A life in letters: Carluke Gospel Hall

(Best read in conjunction with the artcles on Carluke and on the Martin Memorial Baptist Church.).

Having attended a Brethren Church before we moved to Carluke in 1962, my parents and I left the Martin Memorial Baptist Church in the town in 1970, where we had been members, and moved to Carluke Gospel Hall. I still remember the names of some of the elders - Mr Wallace, Mr Brownlee, Charles D. Pollard, men whose decisions seemed to be to be incontrovertible.

A key feature of Brethren meetings was (and remains) the ‘morning meeting’ when members gather around a table in the centre of the room bearing bread and wine. In those days women were not permitted to take part audibly in these meetings, but the ‘brethren’ would, as prompted by God announce hymns to be sung; pray audibly; give short Bible-based ‘words’ or sermons. The service culminated with the giving of thanks for the bread and wine, and the sharing of both as they passed from person to person. In my experience, where people are genuinely open to God, such a service can indeed have a sense of being ‘led’ by the Spirit of God.

 
For me, however, these services burdened me with guilt at what I felt was my hypocrisy. Outwardly, I claimed to be a Christian believer, and yet for all my seeking of God, God seemed remote, disinterested. I believe my issues were both spiritual and psychological, the one exacerbated by the other.

On Sunday afternoons, except during the summer when open-air gospel services were held in the Market Square, there would be a Bible teaching meeting at the hall, and then an evening gospel service at 6.30pm, often followed by a meeting for young people, or hospitality in someone’s home.  We were often in the house of Charles and Sheena Rose, I remember – he was one of the local postmen.

At a time when I was particularly angst-ridden, in December 1973, something very unexpected and significant happened on Sunday 15th when, sitting in Carluke Gospel Hall, and later at home, at last I had the sense of God’s acceptance and love which I had yearned for. I knew at the time that it was a significant moment, and I still see it in that light

It was not the end, or the beginning of the end, but it was perhaps the end of the beginning. Since then in terms of spiritual journey and discovery, I have travelled far, and see now much more clearly than I did then.  And that December day did not mark the end of my neurotic anxiety, the symptoms of which worsened over the next 15 years before they began to improve through better treatment. But from then on, I had at least a memory of knowing myself loved by God, and at best a sense of God’s continued creative whisper within me.

I was involved in various ways in the work of the Gospel Hall, apart from singing excruciatingly at the Market Square open air meetings!  Initially, I attended the small Youth Fellowship myself – I recall Andrew Weir, the leader talking intently at one year’s end about his certainty that the Lord must surelt return in  the coming twelve months. For all my experience of being accepted, it would be many, many years before I could hear talk of the Lord’s return without being gripped by panic that those I loved would be taken, while I would be left. And there were the Sunday evenings when young people in the fellowship were invited to the house of Charles Pollard and his family, in Wilton Road. Mr Pollard was, if not officially the ‘leading’ elder, certainly the dominant one: it was not easy to question his views even if you wished to.

I taught a Sunday School class of young girls, perhaps aged 8-10. In some ways, I was dedicated. I would drive through the Crawforddyke housing estate and round many of the children up in my car, and take them to the Hall – today we would recognize the complete inappropriateness of my doing this.  I bought them each a weekly packet of polo mints with no concern for the state of their teeth.. And we occasionally had them to the house for parties – I remember my mother was distressed to discover after one such event that one child had peed on a padded dining room chair! But when it actually came to teaching the kids, no lesson plan was used, and we were left on our own to plan the lessons. I gave very little attention to what I was teaching – I occasionally used a book of sermon outlines by a Brethren author - and how best to present it to connect with youngish children.  I remember one lesson, speaking about the parable of the Vineyard in Isaiah 5. God plants a vineyard, does everything possible to encourage strong, healthy fruitfulness and is disappointed by its failure to produce good fruit.  I did this with a mimimal of preparation, and persevered despite the bored, bemused faces in front of me.

And I continued writing plays based on Bible stories (but never of course featuring Jesus himself, for depicting Christ in this way was deemed to be inappropriate.) These were performed by the teenagers in Ena Beattie’s Girls Club at their annual social events, often chaired by me. It became increasingly difficult for Ena to persuade the girls in her class to commit to learning their lines.  I think I also occasionally gave short sermons at the Gospel Hall, and certainly took part in the Bible study sessions which were led by the elders on a mid-week evening, but I was still saying what I thought I was expected to say, rather than what I actually thought.

