The Road To The Isles

And I heard a voice from heaven saying, “Write this: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord henceforth.” “Blessed indeed,” says the Spirit, “that they may rest from their labours, for their deeds follow them!”

Revelation 14.13

Do you not find it strange how often the smallest details in life can have the most profound significance for you in later years? If you were a schoolchild in the nineteen-fifties, you may remember that there was a series of radio broadcasts for schools called “Singing Together”. Whole classes gathered around the classroom wireless whilst the announcer taught you mainly British folk songs, line by line, backed by the radio pianist and choir… Who is Sylvia?… Linden Lea… Land of my fathers… Cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o!

Each child had a booklet with the words and music of each song, and at the top of the page there was a little line drawing to capture the spirit of the song. I remember one very clearly, because it depicted a bandy-legged, be-kilted Scot walking towards a distant mountain range. Later I learned that the figure was almost certainly supposed to be Sir Harry Lauder and that the mountain range was the Cuillins on the Isle of Skye. The song, of course, was “The Road to the Isles”… O, the far Cuillins are putting love on me, as step I with my cromack to the isles… (a cromack being a knobbly walking-stick, and nothing at all like a mashie niblick).

I decided then that one day I would go where the song described. I too would take the road to the isles. Not long afterwards I determined that if I were ever to marry I would take my bride there on honeymoon – a strange resolution for a ten-year-old to make. But fifteen years later, it came to pass, and that is exactly what I did. It was a long drive from Hatfield in Hertfordshire to the wedding just outside Edinburgh, and then a further two hundred and forty miles via Glencoe and Fort William to the Kyle of Lochalsh, the narrowest crossing over to the Isle of Skye. Even after all that journey, there remained a narrow crossing by car ferry to the dark and mysterious island, so close, so unknown, and yet there… looming before us.

In relative old age, I saw that whole journey as a metaphor for our earthly life, but by the time that I realised it, they had built a road bridge at the Kyle of Lochalsh, and although Skye is geographically still an island, practically – as far as driving is concerned – it no longer is. There is no further need for “speed, bonny boat.” As a metaphor for our mortal journey, its usefulness has melted away. To rediscover it, we need a destination of an un-bridged, large and mysterious island, with a narrow sea between, that we cannot cross except with help… the help of a guide, a pilot, and ultimately a Saviour.

What I visualized in the Hebrides merely from a line drawing on a page, nearly three hundred years beforehand the hymn-writer, Isaac Watts, could see for real off the south coast of England. Watts was born in Southampton in 1674, and as a child he could daily look down Southampton Water and across the Solent to the Isle of Wight, an island which, of course, still remains un-bridged… “a narrow sea divides this heavenly land from ours.” Scarcely thirty years old, Watts wrote “There is a land of pure delight where saints immortal reign” as one of his earliest hymns, using the Isle of Wight as a metaphor for heaven, and the “narrow sea” between it and the Hampshire mainland as a metaphor for what Charles Wesley would soon call “the narrow stream of death”…

There everlasting spring abides,

And never-withering flowers;

Death, like a narrow sea, divides

This heavenly land from ours.

Further west along the Hampshire coast, from the harbour at Lymington, nearly two centuries later, the poet laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson, surveyed a similar scene towards West Wight whilst waiting for an evening ferry from Lymington to Yarmouth, from whence he would walk the short distance to his house at Farringford. As a very old man, he then wrote one of his most moving poems called “Crossing The Bar”…

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place

The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

When I have crost the bar.

Strangely, he makes no direct reference to the looming mass of the Isle of Wight before him, and for which he was bound. Perhaps it had already disappeared into the darkness as the sun slipped beneath the western horizon. But Tennyson picks up on the reference in Saint John’s Gospel, in chapter fourteen, where Jesus promises to come to meet us at our life’s end and to guide us safely home: “And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.” The sandbar to which Tennyson refers is the boundary between the estuary and the narrow sea. Once crossed, there the Pilot waits to meet us and to guide us home.

November 1^st is All Saints’ Day, and November 2^nd is All Souls’ Day. On these days and in this season, Christians think upon those who have made that journey across the narrow sea before us – the great saints of the Church and the ordinary, decent Christian souls that we hope ourselves to be. They made the long journey of life to the water’s edge of the narrow sea, and then cast off in the confidence that their Pilot would come to meet them, just as he promised. If they were of a generation close to our own, we may have even waved them farewell, bade them, “God speed,” and asked them to wait for us on the further shore and to meet us in our turn.

How we longed to hear a voice of assurance across the narrow sea from whence they had travelled, but for the most part we only heard the sighing of the waves as they lapped upon the shore at our feet. Perhaps we were listening in the wrong direction.

We have inherited the idea and the spatial topography of the three-decker universe so common amongst the thinkers of ancient times who thought that heaven was “up there” and that hell was “down there”, and that we lived our earthly life on a plane of existence between the two. What if we were to use the metaphorical geography of Isaac Watts and Alfred Tennyson and look for heaven in front of us – both literally and temporally – across that narrow sea, on whose shore we have stood so often when we have said farewell to a loved one? Then our text – the prophecy of Saint John – from the Book of Revelation assumes a dramatically new perspective: And I heard a voice from heaven saying, “Write this: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord henceforth.” “Blessed indeed,” says the Spirit, “that they may rest from their labours, for their deeds follow them!”

Now, with that perspective, we hear the promises of God coming to us from across the waters that we all must cross one day. But they come from across the waters over which a Saviour waits to guide us, as he himself promised. The saints and souls who went before us made the crossing safely, taking the Saviour’s hand even in the darkest moments of the crossing. They are home now… “Blessed indeed,” says the Spirit, “that they may rest from their labours, for their deeds follow them!”

Their deeds follow them…” Yes – that is so. What they were during this earthly journey is the basis for what they are in their heavenly homecoming. They ran the race, they kept the faith… yes, all that, but the qualities that they displayed in their journey became woven into their souls, so that their love, their faith, and their hope were never going to be merely vague philosophical concepts to them. They endured! They made the whole journey honourably and faithfully, and when they got to the shore of the narrow sea, they launched out, trusting that their Pilot was waiting to guide them home. How hard that is to do, even for the most faithful of Christians…

But timorous mortals start and shrink

To cross this narrow sea,

And linger, shivering on the brink,

And fear to launch away.

But this is the last journey that we have travelled all our lives to make. It is the journey home. Jesus has promised that he will come to us and lead us there, where an eternal vision of glory has been promised: “I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.” So said Job, even without a description of the geography of heaven. I know hardly anything about heaven, but I do know that the saints who endured await us on that further shore – the “Shining Ones”, as John Bunyan called them.

This life is not a journey without a purpose, nor a pilgrimage without a destination. “I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.” Those are the words of Jesus that echo across the waters where Isaac Watts stood, across the waters where Tennyson beheld the sunset and evening star, across the waters over which Saint Columba gazed upon the Outer Hebrides, and from the far Cuillins on the road to the isles. Take heart. Straighten your back. Make proud your step. At a time of God’s choosing, heaven awaits…

Sure by Tummel and Loch Rannock and Lochaber I will go

By heather tracks with heaven in their wiles.

If it’s thinking in your inner heart the braggarts in my step,

You’ve never smelt the tangle of the isles.