I’m writing on the night train home from Scotland, trying to garner in my mind’s eye and in my heart the wonderful sights of mountains and eagles, mist and rain, waterfalls and sea shores, and the sunset quenched in the flaming red water; and to preserve in the soles of my feet the sensations of scrambling on grass, rock and heather; of walking, running and climbing through the thick highland mud.
I had no shofar with me to blow on the first day of Elul, but instead stood and prayed next to the hill-wise sheep with their impressive curled horns. It is of them and their glens that I will think on Rosh Hashanah when I say the blessing and endeavour to listen as deeply as I can to the sound of the shofar. Their hills are my personal Sinai, my place of revelation, where the wordless utterance of God says simply and constantly, ‘I am’.
I haven’t forgotten during this fortnight in the Highlands that the world is complex, full of violence, pain, alienation, unresolved conflicts and millions of innocent people who suffer for what they have not done. I spend most of my life inside the circumference of such concerns.
But all of us need to charge our heart and soul, to fill them with beauty, grace and inspiration so that we have the strength of spirit and the resilience to negotiate with courage and loving kindness the struggles of our own life and those of others. I often ask people when they turn to me in times of distress: ‘What nourishes your spirit?’ Perhaps it is music, prayer, poetry, nature, walking the dog, the companionship of those friends to whom you don’t have to tell everything because they know and understand. Then I say to them, ‘Whatever happens, take the time to restore your soul’.
Elul and Tishrei are the months of the beautiful 27th Psalm, ‘On your part does my heart say: “Seek my Face.”’ The heart, teaches the Zohar, is God’s temple within each person, God’s sacred abode in each and every life. It longs for its home with God, and, like a satnav to a different dimension, tries to help us locate it here on earth.
Libbi, our elder daughter has always loved otters. The Isle of Mull has at least one otter family for every mile of its 360 miles of coastline, so at dusk we went down to the shore to see if we could find one of their havens. We sat in silence as the twilight deepened in to darkness. We listened to the washing of the waves against the rocks, the constant variations in the movement of the ripples of the water, the seaweed, the boats moored a small distance from the shore. We found not a single otter.
Instead a deeper presence found us, calmed and silenced us, and without words reminded us that the world is full of the presence of God. For a moment, we were privileged to enter malchut shamayim, the sovereign domain of heaven.