A communion reflection for Sunday September 25 7pm

Readings: Exodus 17:1-7; Philippians 2:5-11

On Friday night, I tuned into the auditions for the TV programme X-Factor – this time, the American version. Thousands upon thousands of people lined up, waiting for hours in the sweltering heat – seeking something special beyond their ordinary lives; hoping for a chance; longing to be chosen – to be discovered as the next hot favourite in the pop music world.

There’s no word to describe some of the auditions, other than plain awful.  Along with the audience and the judges, I found myself wincing as some excruciatingly dreadful attempts to sing were offered by obviously deluded people, who thought they had the X-factor!  Occasionally we were all spell-bound by some extraordinary talent.

But the one person, who stayed with me long after the credits rolled, was 49 year old Dexter.  He swaggered on to the stage (a predictable “Mick Jagger and James Brown all rolled into one”[1], with his vintage disco dude heels and his sparkly Memphis jacket) and delivered a copycat rendition of a 1970s James Brown song.  The judges were quick to criticise his lack of originality, hinting at his phony attempts to be what he was not; and yet somehow, they could see the potential that lay behind the mimicry, the sparkles and the crazy behaviour.  “You know,” judge Simon Cowell addressed Dexter, “Forget the craziness, I’d like to hear you sing something else.  15 seconds a capella – just you.”   After some poignant moments of silence, and then with tears sparkling in his eyes, Dexter “offered up a soulful, passionate minute”, drawing delighted screams from the audience and warm affirmations from the judges.  Stripped to his soul, we caught a glimpse of the genuine, truly human Dexter, whose song will continue to be heard.

How often are we stripped to our souls?  How often, do people see the genuine you?  So often, this only happens at times of challenge and difficulty; like Dexter, who had reached the point where he had nothing to lose. Sometimes it’s at those points of deepest despair that our true selves are revealed.

I think that’s part of what is being described in what we know as the Philippian hymn that is our reading tonight – here Jesus is described as stripped to his soul.  Here, the one who could have acted god-like, strutting across the stage of life in power and glory, demanding that people bow to him, instead emptied himself of all greatness, becoming genuinely human – like us – providing us with a role model so that we too might discover our X-Factor.

John O’Donahue’s poem “The unknown self” might help us recognise our genuine human self, which lies within:

So much of what delights and troubles you

Happens on a surface

You take for ground.

Your mind thinks your life alone,

Your eyes consider air your nearest neighbor,

Yet it seems that a little below your heart

There houses in you an unknown self

Who prefers the patterns of the dark

And is not persuaded by the eye’s affection

Or caught by the flash of thought.

It is a self that enjoys contemplative patience

With all your unfolding expression,

Is never drawn to break into light

Though you entangle yourself in unworthiness

And misjudge what you do and who you are.

It presides within like an evening freedom

That will often see you enchanted by twilight

Without ever recognizing the falling night,

It resembles the under-earth of your visible life:

All you do, and say and think is fostered

Deep in its opaque and prevenient clay,

It dwells in a strange, yet rhythmic ease

That is not ruffled by disappointment;

It presides in a deeper current of time

Free from the force of cause and sequence

That otherwise shapes your life.

Were it to break forth into day,

Its dark light might quench your mind

For it knows how your primeval heart

Sisters every cell of your life

To all your known mind would avoid.

Thus it knows to dwell in you gently,

Offering you only discreet glimpses

Of how you construct your life.

At times, it will lead you strangely,

Magnetized by some resonance

That ambushes your vigilance.

It works most resolutely at night

As the poet who draws your dreams,

Creating for you many secret doors,

Decorated with pictures of your hunger.

It has the dignity of the angelic

That knows you to your roots,

Always awaiting your deeper befriending

To take you beyond the threshold of want,

Where all your diverse strainings

Can come to wholesome ease.[2]

Here at the Table, where we remember our calling to be the Body of Christ, here we can find our true souls revealed.  “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus”, the Philippian hymn urges.  Here at the Table, we can be taken beyond the threshold of our wanting, to that place of wholesome ease, where we sing the authentic song of our soul, becoming one with the Horizon of our Longing.

