The Cottage

by Michael Phillips

  David laughed, and then grew serious.

  “I do owe you an explanation,” he said. “The fact is, when it was clear you were gone, I realized I wasn’t willing to lose what had become a special friendship. I wasn’t willing not to see you again. I missed you.”

  He paused and drew in a thoughtful breath.

  “When the uncertainty of the inheritance was at its worst,” he went on, “my aunt once accused me of being too passive. She said that as chief I should fight for it. I told her I wouldn’t fight for something unless I knew it was right. I told her I hoped I had the courage to fight for what I believed in. But I also told her a man has to choose when and where to fight. After you left, I knew that such a moment had come. It was time to fight for a friendship I did not want to lose.”

  58

  Who Am I?

  An hour later Loni and David were still seated cross-legged on the grass in the small meadow that, before that day, Loni had always considered her private discovery of solitude.

  “I can still hardly believe my grandfather told you about this place,” she said. “I am learning more about my grandparents than I ever dreamed.”

  “I don’t suppose any of us know our parents—or in your case, your grandparents—as well as we think. Now that I am a man, there are so many things I wish I could ask my father. When you’re young, you are too wrapped up in yourself to realize how important those memories will be later.”

  “I can’t help feeling guilty for that. But then . . .” Loni added with a wistful smile as she paused.

  “What is it?” asked David.

  “I was just going to say that I didn’t know myself either. I never really knew who I was. I’m still trying to figure it out. Going to Scotland, the inheritance, even meeting you—it’s all helping me discover the answer to that all-important question.”

  “Why meeting me?”

  “I don’t know. After I got angry with you for not telling me you were the chief, I had to do some hard soul-searching. I realized you were not really as complicated as I had tried to make you. You weren’t trying to hide anything from me—you were who you were. I mean, you are David. You aren’t sometimes Dave, at other times a boyishly conflicted Davey. You are just David. You are always David, an integrated whole. You are at peace being David Tulloch. There are not two David Tullochs. There’s just one, and he’s you. You know who you are. You are comfortable in your own skin. I admire that. I probably envy it.”

  “And you?”

  “It’s different with me,” replied Loni. “All of that is foreign. I’m not an integrated whole. My different selves are in conflict. At least that’s been the case up until now. It’s related to my lifelong uncertainty about my mother and my roots. Sometimes I’m Loni. Then I went to the Shetlands—and it all started with the letter from Jason MacNaughton addressed to Alonnah Tulloch Ford.

  “Who is that? I wondered. The name on the envelope was a complete stranger. The unknown Alonnah of my childhood who had no mother became Alonnah Tulloch, and Loni didn’t know who she was.” She paused, smiled. “When I went to college and said to myself, and everyone else, ‘From now on I’m going to be known as Loni,’ I was only trying to fool myself into thinking I could stuff the Alonnah into a cupboard and pretend she didn’t exist. But she was always there, always wondering who she really was and where she had come from, looking out from a crack in the cupboard, staring at me with her big childlike eyes of confusion and question: My name is Alonnah. Who am I?”

  “I see what you mean,” said David. “This hasn’t just been about inheriting the property. Your entire sense of who you are has been at stake.”

  Loni nodded. “Self-knowing, I guess,” she said with a smile. “The eternal question of humanity: Who am I?”

  “There is a very perceptive line in one of George MacDonald’s novels that pinpoints the universal question—‘I dinna ken whaur I come frae’ . . . I don’t know where I come from. It is such an insightful cry of the human heart.”

  “That’s me,” said Loni. “All my life I haven’t known where I came from. Then I landed on Whales Reef, and an entire family heritage overwhelmed me. Maybe that’s partly why I left too. I suppose I needed time to absorb it all.”

  “And do you have it resolved?” asked David.

  “Not yet,” laughed Loni. “But I hope I’m getting there.”

  “Things are clarifying for you, then?”

