39 mins
A society of friends
FEATURE
Booker T Washington (left) and Andrew Carnegie
MUCH that the brilliant cosmologist Professor Stephen Hawking said in his book A Brief history of Time, about black holes and cosmic inflation, was too complicated for most of us to understand, but when he said: “It would be an empty world, were it not for friends I love and friends who love me”, millions understood him perfectly.
When a psychologist was recently asked if he felt he could be happy living alone on a desert island, he said he thought that for a short period, he could derive satisfaction from leisure activities and keeping fit, from studying the flora and fauna of the island.
He also felt he could enjoy for a time the challenge of building a house on the island, but what he would most miss would be family and friends.
I cannot remember who my first close friend was. But several boyhood friends I do remember clearly. We did not all go to the same school, or have the same interests, or same academic or sporting abilities, yet there was a kinship of spirit that went deeper than any of these differences. What a strange, elusive, almost haphazard thing deep friendships are. I recall a wedding where the bride was 5’0”. The bridegroom was 6’5”. Yet theirs was a very happy marriage. Close friendships are not dependent either on similarity in age or background. The Bible story of the friendship of Ruth and her mother-in-law Naomi is a most moving one. Ruth’s young husband had died, as had Naomi’s husband. Despite the age gap their friendship remained an amazingly close one. So was the close friendship in the 19th century of Andrew Carnegie the richest man in the world, and Booker T Washington who had been born into slavery. Carnegie said of him: “To know him has been a rare privilege.” When Washington founded the Tuskegee Institute, the first college for the education of former slaves, such was Carnegie’s huge regard for its founder that he donated a library to the Institute. I think also of the close friendship between the atheist Sigmund Freud and the Protestant Swiss pastor Oscar Pfister. They corresponded for 30 years.
While out riding one day with a well-todo friend in the Lake District, the poet Coleridge was wearing his customary shabby jacket and trousers. Seeing a group of well-dressed people approaching, Coleridge suggested that to save any embarrassment, his friend should introduce him as his servant. “No” said his friend, “I am proud of you as a friend, but dressed the way you are I would be ashamed to have you as my servant.”
In “Dombey and Son”, Charles Dickens tells how Dombey hadn’t a real friend in the world. I can scarcely imagine anything more awful. Part of the incentive for getting up in the morning is as Hawking said that we have friends we love. There is a world of difference between acquaintances and friends. Whereas acquaintances are happy to share our prosperity, true friends insist on sharing our adversity. Deep friendships can sometimes prove to be costly. “Greater love has no man than this”, said Jesus “than that he lay down his life for his friends.”
The Quaker titles for their church, “The Meeting Place” and “The Society of Friends”, describe what ought to be striking characteristics of every Kirk, meeting places, not only to worship God, but to engage in friendly conversation with each other and with strangers, and hopefully glimpse a vision of how, by our uniting to care and serve, the Church could play a far more significant role in many areas of our common life.
A close friendship in the 19th century of Andrew Carnegie the richest man in the world, and Booker T Washington who had been born into slavery.
ERIC DOUGLAS AITKEN
Eric Douglas Aitken, known as Douglas, will be remembered by many people, as a parish minister, local councillor, religious broadcasting producer, Rotarian, scouting chaplain, husband, father and friend. Douglas was born and educated in Wimbledon, London, to Scottish parents.
In 1945 the family returned to Glasgow, where he completed secondary education before beginning training as a marine engineer. However, in 1953 he could no longer resist the call to the Ministry.
Poor health and National Service delayed his training, but Douglas was licensed and ordained by Glasgow Presbytery in 1961. The following eight years were spent at St Andrew’s Church in Nairobi, Kenya. While there, regular radio and television broadcasts fostered his love of broadcasting, and on returning from Africa he spent eighteen years as a senior producer of religious broadcasting with BBC Scotland.
In 1987 he became part of the Ministry team at Mayfield Church in Edinburgh, and also took on the part time role of Director of the Church Garden Project at the 1988 Glasgow Garden Festival. He then became director of media and training at the Buckhaven Parish Church Community Project for 18 months, before taking up his first full-time Scottish charge in 1991 in Clackmannan Parish Church where he finished his career in 1998. In retirement, he served as locum minister and interim moderator in both Stirling and Dunfermline Presbyteries.
He maintained his interest in broadcasting as a volunteer for Central FM, and for 19 years he produced what we would now call podcasts, reflecting on each day’s proceedings at the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.
He was heavily involved in both ecumenical work, through the WCC, and served on several committees and the Board of Communication for the central Church of Scotland.
In Scouting, as well as a stint as District Commissioner, he was National Chaplain for Scotland and a member of the UK National Chaplaincy Team.
He is survived by his wife of 57 years, Fiona, their three sons Ewan, Stewart and Ronnie, and seven grandchildren.
The Rev Angus Mathieson IAN FRASER
The most extraordinary aspect of Ian Masson Fraser, who has died aged 100, is not that he lived to be a centenarian but that he filled each day with something of substance and significance.
His CV can be briskly summarised: MA and BD, ministerial charges in Arbroath and Rosyth (where he completed a PhD), warden of Scottish Churches House, executive secretary of the World Council of Churches, dean and head of the department of mission at Selly Oak Colleges, research consultant to the Scottish Churches’ Council and an informal ambassador for British Missionary Society and Boards. His reality was more colourful. He was an instigator of the Iona Community as well as a traveller to 95 countries where he invited the ire of dictators and totalitarian governments and a relentless opponent of apartheid and repression. He also joined the Frankie Vaughan initiative to end gang warfare in Glasgow and took on the Thatcher government on the poll tax, with the case going to the European Commission for Human Rights before the government abandoned the policy.
His childhood days started early with Fraser helping to make sausages in his father’s butcher shop at 5.45am in Forres before going to school. The role of a Church of Scotland minister initially held no attractions for him but became his goal when studying at Edinburgh University. His first job was as a chaplain at a paper mill in Fife from 1942-1944. “As a labourer, at a labourer’s wage,” he said. “It was a lonely thing to do.” It was also essential, he believed, to be a minister. “You have to know the people,” he said. “A man who wants to be a minister in an agricultural region should have to work for a spell on a farm.”
He has left a substantial and impressive body of writing, including theology, poetry and hymns. Until the last, he was a seeker, always reading, always asking questions of his visitors, always presenting his faith with an affecting humility.
He was sustained in his considerable endeavours not only by his faith but by his wife, Margaret, who died in 1987.
He is survived by three children, nine grandchildren, and 11 great grandchildren.
Hugh MacDonald
This article appears in the June 2018 Issue of Life and Work
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