Time Meadow hill sky.

Aoradh Wilderness Meditations/Ritual

What?

A meditation best suited to individuals, or small groups, based on the theme of time.

Kids might struggle with the philosophical stuff, so this would need lots of adaptation to include young people.

Where?

A walk just about anywhere that you can combine small landscapes with large ones - meadow and hill, forest and mountain. Where you find time to stop and linger is up to you - but as you will see below, the shape of the meditation lends itself to beginning small, amongst the flowers of the lowlands, then moves on to where the land is marked by man, followed by river or ice carved valleys and finally the infinity beyond.

A walk from just about any valley floor to mountain top should work fine.

What do you need?

Not much really - a cheap watch, a plastic bag, a Bible and a copy of the meditations, that’s about it.

Introduction.

Time.

So often our master. There never seems enough, and yet if you are like me, we seem to waste so much. For most of us, as life goes on, the spectre of ‘Father Time’ with his sharp scythe to cut us off at the knees is never far away.

People of faith have always had an interesting relationship with time. We use phrases like ‘setting time aside’, or ‘quiet time’, where we try to reconnect with God, who we regard as existing outside time. Within my Protestant tradition, the works of a lifetime have largely been seen as secondary to the goal of eternal salvation, although the way we use our time is far from insignificant. More recently, I have been greatly influenced by writers who have focussed on the significance of the here and now of God’s Kingdom, not just the eventuality of the promise of eternal life in another place.

Jesus talked a lot about ‘The Kingdom of God’. In fact, as Brian McLaren (amongst others) has reminded us, the best definition of the Gospel of Jesus is ‘Behold, the Kingdom of God is here!’  This implies something here, right now.

Other passages of the Bible, however, seem to draw us to an understanding of a Kingdom coming. A time when suffering will end, and swords will be beaten into ploughshares, and the lion will lie down with the lamb.

It is within this present-future tension that Christians are called to live. We are the agents of the Kingdom of God - people who carry the very presence of God within us into all situations. People whose life and times are therefore bonded to an eternal agenda, made present right now. We are bringers of peace, carriers of light, truth and justice, servers of the poor and needy, salt where others need to find savour.

Many of us lead hectic, busy lives, full of obligations and duties - employees, employers, wives, husbands, fathers, parents, carers, ministers, leaders, or persons of hospitality. All of these things are good, and may they bring you blessing, as you bless others.

But the very fact that you are taking time to use this meditation tells me that you are aware that there is a need to step away from these responsibilities for a while, to find time to set your mind towards God. You follow a fine tradition, and I pray that your time too is blessed.

As a sign of your commitment to stepping out of the normal use of your time, we invite you to take off your watch.

If you are prepared to risk your watch, then you might like to lace it in a plastic bag, and hide it somewhere near the beginning of your walk. You could bury it, or place it in the trunk of a hollow tree - just make sure to be careful so as to find it again later!

Offer this time to God in prayer.

1.  MEADOW Life time

We live in such a beautiful world. Take some time to appreciate the living things all around you. Perhaps you might like to get down on your knees and look at the small things at your feet. Choose a small patch of grass and count how many different plants seem to be growing there. How many insects?

Lift your eyes to the middle distance. How many different shades of green can you see? How many different kinds of trees are discernable even from this distance?

How many different bird sounds can you hear?

All around us, life is circling.

Some circles are big, some very small.

Insects that live a whole life in one of our days. Breakfast sees the end of childhood, lunch the weight of middle age responsibility, tea time the creaking of age, and with night, the sleep of the dead. Until the next generation comes into being.

Or consider the life of these tall trees.

Each slow forming ring of growth, evidence of their elevation over our own anxieties.

Each falling leaf layering the soil, laying down the food for the coming spring.

Each spreading branch offering the arm of shelter to a thousand lesser creatures. And me.

Seeding slowly and deliberately.

But even the tallest trees

Will one day

Fall.

And what of us?

What of our life time?

We tend to see our journeys as linear. Even then, perhaps we are comfortable with the now, less so with the tomorrow, and the future is a foreign country, were be dragons.

Away we go, off into middle distance - always forward, but often acting as if we are standing still.

But we are born not to die,

But to live.

To trace our own arc through this space of ours -

To windmill wide and open,

To love this life

And let it love us back.

Perhaps unlike any of these other circles, we humans have this gift (this curse) of knowing.

Knowing and seeking to know more.

Seeking to connect and to overlap these circles

Seeing where they depend one on the other.

Seeing where they smash into one another.

All of these circles, whatever their size, contain the possibility of interruption. Danger has many different forms. Many different guises.

There is the point of all circles when the end meets with the beginning. For some, the meaning they bring to this is seen in new beginnings in this beautiful world - in recirculating, reincarnating.

For followers of Jesus, this circle means something else. It means the existence of an eternal soul in a temporal state, before we go home.

