Day thirty-one

31st May 2009   ENGLAND

A truck driver standing still

It is three in the morning and I’m awake… I lay in bed with arms behind my head, it is a Sunday… yesterday evening at the dinner table, David had asked me if I would be happy to share something of my walk with the Youth Sunday Service… to do that would mean the walking would probably not start and till mid-day… I couldn’t really say no (not to David anyway), those of you that have been reading the story of this wee adventure will know only too well, that I ramble on a little sometimes (a little too much maybe). David is not a guy to ramble, he is a doer, a church minister and much more. A lot of the work David and Patricia do, involves bringing different communities together, breaking down walls and building bridges… I have a huge admiration for this couple.

To be asked to stand up in front and share something of this adventure to a group of young people (half my age and less) in the environment of a Sunday service… I felt that I needed give some proper thought to what I talk about, I didn’t want to just talk about the day-to-day external aspects of the walk… the how many miles I had walked each day… the route taken, the places I had stayed, the meals and endless cups of tea given, all very interesting (or maybe not), but certainly not that inspiring. Should not a Sunday service make us think how it is we can be more than what it is we are. That is what I wanted to try and get across, to touch on truth, to step out of this physical world and into the invisible world of falling pencils… I guess I didn’t want to waste their time, they wouldn’t know this raggedy man standing up in front of them from Adam… the least I could do would be to share something worthwhile. Maybe… just maybe even give some inspiration…

…so here I am, three o’clock in the morning, staring up at the ceiling, trying to put together a talk. I have two working titles in mind, the motto from RAF Cranwell, ‘We Seek Higher Things’ and the motto from my RAF Mountain Rescue, ‘Whensoever’. In my head I would break the talk down into three parts, Scotland, Ireland and Wales (I had not yet finished the England part of the walk).

I pull some thoughts together, starting in Scotland. I remember the doubt that I had felt sitting on that rickety bus rattling along the northern coast, leaving the small town of Thurso behind me and heading to the starting point of this adventure, a Youth Hostel in a small village called Tongue. If I close my eyes and breath in, I can still smell the sea air, the moors the diesel fumes of the bus and all this mixed with a sprinkling of doubt… a fine blend.

The first day of the walk I stepped into the church at Altnaharra, and under my breath, I was singing (hmm… mumbling is I think closer to the truth) the words of a song “it’s me, it’s me, O Lord standing in the need of prayer”. Not really knowing how, but I was wanting to make an offering. I wonder at what it is I have that I could give… it wasn’t looking good… pockets empty of money and a raggedy guy full of flaws, I was going to say, I ain’t nobody special… but it is wrong to think like that, to do that is to put our own thoughts before those of our parents (and that in my head includes God our Heavenly Parent)… our own thoughts of who it is we think we are, need to line up with those that ‘know’ the value of who it is we are … in all of history there has never been another you (or I) and never will there be in the future… that makes us unique… a one of, never to be repeated… I think it’s fair to say that also makes us pretty special.

…so what is it that I had, that I could give, that I could offer… I turn my pockets inside out… I find nothing other than a scrunched-up bus ticket, hmm… don’t think that’s going to work as an offering. What I do have is this… Forty days and five hundred miles and probably close to five hundred more… that is what I have, to make an offering. It is this that I take to the south coast and lay at the altar of that church… for any of this to have any kind of value, I knew that I needed to keep both the head and the heart in the right place… and at the centre of that right place, would need to be gratitude.

It is still incredibly early; the bed is warm… I try to sleep but it’s not happening; thoughts on the talk that I have been asked to give tomorrow gets muddled up in my head with different ideas and memories. I close my eyes for a moment, and I am back on the moors of that first night, clouds drifting slowly across a night sky of a billion stars. I close my eyes a little tighter and wonder at who it is we are.

We are told that we are created in the image of God and that we should not live on shortbread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. How do we unpack that statement… for the moment I don’t think it matters if we believe in a God or not. In those few sentences there is talk of two worlds, the world we see when we open our front doors (a world I spend much of my life looking at through the windscreen of a truck), a world that is moving at 67,000 miles an hour through space (how we don’t bump into one of those billions of stars out there, I really don’t know), it is a bio-diverse world, a world of oceans, rivers, mountain streams, huge forests and woodlands… not forgetting the fish in the sea, the bugs, beetles and butterflies, the animals that roam the land and the birds of the air, plus our contribution, those soon to be golden fields I spoke of yesterday of barley and wheat, plus the many other crops we have developed (we don’t need to live on bread alone, there are wild bittersweet brambles out there waiting to be turned into jam). This is a world that has everything to sustain our physical bodies…

