CHRISTIAN VIEWPOINT: Finding a home where people listen to the beliefs of others
Marlene Finlayson grew up in Northern Ireland in the 1960s - but among the violence and prejudice of those times she learned to attach herself to the peace-makers.
Now, the retired teacher is a member of the Inverness Interfaith Group, which comprises people of different religions who meet together regularly, and hold an annual picnic which this year is at Pluscarden on August 10. Marlene describes how she has learned over the years to be open to others.
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Here she is, age 19, invited to talk about her faith in her Irish Presbyterian Church. She and a friend described handing out religious tracts in a Catholic area. Catholics, she assumed, needed salvation. They would never hear the gospel from a priest.
Afterwards, her wise, saintly minister shook his head and soon arranged for her to volunteer at the Corrymeela Community which works for peace and reconciliation. She vividly remembers chatting there to Kevin, a young man training for the Jesuit priesthood, and realising that he too was alive with faith in Jesus.
Here she is arriving on placement at an Edinburgh Church of Scotland parish while training to be a deaconess. One of the ministers is smoking! Her immediate reaction, shaped by the strict rules for Christian living which she had absorbed growing up is ‘he can’t be a Christian!’ Very soon she recognises the man’s deep spirituality. Another barrier dissolves.
Later, married and a member of the Iona Community, Marlene realises there is no barrier between Christian faith and political action, rather an obligation to speak out, challenging injustice and toxic religion.
The Community shows her the benefits of stepping out of the individualistic silos we shelter in, and enjoying the mutual understanding and support of others.
Here’s Marlene, meeting some Muslims while writing a Religious Education course. Drawing close, she finds kindred spirits reaching out as she is to something greater than themselves. Their prayers for Allah’s protection resonate with her Christian prayers for spiritual armour.
And so Marlene finds herself at home in the Inverness Interfaith Group, where people listen to the beliefs of others and come to understand and learn from them while remaining rooted in their own faith.
Each January, the group organises the annual Holocaust Memorial Day event in Inverness to keep ever-bright the memory of this atrocity, the consequence of a virulent ideology which ‘othered’ a whole race. The day reminds us annually of the Holocaust’s perpetual lesson: never again.
So many influences have shaped the life of this woman who sits quietly talking to me in her house at Contin. ‘It’s like being a pebble on the beach,’ she tells me, ‘smoothed out by countless waves.’ And for each of those waves she is truly thankful.
