Salt for all

SERIES

AS I write this, on a cold January day I have been contemplating some remote places in Scotland that I was able to visit during a complicated life. The subject of this article is therefore the most northerly of three church buildings in the parish of Northmavine, in the extreme north of mainland Shetland, which I first saw more than forty years ago.

I am moved to choose this building having read of the award to the Very Rev Professor Iain Torrance of a knighthood in the New Year’s Honours List, for it was to this remote part of a remote island group that Iain went as his first ministerial appointment.

Before oil-related improvement of Shetland roads Northmavine was almost unimaginably isolated.

The parish church of Northmavine is at Hillswick, on its west coast, with two small churches on the east coast, at Ollaberry and at North Roe, two tiny villages. North Roe is near the end of the spine road that runs up the Mainland.

Beyond that in 1976 was an abandoned road that led north to a fishing station at Fethaland. From this in 19th-century summers local crofters conducted the ‘Haaf’ fishing, with baited lines from open boats – ‘yoles’. The gutted fish were split and dried in the sun and exported to countries like Portugal.

I never saw Fethaland, but did see another such fishing station on the west side of the parish which I last saw in a January gale, with the wind and waves attacking its ruins with primitive savagery.

But, harsh living conditions in remote places often beget a strong sense of mutual caring and sharing.

I am mindful of Our Lord’s call to fishermen to become the bedrock of His Church, of His personal experience of storms seen from an open boat, of the miraculous draught of fishes. I sometimes speculate that Jesus, the carpenter’s son, may have been a ‘ship’s carpenter’ (boatbuilder) before the start of His earthly ministry, and through that knew the men he chose. Certainly, he knew how fishermen risk their lives when they go to sea, and their absolute reliance on each other.

This comes forcibly to mind when contemplating Northmavine, described in the late 19th century as having ‘nearly everywhere a bold and rock-bound coast…engirdled by skerries, towering islets and fantastically-outlined rocks’.

The little mission churches at Ollaberry and North Roe are another part of life beside a threatening sea. For fishermen’s wives and families share in the risks that their husbands, sons and sweethearts experience, and the comfort of the Holy Spirit that they found in worship in these little churches would have been integral to lives lived in difficult circumstances.

Recently I have compared the ‘visible church’ with the Jesus whose garment was touched by the woman whose haemorrhage was thereby healed, and, too, with the concept of the Church as a ‘well of living water’ from which all can draw to satisfy their spiritual thirsts. I am utterly convinced that as the national church the Church of Scotland needs to keep church buildings open, especially at a time when more and more people are suff ering spiritual deprivation because of the rise of secularism, which has so little to offer its devotees.

These thoughts may seem a long way from the north of mainland Shetland, its extremes of isolation and of weather, its dark winters, its threatening coasts, but I don’t see it like that. It is in places like North Roe that the ‘visible church’ needs to be, so that it can provide the light of the Spirit, and add the flavour that comes from being the salt for all.

This article appears in the March 2018 Issue of Life and Work

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