Christian Viewpoint: John Dempster finds Ross-based Cáit O’Neill McCullagh has some valuable views worth sharing
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I love the words of George Mackay Brown which Cáit quoted: “Everything we do sets the whole web of creation trembling with light or with darkness.”
Ross-shire based Cáit O’Neill McCullagh describes herself as “ethnologist, stray archaeologist, and ‘becoming’ [a] poet.” She’s deeply interested in sustaining communities at a grass-roots level. There’s a spirituality in her writing which appeals to me as I think about our interconnectedness as humans, about the divine longing to draw together in one the whole of creation, centred on Christ.
Cáit is not now a practising Christian, but does believe in another, pre-existing reality which sounds similar to what I mean in referring to God as ‘The Great Love’. Cáit is deeply spiritual and speaks profound truth.
We talk about human unitedness. Cáit describes her ‘sense of universal belonging’ as a young Catholic in London in a parish of folk with Irish roots. Not until she was 18 did she have a conversation with a Protestant, “discovering our connections, our uniting characteristics”.
Three years later she worked in Belfast during the Troubles, bringing young Catholics and Protestants together, nurturing “moments of connectedness” through toddler groups, football trips and similar activities. Young people would risk talking and laughing with folk from the “other” community and experience “wellsprings” of grace as they glimpsed their shared human loveliness.
This is the challenge we face: to be open to those we have come to see as “the other”, “the enemy”.
But what about the systems and ideas we buy into which exercise power, dominating some and excluding others – whether political, economic, cultural or religious? How can we be open to people when such systems shape their lives?
Cáit reminds me gently that all of us are broken and weak, both misusing power ourselves and open to being abused by power. The greatest brokenness lies not in people, but in the systems themselves. So we can repudiate what’s bad in the systems but make ourselves vulnerable to one another in compassion and forgiveness.
This rings true. Jesus showed grace to individuals, while criticising the political and religious establishment. Jesus, says Cáit, was “always ready to interrupt what’s taken for granted”.
The challenge to Highland churches, Cáit rightly thinks, is to create relationship-rich communities which “come together to do something lovely... sing, pray, be vulnerable” but also engage in the “activism which speaks truth to power”.
I love Cáit’s insight at her first Holy Communion, aged six, that Christianity was “not about us scrabbling around looking for the divine, but about the divine touching humanity”.
And I believe that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus set “the whole web of creation trembling” with a light which the darkness will never overcome.
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