Reflections on The Coracle Trust

Nick Adams

Nick is a Coracle Trust trustee and a theology lecturer at Edinburgh University. He attends Old St Paul's Episcopal Church on the Royal Mile.

I'm a lecturer in theology at the University of Edinburgh, where I've been teaching for nearly five years.

What is a theologian? Theologians are people who, when explaining what they do, discover that they are talking to someone who can also claim to be a theologian. This is the first of two things that distinguish them from specialists in all other academic disciplines. The second is that they may be interested in everything: there is nothing in creation that is not of legitimate interest to a theologian.

Most professional theologians nonetheless typically have a focused area of expertise, or at least pretend to until they retire. Before my retirement, mine is German philosophy. I also dabble in broader questions concerning the role of argumentation in society and I sometimes write about music.

I'm a trustee of the Coracle Trust, where my role is obscure, chiefly because of the two things that distinguish theologians. My job sometimes seems to be to prevent Kenny and Bridget from worrying that there are any theological obstacles to their wonderful work with young adults, but in practice this means that I am learning a lot about God's action through the wealth of imagination and energy that come from Coracle Trust activities.

I think the future of the Church lies in something like an 'Evangelical Left'. This does not really exist yet, but the Coracle project seems a good place to discern some outlines of what aspects of it might look like. I'm delighted to be playing a small part in assisting Kenny and Bridget in their development of resources for Christian fellowship, education and society.

Kate McDonald

Kate has participated in the Trust since 2004.

Almost three years ago, I was getting ready to board a plane to come to Scotland from my home in Virginia, and I was terrified. I was coming to Edinburgh to work on my Masters, but I knew no one, had no long-term accommodation lined up, and while I somehow knew in my heart I was doing the right thing, I couldn’t help but wonder what lay ahead and how I would cope. Just before I passed through the security checkpoint, my mom handed me a letter. We said our teary good-byes, and I turned to walk to my gate.

Once on the plane, I opened the envelope and pulled out the papers. Most of it was general encouragement and words of love, but the closing image was one which I have kept with me ever since. She wrote, "Sit prayerfully with open hands—palms up... Just sit with open hands—letting go—and prayerfully ready to receive. And, whatever you receive, hold it loosely. It is a gift given... maybe just for a time."

The image of open hands is not an original one, but at that moment, it was exactly the one I needed to help me survive the move. Now, three years on, and one-and-a-half years into my time at Coracle, it is still an image I return to regularly in prayer, and it is one which Coracle has helped me to appreciate more.

Coracle encourages open hands (and open hearts and minds). It is difficult to put ourselves in this position. We cannot make fists to defend ourselves, and we are left at the mercy of God and others. Nor can we grasp what we have been given; we must leave it sitting to be taken away if that is God's will. But with fists and grabbing hands, we can't receive gifts and blessings. We can't reach out in praise. We can't offer up our worries. We can't embrace the world around us. Closed hands are limiting.

Coracle has become a safe place for me to sit with open hands, and through it, I have had burdens lifted and gifts given to replace them. By releasing my grasp, I have felt friends’ hands slip into my own to guide me through difficult times, and when my hands are open, only then can I offer myself to others. To find a place where you can be so vulnerable yet feel so loved is rare, and even rarer still is to find a community which can so gently nurture the soul while challenging its members to continue to tackle the tough issues of truly living our faith.

Even with the support of Coracle, it is still not easy to keep my hands open and allow God to be in control, but through this group, He has blessed me with deep friendships and a greater awareness of Him in the world around me so that I am more quickly aware of when I have closed myself to Him. This growing discernment has made me realise that when mom gave me that letter, she placed into my hands a gift much greater than her words.

Justin Reynolds

Justin has been going to Trust meetings since summer 2002.

I attend Old St Pauls Episcopal Church, just off the Royal Mile, and have been going to the group set up by Bridget and Kenny since the middle of 2002.

The group meets on the first and third Tuesday evenings of each month, and is designed to provide an opportunity for twenty and thirty somethings across Edinburgh, from very different church traditions, to meet on a regular basis and together try to make sense of Christianity, and what difference our commitment to it does or should make to our lives.

At present there is a core group of about 20, though I reckon about 40 different people have attended at some time or other since I have been going. Some find they can't attend for a while, but come back a few weeks later. New members are very welcome at any time.