I remember the Hogmanay gatherings at the Gospel Hall. Perhaps arising from a tradition of offering sanctuary at a time of year when members might have a history of over-indulgence, we met sometime after ten for tea, and singing and chocolates, and prayers, and hugs after midnight.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say I felt I belonged there, but it seemed a safe place: outside, the darkness of an alien world, when at any time the Lord might come, and in myself I still felt desperately insecure.

In the mid-1970s, we began driving over to Airdrie every Sunday to attend Ebenezer Hall, Coatdyke which my grandparents had been members for a while: my parents also worshipped there when they were first married.

Part of the reasoning behind this move lay in my parents’ desire for me to meet a wider range of people, which they felt would be beneficial for me; I think there were also some other issues relating to Carluke Gospel Hall. 

I don’t suppose I had much of a say in this, and even if I had, I don’t know that I would have any firm ideas. As earlier in the Baptist Church I had no one in the Gospel Hall whom I would call a personal friend, no-one with whom I could be real, no-one in whom I could confide.

Edmund Gosse: a Brethren childhood

Although I was born a century after the writer and critic Edmund Gosse the religious dimension of his childhood resonates with me deeply. In Father and Son published on 25 October 1907 Gosse describes his childhood and young adulthood. Following the death of his mother Emily in 1857 when he was just 7, his childhood centred round the towering presence of his father, the naturalist and deeply committed evangelical Christian Philip Gosse.

Edmund’s factual accuracy in Father and Son (as in some of his other works) has been questioned – his claim that his arrival on 21st September 1849 was not welcomed by the Gosses, for example, is demonstrably untrue. But the book is not, as it has sometimes been caricatured, a harsh, critical tirade against his father: in fact in its pages the younger Gosse appears warm, generous and lovingly respectful towards Philip.

For me, the most fascinating aspect of the book is its description of a mid-Victorian upbringing within the Plymouth Brethren and the comparisons and contrasts with my own experiences as a child in the same branch of the Christian Church a hundred years later.

The Brethren meeting place I attended was very similar in layout to ‘The Room’ in Devon which Edmund describes. Each Sunday morning, the saints gathered in the corrugated iron hall, sitting on wooden benches around a plain wooden table on which, beneath a freshly-laundered white cloth, had been lovingly placed the bread on a polished silver plate and the wine in a large, silver goblet.

For an hour and a quarter, as prompted by the Holy Spirit, brethren would pray, announce hymns which would be sung unaccompanied, reflect on passages from the Bible until the climax of the meeting when someone would give thanks for the bread and the wine which would then pass from hand to hand as those who were ‘in fellowship’ (and this excluded the children) shared the Lord’s Supper.

At the evening ‘Gospel service’ the message of grace and forgiveness through Christ’s death was offered Sunday by Sunday to all who would listen, just as it was in Gosse’s Devon. Both his church and mine emphasised the imminence of Christ’s return to take his people to himself, and the urgent need to be ready in the light of this coming.

I was made very aware, as Edmund Gosse had been, of the challenge facing Christians to keep focussed on God’s will for our lives, and to avoid ‘worldliness’, although worldliness for Gosse was defined in a stricter way than it was for most of my generation of Christians. Storybooks were banned from the young Edmund’s house by his mother on the grounds that ‘to “tell a story”, that is, to compose fictitious narrative of any kind, was a sin’,  although after her death Philip gradually relaxed this ban. However, Philip discouraged Edmund’s attendance at children’s parties on spiritual grounds, and there is a famous (if possibly apocryphal) story of the father, who was deeply opposed to celebrating Christmas,  destroying a plum pudding which the servants had secretly given his son while describing it as an ‘accursed thing’.

Few restrictions were placed on my reading, but I was 11 before we had a television in the house, although TVs had been widely available for some years. Once we had our first set, my viewing was carefully monitored by my parents. I was never taken to the cinema – my first visit, when I was allowed to go on educational grounds to see a Greek tragedy as an early teenager was a sheer delight, as having endured Oedipus Rex  I revelled in the B movie, the first feature I’d ever seen. (It was Charade with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn)  Even when I was 17, a school visit to the theatre to see Shaw’s Saint Joan was only permitted on the understanding that I didn’t ‘get a taste for the theatre.’

But over and above these specific warnings of ‘worldliness’ I had a pervading sense as a teenager that as the child of Christian parents I was somehow different, and that I should not engage too closely with those who were not believers.