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[1] http://popcrush.com/simon-cowell-x-factor-dexter-haygood/

[2] “The unknown self”, John O’Donohue, Benedictus 2007, p.158-159.

Sermon for Sunday 18 September

Exodus 16:2-3, 11-15; Matthew 20:1-16

It’s not fair!  The story – or parable – Jesus tells, to give us a picture of how the kingdom of heaven might be, is totally not fair!  Imagine yourself as one of those workers getting up before sunrise, heading for the market place, hoping against hope you might find work today – enough to provide food for your family.  It brings to mind the family I heard of in Myanmar, who, each morning have their meagre breakfast of rice, sell their plates and utensils to pay their transport costs to the city, where they desperately hope they will earn enough money at least to pay for the return trip home, another meagre meal and the plates from which they will eat.  For many of us, it is extremely difficult to imagine the privation and despair of such hand-to-mouth existence.  Getting to the market place early, hoping to be employed, trying to find some edge over those whose need is just as great – the silent cry: “pick me, choose me to work for you” – the defiant, humiliation when not chosen – the surge of hope, the knowledge of food on the table tonight, for those who are hired.  It’s a way of life many experience; and one most of us can hardly imagine – but we need to put ourselves there to get the full weight of the parable.  For those listening to its first telling, there would be no difficulty in understanding;  Jesus would need no reference to Myanmar to make his point; his listeners knew this grinding poverty only too well.  But then, comes the twist in the tale: the landowner returns to the market-place – hiring those who had lost hope of employment, those whose chance of a meal that night had faded – employing them for half a day, quarter of a day, or just an hour – and then, amazingly, paying these later comers a full day’s wages!   And you, as one of those who had secured work in that fickle job market, who had worked all day in the hot sun, sweating over the vines, how would you feel about those who hadn’t worked for anything like as long as you; how would you feel about them getting a full day’s pay?    Wouldn’t you, at least, expect a bonus ... something extra for all your hard work?  Wouldn’t you complain too?  Of course, if you were one of the ones who had been waiting all day, apparently hopelessly, with no work in sight, it would be a different story.  The full day of wages, placed in your hand, would, no doubt, be an unexpected delight.  But no matter whether you are one of the thrilled or the complaining, the paying of identical wages couldn’t be described as fair. 

And that, said Jesus, is what the kingdom of heaven is like ... the kingdom of heaven has a different set of cultural norms – it’s where generosity is abundant and where there are no bonuses; it's where those who find themselves at the end of the line, empty without any resources, all of a sudden discover hope; it’s where there’s no place for entitlement, no place for meritocracy; there is blessing and abundance for everyone.  And that’s not fair...

From deep within our tradition we know that Creation not fair - but good  – and somehow, Jesus’ parables call us to participate in and contribute to that goodness – even when it means that those who assume they are entitled to some particular blessing or privilege will be disappointed; and those, who have been told implicitly and explicitly that they are not entitled to blessing and privilege, have every right to expect that generosity.

Let’s take a detour for a moment, to ask: what is this Kingdom of heaven/Kingdom of God - a term used often enough in the gospels for us to recognise as a significant concept in Jesus’ teaching – but what exactly does it mean?   Like so much of Jesus’ teaching, it is ambiguous.   For one thing, the language is problematical.  God’s good kingdom is the antithesis of Kingdoms of this world with their layers and levels of interconnected dominion and privilege.  To get away from these overtones, some scholars have attempted to use other terms – such as God’s Reign, God’s Common-wealth, God’s Realm or, the one I prefer to use, God’s Kin-dom. 

The gospels contain many different pictures of the kin-dom – each providing a facet of a much more complex idea, which tease and entice us into flourishing abundant life.  As we take the broad, multi-faceted perspective, we find God’s kin-dom is a Loving Goodness already known and yet, also, still to be known; a state of being at the horizon of our longing.  It’s a Way of living demonstrated and taught by Jesus, which we, the Body of Christ, can also experience amongst and within us.  Kin-dom living is fullness of life in companionship within a living community.

