Earlier this week I was in Edinburgh and several wee happenings came together to make it an interesting day.
I was in Edinburgh doing research amongst some of the personal papers of George Macleod, founder of the Iona Community, Kirk minister, Peer of the Realm, Peace activist and apologist, and, undoubtedly, a man of prayer. I was spending the time researching his prayers – an odd word for the process of literary and theological criticism, which involves reading, comparing, analysing, organising, of all things, written prayers. As if one man’s devotions should ever be the object of another person’s intellectual curiosity!
Many of those prayers were typed on A6 paper of the kind inserted in small leather bound loose-leaf folders in the days before they became ‘personal organisers’. Typed – complete with deletions, insertions, revisions. In several of them, like a palimpsest, you could trace the first draft, the corrections, the re-wording to capture the particular nuance of spiritual longing which guided the prayer towards completion. Macleod was passionate about the worthiness and worth of what was offered in worship, and therefore careful in the spiritual discipline of finding fit words, to speak the Word, of the Word, fittingly.
But later I called up another folder, this time his Peace sermons – and there was his address from the mid-80’s,to the Church of Scotland General Assembly, about Trident. The shaky but still bold scrawl of handwritten words, aides memoire scored into the paper, reminders for a nonogenarian clergyman outraged by the blasphemy of nuclear weapons and not wanting to be short of ideas. I thought about the current Moderator, the Right Reverend Alan MacDonald, a good friend and supportive colleague from my Aberdeen days, and a long time outspoken critic of nuclear deterrence as an acceptable policy, and one involved in recent protests at the renewal of Trident. And this on the day of the vote at Westminster. Well on the way home, walking down the Waverley ramp, who’s coming towards me but Alan – and I was given that most efficacious of informal sacraments, the Moderatorial hug.(Photo shows footwashing after a long march of protest against Trident, another sacramental act of political and spiritual critique).
Earlier I’d been in the sandwich shop near Greyfriars Bobby and had ordered a grilled Foccacio with chorizo, brie and black olives – and sat beside Jock (on an ex-church pew – complete with worn varnish and backside-numbing hardness), a pretty good busker, complete with guitar, black coffee, a Snickers and a good line in conversation. He’s off to a gig in – well, where else – Mexico – at the end of April. Somebody heard him sing, thought he’d be a good support act, and so off he’d go. Long way to go for a gig I suggested – ‘Aye but I love eatin’ Mexican – it’s the chillies’, he said. Fair enough. And I hope that, and much else, works out for him.
Then accosted by a young lad thrusting a flyer at me asking if I was interested in the concert. Not your usual big name rock stuff – no, Russell Watson and Kathryn Jenkins. Probably costs a fortune, so I declined pleasantly and continued the hike along Princes St to Waterstones – I have shop tokens remember? I’ve still got them!
So, a hug from the Moderator who mixes politics with religion as a way of being faithful to Jesus; touching and handling the prayers of Lord Macleod legible and still prayable with all their corrections; a blether with Jock about his trip to Mexico to do a gig; a concert I didn’t know about and might just decide to go to, a wee bookshop crawl albeit unsuccessful. Not a bad day – aye, and ‘we are being renewed day by day’, by the grace of Christ, encountered at times, in the people who walk into our lives and walk out again…, a’ the time!…..if we live witttily enough to notice.
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