  “In some ways, but these things take time to sort themselves out in your depths. You don’t just change your self-perception overnight. I realize that I’m both Loni and Alonnah. Now I just have to figure out how the two can live together, and how the Tulloch and Ford names fit into my new persona. And there’s my middle name Emily in there too.”

  Loni climbed to her feet and glanced around the meadow. It was not just hers anymore. Henceforth her private world of solitude would always be shared with this gentle Scottish “chief” she had not even known existed two months ago.

  “Maybe we should head back to the house,” she said. “By the way, where are you . . . I mean, what are your plans? Are you staying—?”

  “Your grandparents asked me if I would stay the night,” said David.

  “Oh, wonderful!” exclaimed Loni. “There’s so much I want to show you—our church, where I went to school, the farms of some of my relatives.”

  “It sounds like you love it here.”

  “I am learning to. Yes, for the first time in my life, I think I do.”

  59

  Spiritual Connections

  Returning to the Ford home through fields of ripening corn, Loni gave David as complete an account of her past as she had verbalized to anyone.

  “This terrain is certainly different from Whales Reef,” David was saying. “It is so warm and humid. It’s never like this in the Shetlands.”

  “It’s nice here now. But winters can be long and cold.”

  “Do you get snow?”

  “Sometimes a foot. That is rare, but it can build up to that and more.”

  They climbed over the fence, crossed the road, and started down the long drive toward the house. A white-haired figure stood watching their approach.

  “The perfect image of the prodigal’s waiting father,” said David. “Not to suggest a comparison between you and the prodigal, it’s the picture of the father in the distance that struck me.”

  “Perhaps there is more than a little truth in the parallel,” said Loni. “Prodigality doesn’t necessarily always mean drugs and crime or the life of a wastrel. I’m sure it takes as many forms as does home-going.”

  “You’re right. I was merely reminded of the image of God’s Fatherhood—always waiting expectantly for us, in the sense, as you say, that we are all prodigals in our own way.”

  They continued to the house. Returning her grandfather’s smile, Loni went to him. He opened his arms and received her into his embrace.

  “Grandpa,” she whispered. “You knew about my special place all along.”

  Her grandfather merely held her close. David continued up the steps to the porch and inside.

  For the rest of the afternoon David and William Ford talked like old friends. Their conversation ranged from theology to favorite books, from Studebakers and tractors to animal husbandry and crops and weather, even to woodwork, in which David, an admitted amateur, was full of questions for the man whose craftsmanship had been turning out handmade furnishings for half a century. With the eager humility of a son, David listened and absorbed the wisdom of the older man’s years.

  “Some of Alonnah’s happiest memories are of this place,” said Mr. Ford, smiling nostalgically as he and David walked through his workshop and the former showroom, filled with half-completed pieces he was working on. The aroma of oil and lacquer and sawdust filled David with reminders of another Carpenter’s shop long ago, the very workshop and training ground of Saviorhood.

  “This was where Alonnah got her first taste of the business world,” said Mr. For
d. “Once she began interacting with customers, she was hooked. I should have seen then, like Scuffy the Tugboat, that she was meant for bigger things.”

  Loni saw from an occasional glance that her grandmother was in awe of the fact that David was chief of a Scottish clan, however small it might be. Mrs. Ford was also deliriously happy to have two guests to make up rooms and cook for. She and Loni kept busy in the kitchen all afternoon. The spread they set on the table for supper was a feast that could have fed a dozen hungry men—roast beef and mashed potatoes, gravy, biscuits with fresh honey, peas, green beans, coleslaw, with three pies waiting in readiness—apple, chess, and shoo-fly, the latter two completely new experiences for David.

  The four talked all evening. Abundant stories from Loni’s childhood kept the conversation animated. For the first time in her life Loni was able to appreciate her early years in new ways, aided by the fact that most of the stories were accompanied by David’s infectious laughter. Popcorn and hot chocolate followed about nine, with no letup in the conversational flow.

  David was momentarily taken off guard when Loni shifted the conversation in his direction.