So, having taken that diversion, we now must address the question : so what?  If this parable is about the unfair, goodness and generosity of the kin-dom – where blessing and privilege are not linked to merit or work –then what does this mean for us as a community of faith?

Is it an accident that this parable is about the allocation of money?   (We all know that ministers aren’t meant to talk about money – so it can’t be that, can it?)  Is it an accident that this parable follows immediately after his encounter with the rich young man, after which Jesus comments to his disciples “it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven”?   Isn’t it interesting that while some would say ministers shouldn’t talk about money and many people would shroud their own personal finances in a veil of privacy, Jesus talks about money a great deal and very publicly?  Contrary to what many suggest, he also says almost nothing about what we should believe, or who is acceptable in leadership.  Could our silence surrounding money be a culturally imposed protection, ensuring we do not face the challenges Jesus made – and continues to make?  What would it be like if we were to tear down these imposed silences and consider living out the kindom described in this parable – reflecting the generosity of the landowner?

I’ve been interested to hear recently of several  young people in this country – young people in their thirties, usually from outside the church – dissatisfied with the way in which money and the market have been given almost human status; disillusioned that those on our rich list, are celebrated for having created so-called ‘deserved’ wealth.  Some of these young people are making very practical choices – discarding materialism, stripping their belongings to a bare minimum, choosing to live simply so that others may simply live; others are providing an academic critique – showing how average New Zealanders create wealth in many different ways, even as the ‘small, distant [wealthy] elite’ deny the role they play.[1]  Where is the Church in this challenge?  Where are we making our voices heard for God’s bias of generosity towards those not to be found on any rich list, but struggling to make ends meet?

I was talking this week with Janet, convenor of our Looking Outwards Goal Group.  She was sharing with me the concerns that Christian World Service face in the cuts the government has made to overseas aid.  In trying to address the problem, CWS suggests that parishes make a commitment to a particular project.  I found my heart sinking – not another project; aren’t we doing enough already – it seems an uphill challenge constantly trying to enthuse people to give to the many projects we are already committed to – Myanmar, Presbyterian Support, Orokonui, the Prison, APW projects, Christmas Appeal, Hospital Chaplaincy – it seems to go on and on.  And then, that doesn’t even begin to address our apparent inability to meet our church basic budget.  I returned to my study and was confronted by today's gospel reading…

I could only wonder what a community based on kin-dom generosity would look like.  And I wasn’t sure.  I had a feeling it might be a lively church, avoiding complacent comfort, well-known for its over-flowing generosity to those considered 'the least' in society, bravely challenging a debt-crippled world to live within its means, enthusiastically embracing many projects which transform peoples’ lives, over-subscribing to its own budget – flourishing in all ways – but I wasn’t sure ….I wonder what you think, you who sit in these pews perhaps very occasionally, or maybe faithfully each Sunday?  How does this parable speak to you, and how will we engage with it so that our life together and beyond will be transformed – so that we may live the kin-dom way?   How you respond, will make a difference ….

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[1] Campbell Jones, Senior Lecturer, Department of Sociology, University of Auckland “Real creators of wealth not a small, distant elite” The Dominion Post 26 August 2011, Opinion, p.4.

Evening Sermon for 9/11 11 September 2011

Readings:

Matthew 18:21-35; Exodus 15:1b-11, 20-21       

Were you disturbed by the reading from the Hebrew Scriptures tonight?  I certainly was – and I hope you might have been too.  I hope we all listened carefully, wondering how, on this day – or any day – we might pay attention to what the Spirit is saying to the church, even as we hear words of celebration at the slaughter of one’s enemies?

It’s September 11 2011 – ten years on from 9/11 – how do we, as Christians, speak about this tragedy?  This evening’s readings offer two different approaches – both owned by our Judaeo-Christian heritage:  the story of a God, who is on our side, drowning our enemies ... and the story of a man of God, who teaches us to turn the other cheek, to offer love and healing – and always, to forgive and forgive and forgive....

