Desperately Seeking Annie

Where does the longing come from?

Early memories may carry clues – tucked up in bed, cosy and warm, safe and sound, listening to the winter North wind tearing the world apart. Night after night after night. Other nights, clear cold, wintry, still. Standing on the concrete of the garden path, gazing at the clear night sky above the roofs of the houses at the top of Ellison Road hill, awestruck with delight at the blaze of radiance dancing in the heavens. The Northern Lights, heavenly dancers.

(I have never seen them since childhood. It is my keen wish to see them again before I die.)

I used to ask myself : what vast Power generates the destructive energies of the wind, the visual delight of the Northern Lights? What are they for? Who performed the long, hard labour of setting upright on a Hebridean moor that great Neolithic astronomical calendar, the Callanish Stones? Why did they do it? What rites were performed there? What gods were honoured ?

Where does the longing come from?

For as long as I can recall, I have longed to know  why we are here, why the world with its staggering diversity of  teeming, turbulent life is here. I have tried to find out what our presence here may mean, whether it is random or not.

During my lifetime, the vast scale of  the Universe has been visually confirmed by the explorations of science far beyond the boundaries imagined by Darwin or Einstein. I have the Hubble images on my wall, and gaze at them every day. Their beauty, and the vastness they invoke, goes beyond the power of words to express.

We now know that our Universe is one of  many, that there may be a vast Multiverse: matrix from which arise countless Universes. We are so minute, here on planet Earth, the Solar System, The Milky Way Galaxy, home to millions of other stars. Why am I standing here, wondering why we are here and what it all means?

New Hubble Image: Carina Nebula
New Hubble Image: Carina Nebula

(http://blogs.sacbee.com/photos/2009/09/hubble-telescopes-latest-image.html)

It’s a long way from the Metaverse to the eccentric Rev. Dr. de Sousa in his green plus fours and his rusty bicycle, teetering precariously from his gloomy rectory to his sombre church during the late nineteen fifties.The small island town in which I grew up, a place of some five thousand souls, was remarkably well served for churches in those days. There was no shortage of  Christian establishments in which I could place myself in an attempt to find some answers to my big WHY.

The Episcopal church was regarded with suspicion because of its uncomfortable perceived closeness to Rome.

There was the United Free Church, where Popery would have shrivelled to a cinder had it ever crossed the threshold. Serious Christianity was practised here. No flowers, no music (apart from precenting), definitely no graven images. An old testament God hung out here. Fun and laughter were not encouraged.

Then there were the Seceeders, whose precise denominational and doctrinal position remained a mystery to me throughout my youth. I knew they had split off from some other lot, and therefore regarded themselves as “a cut above” – but above what, I never quite established.

Then there was the plain old Church of Scotland. The minister, a mild, thin, bookish looking soul who had been at school with my father, bore the distinctly uninspiring nickname of “Optic” which had stuck with him since his very short-sighted schooldays. His spectacles, I was convinced, really were made out of the bottoms of milk bottles.

I used to attend his sermons with hair rollers under my Sunday hat as a mute and invisible but satisfying form of protest. He had had a charisma bypass, and took boredom to punishing levels. However, I always liked the Benediction at the end …...In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost…” it always seemed to come from somewhere other  than him, although he was saying the words. This sense never failed to confuse me…..

We went there on our intermittent forays to Church, depending on whether inertia or guilt dominated my mother’s frame of mind on a Sunday evening. Trips to Church were usually minus my father, apart from hatches, matches and despatches.

A spiritualist medium, describing my father’s wayward character to me with remarkable and eerie accuracy not long after his death, said he was a man “who knew his God.” Wherever Dad’s God hung out, it was not in any of the establishments on offer in our mid-20th century small Scottish town.

Personally, long before my encounter with the medium, I always thought my father’s God was out there in the distant hills where he went to poach deer, or in the eye of a storm at sea.  Not that we ever talked about such matters. The only time we ever discussed my spiritual life was when, aged twelve, I realised that I could not face replacing the utter tedium of seven years of Sunday School with the probable continuing tedium of Bible Class, which is where you went on entering secondary education.

An epiphany prompted my nervous and tentative approach to my father. We had recently aquired a Readers’ Digest World Atlas, a huge book which I could barely lift. I was riveted by a double page spread of the whole world, with countries coloured in according to religion. I realised that day how many world religions there were.

