The Sermon on the Mount

Blessed are the passionate
For they shall be lovemakers in eternity.

[Beatitude, from Love and Revolution, Alistair McIntosh]

I suppose, with a little poetic license, the mount in question could be the saddle of the bicycle... but that may well be another story.

The mount here is the green-grey rock of Dunglass, the inimitable volcanic plug that rests beside Strathblane and opposite the great fissure in the fells at Ballagan. This is the rock that got me sketching, and which continues to inspire me over and over. The view from its summit, a mere 100 odd metres up across the Blane Valley is simply stunning and you don't have to be Edmund Hillary to scale it!







Milngavie Railway station is in the bottom left of the map (it's a 20 minute train ride from Partick, 30 mins. from Glasgow Central). This route can be used with the Milngavie circular map (see earlier post) via Lennox Forest. Dunglass is in the top centre of the map, just to the east of Strathblane. This is a dedicated walk/cycle way, The Thomas Muir Heritage Trail, that runs from opposite Strathblane Parish Church all the way round to Kirkintilloch and then onto the canal towpath down to Bishopbriggs.

Today, Good Friday, I was a little surprised to see what looked like a cross fixed atop it. But not that surprised, as I knew that to the south of Glasgow near Newton Mearns, another mount, that of Duncarnock Craigie, regularly had an Easter Sunday 'conventicle' upon it. These conventicles (or open-air services) are a throwback from a dark period in Scottish history when the Stuart monarchy and Charles II (who believed in the divine right of kings) sought to control the church (who thought primogeniture an aberration of the special relationship between God, the church, and the people) by ousting Presbyterian ministers from their parishes and replacing them with Episcopalian bishops and ministers.These ousted ministers simply took to the hills with their congregations holding their masses al fresco. Troops, however, patrolled these hills and moors (more so to the south of Glasgow than here to the north), and if they found any of these 'illegal' masses, were apt to hand out 'on-the-spot fines', notably summary execution and/or imprisoning them.

And so it was, atop Dunglass this fine April day, that a silent sermon, a beautiful beatitude, was given, in praise of space, in praise of wind, in praise of flowing air and running water, in praise of the birds and the animals...

Midst this silent 'prayer' ('work done in gratitude, kindly and well, is prayer,' wrote the 'hillside farmer' Wendell Berry) it was then that I realised what the cross and the crucifixion meant. 

The cross represented the work on the Self; the work itself (unremunerated, unrecognized - 'this is not work for hire' writes Berry) was the sacrifice....

Whether you call 'it' God, the Tao, or the Force (it really doesn't matter), up here, gazing across the resplendent Blane Valley and that great monument to deep time, the Campsie mesa, all space and time melts away, as does consciousness itself (the air and the exertion will do that to you), to leave you thoroughly immersed in all that is. Like this, 'thinking the unthinkable', one thus becomes as God, or perhaps more accurately, in God, (or as I prefer to say, in Love), as one becomes One.

'Love is the delicate but total acknowledgement of all that is', the writer Doris Lessing once remarked. 

Blessed are the open-minded, for they shall inhabit Love....

Looking north-west over Strathblane village, through the cleft between the Campsie Fells (on the right) and the Kilpatrick Hills (on the left), towards the Highlands. Like something out of a Caspar David Friedrich painting, only more beautiful...

Looking east towards Lennox Forest (on the right) and the great Campsie mesa above Lennoxtown on the left. The Thomas Muir Trail can clearly be seen just below Dunglass (running parallel to the road further to the left.