Glottal stops were all the rage when 'e were a lad...

The rain falls in straight dense lines outside the early morning window, obscuring the soaking foliage of the lime trees.  August in Argyll. At least the midges will be grounded.

No blogging in July, a holiday month but a busy month.

And I'm glad that the rain was not this Argyll monsoon two days ago, as some of the Swift side of the family gathered in St Helens, Lancashire, to bury my father's ashes in a family plot in the catholic graveyard in Sutton.  The priest who celebrated the requiem mass said in his reflection,

"He went from Scotland to heaven via Sutton."

The bald simplicity of that was rather shocking, and wasn't something that I would find myself ever saying in that sort of context, but then I'm not a catholic priest.  On a facetious level, a Scot would also observe that such a theologically distilled journey was also a very long detour to get back so close to home, etc. etc.

The whole occasion was quite striking.  I have never been to St Helens before, even though this was the place of my father's childhood and adolescence, and he always had a rosy, soft focus perspective of the eighteen years that he spent there, eighteen years that ended with his departure for university (nearby, in Manchester) and also the death of his mother and his entry into orphanhood.

Well, now he has joined Charles and Sarah Swift, both dead in their fifties in the fifties.

Even that was complicated.  I suppose I have developed a clergy antenna for 'things-that-could-wrong-at-funerals' and it was twitching like mad as I arrived. After the Scottish party had had dinner with my aunt and uncle, I slipped over to the graveyard to make sure all was well.  We had a muckle big wooden casket, about a foot long, which, it transpired, my mother and sister really, really wanted to have buried.  I had rather supposed that we would get away with infusing ashes into the grave, pouring them from the urn into a hole.  I was used to a fair sized hole for this pouring process.  But if the casket was to go in, it might well have to be a bit deeper.

In Lancashire, or in Sutton anyway, it seems that a hole about the size of a tin of beans is sufficient for the resting place of the cremated faithful.  Quick call to the priest, then a quick call to B&Q for a shovel, and I dug out a hole in the iron-hard urban earth to take the casket.  A couple of inches deeper in the morning (thanks to George my brother-in-law) and it looked OK.  All rather Father Mackenzie from the Beatles track 'Eleanor Rigby', I walked away from the grave wiping the dirt from my hands.

All went well, the thurible was swung a little, the asperge did its thing. The priest coped with no questions or preparation beforehand whatsoever with great aplomb and style.  The slight oddity of Scottish cords attached to the casket was rather useful, as the family members were able to lower the casket into the rather deep hole with grace and no scrabbling on the ground.

We then retired to Widnes for Marks and Spencer sausage rolls and cups of strong tea.

And it was mercifully dry, in Lancashire, returning a man to his home.

Dr Bernard Christopher Swift, Chevalier de l'Order des Palmes Academique, Requiescat in pace.

General Synod reflections...

The speaker at last night's General Synod dinner was Professor Tom Devine.  The name rang a bell for me, but in my ignorance I must confess I didn't know that much about him.  A Scottish historian, leading academic, that sort of stuff. (Image from forargyll.com)

He spoke last night as a Scottish Roman Catholic, in the wake of the events of the past few months and years.  Not a comfortable place to be starting from.  He was upbeat about his church, and as a historian seemed to have good historical reason for so doing.  He ended by saying that future "was not his field" which neatly sidestepped the crisis that their leadership, who lack an empowered laity and have some rather horrendous systemic issues, must now face.

The thing that I heard was the change in what it is to be a Scottish catholic, from the tribal basis of even as recently as the 1960s.  The working class discriminated group that were Scottish (/Irish) Catholics at the start of the 1960s have now become leaders of Scotland.  Judges, politicians, leaders of industry (but less so the financial sectors...) all are now occupied as easily by Catholics as by anyone else.  The influx of English firms/organisations, and English Catholics (of which my parents were two) changed all that.  It doesn't now matter.  

My take: maybe religion doesn't now matter, so who cares about the denomination/faith/tribal loyalty of people? It does matter in many places still - the tribal loyalties of the old times are still present in Scotland.  Episcopalianism doesn't quite fit neatly into it.

But I was struck by my personal response to Tom's talk.  My father was a university professor. His father was a shipwright on the Mersey.  He was part of a social revolution that turned merit into a factor in where one could aspire to be, rather than class or tribalism.  He was a catholic, although became disillusioned with tired rhetoric from out of touch men in black who seemed more interested in maintaining a self-satisfied status quo that transforming themselves or others (at least that's what I think happened, when he walked away some years before his death). But he worshipped the ground that John Henry Newman walked upon, and the energy of the Jesuits who educated him (with no sinister undertones).

My own swim - from the Rome side of the Tiber, changing into the Tweed as I came back north, confuses me with where I am with my own Catholicism, which is still part of what defines me.  You can take the boy out of the Catholic Church, but you can't take... Etc. etc.

I think my late father would have enjoyed discussing Tom's talk with me, and seen himself in some of this revolution where being a catholic is no longer an obstacle to progress in Scotland, as Scottish structures and society have changed.

But it seems that celebrating the fact that religion is less relevant (the negative way of reading this revolution in the last 40 years) is very uncomfortable for 'professional religious people.'  How do we make ourselves relevant to a Scotland that doesn't see religion or denominations as relevant or meaningful matters. How do we proclaim a gospel in a post-sectarian society?