The photo was taken late in the day last Spring at Loch Skene, a couple of miles along the road. It was a swan convention, one of those moments when beauty all but forbids trying to make such a coincidence of loveliness into a digital memory. George Macleod's book of prayers, The Whole Earth Shall Cry Glory, is one of the devotional treasures of the Scottish Kirk. These prayers are carefully crafted by one of the most practical mystics in the history of the Church of Scotland. The term mystic shouldn;t be interpreted as meaning vague, soft, evasive of the grit and grind of reality. As far as Macleod was concerned his mysticism was both otherworldly and this-worldly; because it is the awareness of that other tworld, and its proximity to the affairs of this worold that suffused his preaching and writing with a passionate sense of the closeness of the holy to all that we do. He famously described Iona as a 'thin place', a place where heaven and earth are separated by the thinnest of veils.
This man could sit on an Edinburgh pavement eating fish and chips with young lads he had bribed to come to church with the promise of a fish supper; he could galvanise unemployed tradesmen to come and work at the restoration of Iona Abbey and gift to countless seekers a place tome and feel and see and discover the presence of God in the beauty of creation; he could stand as a man in his nineties and deliver an impassioned plea to the General Assembly for a principled and unerring condemnation of nuclear weapons and the abhorrence of the doctrine of deterrence. From such a man comes this prayer, its tenderness and peaceableness with God's creation, all but palpable. Pray it, and enjoy it.
Invisible we see You, Christ above us.
With earthy eyes we see above us, clouds or sunshine, grey or bright.
But with the eye of faith we know you reign:
instinct in the sun ray
speaking in the storm,
warming and moving all creation, Christ above us.
We do not see all things subject unto You.
But we know that man is made to rise.
Already exalted, already honoured, even now our
citizenship is in heaven
Christ above us, invisible we see You.
Invisible we see You, Christ beneath us.
With earthly eyes we see beneath us stones and dust and dross,
fit subjects for the analyst’s table.
But with the eye of faith, we know You uphold.
In You all things consist and hang together:
the very atom is light energy
the grass is vibrant,
the rock pulsate.
All is in flux, turn but a stone and an angel moves.
Underneath are the everlasting arms.
Unknowable we know you, Christ beneath us.
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