  “David, do you remember when we were on the way back from Lerwick and you said that your spiritual story was a long one? I am just as interested in yours as you are in mine.”

  “My turn to unburden the secrets of my past, eh?” said David.

  “If I can, it shouldn’t be so hard for you,” said Loni with a grin.

  “Touché!” laughed David. “But I would not want to bore your grandparents,” he added.

  “No fear of that, son,” said Mr. Ford. “Nothing is more interesting, nor eternally important, than an individual’s quest for truth, especially if that quest leads to God.”

  David became thoughtful. “There are more similarities in our stories than you might imagine,” he began after a minute. “Both my parents are gone too.”

  “I am sorry to hear that,” said Mr. Ford.

  David nodded in appreciation. “My mother died only seven years ago. I knew both my parents, so I did not face the pain you did, Alonnah,” he said, glancing toward Loni. “The loss of my father, however, was very traumatic. I was fourteen.”

  “What a devastating age to lose a father,” said Mrs. Ford tenderly.

  “He was a fisherman,” David went on. “He went down at sea. The curse of Shetland life. I was so overwhelmed when I heard that his boat had gone down, I almost jumped off one of the island’s cliffs.”

  “Goodness! I’m glad you didn’t!” exclaimed Loni.

  “Me too,” said David. “That’s where my quest to find God began, standing on the edge of the North Cliffs. I had just lost my father. Yet from out of the wind, swirling in the storm and the turbulence within my own soul, I heard the words, I am your Father . . . find your Father. It reminds me of what you told me, Alonnah, about how Quakers speak of God revealing himself inwardly.”

  “The Light Within,” said Mr. Ford. “It sounds to me as if God’s inner Light indeed revealed itself to you in that moment.”

  David smiled. “It saved my life,” he said. “However the words or sensations came, they filled me with a sense of quiet, not exactly peace but calm enough to keep me from throwing myself over the side. Gradually I knew God had spoken to me. Over the years that followed, though I was young and the process lasted well into adulthood, I saw that we all have two fathers, and that our earthly fathers are given us so that ultimately we might discover our heavenly Father. Some, like you, Alonnah, face the challenge of discovering God’s Fatherhood in the absence of earthly fatherhood altogether. I’m sure that isn’t easy.”

  “No, it hasn’t been easy,” said Loni, “but I have had the best grandfather in the world to demonstrate fatherhood to me.” She gave her grandfather a childlike smile. “And I continue to see more of what I was unable to perceive as a child. But I have been curious, David, as you told me, why your experience turned you away from the church if it brought you closer to God.”

  “That is the other side to my struggle to find faith.”

  David paused, and the room remained quiet a few moments.

  “We, too, would very much like to hear your story, son,” said Mr. Ford.

  David continued to gather his thoughts.

  60

  The Cancer of Spiritual Elitism

  “I’m afraid one of my proclivities is always to start at the beginning of things,” David began. “Every book I write begins with creation,” he added, chuckling.

  “Not a bad starting point,” said Mr. Ford.

  “My editors struggle with it a bit! They think I should get to the point quicker. In any event, my personal story is intrinsically tied to the religious history of Scotland. Many people are unaware of it, but Scotland was the second primary greenhouse, along with Geneva, where the Protestant Reformation flourished. Because of that, Scotland has been a deeply religious country for centuries. The Presbyterian Church of Scotland has dominated both religion and politics since the early 1600s.”

  “I was not aware of that,” said Loni.

  “Intrinsic to the whole reformational mentality,” said David, “has been an emphasis on experiential outpourings of spiritual fervor.”

  “The same tendency exists in our history,” said Mr. Ford. “In spite of our reputation of sitting silently in church, the followers of George Fox were so rowdy with jumping and stomping and shouting that they caused what was called ‘quaking.’ That’s where the name came from. They were the original Pentecostals, you might say, though without the speaking in tongues.”

  David nodded. “I had occasion to learn some of that during my study of the history of British religious movements at Oxford.”