But lest the focus of our circling ever be on its ending, let us remember - we humans were made for more than an empty circle.

Our circle contains the hope of Joy.

2. Landmarks Historical time

Much of our small crowded planet can no longer be regarded as true wilderness. As you walk to the hills, you will almost certainly walk over landscape marked by man.

Fields and field boundaries - some new, some ancient, shaping the subsequent developments.

Hedgerows and dry stone walls.

Old signs of settlement, perhaps still in use, perhaps now redundant, abandoned, remaining only as bar-codes of bracken and nettles.

The very path you walk upon has been made by the passing of other feet, walking their own walk, into their own unknown, uncertain futures.

We humans have transformed the planet in the last few thousand years of our ascendancy. Forests gone, rivers diverted. Roads made straight across mountain and valley. Many of these marks are irreversible, at least in the foreseeable future. The land may clothe them in green, but the marks will remain for thousands of years to come.

As I write, the debate about how our patterns of living might have contributed to accelerating climate change continues to rage.

Humans have been of significant influence on my islands for a mere 5000 years or so. In some parts of the world, they can trace the mark of man further, in many, much less. What a legacy we inherit from our forebears - both great, and fearful.

Our lives have been shaped by this legacy too. We stand on the shoulders of those who gave the land its present shape. Others will stand on ours.

As a Christian, the landscape I grew out of has also been that of the people of faith who proceeded me. I inherited a Christian tradition containing many wonderful things, but also much that I would love to see changed. For instance, I am ever grateful for the appreciation that my faith gives me for the created world about me, but am see no significant difference between the way that we Christians approach the stewardship of the land God made, and that of the general population.

History may yet record this modern rich western generation as culpable for making the climate pay for an unsustainable lifestyle. The accounts kept by historians may be short, when placed alongside the age of this planet of ours, but they can be harsh.

As an exercise, you might like to spend some time thinking and praying about some of the following;

There is much to be thankful for in our inheritance as people of faith. Take time to think of three things that are of special meaning to you. Spend some time savouring them, and giving thanks. Perhaps persons of particular significance, or a story that has inspired you, or an understanding that has shaped the way that you live your life.

Looking forward, it is sometimes possible to plan new uses and shapes for the landscape we live in. Always we will be building above what is already there.

What of your present situation would you seek to change?

What walls would you break, or new structures would you love to see built?

What might your place be in this new landscape?

Take some time to pray about these things.

Remember humility. Pray that the marks you make will age kindly.

3. Hill Geological time

‘You turn men back to dust saying “Return to dust, O sons of men,” for a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night. You sweep men away in the sleep of death; they are like the new grass in the morning’   Psalm 90.

I understand, from those more learned than I, that the Latin root of the word ‘humble’, is humulis -meaning low, or perhaps humus - the ground. Certainly there is nothing more humbling than the thought that our earthly bodies are all, sooner or later, to lay low, and return to the earth from whence they came. Our stay here is temporary.

I am blessed to live in a wonderful place of mountains and lochs, where time is often measured geologically, not on the human scale. The landscape that surrounds my home was formed by the action of massive ice sheets, slicing and grinding, groaning down valleys forced wide by their passing, lifting and dropping splintered rock to form moraines and corries.

The ice is gone now, and other processes dominate the landscape. Plants and trees grow, soil forms, then, as the climate becomes wet and colder, soil turns to peat, and the highlands become a carpet of low, acid-loving plants. Young saplings find cracks and faults in the old rocks to reach down their supple roots.

Over it all, the wet winds from the sea rise over the mountains, and release precipitation in a constant energy cycle, a great stirring of the waters. And does it rain! Tumbling from the heavy clouds that boil about the high crags, sheeting across the landscape like curtains in a great theatre.

All this water is collected into mighty streams, which boil down over the ice-fractured rock, bouncing and smoothing them into stones and pebbles, cutting through sediments, and returning again to the sea.

All about me is the evidence of God’s unfolding creative power - a few seconds of the life-breath of this beautiful planet. And the mountains of Argyll rise above, so mighty, and me so small.

Perhaps your landscape is different, but still, if you scrape back the soils that have accumulated over the last few years, you can read the signs of changes that have taken not just millennia, but millions of years. Rocks poured out molten then, in turn, cracked and shaped at depth, only to be uplifted to the surface by massive forces. There the rocks may be subject to erosion over countless years by wind, rain and ice. Rivers grind and cut imperceptibly but inexorably, and wash the rock downstream in the form of sediment. As this sediment layers the bottom of lakes and oceans, it covers over the bones and shells of animals not yet imagined by humans, but whom had always had been in the mind of God.

In turn, these sediments built up, compacted, and over more millions of years, became hardened to become sedimentary rocks. By then, more huge tectonic forces may have uplifted these rocks, or perhaps the changing climate removed the covering waters. These limestones, sandstones and chalks become the building blocks for a new landscape, until the eroding forces of wind, rain and ice once again cut away, sending down new sediments composed of the old ones. And so it goes on.

