THE PARISH CHURCH FOR LYTHAM

Last Updated 04/10/2008 22:20:57

A WALK ON THE BEACH

Rebekah and myself - together with our two children, Gill and James  - have continued to enjoy the beaches around Lytham and St Annes. Although when Gill asks if she can walk to the sea when the tide is out, we have to warn her first that it is about a day’s hike away and we’ll have to take a packed lunch.

It’s all a great change from sitting in our garden by Junction 31 of the M6 leaning forward to one another, trying to catch a word or two above the din of the ceaseless traffic of the motorway on one side and the A59 on the other. There the air was so thick with exhaust fumes, you could chew it. And I’ve never heard a dawn chorus like it, birds asthmatically staggering to the edge of their nests, or balancing precariously on the ends of branches, wheezing and coughing their poor little lungs out as they made their usual pathetic attempt to sing. Usually, after five minutes of coughing and spluttering they gave up, gasping their way back to shelter and either a quick addicted fix on some more carbon monoxide or a stint on the canary inhaler, on loan from the local mining museum which they gallantly shared amongst themselves.

The last beach I was on – before this one – was Holy Island, or Lindisfarne as it is also known, off the Northumbrian coast. There the golden sands are beaten and pounded daily by the surf of the waves that come crashing in with various pieces of flotsam and jetsam from the cold and forbidding North Sea. Here the birds soar on the thermals, dancing and diving in the wind, and it is we who are breathless as we admire their aerobatic skills.

Lindisfarne has been a place of faith and ritual for thousands of years. Christianity made its home there in the seventh century when St Aidan and a small band of monks were sent by St Columba from Iona (another Holy and spectacular island) at the request of King Oswald to bring the gospel to the kingdom of Northumbria. Later on Cuthbert became the abbot of the community and from there he travelled across the North West, preaching as he went. He also spent a considerable time living as a hermit on the barren and exposed Farne Islands where there was very little that would sustain human life. The beauty of Lindisfarne is matched only by the barrenness of the Farne Islands. How Cuthbert must have suffered from the relentless wind and driving waves off the North Sea which in the winter months would have been freezing cold, chilling him – tough though he was – to the marrow of his bones. It doesn’t take much imagination to guess that there must have been times when he was cold and hungry and his faith was tested to the limit. At times his faith would have been tested by the driving wind and rain relentlessly driving into this body and soul, in conditions that he managed to make his friend. Perhaps that is why he became such a saintly man.

In fact, I don’t know of a saint in the history of the church that hasn’t at some time or other felt abandoned by God or on some occasion hasn’t wondered why Jesus doesn’t make his/her life easier and their faith stronger.

St John of the Cross, the 16^th Century Spanish mystic and saint, is well-known for his discussion of the ‘dark night of the soul’ when God withdraws his presence and we feel left completely on our own. But he, like many other saints, found that times like these instead of ending in spiritual melt-down became the best, perhaps the only way, of union between the soul and God.

I was not altogether surprised when I read recent reports in the newspaper of the doubts and fears of Mother Teresa. Over many years she wrote letters to her spiritual advisors in which she shared the deepest secrets of her heart and faith. She asked that they should be destroyed at her death but the Vatican decided that they should be preserved for the edification of the Church. These letters reveal that on many occasions Mother Teresa struggled to know the presence of Christ in her life. In fact, from about the time she began her ministry in Calcutta, she appears to have been tortured by doubts: ‘I am told God loves me and the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.’  These letters have been used by the sceptical and godless to attack one of the most influential religious figures of the Twentieth Century and to suggest that Mother Teresa’s faith was somehow seriously flawed. But anyone with any real experience of the Christian faith knows that doubt does not vanish the day we say we believe in Jesus Christ. If all was certain and proved in a scientific way, we wouldn’t need to have faith. We would simply accept the presence of God at all times and I suspect such acceptance would bear unfavourable comparison with the depth of faith that is gained when we have to hang on to Jesus Christ when things are less than clear. In fact, I would worry if we never had times like this because unblinking certainty in the eyes of the religious fundamentalist who thinks he or she knows all the answers, is frightening to behold and the cause of much terror today.

The summer is taking its leave and the winter will be upon us soon when the wind and waves will buffet the coast and we will shelter from its unforgiving attention. But we keep going not least because we can take shelter while the storms are upon us and because we know that Spring and Summer will come again. St Cuthbert knew, too, both from his prayerful life in a priory and also from the times when he struggled to survive on a tiny windswept island in the North Sea, that light follows darkness if we keep looking for it. And could it be that on this coast on the other side of the country – visited and hallowed by Cuthbert’s coffin borne here by faithful monks many years ago – that this is one of the greatest blessings our patron saint has given us? That doubt and faith, joy and sadness, life and death, go hand in hand in our spiritual journey where absence makes us even more aware of presence? This is the stuff of faith that makes you stand on the seashore, take a deep breath and be thankful.

Andrew Clitherow.