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Fr Frank's Reflections

Follow the Star

A few years ago I had come over from Scotland to Belfast for meetings at the end of November.  I had travelled on a beautifully still, bright, crisply cold Autumn day, but when I was due to go back, icy gales and storms were sweeping the Irish Channel.  The small, fast ferry from Belfast on which I was to return was cancelled, and I was transferred on to The Pride of Rathlin, a bigger, slower, more conventional ferry, sailing from Larne to Cairnryan.  As I drove from Belfast to Larne, with not much time to spare, I came upon the inevitable road works, and a big sign loomed up in front of me that said, “Wait for the Light.”  So I waited for this light to tell me to drive on, and I waited and I waited and I waited.  I waited so long in fact, that my mind began to drift, and I started to think what a marvellous slogan this was for Advent.  “Wait for the Light.”  And of course I got so engrossed in these thoughts that the light came and went and I missed it, and so I had to start waiting all over again.

I arrived in time, and was quite relieved that, despite the gales and storms still raging, the ferry was going to sail.  I had a long standing arrangement to speak at a St. Andrew’s Dinner the following night and I would have been embarrassed to miss it.  Part way through the sailing I pulled my coat around me and went up on deck, something that would have been impossible on the smaller, faster ferry.  I unsteadily, because of the wind, nothing else, made my way to the rail, and looked overboard into the raging sea.  As I stood there, and felt the power of the wind and the roll of the waves, I thought of St. Rule, the keeper of the bones of St. Andrew, who, in order to keep Andrew’s relics safe from invaders, set sail from Greece in response to a vision of an angel.  No one knows where he was heading, but the voyage was difficult, and along the way the boat was hit by storms and gales and was forced to land along the east coast of Scotland, at a place called Kilrymont in Fife, and Rule just buried the bones where he landed, and later on the cathedral and town of St. Andrew’s took shape around that spot, and it became one of the great pilgrimage centres of Europe.

Of course we Scots would claim that this was God’s intention all along, and that it was God who brewed up the storm in the first place and brought the boat to land.  So as I stood above board on The Pride of Rathlin, thinking of my patron saint, with the gale and the storm still unabated, and Cairnryan not yet in sight, it was comforting for me to know that there could be a providence of God, even in storms.  I looked into the sky and saw a solitary star, shining very brightly, as if to lead us home, and I felt very safe, and I even knew that my talk for the following night was taking shape amid the wind and the waves, through the grace of the Spirit, and by the light of that same star.

Have a wonderful Advent, follow the star, and this coming Wednesday spare a thought for this poor Scot in exile.  Take time to celebrate the Feast of St. Andrew, and if you need any other reason, just remember that the bones of our own beloved saint that we care for here in Mount Argus, are the bones of Blessed Charles of St. Andrew.