The following extract is from The Islesmen of Bride (1922), a semi-autobiographical novel about an unnamed island in the Hebrides by the remarkable Episcopalian, pioneer photographer, and traveller in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, Mary Ethel Muir Donaldson (1876-1958). She recorded a vanishing way of life in lively books infused by a romantic Celticism, a Jacobite Episcopalianism and a passion for the people of the Highlands and Islands. She does not hide her prejudices, particularly against Anglo-Saxons (the English) and Calvinist Presbyterianism. MEM Donaldson travelled with her companion, we might say ‘partner’, Isabel Bonus who was an artist and produced the cover of this book and painting of the book’s hero with St Columba on a beach. Donaldson and Bonus lived together in a house they designed at Sanna Bheag, Ardnamurchan until the latter’s death in 1941. The house burnt down in 1947 and Donaldson then lived in Cornwall and Edinburgh. They are buried together in Oban.
Amidst the beautiful and rich descriptions of landscape and people in Donaldson’s books, we see glimpses of her faith and spiritual life. In this extract, which follows a series of legends about St Bride, she gives a convincing and theologically deep justification of prayer to the Saints. Women have not featured much in the conventional history of Scottish theology but here we find an understanding of the implications of the communion of saints much in advance of that found amongst her Episcopalian contemporaries. Prayer to the saints was commended by Bishop William Forbes of Edinburgh (1585-1634) and the Episcopalian nuns of Aberdeen for whom the Day Office of the Church was composed in 1874 but it remained a minority practice although it was included in the 1929 Scottish Book of Common Prayer. Donaldson’s books are hard to find but are worth tracking down.
“….These are the beautiful legends of Bride; but such, while they have their own value and their own lesson to teach, must never be allowed to obscure that which is authentic biography in the lives of the Saints, for the Saints can be much to us if we will have it so. How can one ever be lonely in their Communion? Does not Christ Himself provide us with friends from the realms of Paradise as truly as He gives us those whom we love in this present world? Does He sanction our friendship with the Saints the less because they are nearer to Him, and by, the example of their lives, are leading us closer to Him, helping us onward by their prayers? Nay, surely He Whose love for Blessed John for ever hallowed human friendship, has not set any limit forbidding friendship in the Communion of Saints, where the common bond of love does not dust Divine Love, but links all lesser loves about the Feet of Love Incarnate.
I have many friends amongst the Saints – friends as dear and as intimate as any with whom I have communed in the flesh. S. Bernard, ‘the faithful watchdog of the house of the Lord,’ I love best of all; but on this island it is not unnaturally Blessed John and S. Columba who most frequently bear me company. Dear kind Saints, would that the many who know nothing of you, realised that the halo does not remove you from your humanity: would that they knew how truly human ye are: how near, how companionable: would that the multitude sought illumination from the lamps ye steadfastly bear, lit by the Hand of, God Himself, and still aglow with the flame of the Holy Spirit! For ‘the land that the soul of the Saint inhabits is not a land of forgetfulness…. Brethren, the amplitude of Heaven does not contract the heart but dilates it: it expands the affections and does not restrict them. In the light of God, one learns what he did not know: he does not unlearn what here he knew…. Do they, the Saints, because inhabiting Heaven, look with disdain upon earth? Do they not rather visit and frequent it? What, then, shall Angels go abroad and succour men, and those who are of ourselves be ignorant of us, and not know how to sympathise with us?’
Thus my S. Bernard, and I know from my own experience the truth of what he says. Yet to the overwhelming majority of those who in this country make use of the Apostles’ Creed, the confession, ‘I believe in the Communion of Saints’ is merely a lip assent to some vague doctrine that, for lack of any definite teaching, conveys nothing whatsoever of any practical value to them, so that some put their own hazy interpretations upon it. Thus are brought into being such utterly erroneous ideas as are evidenced by the selection of hymns commemorating the glorified saints for singing at the funeral, or ‘memorial service’, of those whose Christianity may have been of the most purely nominal order. As the inevitable penalty paid by the suppression of any truth is the rise of some compensating heresy, so a materialistic jugglery, claiming to hold communication with spirits, has arisen to offer a grotesque substitute to sore and stricken hearts robbed of the Church’s comfortable teaching concerning the vivid realities of the Communion of Saints. Materialism, even in the guise of Christianity, can never satisfy the spirit of man. If Christianity be mutilated and shorn of its intimate, precious, and tender teaching regarding our relation to the world of spirit and its inhabiters – that, in the consciousness of the Communion of Saints there is no impenetrable barrier between this world and the world of spirit that cannot be pierced by prayer – then the ingenuity of man will invent something claiming to satisfy this innate and surely legitimate craving.”
amalarius 