Linn of Muick, Duncan MacMillan

“Tell me who has died?” “I have” Waking with this mysterious question and answer hanging in my conscious awareness, I was haunted by it for several days. The mystery of ‘dying to self’ is much more profound and imminent now than when I was younger and much more black and white about virtually everything. Looking back now on how I experienced scriptures on death to self, they seemed like an invitation to a heroic endeavour, something at which I could excel if I gritted my teeth enough. By effort and personal application, I could achieve death to self. Now it seems much bigger than anything I could manage. It feels more like something I’m falling into. And whereas my own intentionality is significant, I know myself to be experiencing the truth or Richard Rohr’s wise but paradoxical statement “You can’t get there, you can only be there”.

Gus MacLeod