A numinous old Scottish church was, and to some extent still is, a touchstone for earthly struggles
By B.C. | GLASGOW
CHRISTIANITY, like all the world's major religions, can be deep and mystical, or it can be intensely engaged with the practical problems of the world. The two things don't usually go together easily. Think about it—Islam has its dreaming Sufis and the bustling activists of the Muslim Brotherhood. In Buddhism, you can find monks in pursuit of nirvana, and hard-nosed players in the internal politics of Sri Lanka or Myanmar. And Christianity contains both phenomena too: from gung-ho liberation theologians in Latin America, to monastics who pray all night.
Can these two impulses ever be reconciled? Through the 20th century, a fine place of worship in a hardscrabble, dockside district of Glasgow witnessed a bold effort to bring the two kinds of religion into sync. Govan Old Church is certainly a numinous location. The present structure dates only from the 19th century, but it stands on a site where Christian worship was offered for many centuries before that. It houses remarkable stone carvings, including a sarcophagus that probably contained the relics of a local king who died fighting the Vikings. The saintly king was called Constantine, after the first Christian ruler of the Roman empire.
But as I mention in this week's print edition, Govan hasn't in recent times been a place where many people could spend hours contemplating stained glass. It was home to one of the world's greatest shipyards, and saw bitter industrial strife in the latter half of the century. The church's most famous minister, George MacLeod, was conscious of the dilemma he faced and responded creatively. On one hand, he had a mystical streak: he was carried away by an Orthodox Easter service in Jerusalem. On the other hand, he knew that such things did not mean very much to his neighbours—ship-builders who were making the world's greatest vessels but were subject to the wild economic fluctuations of the 1930s. So he invited a group of Govan workers to help him rebuild the abbey on the island of Iona, the birthplace of Scottish Christianity, and then founded the Iona Community, which turned into a fraternity of Christians in Scotland and beyond whose sympathies were on the political left. The community operated both on Iona and in Glasgow, mixing the mystical beauty of a remote island with the tough realities of an industrial city. (Its present and former leaders were strong advocates of the "yes" campaign in last week's referendum.)
In more recent times, people from Govan have continued to take pride in the church as a local monument, even if they had little or no religious feeling themselves. In 2010, the church hosted the funeral of leftist firebrand Jimmy Reid, who had led massive industrial protests three decades earlier. But as the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland itself has weakened, so has its role in political and social action. In 2007, to the horror of history buffs, conservationists and many local people, the Presbyterian authorities announced that the church was redundant; a compromise was found by merging a couple of congregations, whose combined total is still fairly modest. This combined community uses the Old Church for week-day services but not on Sundays.
The current minister of that church, Moyna McGlynn, sits on the board of a nearby social-welfare project, Galgael, in which individuals with troubled pasts are taught to use wood and build traditional boats. But the atmosphere at the project is pretty secular—like almost everything else in Govan.
Visiting the neighbourhood and the church now, it feels at times as though a noble effort to combine "deep" religion with wordly needs has run its course. But perhaps Govan Old Church has not said its last word. One of the distinguishing features of "holy places" is that they can be re-interpreted and re-invented in every successive generation.
