Ascending the Mountain

How the beauty of the Church attracted Lucy Fraser to convert to Catholicism.

Jan 10, 2025

“Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction – so easy to lapse into – that the world has been made for humans by humans...By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us.” – Rob MacFarlane, ‘Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit.’

The remoteness of the Highlands, with it’s sweeping purple hills and ancient landscape, draws people in for the deeply physical, and thus spiritual change of perspective. The wilderness has always been a place where people face themselves and in doing so, open up to a dialogue with God.

One aspect of modern evangelisation efforts that has struck me as a convert is the lack of conversation around the need for the mystical – a dense spirituality. People of the British Isles think they know Christianity because they performed in the nativity as a child, but the de-sacralisation of the Faith during the Reformation has left them with only a skeleton of the true Faith. Westerners all too often try to find this meat in eastern religions or New Age pseudo-spirituality because “man is by nature and vocation a religious being” (Catechism 44) and they yearn for a journey, a Quest.

Pilgrimage to ancient ruins where even now it feels like there is something meaningful emanating from the stones, was the first step in my conversion; the Bishop of the Aberdeen Diocese has overseen Mass at both Elgin Cathedral and Kinloss Abbey ruins and has been at the helm of the Greyfriars to Pluscarden pilgrimage for many years, in an incredible way to show the community the immutable beauty of the Church.

In a similar way there is a local story about a Mrs Gordon coming alone to pray in the ruins of Pluscarden Abbey before it was re-built – I think she understood the romance of it. There again is this romance between God and His Church, using beauty as its signpost.

Pluscarden Abbey in Moray is an island that remains still while the world speeds around in a dramatic time lapse of creation and erosion; and yet it has itself eroded and been renewed throughout it’s history. It has remained a sanctuary as well as a beacon in the forests of northern Scotland, as the Church itself has in the spiritual desert of recent centuries.

One might ask what the significance of a sanctuary is? The sanctuary is the Body of Christ, as Bishop Hugh Gilbert explains in a homily upon the re-dedication of Pluscarden Abbey Church:

“When Jesus stood in the Temple… He pointed elsewhere. ‘Destroy this sanctuary, and in three days I will raise it up.’ He was speaking of the sanctuary that was his body, and when Jesus rose from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the scripture and the words he had said.”

When you walk into Pluscarden Abbey there is a very Celtic looking tapestry above the altar to the Blessed Virgin that reads: Where were you when I laid up the foundations of the earth? (Job 38:4) This feels apt when one is enclosed by the hills and coastline of the Moray Firth. Interesting that this question is asked above the altar to the Blessed Virgin, Mary who also guarded the faith, the new Covenant in her womb and made a perilous journey (a pilgrimage) to Bethlehem to birth Him.

The Catechism (#175) says “we guard with care the faith… as if in an excellent vessel” and that the faith within, by God’s spirit is constantly renewed; I see in our Faith this Pentecostal flame, carried with great care by St Brendan as he navigates the treacherous sea (full of monsters as the legends say), the dense forest and marshland of western Alba and into Pictish territory to preach the Gospel; then tended to by subsequent saints as they built their monasteries and hermitages.

Later on after the Reformation in Scotland, the Faith, this flame, was closely guarded in the darkest spaces of the Highlands, sheltered by clandestine priests as if in a Sacrament House, but shared keenly among pilgrims, lighting their lamps at great risk to their own lives. A handful of faithful, most notably the House of Gordon, and later on after the uprising of 1745 the ‘heather priests’ of Scalan College, trained priests and administered the Holy Mass in secluded glens (in the “Siberia of Scotland”) while their college was burned down by Red Coats. I can only imagine the inventive ways they had to navigate this oppression, leaving covert signs for the quiet believers to find on the path – a true Quest.

When thinking about modern evangelisation and concerns about identity and political upheaval as was mentioned in the recent Synod on Synodality, we can consider those first missionaries in Scotland and their uncertainties about the future. We must remember that Christ came to fishermen to make his disciples and preached to tax collectors and prostitutes, and in this spirit St Moluag, St Columba and others sought out those whom it was believed were beyond the accessibility of Christ’s Gospel.

There is beauty and powerful witness reminiscent of the lives of the apostles in the dangerous missions of the faithful and also in the conversion of outcasts and prodigal sons. We are called to “let our light shine before others” and Church tradition is the sanctuary and beacon in the darkness of the modern world; but we must not attempt to make the Faith acceptable to the world as a means of reaching our marginalised brethren, of whom we have a long held custom of reaching out to first.

We may no longer be hiding our priests or seeing them martyred like Blessed John Ogilvie, because our desert now is one of apathy and ignorance of the need for the Faith, despite the growing ill mental health in the West. Though our paths look different in the modern world, pilgrimage is as crucial now as it has ever been.

The Church is "the pillar and bulwark of the truth" (Catechism 171) and as Pope Benedict XVI said in a homily examining Psalm 24 (at the 22nd World Youth Day 2007) “And let us understand properly that truth and love are not abstract values; in Jesus Christ they have become a person. By following him, I enter into the service of truth and love. By losing myself, I find myself.”

“Who may ascend the mountain of the Lord?
Who may stand in his holy place?
One who has clean hands and a pure heart,
who does not turn his mind to vanities
or swear an oath in order to deceive.
He will receive a blessing from the Lord
and vindication from God, his Saviour.
This is the generation of those who seek him,
who seek the face of the God of Jacob.” – Psalm 24:3-6

The essential conditions for those who ascend, to paraphrase His Holiness from the same homily, must be that they question themselves about God and are seeking His face. He says that the Psalm interprets the interior ascent with Christ – that same Christ who is both shepherd and sanctuary – but as with the pilgrimages of the Northern Saints, the missions of Heather Priests and today with the monks at Pluscarden Abbey and Papa Stronsay, this ascent or pilgrimage in the wild was and is a reality that mirrors the internal experience. Archbishop Sheen said to “live each day as you would climb a mountain”, keeping the summit in mind but appreciating the journey.

The spiritual desert can also be a densely populated city with innumerable distractions – and so, perhaps these distractions are the modern equivalent of the monsters many of the saints faced along the way.

The aforementioned apathy has replaced the open hostility (at least in the British Isles) of bygone eras. The world will always want the Church to fall in line with the status quo, but let us be counter-cultural! For “If the world hate you, know ye, that it hath hated me before you.”(John 15:18)

There are movements of people intrigued by the medieval depictions of the Church, the grotesques on fonts and pews and the stories of the Saints and Martyrs. So, how do we tend the flame and light the beacons across the peaks of Britain? By ascending the mountain, who challenges you to climb it, by boldly embracing the heritage of the faith and the mystical tradition rather than easy roads and quiet acquiescence to current trends.

Modern converts can offer an insight into what attracted them, and increasingly it is a rejection of what the world is offering us: radical ideologies based on a plurality of truths and hedonism. So, let us take the Faith back to the wilds where it all began on these Islands, for that clarity of perspective with our passionate wild saints of the North and those first Scottish priests, who standing before uncertain paths kept Christ as their torch, did not seek to please men (Galatians 1:10) but lived the Gospel.

By Lucy Fraser

You can find more from Lucy on her own substack here. She is a Catholic convert and home educator in the Scottish Highlands, and a regular at Pluscarden Abbey.

Get our full list of Scotland’s saints for January below; most notable amongst them is St Kentigern or Mungo, patron of Glasgow.

A Calendar of Scottish Saints