Aberdeenshire is a very large shire. A run in the car the other day was a round journey of around 100 miles, and we never came near crossing into any of the neighbouring local authorities. Given its size Aberdeenshire presents itself in so many different landscapes – sea and coast, mountain and glen, arable, cow and sheep farming, forest and moor.
Running throughout the shire is a network of minor roads and single tracks with passing places. It really is possible to travel miles and miles on these traffic capillaries and not encounter anyone else – well apart from the occasional tractor. Our own meanderings took us into Glenbuchat, a place that used to be a hidden hamlet known only to those who had their annual holiday in one of the under developed cottages scattered along the way. Now most of those cottages are gone, mainly because they are now overdeveloped second homes or holiday lets.
Still, so long as there is still life in the glen, and the occasional visitor can still enjoy a landscape more or less maintained and retaining its character as rural agricultural Aberdeenshire, there's little reason to be anxious about the continuing joy to be found in those hidden places of solace and silence. And there, up one of the lesser used single track dead-ends, is the Old Kirk of Glenbuchat.
I've often wondered if old places of worship retain the vibrations of previous prayers and praise within the ancient stones of a sacred space. The Precentor's tuning fork is still there, a reminder of a past community in which singing of the Psalms was as necessary to the soul, as ploughing and farming the soil to keep it fertile.
This parish and church was born in the late 1400s after a tragedy, when some of those coming to worship were drowned crossing the River Don. It has twice been rebuilt in 1629 and again in 1792. Now it has an annual communion service on the third Sunday of August, a tradition now centuries old.
The photograph shows a church enclosed within a graveyard. In taking it I was aware of the long slow decline in the numbers of those for whom church retains any significance or even relevance for human life and flourishing. The communion of saints is made up of the gathered company of Christian believers throughout the world and across the centuries. An isolated Kirk, in a Highland glen, where worship has all but ceased after more than five centuries, could be reason to sigh in sad resignation, and hard to resist nostalgia for what has been lost.
But as I stood there, trying to align my own faith with those for whom this was the place of worship, communion and prayer, I prayed a prayer of both relinquishment and hope. To relinquish the past is not to invalidate or devalue it; but to surrender it to the providence of God. Hope is to go on asking, "So what is the form and mission of the church in our own times, and how do we till the soil of our own souls so that we too are fertile with ideas, and fruitful in our living of the Gospel of Jesus?"
T S Eliot had it right about the church. For all our human strategies and anxieties, ultimately the church as the Body and presence of the risen Christ, as the community of the Kingdom of God, lives and moves and has its being in the grace and mercy of God. T S Eliot had it right about the church in the flux and furores of human history:
There shall always be the Church and the World
And the heart of Man
Shivering and fluttering between them, choosing and chosen,
Valiant, ignoble, dark and full of light
Swinging between Hell Gate and Heaven Gate.
And the Gates of Hell shall not prevail.
Or to put it in the language of the church in much more militant mood:
The Church's one foundation
is Jesus Christ, her Lord;
she is his new creation
by water and the Word.
From heav'n he came and sought her
to be his holy bride;
with his own blood he bought her,
and for her life he died.
Elect from ev'ry nation,
yet one o'er all the earth;
her charter of salvation:
one Lord, one faith, one birth.
One holy name she blesses,
partakes one holy food,
and to one hope she presses,
with ev'ry grace endued.
Relinquishment then, of what is past. Hope as we live in our own time. But relinquishment must include gratitude for faithful worship and practice of the way of Christ, and repentance for failures in such faithfulness. And hope when it is rooted in the grace of God, becomes hope which is imaginative, creative and energised by love for Christ, and keeping in step with the Spirit hope with a vision of human community towards which we work with humility, welcome, generosity, and joy.
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