Current issue

April 2024

  • Leading Worship Without a Minister
  • New Life for Church Buildings
  • Scottish Love in Action

 

Home  >  Features  >  Amazing Grace

Features

Blue Sky Photography
Blue Sky Photography

Amazing Grace

Monday July 31 2017

Life and Work's much-loved columnist, the Very Rev Dr James Simpson, has chosen some of his favourite pieces from over 10 years of meditations.

In his latest selection, from September 2010, he reflects on the 'immortal longings' surrounding our lives, whatever we believe in.


Some words of a Russian song, written in the 1980s when the Soviet Union was still not just communist, but to a marked degree atheistic, are deeply moving.

The song was written and sung by a young Soviet metal band, called Black Coffee.

See the wooden churches of Russia,
Feel their warped and ancient walls;
Come close and ask them about life.
In these timbers beats a heart, lives a faith.
Hush, hear the heartbeat.

Even under the frozen ice-cap of Soviet denial, immortal longings stirred.

During a visit to Edinburgh, Winston Churchill was introduced at a social gathering to one of the city’s finest ministers. On hearing that Dr Gunn preached to more than 400 people each Sunday, Churchill said: “If I were to speak each week in the same place about my subject, politics, at the end of six months there would be no-one there to listen.”

The explanation lay, not in oratorical ability, but in the fact that though full barns may satisfy cattle, people have deeper hungers which food and drink and political doctrines cannot satisfy. The Psalmist expressed it well: As a deer longs for a stream of cool water, so I long for you O God. With my whole being I thirst for God.

The temptation is strong to live from moment to moment, year to year, achievement to achievement, and sometimes from relationship to relationship. But when alone, or when some sudden happening forces us to take stock, many experience moments when as Silas Marner said: “There’s dealings with us.”

The Harvard psychology professor William James likened these immortal longings to a time that was there in the back of his mind, but which he could never quite identify or get rid of. “It is most indefinite to be sure and rather faint. And yet I know that if it should cease, there would be a great hush, a great void in my life.”

I believe these immortal longings are why we surround birth and death with religious ceremonies. To discern what life is all about, draw close to a man or woman when a new life is being brought into the world, and before their spirits have relapsed again into the world’s casual and trivial commonplace. On such occasions, parents often rise to heights of spiritual discernment they never quite touch again.

A baby’s birth is an old, old story, yet ever utterly new. When a mother holds her baby for the first time, her instinctive longing is to thank Someone. Then at least, she feels there is more to birth than just a physiological process with merely a physiological meaning.

Often at funerals in Dornoch Cathedral, I would see people who were never present at Sunday worship. Some probably felt uncomfortable in the presence of death and hearing a minister read the words: “This corruptible body must put on incorruption; this mortal body must put on immortality.” And yet deep down few would have had it any other way. Most felt it was somehow right for a minister to be there and speak the name of God over their deceased friend.

A teacher of mine, Professor McAfee Brown tells of once teaching philosophy and religious studies in a French university. In one class there were a few practising Catholics, a few lapsed Catholics, a number of Protestants, mostly lapsed, and a group of what he called ‘happy pagans’. At least they were happy, until one day, during a field trip, one was killed in a road accident.

That night Dr Brown conducted a short memorial service. Given the variety of outlooks, he bent over backwards to avoid being sectarian. He felt the service went reasonably well. But at its conclusion, one of the students went to her room and returned with her guitar.

To Dr Brown’s surprise she started playing Amazing Grace. To his even greater surprise, the lapsed Catholics and Protestants, and the not-so-happy pagans joined in.

On that occasion, the words of that specifically Christian hymn filled a vacuum in their lives. It ministered to their immortal longings.


Previous: Grandfather and I

James A Simpson's books, written to raise funds for cystic fibrosis research, are published by Steve Savage and available in shops and online.