The Shed That Fed a Million Children: The Mary’s Meals Story. Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow

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СКАЧАТЬ by an altar, and, after some months, Craig Lodge the guest house, became Craig Lodge Family House of Prayer. As well as a multitude of visitors who came for a day or two, others would stay longer and soon a little community was born (the Krizevac Community, named after the hill of the cross in Medjugorje), comprising young people who came to live with us, who wished to devote time to deepen their spirituality and discern their calling in life, or who perhaps just needed a place of refuge to recover from what life had thrown at them thus far.

      So our idyllic, quiet country house became a hive of activity. Having lived in a guest house or hotel since my earliest memory, I was used to others often being in our home. It was also not the first time Mum and Dad had made a dramatic decision that would alter the life of their family. Two years previously we had fostered Mark, a seven-year-old boy with a dreadful skin disease, who had been abandoned in a hospital in Glasgow. At twelve years old I was surprised and discomforted to find myself no longer the ‘baby of the family’. Suddenly we had in our midst a small boy with some serious behavioural problems, prone to spectacular outbursts of rage. We very quickly learnt from this little city kid a whole new range of swearing and ways to insult people. But Mark very soon became our much-beloved little brother and before long we adopted him. Not only did he become a permanent member of our family, but also for all of us an incredible blessing.

      But Mum and Dad’s latest decision to open their doors was a new kind of invasion of our family space; a nice friendly invasion, but not one that I always found easy. The stream of house visitors was incessant and the boundaries around private family space were sometimes nebulous. Most of my social life was with friends who I had grown up with in the village of Dalmally, and as I grew into my late teens most of my time was spent away from Craig Lodge, playing sport or in the local pub. In that company I would almost never speak of my faith, the retreat centre or my experiences at Medjugorje. It was almost as if I began to lead two separate lives. I never lost my faith, and still prayed every day, but outside of my family there was no one I would speak to about this. My closest companion was my brother Fergus and together we were part of a very tight-knit group of friends who had grown up together in the village. From an early age we were all fanatical shinty players (the Highland sport with a slightly unfair reputation for violence) and most Saturdays we would turn out for our village team, Glenorchy. A close relation to the Irish game of hurling, shinty is often described by those who see it for the first time as field hockey without rules. But shinty was my passion. I loved both the game itself and the fact that nearly all my teammates were boys I had grown up with. We had won the Scottish Cup at primary school and stuck closely together ever since. Our early glory inspired us to believe that we would one day be national champions at senior level, something our village had never managed, but as the years progressed our success diminished. This was probably largely due to the amount of time we spent in our village pub rather than training on the shinty pitch.

      Following the match, most Saturday evenings were spent in our local pub, or heading to one of the nearby towns and villages for a ceilidh or party. Often on Sunday mornings Fergus and I failed to get up in time for our local Mass, and so frequently Sunday afternoons were spent driving to attend an evening Mass as there was none near us. We never missed one ever, but most were attended with sore heads and parched throats. We would talk together about our faith and pray together – actually we had always done that from my earliest memory when we shared a bedroom – but we would never speak to our other friends about this part of ourselves, close though they were to us. So our double lives became more disconnected and as they did so I became less happy. But I never lost my faith or my very deep respect for my parents and their choices. I could see that what they were doing was something very beautiful, something that was changing the lives of many people. Their decisions made no worldly or economic sense; those who came to stay were invited to make a donation to cover costs, but those who could not afford to give anything were never turned away. In time, to make ends meet, they sold the salmon fishing they had owned on the Orchy and happily continued to welcome all with smiles. Mum’s home-made soup became famous far and wide; Dad’s ‘bear hugs’ even more so.

      Meanwhile, I headed to Stirling University to study history, although in my heart I never wanted to leave Argyll. Much of my childhood had been spent deer-stalking and working outside and I had never held a desire to move to a city, nor had any particular career in mind. And my best friends were all staying and finding jobs around Dalmally. But I had done well in my exams at school, and because it seemed expected of me I headed off for the university. History had been my favourite subject and so I chose to study that. I did not last long in Stirling, though. I found my shyness, which I had coped with so far by staying in the company of close friends when socializing, became crippling in this new environment. I could not talk to the other students never mind make friends with them, and every weekend I would hitch-hike home to see my friends and play shinty. With my beloved Glenorchy stripes on and shinty stick in my hands, I would become happy and confident again for ninety minutes. ‘Well played, the Big Man!’ the older men watching on the sideline would shout when I won a tackle or hit the ball up the field (fortunately, teammates such as Foxy, the Heekor and Pele had earned more imaginative nicknames). Then I would travel back to the university campus and hide in my room. After six months I nearly broke my mother’s heart by giving up and dropping out. I returned to Argyll to work outside again – planting trees for the Forestry Commission, stacking timber at a sawmill and then eventually becoming a salmon farmer. For six years I was part of a small team looking after the salmon that swam in the huge net cages that floated on Loch Craignish, a secluded deep-sea loch 4 miles from the nearest tar road. It was a place of great peace and I enjoyed the quiet but strenuous daily routine. It was good place to think and pray, and the boys I worked with became good friends too. I thought I would probably spend the rest of my days living and working in this part of Scotland and most of the time I was quite happy at that prospect, although the long, dark, cold winters often prompted thoughts of exotic warmer lands and new experiences.

      But then one rainy evening, in November 1992, Fergus and I walked down to our local pub for a pint. It was unusually quiet. There had been no shinty match that day because of a waterlogged pitch and very few of our mates had shown up. We began to chat about what we had seen on the television earlier that night. A news report had shown the suffering of the people in Bosnia-Herzegovina who had fled ethnic cleansing and who were now in refugee camps. The Yugoslavia we had visited as teenagers was tearing itself apart. In 1991, Slovenia and Croatia had declared themselves independent; a move which ignited a war between the Serbs, who had dominated the Yugoslav state, and those wishing to break away. A year later Bosnia-Herzegovina, home to Croats, Muslims and Serbs, exploded into civil war – a gruesome conflict played out in front of the world’s cameras. In Medjugorje, Our Lady Queen of Peace was still appearing to the same six young people, and the title she had given herself had taken on a new significance. Over the years her messages were invariably about the way to peace, about how wars would be avoided if we lived the Gospel message. Exactly ten years to the day after she appeared to those six children in Medjugorje, the first shots of the war had been fired. As the horror unfolded and a stream of reports of bloody massacres, ethnic cleansing and mass rape stunned modern-day Europe, the reason for some of Our Lady’s messages and the urgency with which she had spoken them became much more clear. Perhaps too few of those of us who had been privileged to hear and believe her messages had really ever put them into practice in our lives.

      This particular bulletin had focused on a camp near Medjugorje and probably for this reason we began talking about how much we would like to help the people there. We knew of a group in London that was organizing the transport of aid to Medjugorje, and we began discussing the idea of making an appeal locally for aid and driving it out with one of these convoys. After closing time, walking back home alongside the black river which had, all those years earlier, nearly stopped us from visiting Medjugorje, we talked ever more enthusiastically about a return visit.

      The next day we shared the idea with the rest of our family and almost immediately, before we could ponder it further, our little appeal was launched. Mum and Dad phoned various friends and regular visitors to the retreat centre to ask if they would help, and before long parcels of food, clothing and medicines were being delivered to our house. Donations of money СКАЧАТЬ