Our stories of faith invite us into the occasions of our own life when we are faced with choice – choices of how we will react in the face of fear, terror and oppression.  Is our only option to return violence with violence; will we delight in the vanquishment of those who have hurt us; or will we respond with openness and forgiveness – even when we have been hurt to the core of our being? 

Some of you may know of Etty Hillesum, who lived for only 29 short years in the middle of last century; a vivacious, sharply intelligent young woman, who had that magic ability to light up the world wherever she went.  Like many such lively people, she also lived with occasional bouts of depression.  Very self aware, she thought of herself as “‘a small battlefield’ where the problems of her time were being fought out.”  As she came to understand herself – and her faith – she seemed to welcome these difficulties, believing “we should all make ourselves available for those struggles.  We should accommodate them, pay attention, care about them.”

What Etty wanted to do more than anything else was to write – “it drove her mad that she didn’t even know the words to describe the colors she saw.” [1]  But increasingly, in 1941-Amsterdam, what she found she had to pay attention to, was the way her life – and the lives of so many other people – “were being complicated … by the fact that they were Jews living within the tightening noose of [Hitler’s] Third Reich.”[2]  Her writing demonstrates that spiritual practice can be developed in the midst of much joy – and also, when our lives are overturned with incredible suffering. 

I wonder what Etty would have thought of our reading from the Hebrew Scriptures tonight? – a reading taken from her religious tradition (although she and her family were not particularly observant Jews).  What would she have thought of this – one of the founding legends of the Jewish people – the rejoicing of the drowning of the Egyptian enemies?    She writes in her diary: “the problem of our age [is ] hatred of Germans [which] poisons everyone’s mind. ‘Let the bastards drown, the lot of them’ – such sentiments have become part and parcel of our daily speech and sometimes make one feel that life these days has grown impossible.”[3]

Things haven’t changed - life continues to be impossible for vast numbers of people on our planet.   It doesn’t take much imagination to think of all the groups that might be candidates for drowning in the Reed Sea – along with those Egyptians of long ago.  Not just the Germans; those who lost loved ones at Pearl Harbour would probably want to drown the Japanese; and those who experienced the bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki would want to drown the Americans.  Today, some Australians might want to drown asylum seekers – Americans might want to drown Al-Quaeda, - some Libyans would rejoice if Gadaffi were drowned. We could go on and on – ‘letting the bastards drown’ might seem too kindly a way of treating some people.

On this day, when we remember that one option is to turn to hatred, declaring whole countries part of an axis of evil – that one option is to act unilaterally and pre-emptively against any nation thwarting the imposition of a particular way of life on them[4] – that one option is to claim God is on ‘our side’ – Etty’s writing reminds us it doesn’t have to be this way – there is an alternative.

Etty writes “suddenly, a few weeks ago, I had a liberating thought which surfaced in me like a hesitant, tender young blade of grass thrusting its way through a wilderness of weeds: if there were only one decent German, then he should be cherished despite that whole barbaric gang, and because of that one decent German it is wrong to pour hatred over an entire people.”

She goes on, “that doesn’t mean you have to be half-hearted;  on the contrary, you must make a stand, wax indignant at times, try to get to the bottom of things.  But indiscriminate hatred is the worst thing there is.  It is a sickness of the soul.  ….  If things were to come to such a pass that I began to hate people then I would know that my soul was sick and I should have to look for a cure as quickly as possible.”[5]

And so, she sets out to live out – and to reflect on – what it means to affirm the inherent meaning and beauty of life without ever turning away from the full depravity of what was going on around her.  Her spiritual practice was intense as she sought to be “an unblinkered witness to history” without giving way to hatred.  When she was eventually incarcerated, Etty found that “if she could look straight into the eyes of the eight-months-pregnant wife of an epileptic man who was being transported to Poland, and if she could then look that same day, and just as unwaveringly, into the eyes of the bully who was pushing him onto the train … and if she could then still swear that life is meaningful, then and only then, she maintained, would her words carry weight.”[6]