What does this bring into our consciousness? Humility perhaps. Our place in the life of this planet is ephemeral. And yet…

This beautiful creature that God made ‘…a little lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honour…’ has a special place in this wonderful world.

Who can stand before all of this unmoved? The sweep of land from forest to crags peering through the shroud of mist. The wild beauty of a summer storm as lightening splits the night. The cold flickering of the northern lights in the dark winter. The smell of spring on fresh April mornings, when all things seem possible. These events will happen whether or not we observe them, whether or not we participate within them. But in experiencing them, perhaps we bear unique witness to the artistry of the Creator. Perhaps we alone can tell at least some of the story, some of the shape and size of what this thing called Earth really is.

Sometimes it seems to me that we overplay our place as the top of nature’s food chain. After all, we are so small, and other life forms on this planet may yet outlast us. But then it occurs to me yet again that we beautiful creatures are alone in our ability to understand, to measure, and ultimately to choose to raise our voices in concert with the angels in a unique song of praise…

Find your place to sing your own song of praise. You might just like to sing - but for the more reticent, some of these things might help;

• Many of the psalms from the Bible are creation-praise hymns. You might like to read one or two of these; Psalm 66, Psalm 90, Psalm 98, Psalm 104, Psalm 103.

• Look around you with the eyes of a photographer, or a painter. Perhaps you have a camera that will help you frame some of your surroundings. Or you could use your hands to make a viewing square. Give thanks specifically for the parts that make up the picture- for the forces that shaped them so beautifully -and then for the whole.

• Imagine another being (whatever we beautiful creatures become) sitting more or less where you are in a few million years. What might have changed? If you were to join together in worship with this creature, what would you have in common with him or her?

4. SKY Outside time

I read something recently about the philosopher Rene Descartes - who was fascinated by what it meant to be, what it was possible to know and what could be described as truth?

Descartes decided to begin by doubting everything he possibly could - to see if he could reduce the knowable to an essential core. He found he could doubt everything - God, the existence of the world about us (which could be an elaborate deceit placed on our consciousness by some demon - a kind of precursor to The Matrix), the rules of science and gravity - all these were dependent on our perception, and perception was ultimately unreliable and subjective.

This led him to his ultimate point of truth - his own ability to ask these very questions - it was not possible to doubt this, as in order to doubt, then this too involved thought. Hence, his famous phrase, “I think, therefore, I am.”

Descartes then turned his mind back to time. We live our lives in the passing of time - in a finite space. We have our beginning, and our ending, and find our existence in between. He was convinced that God was infinite - outside our understanding of time. However much we might think we know of God, we must equally realise that there is so much more. He concluded that as our experience is formed in our finite world, then the very fact that we could imagine the infinite must be proof in itself of the very existence of God - for no finite being could, of itself, think of the infinite.

Descartes thinking influenced an age. Whether or not you agree with his conclusions, the very questions he asked have dominated modernity. They are perhaps being asked again as we stand on the brink of a new age.

What am I?

What can I know, and how do I know it is true?

What is truth anyway? Are there competing or even complementary versions of the same?

Perhaps for people of faith, there remains another set of questions - perhaps the biggest of all;

Who is God?

Can God be known?

Can God ever know me, in the vastness of this apparently infinite universe?

If so, what should be my response?

Are we all heading home anyway, one way or another?

Or is there a responsibility that we are called to - a way of life that is more vital, more blessed, more beautiful?

In the Bible, we read of generations of people of faith - from the nomadic wanderings of the people of Abraham, to the subjects of the mighty (but ultimately fragile) Roman Empire - asking these questions.

The amazing thing about all these stories was that apparently, God, as well as existing in infinite space, was also always here.

There he was, moving across the face of the waters when all was formless and void.

Walking in the garden in the quiet of the evening.

Speaking out of burning bushes (and resting on people with tongues of fire later.)

Even being willing to dwell inside a tent, or an unwanted temple building.

Ultimately, coming himself, in fragile human form. Walking amongst us, revealing something of his heart - inviting participation in a new way of being.

Then promising that the eternal will dwell within us.

That we would become temples of his Spirit - capsules containing something uncontainable, immeasurable, unfathomable.

“When I consider the heavens, and the works of your fingers- the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him- the son of man that you care for him? You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honour. ” Psalm 8.

As you return to retrieve your watch, you might like to pace out this prayer. Let the words become the rhythm of your walking- savour each sentence for a while, and let the meaning to come to you, so that you can send it to God.

My times are in your hands. I trust in you.

Every breath I breathe comes from you.

These hours I live, this life you give, I offer back, to you.

Author of all things, I worship you.

Chris Goan, 2008.