Christ and the Clarsach

When I first read Sunset Song – its theme, Scottish identity – as a student many years ago it left me with a dis-spiriting sense that I wasn’t truly Scottish. Already I had a sense of exclusion from Christian faith, for somehow I didn’t seem to experience God as others did. Now, it seemed I didn’t even belong in Scotland: I was like the minister’s wife in Sunset Song who speaks posh English and never enters into community life. A ‘synthetic Scot,’ I called myself – artificial, not genuine.

Almost all the Christmas carols we sing are English in origin. I suppose it’s understandable – after the Reformation Christmas was not significantly celebrated in Scotland until the mid-20^th century. But at our church Christmas service, some kids from the Gaelic School sang in the original Gaelic the song known in English as Child in a Manager.

And their singing reminded me that we all encounter God in a cultural context – in art, poetry, music and worship traditions. Jesus is at home in any culture to the extent that it is in harmony with divine love. And Jesus comes to redeem culture, turning its focus and its soul towards, light, love and the joy which overcomes.

My issues with Scottish identity, arose in the course of my growing up in Lanarkshire in the 1950s and 60s.  Other than in Primary 7 where we learned some Scott and Burns, there was little explicitly Scottish culture at school. Out-with the classroom, I often heard Scots words dismissed as slang, or as slovenly English.

Though my parents showed love to everyone, regardless of their background, I still had the impression that Scottish language and culture belonged to a certain class in society – those who embraced the politics of the Labour Party which my parents abhorred – and that somehow we, the doctor and his family – were better, or perhaps knew better.

The Christians I knew as a child placed a heavy emphasis on the need to be ‘separate’ from ‘the world’, and culture in its broadest sense was seen as something peripheral which could lure us away from God-focussed faith.

I grew up suspicious of the established and Roman Catholic Churches which I had the impression weren’t fully Christian in the sense that ‘we’ (in Brethren and then Baptist churches) were.

Our culture as a family was predominantly that of evangelical Christianity where the opinion formers were largely English and increasingly American after the 1955 visit of Billy Graham who spoke to 2.5 million Scots.

In terms of spiritual and cultural identity, I reached my 21^st birthday a deeply-conflicted young man. Over the following four decades I have been prompted by God to follow a path of learning, growth and increasing inner wholeness, in the course of which I have been blessed beyond words, and shown that I belong in God’s family, both local and global. And that is my primary identity. That is who I am. John Dempster, God’s cherished son.

But I haven’t thought much about the question of my Scottishness.  There have been New Year ceilidhs, but no church I’ve attended has giving serious thought to exploring what Christianity looks like in a Scottish context.

I’m tempted to say ‘Does it matter?’ Does Scottish identity even exist in any coherent sense? Surely today’s culture is global, and our task is to let the voice of Jesus be heard in cyberspace, on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram?

I suspect it does matter. It matters because we need reminding that Christ does not replace a nation’s culture, but transforms it. It matters because we need to know the back story of faith in Scotland so that we can discern what to avoid, and what to embrace.

It matters because we are diminished if we lose sight of where we have come from and where we are.  It matters because I don’t want to be a synthetic Scot. I want to feel at one with my ancestors who mined coal, drove buses, laboured in steel works, tilled the Clydesdale soil. I want to come home to Scotland.

Seeking inclusion in Christian faith, I realised that I’d been looking through a cottage window watching as those whose experiences I longed to share gathered round the fire. The door seemed closed to me. But then I looked up, and I saw a whole village of cottages clustered under the great, overarching dome of God’s love, for there is inclusion for all who love Jesus.

And then I see myself standing hesitantly outside another cottage, the house of Scottish identity. As I stand there, the door is flung open and I’m welcomed in. Across the bustling room I see, in a corner but prominent, Jesus Christ sitting, smiling, his fingers alive on the strings of a clarsach.

Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 31st December 2015