‘I try to look things straight in the face, even the worst crimes, and to discover the small, naked human being amid the monstrous wreckage caused by [humanity’s] senseless deeds’ she writes.  ‘I am no fanciful visionary… I try to face up to your world, God, not to escape from reality into beautiful dreams.’[7]

 “When Etty first began writing [her] diary, she described her desire for ‘a tune’: a thread, or medium – a calling that would make sense of her existence.  By the end, [as she heads, singing and smiling, towards Auschwitz and death] she has found it, and what she has found is so quiet it is almost intangible by ordinary standards.  Harvard Medical School psychologist Kaethe Weingarten calls it ‘compassionate witnessing’…. [that is, she made herself] completely available to another.  It means standing before ‘the Other’ with heart and eyes wide open, ready to hear them out no matter what.  By bearing witness to another human being who has endured terrible trauma, Weingarten believes, we can set them on the first steps towards being healed.”[8]

Etty wrote “we must learn how to … experience something pleasurable without trying to hold on to it, and we must be able to experience the most intense form of suffering without going to pieces or trying to pass it on to someone else.” [9]

A compassionate witnessing, at the Reed Sea, helps us see the multiple threads of pain and celebration interwoven.  When we witness with compassion, we hear the Hebrew Midrash suggesting that while the Hebrews celebrated, God wept because, "the Egyptians are [God’s] children too!" [10]  And 10 years ago, God wept in New York – but also God weeps in the ensuing and continuing violence in Iraq and Afghanistan. How might our world have been changed had the terrible trauma in New York been responded to with compassionate witnessing?  Just imagine how we might each contribute to the transformation of this world if we were to choose,, in our day to day responses to other people, not violence, not revenge but forgiveness and compassionate witnessing.

As we come to the Table, we are invited to pay attention to an alternative Way of living.    Here, we pay attention to and remember Jesus, who in the face of terror, violence and murder continued to choose forgiveness, love and compassion.  Here, we remember Jesus, whose broken body opens up a new hope-filled pathway into life, even in the midst of the pain of the world.  Here, we find Love and Life.  Amen

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[1] Carol Lee Flinders Enduring Lives 2006, p.41

[2] Flinders, p.45.

[3] Etty: A Diary 1941-43 translated by Arnold J. Pomerans, 1983, p.8.

[4] “Throughout history, nations and non-state actors have justified their wars with all sorts of rationalizations – territorial expansion, retaliation, protection, self-defense, and to spread their economic and political ideology.  America is no exception in this regard ... The thirty-three page [US] National Security Strategy of 2002 .. praised American democratic capitalism as the ‘single sustainable model of national success’ and ‘right and true for every person in every society.’  We would export our way of life ‘to every corner of the globe,’ said the NSS and we’d act unilaterally and pre-emptively against any nation that tried to thwart us.  Needless to say, some countries didn’t like such hubris.” Dan Clendenin “National Tragedies in Light of Spiritual Truths: The Tenth Anniversary of the 9/11 Attacks” www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20110905JJ.shtml

[5] Etty: A Diary 1941-43, p.8

[6] Flinders, p.78.

[7] Flinders, p.35.

[8] Flinders p.89.

[9] Flinders p.90.

[10] R U M O R S # 518; Ralph Milton's E-zine for people of faith with a sense of humor;   September 7, 2008

Sermon for 11 September 2011: Guest Preacher, Prof. Liam McIlvanney

Last week, I attended Otago’s wonderful Polyfest at the Edgar Centre, to see my son Caleb perform a number of traditional Tongan and Samoan dances with his Pasifika group. This week sees the launch of Dunedin’s Celtic Arts Festival, a month-long celebration of Scottish and Irish music, literature and dance. It’s heartening that the city can celebrate its dual heritage – Pacific and European – through these events.

This week is also designated ‘Land Sunday’ in the Presbyterian lectionary, and the theme of ‘land’ – being forced from the land, colonizing a new land, remembering the old land – certainly shaped the experience of the Scottish settlers of Otago, as it has shaped much of the art and literature celebrated in our Celtic Festival.

