Scotland

My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here,
My heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer -
A-chasing the wild deer, and following the roe;
My heart's in the Highlands, wherever I go.
Robert Burns

When I was about nine years old I found a book called Secret Codes and Hidden messages It was my most precious book, but I don't know what happened to it. It disappeared when we moved to Costa Rica. Inside it there was tips for being a spy, how to make different kinds of invisible ink, various codes, including Morse, radio and number. Also how to decipher. ahhh so many long hours planning my secrete club and ways to transmit messages! One day, overwhelmed with love for codes, riddles and solving problems I asked God to make my life a riddle to solve. The prayer was "answered", but it might just be that I began to see life as a riddle. Perhaps that is part of prayer: it is shaping us to see aright. We pray because God provides and so we learn to look to him.

Part of this riddle has been an obsession with Scotland since I was thirteen. I am happy to say that I think I have found the answer to it. And rightfully this should be in my journal, but so many people know me as "the girl who was obsessed with Scotland" that I thought the public should have access to my thoughts. This will not be a small post. ...I suppose that it is because it is a subject that I have shaped about half my (short lived yet) life.

History
No warning could prepare for the longing that developed. One day I was looking for a costume for my 13th birthday party. I saw a picture of a Highland dancer from the set of 1960's Land's and Peoples book and I felt like I wanted to know her. After that I did the most I could trying to learn about Scotland. At that age, 100$ is like 10,000$ now, so the thought of an 800$ plane ticket was impossible. I had to content myself with pen pals and web pages. Most the web pages had gotten Scotland wrong in my opinion. In fact I still think that. They give me a mass produced feeling, in short, they make Scotland into a consumer item. So I mainly looked at historical articles and pictures.

Moving to Costa Rica had a huge effect on my value system. In short, anything vaguely Latin American became the standard for what should be avoided. The closer one got to "Celtic" culture became the standard for what was Goodness, Beauty and Truth. (I really am not kidding, even though it is almost embarrassing: there was almost a moral quality to my aesthetics).

I had the opportunity to go to Scotland when I was 15 instead of have a quinceanos party. I stayed my pen-pals family and was treated like royalty. However, it would be dishonest to say Scotland was everything I dreamed it would be. I probably would not have come home if it was. I found that the girls there wore tight jeans, talked about shoes hair and clothes, and liked living in cities. I found that the boys were interested in video games, girls and lighting fires illegally. The "grown ups" did not wear kilts and none spoke Gaelic. In fact the one boy I met who could (apparently ) speak Gaelic could only say "fuck!" after seeing a machete that I brought for Andrew and Gordon from Costa Rica.

But I did not despair. I had not visited the Highlands, I was in fact in the Lowlands the whole time. And so I just passed off any disappointment in saying I had not seen the "real" Scotland. Still, I enjoyed my trip and gave my host family a huge kick when I whipped out my pocket knife and cut away some turf from Bannockburn (where Scotland won independence in 1314). I took it back to Costa Rica and planted by a tree where I would visit if I was particularly sad or happy and wanted to think. Our Gardner was very understanding and let it grow and did not poison it for bugs. Am I odd? yes. I also took back a rock from the Brig 'o Doon where the Tam 'o Shanter ran across from Robert Burn's poem. It was loose so I slipped it in my pocket and made the mistake of saying that my pants were falling down. The boys found this an amusing comment. Eunice giggled in a self-conscious-motherly way. I still have some very dead sprigs of heather. It doesn't really count because I got them from a garden and not a hill side I had hacked up. I am sure my readers will understand.

After this I encountered the writings of George MacDonald. Looking back, these next years from age 15-18 are very dark years which I withdrew from the world in general and spent mass quantities of time by myself in painful longing for "Scotland". I would spend long times outside in forests, dancing, trying to learn Gaelic, and reading what I could of any story or poem which was Celtic or Scottish. The feeling I felt of longing I called "Truth" and it was always Scotland which I felt it most poignantly.

I did not read much and the books that I did read I read over and over. This is the list that I read:

The Princess and the Goblin
The Highlander’s last Song
Phantasties
Lilith
Taliesin

Eventually I lived life for that day when I would be in the Highlands in a cottage with my highlander and never speak anything but Gaelic again. Oh, what does the world do with idealist Romantics? What did my family do? I am not really sure. They might have been worried...

Somewhere in Costa Rica is my dream of "The Highlander". It is a dream that has haunted me with every person I am ever vaguely interested in: But is he Scottish?? Basically, I am getting married to a bright person. But as soon as I have given my vow an overwhelming spirit of dispair comes over me and I see a highlander watching me, heart broken. And in his arms and by his sides are the children we were supposed to have had. Ugh. I had married the wrong person. What a nightmarish thought. Yes, it still haunts me.

