A change of heart

DOWN in Scotland’s capital, I try to avoid being killed by cars. Back home in Orkney, the traffic to fear mainly consists of tractors and neeps. (A bouncing neep can actually do a lot of damage, denting your sense of selfhood. Being laid low by a neep on the loose can make you feel a right eejit).

I’m not down very often in the capital these days. I don’t venture out of rural Orkney much at all. I worry in case there might be rioting in the streets of Edinburgh. The city of and Royal Burgh of Kirkwall has yet to see such terrible excitements. (Mind you, in its Viking heyday it had more excitement than it really wanted, especially when the likes of Thorfinn the Skullsplitter and Eirik Bloodaxe were doing a peedie spot of burning and looting).

I cast my mind back to the days when I strode the streets of Edinburgh as a journalist. Having started out in the rough old trade as a reporter with our local paper at the age of 16, I eventually began to feel a bit suff ocated in Cowdenbeath: everybody kent my faither. I longed to live in a place where not everybody knew my business. Nothing wrong with that.

After completing my journalist exams, I joined the staff of the Edinburgh Evening News. This was more like it. I could walk along the streets of the capital without worrying about twitching curtains. I felt free. I loved it. Mind you, I kept my links with my home town; I went on regular pilgrimages to Central Park, Cowdenbeath, to watch the mighty Blue Brazil get beaten again. (The decaying old stadium has remained as a theatre of dreams and nightmares for me. My grandfather used to sit in the front of the grandstand, a travel rug over his knees; he and my dad told me stories about legendary players and heroes of mining disasters).

Now I’m walking along the streets of Easterhouse, recalling my switch from journalism to ministry. I remember heroic people – especially women – who helped to hold the community together. Too many of the young men I met had never known their fathers, or grandfathers – or wished they didn’t – and they had no male mentors. Many of the stories they knew were filled with foreboding.

In the days when I lived in Easterhouse and saw defensive hardness in the eyes of some of the hope-less young, it made me want to weep. As a rookie minister, I knew right then that a respectable church that clung to power, property, reputation, and a tendency to prefer what the great Iain Crichton Smith called “survival without error”, could not minister adequately to them. Not until, at least, it divested itself, as Christ did, of that self-same power and reputation. When I think of the lofty lectures from the secure and the good, I see multiple connections with contemporary ethics-free financial arrangements designed to protect the powerful and the profane, and which punish the poor. Some things change, some things never change.

I longed to live in a place where not everybody knew my business. Nothing wrong with that.

So now I’m back in Orkney, walking the rural roads again with my dog. I’ve come full circle in my imagination. People know my business here: lots of folk have binoculars on their window sills – and they’re not just for watching the birds. But I like it here. There’s a deep sense of community, of people looking out for each other. It doesn’t feel oppressive.

Our problems are, at heart, spiritual. Without a generous spirituality of community – whether expressed in specifically religious terms or not – we are stuff ed, done for. Without a change of heart, it’s not just bouncing neeps that are heading towards us. 