In 1943, the great Scottish Modernist poet Hugh MacDiarmid articulated his own vision of the land:

It requires great love of it deeply to read

            The configuration of a land,

            Gradually grow conscious of fine shadings,

            Of great meanings in slight symbols,

            Hear at last the great voice that speaks softly,

            See the swell and fall upon the flank

            of a statue carved out in a whole country’s marble.

In these lines, from a poem called simply ‘Scotland’, MacDiarmid imagines a relationship to the land, defined not in terms of legal possession, or economic exploitation, or political jurisdiction, or military occupation. It’s a relationship of intimacy and deep understanding predicated on love. That we might not simply own or buy or sell or farm or mine or defend but love the land: this is the revolutionary message of MacDiarmid’s poem.

For much of Scotland’s modern history, however, such a loving relationship was precluded by the divisive and traumatic politics of land.

The clearance of Highland straths and glens in the nineteenth century, when a new commercial ethos supplanted the old clan structure of common ownership, and chieftains became landlords, evicting their tenants to make way for more profitable Cheviot sheep, has left lasting emotional scars. We might speculate that a folk memory of the Clearances may well have accompanied the Reverend Donald MacNaughtan Stuart, the first minister of Knox Church, a Gaelic-speaking Highlander from Kenmore in Perthshire, on his arrival in Dunedin in 1860.

The Highlanders were not the only Scots to have their relationship with the land shaped by dispossession. In what historians now call the ‘Lowland Clearances’, the small tenant farmers and cottars of the lowland farming counties were driven from the land, as landlords enclosed common ground and drove up rents, consolidating farms into large commercial ventures in a process euphemistically termed ‘improvement’. The tenant farmers of Ayrshire and Galloway, no less than the clansfolk of Assynt and Golspie, were the tangata whenua of Scotland. Among their number was Robert Burns, whose statue stands in Dunedin’s Octagon. Evicted from the family farm of Lochlie, the Burns family found temporary refuge on the farm of Mossgiel, a name with a certain resonance in this part of the world.  No doubt this family memory of dispossession accompanied the poet’s nephew, the Reverend Thomas Burns, when he came to Dunedin in 1848 as one of the founders of the Otago settlement.

One of the myths of the Scottish Diaspora is that most of the emigrants came from rural backgrounds. In fact, most Scottish migrants, especially in the decades after 1860, came from the town and cities, like the great conurbation of Glasgow. At the turn of the twentieth century, the city of Glasgow was in its pomp. The Glasgow International Exhibition of 1901 celebrated the city’s position as the Workshop of the World and the Second City of the British Empire. But for the inhabitants of the Second City, the statistics tell a different story. 700,000 people lived in three square miles of Glasgow’s city centre. 70 per cent of the city’s families lived in two rooms or fewer; a quarter of the city’s families lived in one-room dwellings. 98.2 of the city’s homes were rented, often in the kind of slum tenements and ‘rookeries’ that made Govan and the Gorbals bywords for misery. Glasgow’s rate of infant mortality in 1901 – the year of the Great Exhibition – was 149 per thousand live births.

These were the conditions against which the great Gaelic poet, Sorley MacLean protested in a devastating short poem entitled ‘Calvary’, a poem that challenges the Christian Church for its impotence in the face of such misery: 

Calbharaigh                                                  

Chan eil mo shùil air Calbharaigh            

no air Betlehem an àigh                             

ach air cùil ghrod an Glaschu                   

far bheil an lobhadh fàis,                           

agus air seòmar an Dùn-eideann,             

seòmar bochdainn ’s cràidh,                                 

far a bheil an naoidhean creuchdach       

ri aonagraich gu bhàs.                                

MacLean’s own translation runs as follows:

Calvary

                        My eye is not on Calvary

                        nor on Bethlehem the Blessed,

                        but on a foul-smelling backland in Glasgow

                        where life rots as it grows;

                        and on a room in Edinburgh

                        a room of poverty and pain,

            where the diseased infant

            writhes and wallows till death

It’s a stark, angry poem, impatient with niceties of theology in the face of such human suffering. In the image of the dying child, MacLean brings together Bethlehem and Calvary, the manger and the cross; the baby writhing in its cot suffers a crucifixion, one repeated endlessly in the towns and cities of industrial Scotland. It’s a bitter indictment of a society, purportedly Christian, that can tolerate such slaughter of the innocents. 

