The Persistence of Quiet Faith
I was in East Kilbride this weekend. I was there to attend a service this morning at the church in which I grew up, St Mark’s Scottish Episcopal Church. Amongst other things, the service was to mark my mum’s ‘retirement’ from active service in and to the congregation. Mum is 93.
I have a complicated relationship with Christianity and the Church; I am not a Christian but, then, neither was Jesus. My memories of St Mark’s in the 1970s are of a large-ish and active congregation. The congregation now is diminished and aging, which is not unique these days whatever the denomination. The appearance this morning of me, my sister and my nieces and nephew with their partners and children pretty much doubled the congregation and halved the average age.
Over the past week I’ve had a number of thoughts about attending the service and the extent to which I would participate without feeling hypocritical. I journaled those thoughts and some of them might appear here one day, but not yet. However, what struck me quite forcibly this morning was that, however ostensibly diminished St Mark’s is, it persists. Every week a group of people meet, share time with each other and participate in a ritual that has meaning for them.
St Mark’s is 70 years old now, a stripling in terms of ecclesiastical architecture but even so a place where people – including Mum and Dad and my family – have gathered and served the community with quiet determination over many years and there is a subtle power in that. And so, despite my non-belief, I was happy to join in with communion this morning not just out of respect for Mum and for the memory of Dad (I wore his cufflinks in my shirt) but because of that quiet persistence.
By happy coincidence, the Gospel reading for today was Matthew’s telling of the expulsion of the money-changers and merchants from the Temple. That (and particularly aspects of Mark’s framing of the stories in his gospel) parallels a lot of my own thinking about personal ethics and organised religion in general, reflecting something older than Messianism or, in Greek, Christ-ism. But that’s a post for another day.
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