Enjoyed a good fight
in the way some people
enjoy bad health.
-- Ronald Ferguson
Triumph of vision and commitment over adversity . . .
-- Thomas Winning
IT gives me the very greatest pleasure to contribute to this special
Weekender symposium on one of the greatest ministers I have ever known
-- George MacLeod. We first met when my husband, Walter Elliot, was
Secretary of State for Scotland in 1936 and 1937. George was then the
minister in Govan and -- if my memory is right -- already famous for his
sermons.
This was before his great work on Iona started. I can remember going
to see the abbey, which was a stately ruin. I was one of the first
people to join the Iona Community, and I have belonged to it ever since.
It was in 1956 and 1957 that my husband Walter was High Commissioner
to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, and our two
Moderators of the Assembly were Mr Scott from St Columba's Church in
London, and then George MacLeod. Preaching in St Giles' Cathedral,
George held the congregation utterly spellbound -- such a wonderful
voice, and such words. I have never forgotten that.
It was some years later that George came into the House of Lords. I
had been a member since 1958, and I was simply delighted when he was
introduced -- the first Church of Scotland minister to be made a Peer.
He made a great impression on all the members of the Lords, and we were
all very sad when his hearing made it impossible for him to take any
further part in our work.
George MacLeod will never be forgotten.
Baroness Elliot of Harwood, of Rulewater in Roxburgh, DBE, LLD, is one
of Scotland's most distinguished Peers. She is a former UK delegate to
the UN General Assembly.
I RECALL wandering around the streets of Govan as a wee boy. On Sunday
nights we always used to go to Govan Cross, where there was a sort of
speakers' corner. George MacLeod was always there, talking about the
yards and campaigning for better conditions. He used to get hundreds of
people listening.
The first time I heard him I went home and asked my father who this
man was. He said: ''That's the minister, son.'' And that impressed me:
that the minister should be out there, talking to the people. The man
had a huge impact on Govan, and he was a great campaigner. I never
actually met him, but I'm sure that if I had been older I'd have been
grasped by him: he had that kind of power.
Even as a small boy, though I could not really understand what he was
saying, I was impressed that here was this minister, reaching out beyond
his church and his pulpit, reaching out to the people.
Alex Ferguson, OBE, was born and bred in Govan. He played football
for, among others, Rangers and Dunfermline. His distinguised managerial
career has taken him from East Stirling to Manchester United, via St
Mirren and Aberdeen.
GEORGE MACLEOD is a towering figure in the Kirk, a Scottish Christian
leader of international standing. It's no wonder that he is up there
with Mother Teresa and Solzhenitsyn in winning the Templeton
International Prize.
He is a big man. Big in his vision, big in his capacities, big in his
flaws. Whether you are for him or against him you cannot easily give him
the ''bodyswerve''. He confronts you, and demands an answer.
He is a mass of contradictions -- conservative, radical, aristocratic,
socialist, belligerent, pacifist, traditional, iconoclastic,
hard-headed, romantic. In my time as leader of the Iona Community I had
to stand up to him in order not to be swallowed up by him: I soon
understood that he enjoyed a good fight in the way some people enjoy bad
health.
Above all he is a visionary who puts his body where his mouth is, a
prophet who sees into the heart of things. His passionate belief that
the spiritual and the material must not be separated has made him an
uncompromising crusader against injustice wherever he finds it.
Everything he does is informed by a passionate love for God. As a
preacher and orator he has had few equals in twentieth-century Scotland;
the Celtic poetry of his prayers has lifted countless people in the
direction of heaven. To be led in worship by MacLeod in Iona Abbey is to
be moved unforgettably, to be changed.
George MacLeod has inspired countless people. Like many others, I love
the man, even when he is at his most maddening. He is not a saint in the
conventional sense (though he is in the sense that Columba was -- an
outrageous, volative adventurer, taking God at his word).
No, not a saint. Just a hero.
The Rev. Ron Ferguson is a former leader of the Iona Community. His
forthcoming biography of George MacLeod is his fifth book.
TWO hundred words on MacLeod? Deduct saint (as in the Bible, not the
Calendar), prophet, gentleman, and political maverick.
That leaves 195, of which one must be orator. As a boy, I was taken to
hear him at his most exasperating, a pacifist in the war that had to be
fought, remembered for gallantry in the one that should have been
avoided. I wished (and still wish) I could speak like that. Of those
I've heard,
only Violet Bonham-Carter and Churchill approached him.
Years later he dazzled me in an Assembly speech about the Lord Jesus
holding Kruschev in the hollow of his hand. Yet when I first met him (in
a BBC studio) he was spouting about the EC as a Popish plot, matched
only for nonsense value by his later eccentric blend of CND with
conspiracy theories about capitalism and the Cold War. Occasionally he
was fooled by the Soviet-run ''peace movement'', though he backed Keston
College when organised ecumenism concealed the truth about persecution.
Not many words left. Protestant has to be one. His life and work
affirm the priesthood of all believers. Leader is another. Postwar
generations only remember him as an old man; but what a word of command
he must have had in his prime, the evil age of the Fuhrer, the Duce, and
Comrade Stalin. Not his own word, but the Word that worked as a
carpenter.
