Our dear fellow Christian, Alec Philip, who died a few weeks ago, was such a busy man. He did so much and didn't say much; he just got on with it. Now it takes a small army of us at church to pick up his work as Fabric Convener and People's Warden. Contractors come, seeking him out about this and that job they had been discussing; all are shocked when they learn of his passing. Nonetheless, we all get on with Alec's jobs willingly, as he did, without counting the cost.
Bride of Kildare has much written about her, and of course she was Abbess of her Religious Community where she lived. We tend to think that these saints of days gone by as in the far distant past, like Isaiah or Job, yet upon reading of their lives and deeds I am struck, as I about dear Alec, how like us they all are. They face the same problems, same disbeliefs from folk, same buildings and property problems. I know Columcille (Columba) did across Scotland and indeed, in building and re-building his monastic Community on Iona. Columba's history according to his successor Adamnan, made much of Columcille and his monks singing the psalms daily. That interests me as I miss chanting the psalms with Anglican pointings. Now we recite them mainly. Now Columcille would not know the Anglican pointings and probably only and reluctantly learned Gregorian chant later, when Rome took the Celtic Church over and changed the Calendar. So, what tunes did the Celtic Church have? Well, one clue is the extraordinary Gaelic Psalmody of the 'Wee Free' Kirk in those very Western, Hebridean Islands. They sing puirt-a-beul ( unaccompanied) and it is a haunting and undulating sound, each line of which is precented and everyone then joins in. It fluctuates like the wind and the waves outwith the Kirk. In the most northerly Scottish Episcopal Church in Shetland, St Colman's Burravoe, the organist was from the Church of Scotland church nearby. That congregation always celebrated the Holy Eucharist at the Episcopal Church and in the evening the Episcopalians attended Divine Evening Service at the Parish Church as a sort of return match. Well, during the Holy Eucharist the woman, Presbyterian organist would start off verbally precenting the Anglican hymn, then she would bring in the organ and the congregation would then join in. Before the end of the first verse she would again over-sing with precenting the second verse, and so on. Curiously, it not only worked but felt familiar, as if in the Gaelic at the 'Wee Free Kirk' Then I noticed the elderly man in front of me, dressed completely in black and wearing big black boots covered in mud. From his briefcase he brought out a book. It was a large format copy of the Episcopal Scottish Prayer Book 1929 - in Gaelic. From here he read the Collect, Epistle and Gospel in Gaelic and softly to himself, for that was his language. Later I learned that he is a Free Kirk Minister and he walks 20 miles on Sundays from his croft, across the moor, to Burravoe for the Eucharist. It was therefore a community of different denominations all sharing together.
Aidan (Aodhan), like Bride, was at home in such environments as those above in Shetland. He was a man of the people and would walk everywhere, giving away a white horse someone gave him, so that he could be at one with everyone else. This is a far cry from the pomp of our Churches and the differentiation we make from each other.
