Expository Times, July 2006
Several years ago, I married Stan and Kathleen. They were the both in their seventies, and had known each other in the years just after the second world war. Kathleen was widowed, and Stan wanted her to marry him, but Kathleen felt then that her young family deserved all her attention. So the two drifted apart and went their separate ways. Until, quite by accident they met again in the early nineteen nineties, and they decided to get married.
At the wedding, I read a short poem by George Bruce, who wrote three love poems for his wife Elizabeth, one of which was called “Touch”. He describes looking out of a window and sensing her touch on his hand
“veined
by the changing years
that gave and took away
yet gave a touch that took away
the years between
and brought to this grey day
the brightness we had seen
before the years had grown between”.
Sitting at the reception afterwards, Kathleen said to me: “How did you know?” And she went on to tell me that she and Stan had met again at a party where she was looking out of a window, and he came up and touched her hand.
As George Macleod used to say “If you think that’s a coincidence, I hope you have a very dull life”!
In the strange way that memory works, that incident came back to me when I was thinking of the death at the beginning of this year of the Edinburgh theologian John McIntyre. He began one of his very early books, On the Love of God, with a description of a celebration of the Lord’s Supper in a hospital in Australia. “There were four of us present: the patient, George, with his mother, a student-minister and myself. As I conducted the service, the student-minister wrote the words I spoke, on George’s bare shoulder.” George had been paralysed, had wanted to join fully in membership of the Church, and had been confirmed and this was his first Communion. “As we proceeded slowly, sentence by sentence, word by word, we had ample opportunity to ponder every word of the Sacramental service. Under God’s mercy one man’s faith had taken us closer to the heart of God’s love than any demonstration by thousands whose faith had come to them in easier conditions.”
John McIntyre was ordained as one of a group of young ministers who went to look after highland parishes in wartime. Although his career took him as far away as Australia and to the heights of the Moderator’s chair and the Deanery of the Order of the Thistle, he always kept in touch with those he got to know in his early ministry in Glenorchy.
One of the last things John McIntyre wrote was an appreciation of John Macleod Campbell, who was deposed from the ministry of the Church of Scotland for teaching that “God loves everyone with a love, the measure of which is the death of his own son”. John Macleod Campbell had a very close relationship with his own father, who was the last person to speak up for him at his trial in the General Assembly. One of the reasons that Macleod Campbell could not imagine God sending “ane to heaven and ten tae hell” for his glory, was that he believed we should use the deepest of our personal relationships to teach us about the nature of God; and he could not imagine a God who behaved less generously than his own father.
John McIntyre’s writing and teaching used to a remarkable extent insights into our human relationships. For instance, in Faith, Theology and Imagination, he writes about how if he were to retrace the map of love which he drew in that early book which told the story of George, he would give far more prominence to imagination in which, he said, we discern in other people qualities concealed from casual observers and may reveal the attractiveness that may underlie a superficial unattractiveness.
Many years ago I preached at a Scottish public school on the first Sunday after Trinity. When I arrived I was told that the preacher the week before had been John McIntyre, and that he had preached on the Trinity. “To a school?” I asked, with much more surprise than I should have shown. “Yes” the chaplain said. “He was very simple. The doctrine of the Trinity just means ‘God: here, there, and everywhere’”.
It wasn’t the first or the last time John McIntyre provided me with a sermon!