’ve done enough now, we’re off home to bed.

I remember one afternoon at camp we all climbed a nearby hill. For some reason I impetuously rushed ahead to get to the top first rather than walking up in the easy companionship of the others.

On the serious side, I remember learning, and being moved by the beauty of the slow, majestic hymn Thine be the glory to Handel’s tune Judas Maccabeas which we sang each day before “Boss’s” talk. And I remember regarding with some awe the missionary Bill Gilvear who was at the camp, and who we knew had just returned from Africa, where we knew he had endured terrible hardship. There would have been challenges to respond to Christ, in the talks, and small dorm groups, but these came standard with the evangelical territory, and made no impression on me.

The Beatles had another hit in the charts that spring, Ticket to Ride, and rather to my puzzlement, boys were running around the camp singing the first line at the tops of their voices. As usual, I didn’t pick the words up properly, and so I wondered why this particular girl so urgently wanted to travel to Brighton…….

Some of my friends from Wishaw High School accompanied me to camp, but I have not recollection of being drawn closer to them through the shared experience. My parents were keen that I build new friendships – there was a boy in my dorm whose name, when I mentioned it to them on the phone, suggested that he might be the son on a prominent dentist. ‘Speak to him!’ my parents urged. But I remained withdrawn, seeking to cover up my sense of shyness and inadequacy with my usual exhibitionistic bluster.

The night before we were to go home, I lay petrified on my top bunk, afraid to go to sleep, and afraid I’d need to go to the loo before daylight came. The dorm leaders had unwisely woven a web of terror with their stories of ghosts which walked in Eassie dorm on the last night of camp.

The next day we returned to Glasgow in the bus. I sat beside the window, sticky-fingeredly sucking rock while reading, and being enthralled by The small woman, Alan Burgess’s book about Gladys Aylward’s experiences in China which I had bought on the camp bookstall. When we got home, I took to my bed completely exhausted for several days.

The permeable membrane

The Book of Strange New Things is a powerful new novel by Dutch-born Michel Faber, who now lives in the Scottish highlands. Its main character is Peter Leigh, a Christian pastor sent to minister to the native beings on the distant planet Oasis, which has been colonised by a secretive, organisation called USIC. Peter must leave his wife for the duration of his visit – their only contact is via an intergalactic email system.

One theme of the novel is communication – between Peter and Bea, formerly so close; between Peter and his colleagues at the USIC base on Oasis; between Peter and the brilliantly imagined, Jesus-loving Oasans; and between Peter and the inner voice which as a child he identified as conscience, but now recognises as God.

Another theme is the risk of excluding reality – ‘home is in here,’ says one character, pointing at his chest, indicating he is self-sufficient, with no need of others. Peter is said to be on ‘Planet God’ by someone convinced that his faith and engagement with the Oasans have distanced him from the reality of what’s happening on earth.

And a third theme is an exploration of the nature and experience of religious belief.

 

Faber is said to be an atheist, but he writes with insight and deep understanding of the Christian’s inner life. Either he has been there himself, or else he is gifted with a quite outstanding empathy. He rarely puts a foot wrong in describing Peter and Bea’s faith, and Christians will find nourishing insights in this book.

But it also depicts faith under threat, faith struggling to cope with the social and economic implosion back on earth. My initial reaction was a sense of betrayal that someone who writes so well of Christian faith and experience should remorselessly describe the undermining of faith.

But the book is fiction. Another author could have written differently, but with equal integrity, of people finding, and keeping, rather than losing faith. (But perhaps Faber would argue that he has shown this in the tragic Oasans.)

I wish there had been more context: reference to people of faith and intellectual integrity who, faced with unspeakable evil, have held fast to their faith not from fear, but out of conviction that God is present in the pain; reference to the work of faith-groups who would, I trust and expect, have been bringing comfort and order to the troubled world.

‘Belief is a place that people didn’t leave until they absolutely must,’ Peter reflects. But it’s a fact that some Christian s do lose their faith. In the novel the time comes when there are simply too many unanswered questions, too much pain. Apparent answers to prayer are re-interpreted as coincidence; the inner voice as merely self talking to self.

At one point atheism seemed attractive to me, and I hope I was prepared to walk that way if truth led in that direction. It would be easier as an atheist, I reasoned – no longer would there be the endless questions about why a good loving God allows evil, or why God seems to play hide and seek, simply a wonder at the miracles of nature, a stoical acceptance of darkness and tragedy, and a resolve to nurture the flickering candle of my life and the lives of others.

But it seemed to me I could not with integrity reject the uniqueness of Jesus and the circumstantial evidence of God’s immense reality and presence in the world. I may be wrong, but I choose with joy and conviction to remain part of the company of people who, across the centuries, have followed the One who is both love and mystery.