Each month we take a particular topic and try to work out a distinctively Christian attitude towards it. Since I have attended the group the subjects have included the theory of a just war, the nature of time, and relationship of faith to day-to-day work. Bridget and Kenny prepare some background material to get the discussion started, then it just develops.

For me, the group offers a rare and valuable opportunity to think aloud about the meaning of the Christian religion with others who don't mind admitting that they are not sure what to make of it all.

I have been exploring Christianity for about three years now. I was drawn into the Christian world after reading the gospels for the first time during a sunny weekend lazing in Princes Street gardens back in 1999. I had decided to read them for a bit of escapism - expecting nothing more or less than a colourful mental journey across an ancient alien landscape peopled with apocalpytic prophets, lepers, puritan zealots and demon possessed madmen wandering graveyards by night.

The gospels were certainly strange, but I got more than just entertainment - I had the unsettling feeling that these old narratives were reading me as much as I was reading them. I was fascinated by the unworldly character of Jesus of Nazareth. His soaring vision of the Kingdom of Heaven was hopelessly idealistic, but totally compelling. And the earnestness with which his ragged band of followers proclaimed his resurrection - many of them sacrificing their own lives in the process - cut through my agnostic complacency.

Over the next few months I read through the whole of the Bible and was inspired and dismayed in equal measure. The letters of Paul seemed to me a peculiar blend of piercing psychological insight and stuffy social conservatism. The author of the Book of Revelation dreamed of a future age of perpetual peace, but depicted with grim relish the horrors to be visited upon the unrighteous. In the Old Testament, the burning desire of prophets such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah and Amos for justice and peace seemed to blaze a trail for the ministry of Jesus. Yet the blood soaked Book of Joshua gave divine sanction for what would we now describe as ethnic cleansing. And many of the law codes recorded in Deuteronomy could have been devised by the Taliban.

The difficulty of making sense of these, and many other puzzles, has left me on the verge of abandoning Christianity on more than one occasion. But I keep returning to the gospels, and am drawn back into the fold again by their magnetic central figure. And in Bridget and Kenny's group I have found a place where I can voice the conumdrums that have been vexing me, and find our how others have tried to resolve them, or just learned to live with them.

I think I can speak for everyone who attends in saying a big thank you to Bridget and Kenny for the initiative they have taken in founding the group, and the effort they have put into running it. They are open minded, kind, and intelligent people, Christian in the best sense, and I greatly value their friendship and support.

Kath Williamson

Kath Williamson refelects on her experience of the Coracle Motherhood, God & Theology group.

What comes to mind when asked to sum up Coracle mums? Hmmmm.... for me it is a special space to explore the journey of motherhood alongside other Christian mothers and how it fits with my faith, with the added bonus of not having the children around when we do it!

We meet on the second Thursday of every month, however many or few of us can make it. Add to that the breadth and variety of Christian backgrounds and denominations found within the group and you have a unique mixture.

The richness of what is celebrated and cherised in each tradition helps to remind me of the wider family of Christ to which I belong. It holds me to remembering that there will always be things of value in others' way of being, and that these invariably add something to my own.

As a group we started meeting three years ago, in response to the need to reflect on these two significant areas of our lives - children and God - as women, that often feed of each other.

We have usually done a small portion of reading of a varying nature to start off/inform our discussion, but it's not a book group, so we often move on past this as the discussion takes a more personal nature.

The first book that we considered, Motherhood & God by Margaret Hebblethwaite, I found very helpful in my own transition to being a mother, talking realistically about the tough stuff of being a mum as well as managing higher things such as the Ignatian exercises! It's still one of my recommended reads to new mums. More recently it has been our reading of Anita Diamant's Red Tent that has spoken volumes into my life.

I guess I value the rootedness of what the Coracle mum's group offers. It encourages my own spiritual journey without piling on the guilt about my lack of time for hour-long quiet times. Together we explore ways of passing on our faith to our children: how much closer to your heart can you get than that?

We are honest in our trials and failures, but without resignation at it always being so. Instead there are earthly practical steps to try new ways of being a Christian mother.

In short I am fed. I am encouraged. I am listened to. I am shared with. I can give to others. Two of the things which are closest to my heart, my children and my God, are celebrated and worked on in a safe place, with women who I increasingly think of as my modern day sisters. Worth getting a babysitter for? I think so!