The impression I’d formed  about Father and Son before reading it was that Edmund Gosse endured a very difficult childhood because of faith-related issues. Certainly the pain of watching his mother die cast a long shadow across his life and increased the pressures placed on him by his parents’ dedication of him to ‘the Lord’s Service’.  But I feel that the pain I suffered as a result of my religious upbringing was severer than that which Gosse endured, although it was the quite unintended result of the sincere desire of those around me to see me following in their footsteps of faith.

From as early as I can remember, I was conscious that I was not ‘saved’, not ‘born again’ and that before I could be sure of getting to heaven, I must reach out to God and ask him to forgive me, and receive his transforming grace. No matter how much I may have been told of God’s love for me (and I’m certain I would have been assured of this) what I remember is my sense of distance from God, of the great gulf fixed between him and me which could only be bridged if I could find the way to believe into what Christ had done for me.

As a child, Gosse seems to have been able to adopt the language of faith and say what was expected of him. In Father and Son he claims that there was always part of him which held out against Christianity, but superficially at least he embraced the faith and at the age of 10 he was baptised by immersion and welcomed into membership of the church his father led.

My childhood and adolescence were punctuated by crises when, wracked with guilt as a result of some sermon I’d heard, I would call out to God to forgive me, and then rise from my knees emotionally untouched with a sickening sense that God had not heard and not answered, and that I remained excluded from the community of Christians and alienated from an unreachable God.

Then there was the fear of the Rapture. In the theology of Philip Gosse and of the church tradition in which I grew up, the Second Coming of Christ to earth as a king and judge in which conservative Christians believe will be preceded by his return to the sky, from where he will ‘Rapture’ – seize up to be with him -  those who have entrusted their lives to him, leaving behind those who have rejected him to face the dire grief of a ‘tribulation‘ which will afflict the earth. Philip Gosse and like-minded believers found reference in the imagery of the Book of Revelation to contemporary figures such as Napoleon III, suggesting that the Rapture was close at hand.

Similar believers in my generation discerned that the symbolism pointed to the Cold War, the European Common Market, the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and the rise of China as a superpower and predicted that Christ would soon appear for his people. As a teenager, this terrified me. If Christ came, my parents and all those who brought meaning and security to my life would be taken, and if I had not by then found God, I would face the unimaginable agony of being left behind. Whenever my parents were not where I expected them to be at a particular time I’d be dread-stricken. I’d phone someone I knew was a Christian, and when I heard their voice I’d put the phone down without saying a word, and collapse in relief. The Lord had not come. Not that day. But tomorrow…..?

For the most part, the young Edmund Gosse found it easy to build friendships with people who did not hold Christian beliefs, or who didn’t share his father’s passionate conviction. But during my teen years, I saw my contemporaries as belonging to one or other of two distinct groups – those who were ‘saved’ (the small group) and those who were not (a much larger group). I felt that I myself properly belonged to neither group. It seemed there was an invisible wall between me and those who believed since I did not share their certainty, and an equally impenetrable barrier between me and those who were not believers, who were at home in that unfamiliar cultural territory defined by James Bond, the Beatles and The Man from UNCLE. I lacked the confidence, integrity and relationship skills to connect with the members of either group, and although there was one precious friendship which I did not fully appreciate at the time, in general I felt excluded from both.

If Gosse was conscious of personal hypocrisy as a teenager he seems to have been remarkably free from guilt. I, on the other hand, was guilt-stricken. When I was about 15, someone asked me particularly pointedly whether I had become a Christian. For some reason I told what I knew even as I spoke to be a deliberate lie. Yes, I said. I had been saved, dating this spurious conversion from the most recent occasion when, gripped by guilt and longing during a sermon, I had cried out to God with no result that I was aware of.

This one lie led to others, and eventually I was baptised by immersion in the Baptist Church which my parents and I were by then attending. I did attend baptismal classes led by the minister, but regrettably he did not question me closely, or give me an opportunity to be real about my actual feelings and beliefs.

I anticipated my baptism and my first Lord’s Supper which would follow it with terror. Surely the Lord would be affronted by my hypocrisy and strike me dead. Well, I walked out of the baptismal tank, and swallowed the bread and wine, and lived. But as each Sunday after this approached bringing with it the inevitable Lord’s Supper again I was torn with fear and anguish. Would this be the week God’s patience ran out?

