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Walking Holidays

 

Bardsey, this peaceful island called Ynys Enlli in the native Welsh tongue, is an ancient holy island that nestles in the swell of the Irish Sea, a few miles off the northwest tip of Wales. Her associations with religion must surely pre-date the coming of Christianity, the name Bardsey (the "Bards' Island") being given to her by ‘visiting’ Viking raiders.

When the Christians arrived and took over the island, the venerable St Cadfan and his companions built a monastery there in AD 546, fallen into ruins a long time ago. Over the centuries since then Bardsey became a kind of Iona in Wales, a holy burial place for holy men and Royalty alike.

The island has been a magnet to me; I have no focused idea why that should be, it just is. She has drawn me, every year I was able to get there, to rest in her arms, to sit on her rocky edges while the sea rolls in and washes the beaches around my feet, to let the salt laden and gentle breeze bite deep into my skin and to listen to the call of the pregnant and new-mother seals and to talk with God in the privacy of one of his places.

One of his places? Of course the whole of creation is one of his places but this one, the blessed island in the Irish Sea, is somewhere where modern saints can sit and listen and hear remarkably well.

It was one of those ‘thin’ atmospheric mornings on the island when I stumbled across one of the basic keys to the world of miraculous kingdom Christianity. At that moment it was going to be something very exciting and very new to me.

Of course I had by then crossed paths with hundreds of faithful Christians who confessed a miraculous faith experience but, on closer examination, so much of what they had witnessed was simply not fulfilling the apparent New Testament promise of a dynamic kingdom that changed lives in droves whenever it came near.

Things happen here and there, in ones and twos, but rarely in New Testament proportions.
Sure enough there were many fellow disciples along the way who had episodes to relate of people receiving miraculous healing, or other life-changing experiences, but they only had one or two stories at best. Many of the episodes being related were from other people’s prayer experiences rather than their own.
The uncomfortable truth I had taken to Bardsey that year, deep in the secret recesses of my private mind, was that we ordinary people in the church are simply not experiencing miracles any more in New Testament proportions and have probably not done so for many centuries.

Much of the God designed system for partnering with Christians in redeeming creation after the fall and for giving glory to the Father through the manifestations of Jesus’ continuing work seems to have dropped right down into first gear. Our healing and our evangelism seemed to me to be very short of breath! There was an enormous amount of hard work going on in and around church life in these areas but that was my problem. I was having difficulty with the words ‘hard work’. My reading of the new Testament was suggesting that these things were, in those days, a lot easier and far more common.

I confess that God is not in the habit of turning up in my brain and depositing mind-bending Churchillian answers to the world’s problems, but he does, from time to time, give me hints and nudges that are paths of speculation and investigation. And, one morning on Bardsey, a big one was on the way.

I was leaning on my elbows on the old dry stone wall outside the front door of one of the island’s old farmhouses, hot coffee mug in hand, when it arrived. My feet were planted firmly on a gravel path which ran across the front of the house and away to my right towards the old farm buildings with its high walled farmyard full of glorious bird song that had served for many years as a hermitage. Away to my left the path led to the swinging cottage garden gate and through to the garden with its high flowering and bee infested hedges and its well trodden path across the lawn to the Ty-back, the ‘little house’ at the bottom of the garden.
The sea breeze had calmed itself as the sun came up and the fresh morning air was filled with the comforting sound of buzzing bees and bird calls, punctuated by the intermittent bleating of sheep.
Beyond the chest high cottage wall on which I was leaning, topped with flat stones that were warming in the morning sunshine,

the ground sloped gently upwards away from me, across the field to the old gate and beyond the rough and rutted tractor track that serves as the island’s main road, The ground rose sharply to form the gorse and bracken covered mountain that forms most of the eastern shoreline and reaches up to scrape the scurrying clouds in the sky above its shoulders.

Slightly over to the right, as I raised my eyes and ears to the mountain, the morning sun warmed my face and gladdend my heart with the knowledge that God was in his heaven and that all was well.

Most of the island sounds may be unfamiliar to the suburban ear and, on this particular day, two skylarks were talking to each other across the field in front of me. At least I supposed that was what they were up to and I was privileged to be sandwiched between them and listening to their conversation.

