View from the third tee, Royal Dornoch Golf Club. Picture by John Haslam under Creative Commons License

Glory Be!

Monday June 29 2015

First in an exclusive series of reflections by the Very Rev Dr James Simpson.

An Irish poet exclaimed, “What can we cry but Glory Be, when God breaks out in an apple tree.”

It was in the Spring of 1976 that I moved from Glasgow to Dornoch, an area described by the Countryside Commission as the area of greatest natural beauty on the East Coast of Scotland.

In the weeks that followed, as I walked the beach or played the golf course, breathing in the fresh sea air and observing the riot of colour in the yellow banks of gorse, I often exclaimed ‘Glory Be'. It was no different later in the year when I enjoyed the beauty of ‘the purple headed mountains and the rivers running by.'

“Earth’s crammed with heaven,” wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “And every common bush afire with God.” Then she added, “But only he who sees takes off his shoes.”

The week prior to the British Amateur being played at Royal Dornoch, I asked Duffy Waldorf, the leading American contender, how his practising was going. “I have not really started practising yet” he said, “I am still soaking up the scenery.” Some of the locals on the other hand , seeing only what they expected to see, often missed the wonder of the surrounding scenery.

Most of us, if asked to paint a tree, would paint the trunk black or brown. But in fact tree trunks are just about every colour except black or brown, grey, yellow-green, purple. It was a keen observer of nature who coined the word ‘saunter’ from the French words, ‘sainte terre’, meaning ‘holy land.’ Going for a walk was for him a pilgrimage through the holy land that lay all around him. Within a few miles of his home, he observed more of interest than many do on a world tour.

Perhaps we should measure life, not by the number of breaths taken, but by the number of moments when our breath is taken away, when the air is drawn out of our lungs in some such exclamation as ‘Look’ or ‘Glory Be.’

Glory Be! will be published each Monday during the summer.