… and what about the internal aspects of who we are (our spirit). It is the phrase ‘created in the image of God’ that jumps out at me (or if you prefer ‘created in the image of what is good’). This talks of another world that is just as important to who it is we are… a world where ‘Heart’ takes centre stage, where such things as virtues and morals are valued where a person is judged not by the job that they do, nor their status in society nor where it is they come from… but by their character and how it is they live their lives. This is a world where another person’s dignity is as important as my own… a world where it is possible to be who it is we are… only better. Is it stupid to dream of such a world… I think not, not if it’s a dream that has been passed down through the ages. The desire we have, to do good is as real as the stones that I have been kicking down the road or the broken lead of a pencil. Maybe more so than the world of bread and jam (that’s not to say bread and jam are not important).

The truth is we belong in both of these worlds… the world of bread and jam and the world ‘of wanting to be better than who it is we are’. These two worlds need each other… many times our faith, our spirit (call it what you will) can be uplifted (inspired) by the beauty of this physical world, the song of a Blackbird, the standing on Conic hill, a hill that sits on a major geological fault-line dividing the Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland and turning full circle with arms out stretched and eyes wide open or just sitting at the dock of a bay looking out across the Irish sea… Likewise our physical body feels a whole lot better (a whole lot stronger) when we live and act according to the laws of that invisible world, do we not have a spring in our step when we do what we know to be good.

I guess my next thought is, how do we find a better way to bring those two worlds closer together, and in doing so create something extraordinary …a world without hate… a world in which we care just that little bit more, not just about each other but about this world we call home. To pull that off, I figure we would have to take on board the third part of that verse from the book of Matthew. To live by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God… the heart of God. Yeah I know, what does that really mean… I don’t think we can pull out a handful of words from our own scriptures and then expect everyone else to just fall inline…pretty words are nice, but they also need to be real, more than this they need to be universal. Maybe in a world of different faiths and ideas a better phrase to use other than ‘the word of God’ would be ‘Logos’ a word from the ancient Greeks meaning Principles, Thought and Word… Words can be powerful, remember that truck driver I spoke off, the guy with the big belly, gravy-stained vest and crude jokes and how he was moved to tears by words written down on a page in a fictional novel… (profound truth can many times be found in fiction). It doesn’t matter who we are, truth, beauty and that what is good will always touch the essence of who it is we are…

…We don’t always need to pick up a book to understand what truth and what good is. That ‘logos’ (‘the word of God’) is buried deep in our DNA, if it were not, the desire to ‘Seek for higher things’ would not be there. Without truth and goodness, this world would be lost… in that world, nobility would mean nothing at all, our motto (not that I think we would bother with such things) would be something like ‘Seek what it is I can take from others’. That RAF Mountain Rescue motto ‘Whensoever’ would be replaced with ‘Whatever’. The idea that a bunch of guys would step out into the wilderness, be it in the day or in the middle of the night, in the dead of winter or the height of summer, in a blizzard or under the mid-day sun, the idea that they would walk out into the mountains ‘whensoever’ to help another would make no sense at all…not in a world that didn’t care.

Is this the kind of stuff I want to talk about tomorrow… I don’t know… The room is getting lighter, my eyes heavier, I close them for a moment… I am no longer on a moor at the top of Scotland looking up at a night sky, annoyingly nor am I in the land of Nod, instead I find myself across the sea in Ireland sitting on a bench in Dromore Cathedral, with a cup of coffee in hand… instead of stars, looking up at the rafters and the stained-glass windows, the craftmanship I see around me tell me that we do live in a world where people ‘seek higher things. I am reminded of those early pioneers of Christianity that came to these islands in the early fourth and fifth century, they travelled light, the one thing they did carry with them was the ‘Word’ and they used those words to tell stories (the Gospel stories) stories that spoke of a better world. These pioneers travelled throughout these islands building ‘wattle and daub’ churches, planting seeds of vision and dreams… I wonder if they ever imagined the extraordinary cathedrals those seeds would one day bring about, not just on these islands but also across the whole of Europe. Regardless of whether we have a faith or not, I think these guys deserve our respect… they played a major part in laying the foundations that we live by today.

