Being different

I HAVE got some horrific photographs at home. In exchange for a barrow load of bawbees I might let you look at them. You might never be able to sleep at night without the supervising presence of a nanny again. Let me describe one of them. No, it’s not a monster, it’s a picture of a glaikit young man. He’s shilpit, to use a guid Scots word - skinny, angular, awkward, unsure of himself. He has a crewcut. He wears drainpipe suede winkle picker shoes. He’s trying to pretend that he’s confident. But it’s all an act.

Who is this maladjusted creature? Yes, you’ve got it in one. I was that pretendy man

One incident still burns me, in my dotage. As part of my aching need to look cool I decided to have a makeover of sorts. So, I went into my local Burton branch - remember them? - and asked if I could buy a pair of trendy trousers. The staff member came back with a promising pair, and pointed me to a curtained area where I could change. Anyway I got behind the curtain and took off my breeks. (If you sense a train crash about to happen, you are right.)

As I looked around me, it dawned on me that I was actually in the shop window. With my breeks down. In Cowdenbeath High Street. On a busy Saturday afternoon. People were laughing

This was definitely not cool. On another occasion, having recovered my nerve, I went out boldly in my best gear. (This begins to sound like a death wish.) I heard a woman shouting my name. “Ronald” she cried. It was my Aunty Nan. A formidable woman who ran a fishmonger’s business in the High Street, she ran after me, turned me around, looked me up and down and said: “In the name of the wee man” before walking briskly away.

Why did I need to dress like that? Because all my peers did.

That’s roughly what Paul was on about in his letter to the Romans. (That’s quite a theological leap - from a shop window in Cowdenbeath High Street to the very gates of Rome!) Here’s what the Apostle wrote: “Adapt yourselves no longer to the pattern of this present world, but let your minds be remade and your whole nature thus transformed. Then you will be able to know the will of God - what is good and pleasing to Him.”

In other words: don’t let your life be dictated by your peers. Instead, let it be shaped by the imperatives of the Gospel. These words were of immediate existential relevance to the little embattled group of Christians in Rome.

Rome was pagan. The Emperor was Lord. To be a Christian there was to put yourself in harm’s way. The Great Fire of Rome was blamed on Christians.

To be different was to be hated, to the point of being crucified upside down.But what about today?

Adapt yourselves no longer to the pattern of this present world, but let your minds be remade and your whole nature thus transformed.

The choices are less clear cut. But the Church has a vocation: it is called to be a holy community of resistance. When I was writing the biography of George MacLeod - then into his nineties - I asked George about regrets. There was a long silence before he responded: “I should have been more radical.”

The Church always has a vocation to resist “The Powers”, the culture that shapes us, often insidiously, and to speak up for the poor and the broken.

To do that, we need to study the mind of Christ, to pray, to worship, to be a counter-cultural sign in the world.

This article appears in the March 2020 Issue of Life and Work

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