What is real?
For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. Hebrews, 4:12 NKJV
Growing up in a divorced family means poverty and insecurity. Your parents now must spend money on two places to live instead of one. There is transport between those places if you are to know your other parent. No joint gifts at Christmas or birthdays.
I remember both of my parents working hard, all the time. For next to nothing in return.
One day at school the teacher asked all the kids what they’d do if they won the lottery. I was about 10 years old, so I was very chubby and already rather insecure. A classmate announced that he would ‘buy Scott new clothes, so he didn’t have to look at the holes in his [my] trousers.’
There was never hope of a foreign holiday when our money came from occasional part-time jobs and welfare. We were poor, that way.
Being a child in a divorced family makes you tough. Whenever people found out my parents divorced, they would say ‘oh I’m sorry’.
I hated that. I was fine, I thought. We’re happy. I don’t need their pity.
It’s only now that I have three young children of my own, in a happy marriage, that I see what joys I missed out on. The distance between me and my father. The insecurity that brought.
Yet, our extended family who still lived in the land of my birth, the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, were a blessing. We spent every summer there living with my grandparents, aunts, and uncles. My mother wanted us to know our family, despite the divorce. And time with them was the greatest foundation for life you could ever hope for.
Lewis is a wild place. So, windswept there are few places with trees. A place so wild and supernatural, the landscape looks as though God was only recently done making it. It feels like the Monday after the first Sabbath. With a decent amount of surviving Viking culture thrown in.
In those days of the early 90s, living with my grandparents was like going back 50 years in time. At least, compared with the mainland UK. We would visit people in their late 90s, who still lived in converted black houses. I remember my father lifting 4 or 5 layers of linoleum and carpet in one house to reveal their rammed earth floor. At 58° North in Scotland, these were some hardy old-timers we used to visit.
Many of these people had lived through the war but didn’t talk much about it. The loss of the Iolaire was recent enough to be part of the life story of many of the elders we would visit. For some that was still too raw to mention. They were sincere people, who kept the Sabbath. There was theological debate after dinner, and conversation was the main entertainment. Well-thumbed, worn-out books within reach at all times. Ammunition for whenever the discussion needed a weighty reference behind a point.
We used to dig peat, a kind of pre-coal stage of the soil that forms up there, dry it out, and stack it for the winter. It wasn’t child labour; it was good healthy fun. Much more than cutting hay for the barn when you have severe hay fever, like me.
I suffered from hay fever up there in summer. As a result, I found myself gravitating toward the beach and fishing, more than the croft. 22 years later, looking back I realise I’m a natural-born sailor.
I’m so salty, I’m allergic to land.
The years went by, and I spent more and more time with my aunts, uncles, and cousins than with my older relatives. I went to Uni. I joined the Navy Unit. Had a couple of girlfriends. Grew up a little.
Near the end of my time at Uni, my grandfather and grandmother were both very ill and frail. I spent my penultimate summer break at university up on the island with my dad. We spent several weeks looking after his mum and dad before he went into a home and his mother went into care.
I saw one of the cruelties of a small community at that time. Like an extended dysfunctional family, Island gossip creates stories about people. The story then becomes the truth, to those on the outside. And the story about my grandfather was that he was losing his marbles.
Not so! I spent a lot of time with him that summer, so this gossip angered me. He was still sharper than most, I thought, despite his frailty. And his joy for life was still vibrant, as would soon be evident in several escape attempts from the care home!
My father would spend the evenings scribing old Gaelic names for local birds and plants. Many of these lost to time, but not to my Shen. In the mornings I would go into his overgrown garden and try to make myself useful. With decades of work in it, he knew what needed doing, even though it had been a long time since he’d been capable himself. He knew each plant, its location, its neighbours, its Latin name, common name, and what it needed.
And if he didn’t know what Gordon bloomin’ Brown had said that week, that did not mean he was losing his marbles!
So, when he spoke, I listened.
He shared something with me, that later when I told my dad, he dropped everything he was doing – stunned. Things he’d never told anyone before.
‘Oh, you’re still doing the Navy. You mean you haven’t got that out of your system yet, boy? Oh, dear.’
He was a charming joker at times. When he found out I was considering the submarine service, he told me:
‘Submarines are terrible things. Floating coffins, boy.’
You see, he’d been a gunner in the Royal Navy throughout the war. The full six years of it, he did the North Atlantic run. I’d already heard the stories. I loved the tale where he dropped a wooden crate and broke it, revealing their clandestine cargo. Shipments of gold from West Africa, bound for Canada and New York. The comedy of a skunk wandering into their Nissen Huts in Canada. The stories of the little comforts, like good boots and a decent cabin.