But MacDonald did not just fill my head with images of a Scotland and highlanders from the past, he also awoke a hunger for this "truth". I developed a spirituality of a very distinct nature, not going to church. (eventually I joined the youth group that my sisters were in and began contact with some mainstream church influence). Ian, one of the characters from The Highlander’s Last Song moved me so much that I wanted to as much as possible learn from him. A quote which sums up my spirituality runs thus:

"It was truth and a higher Truth that he was always seeking. The sadness which
colored his deepest individuality could be removed only by the presence of
the eternal."

It was MacDonald who awoke in me a very hard pursuit for God, but this quest was inseparably tied to Scotland. This was the land of God. "Higher Truth" was pounded into my mind until I became a Platonist in my thinking, and the more so as I passed off life in Costa Rica as having any real significance.

I have grown up with the story of my dad's own ventures when he was 18 over the sea to France. It was assumed by me that I would leave at 18, and of course I would go to Scotland. However, two twists which are fairly significant came into play. First was my youth leader, Dave Bender. He knew I did not want to go to college (again an assumption based on growing up in my family) so he suggested I go "to this place started by this guy named Schaeffer... My friend went there, and apparently the people who go there are really smart. A few of them serve in the US government. I can't remember the name." It was of course L'Abri, which after some spy work investigation on the internet (lucky I remembered how to get information form that book...;) I found it to be a place which sounded like exactly what I wanted. Truth! But they were booked, so I spent the summer alone in Murrayville, Georgia. During this summer of unplanned solitude (I was supposed to be driving and working, neither really went according to plan) I decided that the best thing for me to do was be a nun in Scotland. I had become a full fledged Platonist. The less contact with the world the better, and the best place in the world was Scotland. So in September I went to a little skete in Cannich. From my journal I write:

"[no date]
On a bus to Inverness
Stone buildings, old houses, new shops, bridges, towns, pubs, mountains, wild trees, streets, highways. All these things are in Scotland, all claim to be 'Scottish' but I have seen none of the real Scotland...

September 24th, 2003,
Cannich Scotland
I find now that I am presented with what I have wanted I no longer have the desire to have it. A little cottage in the highlands where I can raise sheep for wool and read and pray all day. Living in this Benedictine Skete even for these few days has been very insightful. The things I thought mattered most to me are nothing but silly thoughts and I hunger simply to walk with God and his Son without anyone telling me who he is and how to behave around him. ... All the time I had asked God for things I desired, a mentor, knowledge, Scotland, time: I find he has already granted them to me. All he has been teaching me is how a Benedictine lives: however I think therefore one can be a 'Benedictine' in truth when one is married and in society.

So off I went with my back pack to look for something, but I did not know what. It wasn't Scotland, nor God. A highlander? No, Highlanders can not bee looked for, they must look for you. Finally I broke down on my way to the Western Isles and decided that I needed to return home.

September 28th, 2003,
Fort William, Scotland
The story of the prodigal son is lived out. I shall return home... Even if I were never to come to Scotland again I would not find myself depressed. For it is not Scotland the land that holds my great pain of love... It is not by possessing a thing that makes the love satisfied. I think that for now the only satisfaction love has is to love without being fully fulfilled--and that presents faith and hope...

I don't think I have fully grasped this yet. I still love things and think that to have them is to satisfy that desire. But this is another thought for another day. (Hopefully a rainy one with a fire)

This is the part in the story where I meet Ivan before going to England to meet up with Grammy Alice and Diana. Yes, I am afraid part of my apologetic for being with him so long was because I met him in the Highlands. Take heed all you fellow Romantics. There again is that great divide between theory and practice. I might have understood intellectually what I wrote but I did not fully grasp it. Perhaps that is the difference between Knowing and understanding.

Thinking perhaps that because I met him in the Highlands, after I had given them up and was going to go home, maybe this was God giving them back? Or maybe really it is just me picking back up what I had given away, not wanting to loose it because it meant being confused for a time. In all events, after writing three letters I decided that I was in love and I told him so. Very practically he suggested that before we were to decided if we were going to marry each other we should get to know each other. I suppose that Romantics do need a balance here and there. But then, what is the difference between being practical and being sensible?

Then *Boom*.

I stayed at L'Abri.

I always say "And then everything changed, but I don't have time to tell you about it". I think that really, I am still processing what I learned at L'Abri so I can not simplify it enough to tell the main points. At any event, after being mentored by Edith, who had her PhD in Philosophy and was all about the Imagination vs Fantasy (the later being evil) and very much for college.

The first thing was Scotland fell (again.) See, it had crept back up and I got to the point of telling myself that because I could not shake it off I was called there. Edith and I talked a lot about fantasy and she suggested that "Scotland" was a fantasy of mine because it is rooted in a non-existent reality (one belonging to the past for one thing).