  “Oxford! So we are in the presence of the intelligentsia,” chuckled Mr. Ford.

  “Hardly that, I assure you.”

  “I don’t know—Alonnah tells us you write books. That sounds like academia to me.”

  “A sideline,” laughed David. “But I am fascinated by Quakerism, not only about George Fox and William Penn, but also your American John Woolman.”

  “Ah yes, our great antislavery advocate. Have you heard of Thomas Kelly?” asked Mr. Ford.

  “The name rings a slight bell,” replied David.

  “He was a recent Quaker of the 1930s and ’40s. He is a great favorite of mine.”

  “I think I mentioned him to you, David,” said Loni. “I found one of his books out in the barn here and then discovered the same title in Ernest’s study. Oh, Grandpa, I would love to show you that room in the Cottage!”

  Mr. Ford shook his head. “I can hardly imagine myself gallivanting off to the wilds of Scotland! But continue with your story, son,” he said to David.

  David smiled. “I was making the point that emotional experientialism is deeply rooted in the reformational Protestantism of Scotland. One of the results has been a revivalist mentality. People are always on the lookout for new manifestations and enthusiastic outbreaks and mass conversions. Prophecy often also plays an important role in new movements. Swashbuckling new teachings promising the revelation that Jesus is coming back soon always attract great crowds.”

  “It has been exactly the same on this side of the Atlantic,” said Mr. Ford.

  “The effect is that periodic revivals have been part of evangelicalism’s religious history for centuries. These are often led by evangelists, preachers, and prophets with the ability to stir the masses. Your George Fox is a perfect example, perhaps even a prototype of the evangelicals who followed—Jonathan Edwards, the Wesley brothers, Moody, Spurgeon, Whitfield, even Billy Graham in recent years. And the common thread is usually evident that such movements originate with a single dynamic individual whose teaching or preaching or writing attracts a following. Would you agree, Mr. Ford?”

  Loni’s grandfather nodded. “With the sad result that pride easily replaces humility, influence replaces truth, and division is the inevitable result.”

  “Exactly,” rejoined David.
“Obviously it doesn’t always happen. Yet the danger is there nonetheless. With the best of motives, the lure of attracting a following seduces the best of men.”

  Both the young Scotsman and the aging Quaker were grieved by the words David had just spoken.

  “What often ensues in large movements and small,” he went on, “is that the leaders of movements become infected with a sense of their own power, of their ability to stir a crowd, to sway masses to embrace their teachings. Certainly many dynamic Christian leaders are humble and honorable, and no doubt usually the evangelistic motive is present. I’m sure it was with Fox, the desire to further God’s kingdom. Yet I don’t think the allure of the crowd to human vanity can be altogether discounted either.”

  “You have great insight into the dynamic of spiritual movements, son,” said Mr. Ford. “That is exactly what took place with George Fox. I would say that pride in his oratory became his thorn in the flesh.”

  “Then the travel sets in. You have British preachers and evangelists traveling to America, bringing whatever new twist of revival or experiential Christianity defines their particular brand, going ‘on tour,’ as they used to say. And you have Americans doing exactly the same thing, going across to our side of the pond.”

  “Again, though you are speaking of Scotland’s history, you have pinpointed one of Quakerism’s historical tendencies as well. Our John Woolman died while on tour to Quaker fellowships in England.”

  “I had no idea,” said David.

  Mr. Ford nodded. “A sad story. He contracted smallpox while in England.”

  “From my limited knowledge, however,” said David, “I don’t think Quakers generally were traveling to draw crowds.”

  “You’re right. Small home meetings of encouragement were the goal.”

  “Just the opposite has usually been the case in evangelicalism,” said David. “The measure of success is always the size of the crowd. Yet revivals and faith healing shows often teach fringe doctrines, promising the faithful various manifestations and blessings if they practice the good Reverend So-and-So’s particular methods and endorse his teachings. And of course contribute money to his ministry.”