The four sections of Faber’s novel are headed with words from the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Thy will be done,’ ‘On earth’, ‘As it is’, ‘In heaven.’  Initially we imagine that God’s will is referred to. But by the end, we re-read the headings as a godless statement of human consequences – our futures, Faber implies, are shaped by the choices we make.’

There is some hope at the end of the novel. I think Faber leaves room for God in whatever happens after the novel ends. In some respects Peter is never more Christian than in its closing pages.

‘There can be moments when grief is stronger than faith,’ Peter remarks earlier in the book. The implosion of our circumstances sometimes overshadow God, but as grief heals, and (as Peter puts it) ‘the membrane between ourselves and Heaven becomes permeable’ we may hear once again the inner whisper, and know its source.

And atheism too is hard to leave until we must, until our experiences cry out so stridently as to leave us no option but to embrace, with both reluctance and joy a new way of seeing.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the issue dated 25th December 2014)

Angels unawares

Last Friday my wife and I went to see Paddington, a new live-action movie based on Michael Bond’s stories. A young Peruvian bear comes to London to find the explorer who befriended his aunt and uncle in Peru, telling them wonderful things about the UK and its capital.

It’s a kids’ film, and as such is enormous fun, but it also raises some serious issues – about how, for example we respond as a society to illegal immigrants who regard the UK as a golden destination.

Paddington stows away on a cargo ship, keeps himself alive on the long voyage by scoffing innumerable jars of marmalade, evades custom checks at London docks, and makes his way to the station whose name he is later given. After a long, anxious wait to be befriended by someone (as the explorer was certain would happen, at least according to the stories he told Paddington’s relatives), he was at last taken home by the Brown family, initially on a very temporary basis.

At one point we see the bedraggled bear wandering through blustery London streets and concluding that the capital is definitely not as welcoming as it’s been cracked up to be. Will he in the end, despite the domestic dramas which his enthusiasm and inexperience of British ways give rise to, find the real home he longs for, the place where he belongs?

This theme is relevant at Christmas. Joseph and the heavily-pregnant Mary arrive in Bethlehem as migrants – no doors are opened wide to welcome them, and they take refuge in a stable. Later, after the birth of Jesus, hearing of evil King Herod’s plans to annihilate all male babies in the Bethlehem area they take flight to Egypt as refugees and strangers.

One lesson of the Christmas story – and it was reinforced by Jesus in his teaching – is that each of us as individuals is both challenged and privileged to welcome the stranger, the ‘other’, the outsider, the person who doesn’t ‘fit in.’

Who is this stranger whom I can make at home? It’s easier perhaps to help folk at this time of year – by giving to a foodbank for example, or inviting a lonely neighbour round to share in the Christmas meal. But is there someone in my life who needs longer-term welcome and support?

Is there someone in my family, someone I share a house with, even, who does not feel at home, and who yearns for a sense of unconditional acceptance? Have I shut some people out of my life because their views are different from mine? 

The Brown family come to realise that Paddington is needed just as much as he is in need. His coming frees Mr Brown from the middle-aged caution which has overlaid his natural zaniness, and helps Mrs Brown, an artist, find her way through a creative ‘block.’ The children grow more open and spontaneous.

This insight also reflects a Christian principle - that as we reach out and open our hearts to ‘the other’ not with a virtuous sense of ‘doing good’ but in simple, generous-spirited warmth, so we ourselves are changed and blessed.

There’s a dark strand in Paddington. The Peruvian explorer has long-since died, and his evil taxidermist daughter wants to – well, you get the picture. A glass display unit in the Natural History Museum awaits one, small, furry specimen.

There’s evil in the Christmas story too – the King’s infanticide, as he sought to wipe out the prince who threatened his reign. Walking in the light inevitably means confronting darkness and facing pain and unanswered questions, but the coming of Jesus at Bethlehem is a sign to us that in the end, light will prevail.

Once the dramas are over Paddington articulates well his sense of being at home in London. It seems to the young bear that there’s lots of diversity in the capital, lots of people who are ‘different’, so that difference becomes the norm, and he, conscious of his own difference, feels completely at home.

There’s a profound theme here. When I feel ‘different’ it’s easy to contrast ‘me’ with ‘them’ – all the others. But when I discover that each of ‘them’ has their own story, their own difference, then I realise that it’s OK to be me, and in welcoming them, I myself, through time, will find a welcome.

In the movie, Paddington waves from a taxi window to a genial elderly customer sipping coffee at a pavement cafe. It's Michale Bond himself. He nods knowingly in recognition. Christmas reminds us that God doesn't simply have a cameo role in the story God created, but came, and comes on set in Jrsus, the ultimate stranger. And it is in welcoming this Jesus into our lives that we find our true home.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 18th December 2014)