JOHN DEMPSTER: Wherever we are, we walk in solidarity with pilgrims following visit to Whithorn, a sleepy town on a peninsula in Galloway well south of the busy A75
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Lorna and I are just back from a holiday in Whithorn, a sleepy town on a peninsula in Galloway well south of the busy A75.
It wasn’t always so quiet: two millennia ago, when travel routes lay across the sea, Whithorn was an important trade centre doing business with Europe.
Our cottage was just inside the pend leading from Whithorn’s main street to the ruins of the Priory, and the present kirk, built in 1822. Walking up the lane to the Sunday service, we followed in the footsteps of generations of Christian pilgrims.
On our right, the museum with its exhibition of carved stones found in the neighbourhood, including the ‘Latinus stone’ erected in around 450AD by a member of the local aristocracy and his daughter, aged four. It proclaimed (in Latin) ‘We praise you, the Lord.’ It is the earliest surviving Christian monument in Scotland.
And then we passed the ruins of the Priory. Holy ground, a place of worship down the ages. The pilgrims came with mixed motives, no doubt, and with differing degrees of openness to God but each was drawn to some kind of encounter, some kind of change.
Here, Protestants worshipped after the Reformation. Here stood the great medieval cathedral and earlier, simpler churches. Here if you follow tradition, stood St Ninian’s ‘Shining White House’ (Candida Casa) built by Scotland’s first Christian missionary over a century before St Columba arrived in Iona.
And then these two pilgrims from Inverness were warmly welcomed at the church door by Rev Alexander Currie, the latest in that long chain of Whithorn spiritual leaders stretching back to Ninian himself.
But it’s easy to romanticise the long drama of Christian history. I’m vexed at the medieval system which so concealed the love and forgiveness of God that pilgrimage was presented as a transaction, a way of earning early release from purgatory beyond death.
And I’m vexed at a Reformed system which blighted so many lives in its teaching that those whom God had not chosen were forever excluded from divine love and forgiveness.
If you look at the world from the perspective of materialism, of the self-enrichment agenda, religious people today might be thought to inhabit a sleepy backwater, far from the A75 of 21st century preoccupations.
But imagine a world where what matters most is the God who made us, and the spiritual connection with God to which we are invited, and worship and thanksgiving will be seen to lie at the centre of reality.
As Christians, wherever we are, we walk in solidarity with a vast company of pilgrims who, though invisible to us, still walk with us.
We proclaim with Latinus and his daughter: ‘We praise you – the Lord.’
