Gathered and Scattered

Readings and meditations from the Iona Community

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• Publisher: Wild Goose Publications
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781849520256
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Rituals & Practice

Daily readings for four months from a wide range of contributors within the Iona Community, reflecting the concerns of the community. A follow-up to the best-selling This Is the Day.

Month 1

Month 1 Day 1

NEW WAYS TOTOUCH THE HEARTS OF ALL

The GalGael Trust:The rekindling of community

Thought for the Day on BBC Radio Scotland is supposed to be an up-to-the-moment reflection on current affairs. If you’re presenting it, the producers phone about 18 hours before the broadcast is due, to start agreeing the topic and wording that will go out, normally live, just before 7:30 the next morning.

But it’s a minefield out there! As the 2-minute Thought aims to be thought-provoking but not confrontational, you have to be terribly sensitive. The art is to phrase things in a way that deepens people’s thinking, yet minimises the chances of putting a foot in the porridge when set loose from the news studio.

For fifty quid, it’s a tough shift. Not only does planning, writing and agreeing the draft take up much of the creative energy of the previous day – you don’t sleep well that night either. At least, I don’t! I keep waking up with fantasies of the alarm not going off and the imagined ignominy of letting down an awaiting nation – not to mention an awaiting mother on the Isle of Lewis!

It’s also advisable to leave enough time to check the internet news before setting off at the crack of dawn. Once I referred to a British soldier’s death in Iraq, but rapidly tweaked this on learning that more casualties had been announced overnight. The newsroom would probably have alerted me as I’d gone in, but it’s easy for glitches to slip by and for the hard-fought-for airspace that the Thought enjoys to appear less than cutting edge.

Recently I received a letter from one of the most senior generals in the British army. He said he always listened to Thought for the Day as ‘part of my daily fix before I leave for work … so that I know what the nation has been told and may appear in some form in my in-tray half an hour later!’ He was London-based and was referring to the Radio 4 version, but still, one can imagine the same influence at a Scottish level.

All in all, to broadcast the morning’s ‘God-slot’ pulls you, for a moment, onto the cutting edge of current affairs. And that is why it was so very strange, on 10th November 2005, for me to have had occasion to present Thought for the Day from a studio in Stornoway spoken … posthumously!

Now, if that sounds like a George MacLeod story coming on, you’re on the right tracks. For it concerns a man who, with his wife, often worked in Govan at a massive desk that had once been the powerhouse of none other than George MacLeod’s secretary.

Sometimes in my role as a board member of the GalGael Trust, I’ll lean over that same desk and say, ‘You know, there’s only one person I could imagine with a greater capacity for getting things done than the Big Man himself, and that was his secretary!’

The GalGael is an award-winning community organisation. Local unemployed people started it, some of whom had met at protests when the M77 motorway took a slice off Pollok Park. Participants are ordinary members of the community, which includes youths who have just left school, retired shipyard workers filled with elders’ wisdom, recovering drug addicts, folk recently out of jail, the occasional academic, and the even more occasional clergy person.

Vibrant workshops resound with boat building, silversmithing, stone carving, basketwork and weaving. But more than that, the GalGael’s a test bed and repair workshop for the software of human beings – for the rekindling of community.

It’s a testimony to all that George MacLeod had in mind that day a wee laddie’s stone apocryphally broke the stained-glass inscription on a church window and rendered it, ‘GLORY TO GOD IN THE HIGH ST’.

To read Ron Ferguson’s magisterial biography of George is like looking back over a blueprint for the GalGael Trust and seeing the dream come to fruition. ‘George found that as men cheerfully offered their labour in a worthwhile cause, community began to form quite naturally.’ That’s GalGael for you, and the key visionaries in the GalGael all see the historical connection. For George, in his pre-Iona incarnation, it was Fingalton Mill that would ‘provide a Govan in the country at the lowest possible charges, where folk can get good air fresher than at the coast’.

For today’s GalGael, it’s Barmaddy Farm, presently being established on lease from the Forestry Commission at Loch Awe and with longer-term plans for a rural resettlement project to connect city and country – because human beings need both.

Phrases like ‘Work is worship’ run daily through the Fairley Street workshop. We’re not a religious organisation and few of the participants would see themselves as potential ‘bums on pews’ to fill the churches. Equally, few would want to shy from the crucial role that spirituality and its articulation in community are playing in their lives’ journeys.

Addictions run hand in hand with poverty, but behind material poverty there’s a much wider spiritual malaise at the heart of the modern world. Those who see this very clearly ARE THOSE whose ego defences are lowered … lowered, because, unlike the ‘better placed’ in society, they no longer have anything to hide.

Addictions, crime and violence are all forms of emotional anaesthetic. ‘Heroin took away my pain,’ says Billy, a GalGael metalsmith, ‘… but it also took away my soul.’

Another GalGael participant with a similarly colourful, hard-pressed background, told me his story in the pub, and I worked it into a poem that ends like this:

… for the more they come on me

and more that all’s gone

the more that all’s left

is mah spiritual song

That’s the kind of banter that goes on these days around George MacLeod’s secretary’s old desk!

You see, the old Celtic shaman was onto something. For all that he might have been a product of his class and his times – ‘for a’ that and a’ that’ – George MacLeod was onto something that runs in the spirit of Govan. Although no relation, at least not in the flesh, Colin Macleod, who founded the GalGael, tapped into the source of that same ancient quicksilver.

Colin dropped dead of a heart attack on 2nd November 2005, aged just 39. By the time his funeral started in Govan Old, presided over by the Iona Community’s Norman Shanks, there were no pews left on which to park a tardy bum. Police had to halt the traffic past Govan Cross for two hours – and that on a football day.

As well as leaving Gehan, he left their children – Tawny, Iona and Oran – whose names are compass enough to the source of his spirituality. Like the Master Carpenter himself, people were this visionary artist’s primary raw material.

And that brings me back round to Radio Scotland, and its unprecedented posthumous Thought for the Day.

Very occasionally, exceptional circumstances will cause a Thought to be recorded slightly in advance. This happened when Colin was due to deliver it during the unusually busy week of the G8 Gleneagles Summit. However, the piece couldn’t be used. On the Friday it was to go out, a live but sombre substitute had to stand in and deliver a thought different to the one planned. It was the day after the 7/7 London bombings. Colin’s wonderfully crafted missive from Govan to the G8 was canned.

We buried Colin on 9th November 2005, at his father’s home village of Gravir on the Isle of Lewis. But it just so happened that I was scheduled to do Thought for the Day the next morning. As George would have said, ‘If you think that was a coincidence, I wish you a very boring life.’ I managed to procure special dispensation from the BBC’s religion team and Colin’s family to use Colin’s recording. Here are the words; and if you want to hear his own powerful voice reading it, go to www.GalGael.org:

I’m going to tell you a wee story that I sometimes tell my kids. It comes from the Clan Macleod tradition. Many years ago there was a big feast at a clan gathering in Argyll, a kind of Highland G8. Right in the middle was a wooden stake with a poor clansman tied to it.

Word was, his only crime had been to take a deer from the hill to feed his family. Now, as a punishment, he was to be gored to death by a wild bull for the entertainment of all. But nobody said anything. Naebody, that is, until the chief of the Clan Macleod could stomach his dram no longer.

Quietly he stepped forward and faced the host. ‘Why don’t you let the man go,’ he suggested, ‘as a gesture of your generosity?’

The host raised his arm. He pointed to the man at the stake. ‘You can secure his freedom, but only if you can stop the bull.’

The gate was thrown open. The bull charged. Quicker than thought, Macleod leapt into its path...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Begin reading
• Title page
• End Piece