Although Christianity appeared to hold its own across the world, it was visually clear  that the great majority of the world’s population – which was a mere two and a half billion in total when I was doing my big religious sums – believed in something else altogether.

I then looked for the tiny isles of the Outer Hebrides, coloured Christian pink. Next, the top island where I lived, barely discernible in the context of the whole world. A wave of inescapable logic washed me away that day. It simply did not make sense that a few thousand members of eg the Free Church of Scotland considered themselves to be right and saved, leaving almost the total remaining population of the world wrong and damned regardless of the integrity and sincerity of their differing beliefs.

My mind buzzing with this powerful realisation, I told my father that I didn’t want to go to Bible Class. I now wanted to do some of my own reading and work out religion for myself.  “Fine” he said. “Don’t go, then.”

At the age of twelve, that was it for me and Christianity, for a very long time, although I continued under pressure to attend church intermittently and always enjoyed singing the hymns at hatches, matches and despatches.

The longing, however, continued, like a barely audible ghost of a sound, echoing my heartbeat….

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1300 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2013
Licensed under Creative Commons – for conditions see Home Page

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6 thoughts on “Desperately Seeking Annie

  1. Your father poached deer on your top island? Now I want to see pictures. So how big was the deer population? I guess I am trying to figure out how the deer got on the island, and how long they have been there. And, does poach mean the same thing in the US? I was also reared Presbyterian in the Buckle of the Bible Belt, which left me wanting. Seems the god of my fathers/mothers did not quite know what to make of my family of origin and the many diverse needs of its members, especially iatrogenic complications that went unrecognized for so long, by so many. I have worked my way around to a lot of different faiths, and been scoffed at by others who have had relatively easy lives. I have come back full circle and do believe in a Christianity that would make most of those in my social circles shudder.

    1. Yes, full circle for me too. I am now an Episcopalian in a very liberal, inclusive, welcoming church here in Glasgow city. And my narrow Free Presbyterian relatives would be pretty horrified – if they had ever cared to ask me even one question about what I had done with my life since I left….,

      Re the deer – check it out on google. I am vague there….but deer poaching was common in my home area. My late father, who never poached commercially, held the islanders’ general belief that ‘one for the pot’ was a right and not a crime, since no-one should be deemed to ‘own’ the land or the rivers.

      1. Don’t know that I would want this made public, but, is there anything in a chart that might indicate multiplicity, as in more than one personality? Thank you…

  2. What a fascinating story. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if the Methodist Church I grew up in wasn’t somehow less rigid than others of the denomination. Always, it makes a difference who’s running the show, and our pastors were warm, caring people who really did seem to enjoy people.

    We were fascinated by the Catholics, who seemed somehow just a little dangerous and a lot mysterious. And we suffered on behalf of our poor Chuch of Christ friends, who couldn’t even have music in church. So many people, so many ways to try and sort life out!

    I’ve never been one for the big questions. I haven’t ever occupied myself with why are we here and what does it mean? That doesn’t mean I’m not fascinated by space and time, because I am. Most of my favorite early adult writers, like Loren Eiseley, addressed precisely such issues. But I’ve never worried about what happens after we die, or thought much about such things as The Original Cause. I read Genesis not for science, but for primal truths about humanity, and even when I worked for the mission board we weren’t one of those organizations who said, “Accept Jesus, and we’ll give you your immunizations”. (About as un-Christian, if not immoral, as you can get.)

    I do love your Dad’s response to your declaration of independence.

    Have you ever read Annie Dillard’s “Holy The Firm”? You would absolutely love it. It’s a very small book, filled with such quotable bits as this: “Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?”

    1. Thanks for these thoughtful reflections, Linda. We do have some similar tastes in reading. Loren Eiseley was one of my favourite writers in my early twenties, and I was knocked out a few years ago when I at last got around to reading Annie Dillard’s ‘Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek’. I could scarcely believe that she had written such a spiritually mature book at the age of twenty-seven: her description of the mystical experience she had with “the tree with lights” has remained in my imagination ever since – I made a note at that time to read “Holy The Firm”. I’ll be passing our local, fantastic Oxfam book shop later today….they are sure to have it!

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