CHRISTIAN VIEWPOINT: There will always be people of ‘peculiar diligence and fidelity’
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He was ‘a bulwark of religion in the place’, a man of ‘undeviating rectitude of principle’ who fulfilled his duties ‘with peculiar diligence and fidelity’.
These words written in 1778 by 23-year-old Anne MacVicar describe a deceased father whose family lived near Fort Augustus. Anne supported his grieving daughters despite her compassion being mocked by others of her social class.
They’re quoted in a fascinating book, The Edge of each Rough Region: Church and Community in the Great Glen, a detailed history of the Christian church in Abertarff (Fort Augustus), Glengarry and Glenmoriston over the last 16 centuries.
The author, Adrian Varwell, previously minister of Fort Augustus and Glengarry and currently locum minister at Urquhart and Glenmoriston Church focuses on the Church of Scotland, but includes accounts of the other Christian denominations.
He outlines the challenges Christians faced down the years as they shared the good news, built churches, survived the dark days following Culloden, responded to the Clearances, addressed the spiritual needs of the engineers and labourers who built the Caledonian Canal and the 20th century hydro-electric schemes.
Can we learn from the past, the author wonders, as the Church weathers the current perfect storm of scepticism and indifference?
Adrian’s final chapter projects into the future the lessons of the past. We still have good news to share, fellow-Christians to nurture and encourage, people to be offered compassion and love, unjust social structures to be challenged, peace and reconciliation to be encouraged, a broken world to be healed.
I love his reference to the minister as ‘poet-pastor’. That’s what we need! Not so much strategies and activism, but the suspicion that beyond the material world lies a spiritual dimension realised not through dull prose, but in the poetry of quickened imagination.
For the most part, the letters and the minute-books Adrian consulted provide the bones of history. Little evidence survives – other than hints from writers like Anne MacVicar – of the reality in people’s lives of this great poem.
Highlanders talk of ‘thin places’ where the veil between material and spiritual is porous. But if our hearts are open to the reality of God, then every place can be a thin place as we falteringly learn to live in the creative, new-every-morning dimension of God’s love.
Adrian’s book reminds us that just as God was with those Great Glen Christians over 16 changing centuries, so God will be with us in future years. Church may well look different, but people will come to believe and will find ways of meeting together to rejoice in God and in one another.
And there will always be people of ‘peculiar diligence and fidelity’, people showing compassion and love in the name of Jesus.