Small wonder that those who fled such conditions for ‘God’s Own Country’ should desire, in the words of the Psalmist, to ‘live in the land, and enjoy security’; that   between the Dùn-eideann of MacLean’s poem and the Dunedin in New Zealand a dream should have arisen – the dream of the quarter-acre section, the house in its own plot of land, the vegetable patch to supply the household’s needs.

And small wonder that those who were forced from the land should continue to questions its ownership:

            Who owns these ample hills? - a lord who lives

            ten months in London and in Scotland two;

            O’er the wide moors with gun in hand he drives

            And, Scotland, this is all he knows of you!

Thus John Stuart Blackie in 1857. It would take another hundred years before another poet, Norman MacCaig, could ask the same question, and answer it with words not of hate or indignation, but of love:

            Who owns this landscape?

            Has owning anything to do with love?

            For it and I have a love-affair, so nearly human

            we even have quarrels.

‘Has owning anything to do with love?’ MacCaig’s almost naïve question takes us to the heart of the matter. It’s not that questions of ownership and dispossession are forgotten; rather they are subsumed in a fare more meaningful type of ‘possession’. Later in the poem, MacCaig returns to his question:

            Who owns this landscape?

The millionaire who bought it or

The poacher staggering downhill in the early morning

With a deer on his back?

Who possesses this landscape?

            The man who bought it or

            I who am possessed by it

We can detect in that last line something of the ‘Zen Calvinism’ that MacCaig jocularly identified as his creed. But we can also see a new dispensation, a wholesale reimagining of ‘possession’. It’s difficult to read MacCaig’s lines without remembering Jesus’ response to the Pharisees in Luke 17:

And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them, and said, 'The kingdom of God cometh not with observation. Neither shall they say, "Lo here", or "Lo there": for behold, the kingdom of God is within you.

And these two insights are connected. When you view the Land as something within you, something loved, it’s easier to extend that perspective to others. Love for the land. Love for your neighbour. Love for your enemy. It’s significant, I think, that one of the first major acts of the new Scottish Parliament was the Land Reform Bill of 2001, giving crofting communities the right to buy their land. But perhaps an even more far-reaching act of the Scottish Parliament was one not of justice but of mercy, even love: the freeing in 2009, on compassionate grounds, of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing. On the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, can we imagine a more hopeful, a more optimistic, a more loving gesture than this?       

W. B. Yeats said: ‘out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves, we make poetry’. I want to finish with a poem made out of the quarrel between two sides of Scotland’s Presbyterian inheritance. On the one hand, a celebratory vision that can see an everyday holiness in the natural world, and on the other, the old negativity. It’s by a Son of the Manse, Alistair Reid, and, like the MacDiarmid poem with which I began, it’s simply called ‘Scotland’:

                        It was a day peculiar to this piece of the planet,

                        when larks rose on long thin strings of singing

and the air shifted with the shimmer of actual angels.

Greenness entered the body. The grasses

shivered with presences, and sunlight

stayed like a halo on hair and heather and hills.

Walking into town, I saw, in a radiant raincoat,

the woman from the fish-shop. ‘What a day it is!’

cried I, like a sunstruck madman.

And what did she have to say for it?

Her brow grew bleak, her ancestors raged in their graves

as she spoke with their ancient misery:

‘We’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it!’

The poet’s ecstatic epiphany is rudely shattered by the woman’s refrain. But the poet was right to give the nay-saying woman from the fish-shop the last word. If we don’t succeed in pushing through our fear and anxiety and hatred to a Christian ethic of love – love for the land, love for our neighbour, love for our enemy – then we will pay for it. Amen.

Professor Liam McIlvanney holds the Stuart Chair in Scottish Studies at Otago University and is an Elder at Knox Church, Dunedin.