…Sorry, sounds like I’m climbing onto a soapbox (or maybe onto the back of a trailer)… I don’t want to sound like a preacher, that was never my intention. When I picked up that pencil (the one I keep dropping) it was in order to tell a story, to share a few thoughts, yeah, for sure I was going to touch on faith, that’s kinda what this walk was all about… but to preach… no that was never the purpose…

To believe in stuff that we can see is a little easier… I’m pretty sure we all believe in truth, beauty, love and that what is good… we see it all around us… It’s hard to step out of the front door without falling over this stuff… but what of those moments, when we catch a glimpse of the invisible, more often than not from the corner of an eye… an impossible smile, a small act of kindness that was never meant to be seen, or something more than just a memory that steps out of the blue, a reminder of somebody we once knew, the stepping into an empty church and knowing we’re not alone, or maybe an answer to a question that was blowing in the wind, standing under a billion stars, fingers locked behind our head and somehow understanding that all of this is not for nothing, kicking stones alongside fields of gold and knowing that we are so much more than just another brick in the wall… have you ever been moved to the point where your eyes well up and you have no idea why (I’m kinda hoping that’s not just me, I’m supposed to be a truck driver). We live in two worlds, that world of bread and jam and a world unseen… a world our senses occasionally pick up on.

I wake up to a hot shower, a good breakfast and on the chair next to me, my bundle of clothes washed and ironed… how good is that… I’m still looking for a better word to use other than “thank you”. After breakfast, I take a mug of tea into the garden, I have a few hours before having to stand up in front of a bunch of young people and share some thoughts... I have touched on Scotland and Ireland, what of Wales… my thoughts are distracted, much of my time in the mountains rescue was spent in North Wales, instead of thoughts, a gang of ‘whensoever’ guys crowd my head… climbing sea cliffs (in the fading light) at Gogarth near South Stack in Anglesey… jumping into rivers (or being thrown in because it was your turn to cook, and you had burnt the soup)… a bunch of us straight of the hills and running to catch ‘last orders’ after a proper long day... “Come on guys, this ain’t fair, get out of my head, I’m needing to give a talk in just over an hour”… I hear myself laugh… and decide to drag these guys into the talk. I have spoken about goodness, truth, beauty even logos… but what good is any of that if you cannot laugh at a pal running down a hill so fast that he takes a tumble or another guy who is halfway climbing over an electric fence before he realises. or the banter between friends over a beer, the poking fun at each other… the retelling of stories (each telling of the story becomes a little more embellished and the laughter that little bit louder)… is this not also who we are… It is not hard to imagine those early pioneers sitting in an ale house after a hard day’s work and retelling the story of how it was Father Colman ended up face down in a big pile of ‘daub’ (mud and manure). If there is a God, then laughter and humour are also apart of who God is… and we, you and I are created in that image.

I give the talk, it kinda turned into a bunch of different stories, not sure how much of what I had been thinking about that morning got into those stories… I probably talked a lot of twaddle and daub… but it seemed to go down ok. In truth, I think they inspired me more than I had inspired them… To see young people, take on a faith and have the desire to do the good, to live for the sake of others, wanting to be the best that they can be… to take on that life is not an easy path to walk (certainly not in today’s world)… I take my (imaginary) hat off to these guys.

After Sunday Service I am taken out for a bite to eat… and again I am grateful, and I am… I am also aware that time is moving on… and that my walking boots are waiting…

It is now mid-afternoon I am back at David’s and Patricia’s home; we are sat in the kitchen a cup of tea in hand, chatting about this and that. Patricia, I think read my thoughts… she says, “Paul take a day off, stay another night and set off early tomorrow morning… it will do you good”. And she is right… I had been slowing down for a number of days now, maybe it is a good idea to stand still for a day… perhaps the boots were waiting… but I think they were also hoping, praying that one day soon things would change… and they too could take a day off.

That evening we sit around the kitchen table to share a meal, David, Patricia, Katrina, Jonathan, Rashioh (a refugee from Sierra Leone) and myself, to hear stories of those who have escaped conflict zones is both moving and incredibly humbling. I think many times we grumble a little to quickly when things don’t turn out how we think they should… we should never take anything for granted, instead do our best to maintain a heart of gratitude, to do what we can, to be better than what we were yesterday and figure out how to be better tomorrow, and maybe find a quiet moment in each day that we have to say a small prayer for those around this world that are in situations that we cannot imagine. I believe that every ounce of good we can push into this world will not be wasted… there is a better world out there, we just need to make it happen.

I lay in bed that night, not properly asleep and not properly awake… I have this image in my head David and myself are building a ‘wattle and daub’ church. Saint Colman walks over to me and asks, “What are you doing”, not knowing who he is I tell him “I’m shovelling daub from one place to another and in between digging splinters out of my hands… that is what I am doing”. Saint Colman then walks over to where David is working and asks the same question “What are you doing”. David like me is covered in muck, he stops a moment looks across at the upright posts and says, “I am building a place of worship… a cathedral… the start of a Kingdom... that is what I am doing”.