But he never spoke of the convoys, or the combat. Until then.
I like to think it was because I had now been in the brotherhood of the sea for a few years. Or, perhaps, being closer to the end of his life, he lowered his guard. He recalled the war, unprompted, as we spoke about ships. ‘Oh boy. It was, … Hell on earth.’
He recalled being in a naval dockyard on the South Coast of England. He’d been fetching stores when Germans bombed the yard:
‘I was by an ammunition store when they bombed. I saw the bombs falling. Fire. Terrible fire, everywhere. It was hell on earth. Somehow, I made it through the fires and explosions and ran back to my ship. I was so afraid.
I was shaking, and I dropped to my knees in my cabin and prayed to God. I promised to follow him, if he would keep me alive through all of this, and that I would serve him’.
And he did keep his word.
My grandfather lived for another year or so after that trip, but I had to leave the island and finish uni. I left my father there to care for him for several more months. As the ferry pulled away, and Stornoway faded in the sunset beyond our wake, I wept. I couldn’t articulate it at the time, but I knew that my childhood was over. My adolescence ended on that day.
His wife, my grandmother lived many more years in the care of her eldest daughter. She too had served in the Women’s Royal Navy. She trained as an accountant and served at a Naval Air Station for seaplanes in Kyle of Lochalsh, near Skye.
At her funeral, I learned that at the end of the war, there was an understandable mood of celebration. Some of the pilots invited her out for a flight in their seaplane, for a jolly. She declined, later saying that she had a heavy and dark feeling come over her. She felt as though the hand of God had held her back from getting on that aeroplane.
Sure enough, the plane crashed, and everyone aboard it died. She could well have joined them.
Peacetime came, and my grandparents had not yet met. They were both attending separate churches. One day the minister said, ‘I know many of you made oaths to God, during your terrible trials in the war. Come, now is your time to fulfil those promises.’
There was a great Christian revival on the island. My grandparents both attended a social event arranged by this minister. And the rest was history.
My grandparents then had five children. They in turn had dozens of grandchildren, and there are so many great-grandchildren I can’t count. And I am here, because of them.
Now, evangelical atheist types tell me that God isn’t real. They tell me that people are simpletons, sitting in a room and singing to their imaginary friend once a week.
How can that be, when I would not exist, but for my grandparents both finding God? Isn’t that as real as it gets?
Whether God is real or not, is a crazy question, when you think about it. Especially for me.
My grandparents believed in God. And their shared love of God is what brought them together. And they followed the ways of God, to bring life into this world. They walked the narrow path.
So, without God, I would not exist.
For me, God did create the world. In the most real possible sense.
Something all the millions of poor aborted babies in the West will never know. They were not brought into existence with love. They, sacrificial tributes to the god of materialism, were not allowed to exist. For excuses of career, feminism, and poverty.
Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward. Psalm 127:3 ESV
Love and faith would have made it all OK. Believe me, being poor, doesn’t mean your life is not worth it. Nihilism is murderous.
God isn’t a cartoon character Jesus, sitting on a cloud pulling puppet strings. He won’t find your keys for you whenever you ask. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t real.
His effect is real, through our actions. That is what it means to be made in the image of God. Our actions, if true and faithful, bring virtue into being. That is making heaven on earth, one act of faith at a time.
The islanders call it the cùram. That is a Gaelic phrase for ‘the responsibility’, meaning caring for religious belief.
Think of the grammatical difference with English there. He is not being ‘a Christian’. That is, in the English sense of being a member of an organisation or a defender of an ideological position. No, they say: ‘He has the cùram.’
It is a burden and a purpose we take up. It is a duty of care. A way to act. Not a possession. Not a choice.
I don’t go to church at the moment, but I try my best to walk the path and act with faith toward my responsibilities.
One island friend told me: ‘Standing in a church every Sunday doesn’t make you a Christian. Any more than standing in a garage once a week makes you a car’.
The cùram is something you have. Like a fever.
I too am trying to have this and to perform, care for it and nurture it. In that sense, it is artificial. But the mere fact that it is artificial, does not make it less real. That faith, nurtured and kept alive by responsible people for millennia, still saves.
Hell can exist right here on earth, but so can heaven. It is our responsibility now. To perform the resurrection, bring the truth back to life, and care for it for another generation.
God is real, so long as we perform and act out the virtues in which he lives.
For we are God's fellow workers. You are God's field, God's building. Corinthians 3:9 ESV