Expository Times, Jan 2007
Fifty years ago this year, the Church of Scotland elected George MacLeod as Moderator of its General Assembly, the sixth of his family to hold that office. For the previous twenty years he had been Leader of the Iona Community, which he founded following ministries in Edinburgh’s fashionable St Cuthbert’s and Glasgow’s very unfashionable Govan. MacLeod’s biographer, and one of his successors as Leader of the Iona Community, Ron Ferguson, wrote a one-man play in which the distinguished Scottish actor, Tom Fleming, plays George MacLeod in old age, looking back over his life.
As it happens, I had a small part in bringing the play into being. Several years ago now, I wrote and produced for BBC Radio 3 a programme of words and music reflecting Scottish spirituality down the centuries from St Columba to George MacLeod. The programme was presented by Tom Fleming. I had chosen a famous prayer of MacLeod’s to end the programme. “Invisible we see you, Christ beneath us. With earthly eyes we see beneath us stones and dust and dross, fit subjects for the analyst’s table. But with the eye of faith, we know You uphold. In you all things consist and hang together: the very atom is light energy, the grass is vibrant, the rocks pulsate”.
As I sat in the production van outside Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh, where the programme was being recorded, it had been a long afternoon’s work. Tired, and looking forward to going home, I was grateful that there was only Tom’s reading of the MacLeod prayer and a final hymn to go. Suddenly I lost interest in going home. Through the loudspeakers in the van I was listening to the voice of George MacLeod. Unmistakeably. Uncanny. I had heard George MacLeod countless times. Tom Fleming had captured his cadences perfectly.
By the time I got home, I had come up with an idea for a series of programmes for BBC Radio Scotland called “Giants in the Land” in which Tom would deliver passages from the sermons of great preachers of the past, beginning, of course, with George MacLeod and featuring some famous MacLeod sermons, including one of the illustrations George MacLeod never tired of telling. “A boy threw a stone at a stained glass window of the Incarnation. It nicked out the ‘E’ in the word HIGHEST in the text GLORY TO GOD IN THE HIGHEST. Thus, till unfortunately it was mended, it read GLORY TO GOD IN THE HIGH ST. At least the mended E might have been contrived on a swivel so that in a high wind it would have been impossible to see which way it read”.
When the first programme in the series was broadcast, Ron Ferguson, by then minister of St Magnus Kirkwall, was preparing to conduct worship. He switched on the radio after the programme had begun and he was completely taken in. He was sure we had unearthed some long-lost recordings of George MacLeod, such was the effect of Tom Fleming’s delivery. The result was that Ron Ferguson immediately contacted Tom Fleming, and asked if he would play the part in a one-man play he wanted to write. The result is “Every Blessed Thing: An Evening with George MacLeod”, which had its premier at the Orkney Festival in 1994 and has since been performed in places as diverse as Iona, Edinburgh, Perth, Glasgow, Ardrossan, London, Toronto, New York, Connecticut and Paisley. It is available on CD from the Iona Community’s Wild Goose Publications.
Granted the number of what Geza Vermez calls “providential accidents” in the gestation of that play, it is tempting simply to quote another of George MacLeod’s regularly repeated sayings: “If you think that’s a coincidence, I hope you have a very dull life”!
As was the custom then, George MacLeod preached the sermon in St Giles’ Cathedral at the start of the General Assembly when he was to hand over to his successor. In that sermon he talked about a suffering God, quoting the nineteenth century Free Church theologian Marcus Dodds, who said that patripassianism was only half a heresy and it would take the twentieth century to make it orthodoxy. Long before the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer were widely know, George MacLeod, in his intuitive, unsystematic, inspired way was prophetic. He used to say the prophets were pelted, not promoted: but in his case both experiences came his way.