The second thing that she convinced me of was that going to college did not imply that you are too lazy to study for yourself, as was my main reason for not going. Why pay to be bottle fed when you could research the information yourself? I applied to go to college wherever Ivan was going (which ended up being Providence --never mind the comments I received about Canadian Mennonite Prairies and suicide weather...)



So that was Scotland for a while at Providence. And in the mean time I had learned a lot about God, people and love. I was still in hermit mode my first year. I was trying hard, but really saw no reason for people for the most part, except Ivan, of course. But God knew what he was doing putting me with Junita and Lindsay, and by the end of that first year I had deep respect for them and wanted to love people like they did.

Little more has developed. After being engaged to Ivan I thought that my future was set, and then after breaking it I found a freedom I had never known, even the possibility to leave Prov and go study in Scotland. ! But I thought it was an ideal, not real? But the feeling of love and longing remain, even if I can not justify them. It might be a dream, but it is a dream which I am constantly having. I did not go to Scotland because I wanted to finish and I had begun to form friendships. So I went back. (those first few weeks were some of the most awkward in my existence thus far.)

Interpretation

So then that takes us pretty much up to working at Prov this summer thinking about love and Scotland. (always the later, even if it is not real).

As I walked home one afternoon I had one of those moments that I had so frequently in Costa Rica. A whisp of longing because I saw earth and sky and felt a gust of wind. My mind imediately said "If only I was in Scotland." Then all the sudden that thought was checked by a very new thought: Why can't l love the wind, grass and trees of Manitoba just as much as I love those of Scotland, (assuming there is such a place)? Everywhere I go in this world I am always aware that I am not in Scotland. And therefore when my heart loves some little space I walk on it is always checked with "but this is not Scotland, and therefore you can not love it." Then it occurred to me that this loveliness of "Scotland" was potentially everywhere. If "Scotland" exists on this earth all land can be loved as much as Scotland, because wind, tree and grass are all the same. It is wrong to dismiss a beautiful landscape in Costa Rica because it is not Scottish.

Whence the pain and longing then?

If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them

(Hebrews 11:15, 16)

I know, and have known, that it is not the physical land which I long for. I have been there, have met the people. They are no different than Costa Ricans. Or Manitobans for that mater. There are two things which happen when I feel love toward "Scotland": joy and pain. The joy springs from my very natural delight in the wonder and love of Creation, which is not limited to one place, but it is everywhere. The pain, which I thought was from not being in the physical land, is rather the awareness of not being in Eden or perhaps God's Kingdom to come.

It was not until a few days later when I fitted the rest of the pieces together, which has to do with loving people. What happens when your worldview forbids you to love people, and yet you find that you do? Either, you can stop loving the people, or make them conform to your worldview, or you can update your worldview. I seem to always do the first two. But as I was sweeping, I began to wonder what would happen if I saw everyone as Scottish? All the sudden I was loving sweeping the stairs, I loved the people who had their little problems, because I love them beyond their problems: they were Scottish. "That's odd" I thought. But I did not want to start having to imagine everyone as Scottish. That would be me living in a slightly detached reality.

Nope. It won't do. I will have to change the way I have thought about things. I can no longer be racist. I must apply what I have learned last semester about infinite through finite medium. "Scotland" with its clans, Highlanders and forests is a very Personal God who reveals himself subjectively. Perhaps it has taken me nine years to finally answer and say "Speak Lord for your servant is listening", but I am finally beginning to see that He touches me through Scotland. Actually, I am not just seeing, I am knowing. The parable is very simple:

I love Scotland and The Highlander more than any other thing in life. To not be part of it feels to me like I betray my very being. But no physical country nor person has the ability to assume the place that these ideas hold in my mind. For one thing one would have to go back to the time where there were such things as clans and kilts and chieftains. I long to live in this country, surrounded by nature, and being a simple little part of it.

Christ is revealed in time and place: he is the Good Shepherd: this is a picture imbedded personally into the Hebrew and Greek culture. "The Highlander" is none other than Christ, who goes to war for his Clan. Who loves his people and is the most honored Chieftain of all clans.

To be "Scottish" is to be human. The love I have for "Scots" is the natural love I have for my neighbor. The deep blooded Celt can not but be loved, I can not help it. I can't but love my chieftain and even my Clan. No one has to ask me to "please love these people" because I am of the very blood of that same Chieftain. "God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him."

Oh, everyone. I might have been slow in interpreting the riddle, but finally I have, and I love you all and I love all this land. I love now, and I long now. I long for that heavenly country and to be finally with that Highlander, who is none other than Jesus Christ. Here is all my theory, and now, day in day out, with much joy I must work on my practicum.