I longed to be able to find this elusive God, and told myself that if only I had the courage to admit my hypocrisy someone would help me. One of the lowest points in my life came when I shared the truth, and was told ‘Don’t be silly! Of course you’re a Christian. This is the devil getting at you,’ by someone whose own sense of security was perhaps threatened by my disclosure. What terrible act would I have to commit to persuade them I was not a believer? I fantasised about doing some terrible thing, and still not being believed, and flinging myself in despair from a city centre bridge. But I made no further attempts to share, and carried my inescapable burden of pain alone.

For these reasons, I believe I was led down badly by the Christian community in which I grew up. I do not label my experiences ‘abuse’, simply because the word implies intention to wound on the part of the abusers, while the Christians I knew, secure in their own beliefs, genuinely thought that in encouraging me to share their faith they were blessing me and seeking my long-term best interests. In additional, my own anxious and introspective personality made me more susceptible to suffering than were other kids brought up in a similar environment, although I realise that saying this brings me close to conceding that my anguish was my own fault, which it wasn’t. But what I experienced as pain, was offered as love.

Despite the similarities, I feel there was a fundamental difference between Edmund Gosse’s inner journey and mine. As a child, Gosse, aware of his ‘dedication’ to the Lord by his parents, felt ‘like a small and solitary bird caught….in a glittering cage.’ He continues: ‘I saw myself imprisoned for ever in the religious system which had caught me.’  Even at the age of 16, he tells us, ‘I was still but a bird fluttering in the net-work of my Father’s will, and incapable of the smallest independent action.’  If Gosse was struggling to get out of a system he felt was controlling him and plotting out his life ahead, I on the other hand felt excluded from the joyous and purposeful reality of the faith I saw in others around me and struggled to get in. For me, freedom was to be found on the inside.

In the end, as he describes in Father and Son, Edmund Gosse rejected the faith he had been brought up in, and embraced ‘the human being’s privilege to fashion his inner life for himself.’ This step away from his father’s faith was apparently much less clear-cut that this would suggest. According to Ann Thwaite’s biography Edmund Gosse: a literary landscape he still considered himself a Christian believer at the beginning of 1873, having realised that he could abandon some of the attitudes of the Brethren without abandoning Christ as well. But a year later, having faced possible death on a runaway horse, he told a friend that ‘the Christian revealed religion had never seemed so little worthy of belief.’

For my part, I finally came at the age of 21 to the point of accepting that the God I had always believed in was real, and that he accepted me. I suppose I had assumed that because my sense exclusion was so desperate, some dramatic divine intervention would be necessary if I were ever to encounter God. In fact my life was changed by a few words from the 16^th chapter of Luke’s gospel. Jesus tells the story of a beggar named Lazarus stationed daily outside the house of a rich man, who pointedly ignores him and his need. Both Lazarus and the rich man die. Lazarus finds himself in heaven, the rich man in the hell he had never believed in or at least taken seriously.

‘Please send Lazarus back to my brothers to warn them of the existence of hell so that they can ensure they don’t come here too,’ the rich man begs. But his request is refused. ‘They have the Scriptures. If they won’t believe their message, then they won’t believe even if they’re warned by someone risen from the dead.’ The instant I read those words, I realised that not only did I have the whole Bible, but also the testimony of someone – Jesus – whom I believed had returned from the dead. What hope was there for me if I rejected this? Nothing more would be given, for nothing more was needed. God came to me in those few words from Jesus’ story, with an inrush of transforming joy, awakening in me a sense of his reality.

That day marked the beginning of a long journey as I explored the great story of the Christian pilgrimage, the story in which I now knew I belonged. I was often still perplexed by the frequent absence of any sense of God’s presence, but there were times on the journey when I felt touched by his love and experienced some healing of the hurts I had suffered.

Much later in life I encountered some of the questions which exercised Edmund Gosse’s sharp intellect as a teenager – questions about how a truly good God can allow suffering, questions about how reasonable it is to regard the Bible as God’s word to us. At the end of this process, the God I believed in was bigger and more mysterious than I imagined, and I had to learn to live with his silences, with the times of struggle and the unanswered questions, but I remain convinced that he is there, speaking, challenging, loving.

Edmund Gosse subtitled his book ‘A study of two temperaments,’ referring to his and his father’s which, he felt, were ‘perhaps innately antagonistic.’ I am very conscious of the fact that people with different personality types seem to experience Christianity with differing degrees of emotional engagement, and I think Christians need to learn not to expect other believers to experience God in exactly the same way as they themselves do.

