A notable year

When living in historic times, perspective is too often a commodity of reason that will not avail itself for application; not until the passage of time might render it, contextually, for the edification of some distant future which has yet to take breath.  

Imagining forward years hence, 2020 and 2021--these hard years of chaos have seemingly been bereft of any purposeful direction.  Doubtless, they will bear many an asterisk marked into the annals by whichever future scribe takes on the task of chronicling them through the lens of our presently missing perspective.  In hindsight, in other words.

That the human species evolved or even survived at all across its time on Earth is miraculous enough in its own right.  Cheap consolation perhaps, but there have been many years far worse than 2020 and 2021 in the human record.  Far worse.  And many things lost, remain to be found.

23 April 2019  Standing Stones, Machrie Moor, Isle of Arran

Surely no one living and still in possession of even a modicum of human sentiment could survey the chasm of hours that separate our present day from, say, that of the builders who erected the standing stones at Machrie Moor on Arran so many millennia ago and not grasp the latent hubris of our present modernity.  Chauvinism in time that has been called.

An axiomatic derivative would perhaps be--"Can't see the forest for the trees".  True enough, and generally more oft than not.  For time is vast.  We tend, in our immediacies, to lose sight of that.

In reality, we are little different than they, those builders of Machrie Moor.  As 2 Timothy 3:7 put it, "Ever learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth."  Truth.  That quest for all the ages, a ceaseless longing to be set free.  Despite the regalia of modern technology, we are no closer to that emancipation than we ever were.  

The question confronting us now is "Whither are we bound?" Socially speaking, our world is crumbling.  Shocks from the future's tremors leave ruins of our present time.  With what do we repair it?  For that matter, can we?

23 April 2019  Ruins of Moss Farm, Machrie Moor, Arran

Among the more somber revelations our Easter sojourns to Scotland have illuminated is just this.  Crumbling ruins of former ages.  We must take from them as many lessons as may be learned, during our casual pilgrimages.  History is an enlightened master, and a cruel one as well.

23 April 2019 Lamlash Parish, Reformation era defacement

Crumbling homesteads and croft ruins resulting from the infamous if not inhumane Fuadach nan Gàidheal (The Clearances).  But also those of derelict Christian sites resulting from man's inhumanity to man, as exampled during the Reformation, or by man's indifference to spiritual life altogether.  

These ruins are everywhere evident across Scotland. Whether they date back to the Neolithic, or to the Medieval; to the Victorian or to the Industrial.

So, are we therefore destined to the oblivion of vast time in which all remembrance expires, life being only a brief candle as Shakespeare put it? 

Is Christianity therefore destined, not to life ever lasting but to the rubble of disheveled stones no longer held together by a living faith?  Perhaps. If one views it by a jaundiced eye.  Yet, God forbid that day should it ever dawn.  

23 April 2019  Lamlash, Isle of Arran

Many, but by no means all, churches in Scotland long ago ceased, their congregations having expired or moved on as time extracts its toll.  But so long as there is Easter and pilgrims left to venerate it, there is hope with each Spring that Truth may still be found...living as it always has in the Word of God.