Amy Liptrot grew up on a farm on the west coast of mainland Orkney. It was a loving but troubled childhood – her father was bi-polar. As a child she attended her mother’s charismatic church and believed wholeheartedly.
Amy tells her story in her wonderful, life-filled memoir The Outrun: I have just seen the recent movie starring Saoirse Ronan. The outrun refers to farmland furthest from the steading, but symbolises ‘the edge’, the place where Amy often finds herself.
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She abandoned faith in her mid-teens, and later relocated to London. She describes her chaotic decline into alcoholism, its impact on her life and relationships and her eventual return to sobriety with help from an intensive group therapy course and the Alcoholics Anonymous programme.
She describes her return to Orkney, her continuing struggles with the impulse to drink, and the slow healing she finds through connecting with nature. She finds freedom, and life in all its fullness, having realised that ‘a sober life could not only be possible but full of hope, dazzling’.
Christians are more used to hearing stories like this in a Christian context. And the AA programme includes a call to recognise and depend on a higher power: ‘God as you understand Him.’
But Amy has an ‘aversion’ to religion, styling herself a ‘21st century heretic’. Yet she describes truly transcendental experiences – glimpses of a richer reality beyond the merely material: “I wake in the night and experience an instant of raised consciousness, a new state that is to ‘awake’ what awake is to sleep.”
Amy concludes that religion is simply another way of attempting to access the transcendental ‘seeking the same highs of experience and places of comfort’ which others find ‘at raves, in drunkenness, in love, in superstition, in mania’. Is religious faith merely one pathway among many constructive or destructive routes to higher levels of experience?
The key question is this: During ‘transcendental’ experiences, what are we connecting with? I wonder what mental picture Amy has of the God she recoils from? Often, our images of God are small and inadequate. But if God exists, then God is so immense, so beyond our imagining that none of our metaphors or words or doctrines or ideas can fully describe God.
God is Transcendence, the source of all love, all goodness, all constructive experiences of wonder. God beckons us into an enchanted dimension surrounding us.
I wonder if someone in Amy’s position might come to re-read her own wonderful story as centred on this Enchanter, meeting a young woman in the outrun of her life, prompting her to change, working with her to move forward, encountering her anonymously in the wild rugged loveliness of the Orkney Islands?