Certainly my temperament is very different from Edmund Gosse’s – I am compliant and lacking in self-confidence, while Gosse was precociously aware of his own personhood. But I think there is a more fundamental difference between us. Gosse spoke of his ‘growing distaste for the Holy Scripture,’ a distaste which ‘scandalised’ him as his ‘desire was to continue to delight in those sacred pages.’ But he was so familiar with the Bible’s contents that for him they had the ‘colourless triteness of a story retold a hundred times’ and in turning to its pages he experienced an ‘invincible ennui’.

I can understand and empathise with questions about the divine inspiration and reliability of the Bible. But I can’t imagine anyone who has ever been surprised by joy as something in the Bible, no matter how familiar to them as words on  the page or ideas in the mind,  awakens in their heart with newly-minted relevance could ever speak as Gosse does of ‘invincible ennui’.  There may be days of ennui, yes, but it is not invincible since in my experience God will before too long again draw near, clothed in words, his voice stirring the waters of the heart.

So it seems to me that the gulf between the Father and the Son arises not so much from two temperaments as from what the Apostle Paul calls (and it’s a distinction Edmund was aware of)  ‘two natures’, the one awakened, alive, seeking the reality of God, the other somehow asleep, dead, closed to the divine.

Edmund Gosse concludes the main section of Father and Son with a description of an evening during his final year at school, a year in the course of which he experienced a resurgence of spiritual longing and perceptiveness. He looked from a window in the school across an evening landscape of profound beauty, and he sensed that the time had come. Christ must surely return. ’Come now Lord Jesus,’ he cried. ‘Come now and take me to be for ever with Thee in Thy Paradise.’  But nothing happened. The Lord did not come, and at that moment he says he realised that the Lord would never come - never invade his life, never break into history. I believe that what Gosse failed to realise, and what I failed to realise for so many years as a young person, was that the Lord was always there.

A life in letters: Open Airs

Summer Sunday afternoons in the late 1960s in Carluke’s Market Square which is more triangle than square.  A group of people stand round a microphone on a stand, a battery-powered amplifier, and a harmonium. Everyone is smartly dressed; the women wear colourful hats. I am standing at the mike, defiant in the enforced eccentricity of my Hunting Macrae tartan kilt, plodding through  How great thou art. One of the Sisters, sitting decorously upright on the wooden slats of a park bench accompanies me, pedalling languidly. The sound bounces back, echoing off the stone house-fronts surrounding the square.

These ‘open airs’ were held, with the local Council’s permission, Sunday to Sunday from around April through to September. ‘WP and DV’ (Weather permitting and Deo Volente – God Willing.) There would be Gospel hymns from Sankey’s Sacred Songs and Solos, perhaps a testimony of someone’s journey to faith, a solo, and a short sermon from the week’s visiting preacher.

As the service progressed, some of the Brethren and Sisters, armed with gospel tracts walked round the paths criss-crossing the market, and lingered on the pavement adjoining the road where cars heading towards Lanark queued when the traffic lights were at red. When someone wound down a car window – or had a window open because of the heat – and looked quizzically at us over the hedge and chain fence, a tract would be enthusiastically proferred. We heard of at least one person who by that means was drawn to Christian faith.

I was familiar with open airs from childhood. Sunday afternoons in the late 1950s found me leaning against the sun-hot railings in the centre of Milngavie next to the Black Bull pub watching the Allendar Burn sparkle on its way below me while the Brethren spoke and sang. The Baptist Church in Carluke which my parents and I attended for a few years from 1962 did not, as I recall, have open airs on the agenda and so it wasn’t until we joined the local Gospel Hall that I found myself once again participating in these alfresco expeditions, taking to the streets with God’s people.

Young men in the Brethren who were considered to show promise as potential future preachers would be invited to accompany an older, more experienced Brother when he was scheduled to take Sunday services at a nearby meeting. Thus I recall one Sunday being asked to go to Allanton with Ben Schofield.

The evening service was preceded, earlier in the afternoon, by an open air. I remember before we went out of the hall – no more than five or six of us, all men – we prayed together, kneeling on the cold lino at hard wooden benches. Then we went and stood on a deserted street corner. We sang, unaccompanied, and someone prayed, and Ben preached through a megaphone. Perhaps I said a few words. But throughout the time we were there, we saw hardly anyone. There was not even a twitch of curtain. The good folks of Allanton must have been lying low until we left.

Open airs no doubt had had their day, but by then the traditional hit-the-streets-and-preach approach had long ceased to be an effective means of communication.