I leaned forward in the morning sunshine, forearms resting on the flat stones that levelled the top of the wall, sipped my coffee and listened a while to them.
It took ten minutes or so for me to quite realise it but I slowly became aware that one was calling and the other repeating his call. The originator was somewhere ahead of me, up across the rugged path and in the bracken and bushes of the lower slopes of the mountain. The copier was very close, sitting in the hedge along the Ty-back path that ran away through the garden gate to my left.

Each birds’ stock of notes amounted to only five or six individual distinct sounds, these were being sung in various order with varying gaps in between. Like ringing the changes of church bells, the connotations seemed endless in the timeless morning sunshine and on the gently salt laden sea breeze that cooled my face in the warmth of the sun. After every slightly differing call instigated by my new-found friend ahead of me at the foot of the mountain, there followed a pause for what I guessed was the collecting of bird thoughts. Then the Sky-lark in the hedge along the path to my left would repeat the call, note for note, exactly as it had been sung a quarter of a mile away to my front. Then the call would change again, same notes in a different order, and be faultlessly copied.

Twenty minutes passed and they were still calling to each other, the same mountain edge bird originating each different call and the same garden bird repeating it note for note in the clear still air and eventually, slowly at first as I was so engrossed in the musical conversation of the occasion, I thought I was beginning to see what God could be saying.

His intention, being expressed through those birds a-calling, was hinting that we should become an echo. As the bird beside me echoed exactly the bird in front of me across the rising slope of the hay field, so we should return to being echoes of Christ’s actual words and works. Might the miraculous life be restored in the church if we all set out to copy Christ’s kingdom ministry?


At first I shrugged off the thought of being a Jesus echo. It sounded almost as if it was going to be the same old tired simplistic Sunday school message we had been laying on mainland church people for as long as the island had been subject to Christian use. It seemed an insignificant saying to me as many more learned people had said it more often to more people in more pews and from higher pulpits than I could ever do.


But the more I listened to the larks the more sense it made. In fact, this message had a simple substance to it that felt very different and needed understanding at a more profound level altogether. It was not the same old message that we should be Christ like in the community by being nice to people, by helping them across busy roads and offering money to drunks and down—and—outs in the street. This was a different and deeper thought entirely.

No, this did not seem like some vague encouragement to be nice to other people, valuable though that is. This was a calling to copy, not to copy what the modern church is, or is not, teaching us about healing ministry in all its variety and different possibilities but to copy Jesus himself in his ministry.

But wasn’t I doing that anyway? Surely I had been taught properly over the years and had built up quite a body of experience. I could see only one thing wrong with the way we do healing ministry; it doesn’t actually work very well. In fact it’s pretty hard work! We may have a lot of different techniques and varied theological understandings but we do not see, compared to the disciples’ New Testament experiences, enough miracles. And if the church truly was pastorally concerned about the state of society today then we were not seeing anything approaching enough miracles! I, like everyone else around me, could recognise this position easily enough but, if we were not in complete denial about it, we were taking it as a spur to continue the search for yet more complexities, to drive on in our gaining of the knowledge of kingdom dynamics from where we were.
The healing ministry has come a long way since Jesus; was the church now teaching itself by listening to itself and not to the Scriptures? Was it developing by drawing in advances in secular skills and practices rather than through a deeper reverence for the truth of the original New Testament ways?

But the Sky larks went on calling and their message to me that morning was insistent, unsteadying, if not troubling. ‘Go back! Start again and be an echo of Christ’s ministry. Imitate Jesus!’
Well, that would be quite an adventure! It felt like a call to disrobe, to fling off all that self-help books and helpful friends had taught, to strip away the outer garments that innumerable lecturers and healing theologians had taught, and start again. I was gaining a real sense that I would have to discard the old and comparatively ineffective clothes of modern healing ministry and return to Christ’s teaching before we could see miraculous Christianity at work again in New Testament proportions.

Such thoughts can be heavy hammer blows on one’s humility and it takes a great deal of courage to change one’s shoes and step out into the world anew.

May the Lord bless you to pick this up

Mike Endicott

 




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