Month: July 2026

Flipping the bird at island ways

/ posttenebrasluxweb / Leave a comment

When you live in the Western Isles, there is a fairly repetitive tendency in the news cycle. It goes: ferries – cost of living – crofting issues – Sunday opening – wind farms – ferries . . . You get the picture. In the last few months, however, we have had a new one: the men of Ness, and their participation in a centuries-old tradition, the annual guga hunt.

Conservationists are, to put it mildly, a complication to indigenous communities. Just ask the Miwok, who were expelled from Yosemite so that white experts could conserve the ecosystem. And don’t think that this is just an historical problem, because you will still find green activists who love every life form except the human. Not for them the edict of Genesis 1, where God placed man at the head of his new creation – not to impose on it, or to abuse it, but to have stewardship of the place in which he lived.

Even if you reject God, you can still see the common sense in this. You cannot manage the environment from outside; the best people to care for it are those who live in it.

And that is why the campaign has been so reprehensible. It has not been against the practice – which I could accept – but against the practitioners. It has been a colonial-style vilification of an entire community, where racist slurs on their morality and intelligence abounded. These ad hominem attacks should have discredited the campaign, even if their public dress-up antics did not. Any right-thinking decision maker would take one look at the situation and take a step back. 

There are two considerations here, as I see it: the wellbeing of the bird colony on Sulasgeir, and the right of the Nisich to perpetuate a tradition which has long formed part of their identity. While I bow to NatureScot’s superior knowledge on the former, I question their fitness to adjudicate upon the latter. One can only hope that they will take advice. It is too much to ask, I suppose, that they do the unthinkable and consult local knowledge.

UNESCO has quite a bit to say about this kind of thing, incidentally. It supports the continuation of these kinds of traditional practices, because it understands them in the context of indigenous people having a unique perspective on their homeland. They have, in fact, what modern parlance would term an ‘integrated’ view of how their homeland should be managed. This encompasses language, land use, heritage and culture.

Which brings me to another of this week’s items of local discussion: crofting. My fellow ‘Gazette’ columnist, Iain Stephen Morrison has written about the decline of crofting, and cites the relationship with the Crofting Commission as not always helpful to the development of crofting. As a result, he says, crofting is on the slide.

External interference, external neglect – the outcome is the same for the people who have to live with the consequences. No one is asking the islanders how best to fix these problems, because, like it or not, there is still a white saviour mentality when it comes to the Teuchs. We can put on suits and mince off to quango meetings on the mainland (if Loganair permits), but I think we should be very aware that the power is not remotely in our hands. There are nine directors on the NatureScot board, of which a nice, round number (zero) are islanders. The Crofting Commission has one, and an obligation that at least one Commissioner should be Gaelic-speaking. One out of nine.

It reminds me of the episode of ‘Yes, Prime Minister’, when arguments against female civil servants were being rehearsed. Perhaps, like Sir Humphrey Appleby, the Scottish civil servants are afraid that islanders on boards might ‘blub’ if put to the test. 

Are we the victims of paternalism? Perhaps there is a degree of that, but I actually believe it’s more akin to colonialism. As the disgusting social media campaign waged against the Guga hunters, and Nisich in general, demonstrates, there is a hatred of what is ‘other’ to outsiders. They despise us for having a strong identity, and a relationship with the landscape in which we have been placed. 

Imagine if this kind of conduct was being perpetrated against Native Americans, or Australian Aboriginals. Even taking the vile campaign out of the equation, would we not be appalled to see indigenous peoples robbed of the right to control their own destinies, their own heritage, their own land?

So why do we think it’s good enough for ourselves?

God is love, but don’t take it from me

/ posttenebrasluxweb / 1 Comment

They say that more people are turning to God since the world began to ramp up its uncertainty. I hope that’s true. He is certainly talked about more on social media platforms now than at any time I can remember. Of course, though, that also means placing his name where some people can throw rocks at it – and they do.

I can completely understand why an unbeliever would say that they cannot reconcile belief in God with the maelstrom that seems to be breaking loose around us every day. Many live in perpetual war zones, their homes torn apart by conflict not of their making. There are countless displaced people, just existing as best they can. And, even besides the theatre of warfare, there are quietly terrifying dramas played out in every corner of the Earth. Families sit by the hospital beds of sick children; unwanted diagnoses are issued to men and women who still have life they want to go on living; and healthy people face the torture of watching those they love suffer.

I fully understand that this seems contrary to the idea of a benign power who loves us, regardless of what we are. And I don’t have the words to tell anyone that they are wrong. Who am I, who is any Christian, to take that task on? 

All I would say is this: get to know him yourself. Don’t take anyone else’s word for who God is; but please don’t dismiss him because you’re in pain. If you want to confront him with the reality of your suffering and ask him where his love is in that . . . do it.

I have done it. In the searing, raw moments of my grief at losing a beloved husband so young, I cried to God. It seemed hollow to me to sit in church and hear that I am the apple of his eye, that my name is written upon his palms, only to return home to a house empty of the man I always believed that same God had joined me to. In these hard, lonely hours, I was like Naomi, asking to be called Mara in my self-pity.

These comfortless seasons sometimes lasted for days, but not days and days. I can’t give anyone the formula for restoration to trusting God, because I don’t think there is one in these circumstances. You have to simply sit with him, and show him your heart – but, in return, you have to listen while he reveals his. Every time I have accused him in my bitterness, he answers me as soon as I open my ears to what I already know.

God is love. We think we invented it, but we only claimed it as our own, remaking an inferior version as best we could in our own image. And human love can be beautiful, whether it is between parent and child, between a man and a woman, between siblings or friends – even the love we can have for our pets. It has inspired countless poems, songs, novels, films, paintings, opera . . . and yet that kind of love, however attractive, is a pale imitation of the original.

God loves us because God is love. We question this because we really only know the fickle, human brand of love, which is rarely as unconditional as we would like. In our blinkered state, we judge the quality of God’s love by what we think we are due, and what we want.

His perfect love doesn’t always give us what we want. I didn’t want my husband to die, but he did. That wasn’t cruelty on the part of God because he is incapable of cruelty. It is sometimes a difficult pill to swallow for me, but in an enduring way, I know that this is part of a greater plan. Hard though this can be, it is made possible because I know God, and to know him is to trust him implicitly. Even if that trust sometimes falters into recrimination when I feel a stab of pain at my loss, in the end I always remember who God is.

God is love. We cannot understand that through any means but being with him. I cannot make you feel it, and vice-versa, no matter how many words we waste. No minister or priest can convince you of God’s love; no lecturer or textbook can QED you into believing it in your heart.

Only God’s heart can do that through a direct connection with yours. I can tell you so much about the reason for the hope that is in me, but why take my word for it?

We love only because he first loved us. That still wasn’t enough for mankind, but then God so loved the world that he gave his only son that we would not die, but have everlasting life.

He so loved the world, so loves you, that he inflicted terrible suffering, even death, upon himself. 

Our names are not merely written on his palms, but carved into them. He endured hell for our sakes, out of love. When we know this, our own sorrows are a little easier to bear.