Pilgrim Ways

Do As Mary asks I am always struck by the story of the marriage feast of Cana. It is the first of Jesus‟s miracles recorded in the Bible. He changed the water into wine so that the festivities could continue.

He told His mother that His time had not yet come but in deference to her he nevertheless did as she asked. A few years ago I was writing a report about human rights abuses and persecution of the Christian minorities in Turkey. With two colleagues we took a couple of days out to go to Ephesus. My friends, who are both evangelical Christians, were deeply impressed by the Roman amphitheatre where St.Paul sparked off the riot by the silversmiths, after Paul, in his typically direct way, had denounced the paganistic materialism of the cult of Diana. They were less sure about my determination to get them up to Marianama, the reputed house of Mary. A German nun, Catherine Emmerit (1774-1824) had a vision of this long buried and forgotten cottage. In 1967, during his visit to Ephesus, Pope Paul VI described it as a place of pilgrimage. My friends were even more puzzled - and slightly uncomfortable to find that as “the mother of a great prophet” her home was also a holy place for Muslims.

The small chapel within is a tranquil quiet place for prayer. What did they make of the Muslim woman who arrived while we were there? With her was her multiply handicapped daughter. The mother lit her candle, as I had done. She knelt, and laid what was on her heart before the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. As we walked down from the chapel we opened a New Testament and there was the story of the wedding feast. Rooted in our Holy Scriptures, and in our belief in the Communion of all the Saints who have gone before us on their own pilgrimage to God, is all the evidence I need to believe in the power of prayer and the power of intercession. When Mary asks, surely her son, the Son of God, will listen.Whether it is the unlikely conjunction of a Presbyterian Kirk and a medieval Catholic shrine or the convergence of Muslim and Christian prayer for the needs of a disabled girl, Mary, the Mother of the Lord seems to be standing there. If Christ is the head of the Church, she will always be His mother and it is not sentiment which reminds me that a mother‟s prayers will never be wasted and will always be listened to.

Elsewhere In Scotland While at Haddington the pilgrim may care to venture farther north. Richard Trench in Travellers in Britain - Three Centuries of Discovery (Aurum Press, 1990) includes a chapter entitled “The Discovery of Scotland” in which he recollects the eighteenth century travels of Samuel Johnson and James Boswell. Their journeying took them to St.Andrews. They later headed west and in Boswell‟s Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides and Johnson‟s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (both edited by Peter Levi and published by Penguin in 1984) they record many insights touching on the ancient faith of the more remote areas, highlighting the many traces of the old world which still survived. Eigg and Canna were still Catholic islands, so were Mull and Iona; St.Kilda did not know money; there were tiny horses on Rhum; on Skye they saw an old woman by her croft, grinding oats with a quern, as the Romans used to do. Boswell was a Catholic of sorts and Iona was for him “a sacred place” but it was Johnson who was particularly affected by Iona: standing in the middle of the ruins he read aloud the fifth chapter of the letter of St.James and a sermon by the preacher, Ogden, and then, in the manner of the countless pilgrims who went before him, he vowed to lead a better life (see Chapter Two, the Celts).

St.Andrews