Pastoral Letter for the Month

Dear friends, 

As October rolls around I find myself, at last, now settled in the pastorate – and to my great surprise almost all the boxes we brought with us have now been unpacked and the manse is beginning to feel like home. There was a time that I wasn’t convinced this would ever be the case. 

‘An Englishman’s home is his castle’, so the old cliché goes. Although having been born in Glasgow I don’t really consider myself an Englishman, and if my home is a castle it’s a semi-detached one. 

Castles, though, are a common enough sight in these islands. I see them whenever I go on holiday. Some are well maintained but many more thrill youthful visitors with the evergreen prospect of sudden and dramatic death from falling masonry, or indeed from falling off masonry. 

 The appeal of a castle is obvious though – well, it would be if you didn’t have to heat it or stop it from leaking. It’s a fortified position and often has substantial defences, mainly things like moats, high walls and holes through which you can pour unpleasant things on to unwelcome Vikings. I suppose that in some ways it’s the opposite to the tent – it speaks of permanence and power, it’s a place where you can fend off enemies, store up treasures and lock down prisoners: solid and dependable. Tents aren’t really that sort of structure: fundamentally they’re not built to be Viking proof. 

Solidity comes at a price though, plenty of maintenance is required if you don’t want people burrowing out of the dungeons or breaking into the vaults. Constant vigilance must be maintained if you don’t want the Vikings to sneak past the portcullis. No wonder so many castles have been handed over to charities, who wants do deal with the upkeep? 

 Tents on the other hand are rather easier to maintain, or even to replace when the time comes. They’re portable too, so when you realise that change is required you can roll up the whole kit and kaboodle, pop it in your rucksack and toddle off to a place where there are fewer Vikings, or more sunshine. 

Perhaps tents and castles embody two ways of thinking and living, particularly when it comes to faith. The first way – castle thinking – prioritises a fixed position that becomes a place of safety and security but requires thick walls and elaborate defences to ensure that such safety is ensured. The second way – tent thinking – recognises instead the primary value of change and movement. Tent thinking accepts that all positions are temporary and that context changes things. It may be less comfortable, but it’s also much freer, and requires far less maintenance.

 Sometimes we expend all our energy building walls to protect a position which we then have to both maintain and defend. It is both simpler and substantially more honest to accept that things change, that each new experience alters our understanding of the world and of God, and that as we grow aware of this we may need to move.

 We started with one clichéd metaphor; let’s end with another – ‘life is a journey’. If that’s true then it must be better to carry a tent than to spend all your time maintaining a castle. 

Simon