The Rev Roddy Hamilton highlights how God can be found outside worship.

OUTWITH the centre of our worship spaces, there is a ripe landscape inviting us to worship. The Bible is full of folk who encountered God on mountain tops and valley floors, quiet places and noisy crowds.

Picking up from an earlier thought inviting the Church to offer resources designed for people far from the church building, might we focus our thoughts on those out of the way pathways and places in which Jesus often found himself, and indeed sought?

During the pandemic many congregations offered a box of ribbons by a tree or gate close to the church with the simple invitation to tie a ribbon in memory of someone or as an act of anchoring ourselves still within a community, among all those other ribbons.

This is nothing new, of course. It is an ancient practice. There are more than a few trees in woods and by pathways folk have decorated with objects that connect with memories, experience or people. It comes from a need, perhaps, for folk to find a strength in connecting with something beyond themselves, and being bound together with other folk who have passed that way before them, and felt the same, and left their prayer or hope or confession.

How might the Christian faith seek out such places, more? It seems to be that the Celts had a great affinity with ‘place’, where landmarks and borders were all thin places. Indeed, pilgrims have grown a sense of thinness where earth, story and tradition all cross paths and something unique is encountered.

How might we engage with that more as congregations, given we service in our own areas of sacred land called parishes? How might we listen to the earth a bit more, and rediscover the stories that have been told in our local places? Marking these, in some way, might invite folk to pause, be still, and worship in their own way.

While emailing one of the farmers in our parish he replied: “Jesus Thimble – look it up”. So I did, and it is a trig point close to us. I had no idea. Now we’re researching the explanation behind this, and by reimagining the original encounter, we’ll organise a trail, and tell some stories.

But, according to a map, to get to Jesus’ Thimble you have to pass Lucifer’s Loch! The landscape is telling our story for us! Clearly here is an invitation waiting to be widened to allow a deeper faith story to be shared in this lonely place.

The more creative among us can be invited to offer some way to mark the path, with words etched on stone or sculptures standing along the way or markings that invite people to pause and listen.

It does not offer the depth of preaching the church believes is so important, and it doesn’t offer a connection to each other in the way a congregation might do, but it does challenge us to move beyond our institutionalisation, and find the creative spirit within us, that invites encounter beyond our church walls and recognises the land of our parishes is rife for that encounter.

“ There are more than a few trees in woods and by pathways folk have decorated with objects that connect with memories, experience or people.

It is as invitational to us as to any pilgrim to encounter God in the breadth of our parishes, wider places in which the bible has Moses, Jesus and Paul all finding the divine presence.

The Rev Roddy Hamilton is minister at Bearsden: New Kilpatrick