Sometimes he is the day before yesterday's man, a great Victorian late
in time, his politics as dated as Columba's. He is also eternity's man
and Christ's man. If I believed in the mediation of saints I would
enlist his intercession. But his response would be: ''Don't follow me:
follow Him.''
R. D. Kernohan is editor of Life and Work and a leading commentator on
Kirk affairs.
IN the late sixties George MacLeod was Lord Rector of Glasgow
University. At a QM dinner a gauche young lady speaker remarked how glad
everyone was that ''our Rector Lord Reith was present''.
Aside from the fact that Reith by that time was dead, there is a
temptation to compare the two men, not simply because they were both
Rectors of Glasgow University. To look at, both were tall, stern
calvinists. But there the resemblance ends, for the vain, unhappy Reith
of close-up does not compare with the unforbidding and mischievous
MacLeod.
The riotous bantering of a MacLeod family meal was hardly the stuff of
which tyrants are made, although had he chosen a career in politics he
might have been less harmless in his benign dictatorship of the Iona
community. But there was always the impish iconoclast within him.
He once complained to me that the New Club, Edinburgh's elite
establishment, was threatening to discipline him for having broken club
rules by discussing business with a guest over lunch. On making further
inquiries about this draconian treatment of an aged member, I discovered
that MacLeod had taken the enfant terrible of Festival Arts into the
ladies' retiring room for a chat.
The twinkle in the eye and love of acting contrary are as essential to
understanding his character as his military and upper-class upbringing.
A remark he was fond of making after recounting a remarkable happening
was: ''If you think that's a coincidence, I hope you have a very dull
life!'' I once told him I was proposing to use it in a book. Contrary to
the last, he replied: ''I've no idea who said it. Certainly it wasn't
me.''
Coincidences abounded for George MacLeod and he certainly did not have
a dull life . . . as Ron Ferguson's excellent book will demonstrate
abundantly.
The Rev. Stewart Lamont is the Glasgow Herald's religious affairs
correspondent. He is the author of several books, including Church and
State (Bodley Head).
TWO things really stand out about George MacLeod: his social
conscience, as reflected through his founding of the Iona Community, and
his deep commitment to the belief that the world must not be allowed to
destroy itself through nuclear weapons.
This man has had a profound influence on Scottish society in the
twentieth century. He has made an enormous contribution to maintaining
our egalitarian traditions and our compassionate attitudes, thus
allowing Scotland to resist the utilitarianism of Mrs Thatcher.
It must now be heartbreaking for George MacLeod, and all the thousands
who have followed him, to see not just the Government, but also the
alternative government, committed to nuclear weapons on the Clyde. But
this is most certainly not a failure on George MacLeod's part -- he has
taken the majority of the Scottish people with him.
He found in Govan in the 1930s a great stimulus for social action. He
found a substantial number of human beings living in poverty. Things are
now better than they were then, and much of the improvement is due to
him. But we must remember that people in Govan are still living on the
brink of poverty; and they are now prey to the moneylenders and the drug
dealers.
Geroge MacLeod is a very great Scot.
Jim Sillars has represented Govan in the SNP interest since 1988, when
he won the seat from Labour in a spectacular by-election victory.
LENGTH of days may not be what makes age honourable, and a prophet may
seldom be recognised in his own land -- but Lord George MacLeod of
Fuinary has certainly confounded everyone on both counts.
He has testified consistently to his steadfast belief in the vitality
of the Gospel. It is truly Good News -- and it is for everyone.
A charismatic pacifist, whose place in the annals of Christianity in
Scotland is already assured, his appreciation of Gospel values led to a
Christian activism.
At no time was this more exemplified than among the unemployed of
Govan during the depressed 1930s. He lived the ''preferential option for
the poor'' long before the phrase was coined as a priority for today's
churches.
A man of vision, he has, however, been a child of his time.
Yet it is to his credit, and our good fortune, that his gift of
insight always overpowered that awesome tendency, which we all share, to
remain rooted in past -- or present -- prejudices.
Thus, his fears that the treaty of Rome, which saw the birth of the
European Economic Community, might be somewhat more than met the eye,
eventually gave way to an inspired dedication to ecumenical initiatives.
The Iona Community -- dare I say it: the nearest the Church of
Scotland has to a religious order -- the restoration of the abbey, the
centre named after him, the 1989 Templeton Prize, all bear eloquent
witness to the triumph of vision and commitment over adversity,
suspicion and human nature.
George MacLeod's pilgrimage through life has indeed blazed a trail for
others to follow. It is a path which leads to Jesus, who continues to
pray that we ''all may be one''.
That, for me, is also the predominant message of Lord MacLeod of
Fuinary. If he is indeed a prophet who is truly recognised and acclaimed
in his own time, and in his own land, then we Christians must make that
message our own -- and act on it.
Thomas J. Winning is Archbishop of Glasgow and chairman of the
Bishops' Conference of Scotland.
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