Blog on the Learig

  9 September 2026 It is a long time since we took our record-players down to the kirk for the Watchnight service in 1984 to play Geldof’s, ‘Do they know it’s Christmas’.   And three years later to show the children Elizabeth Laird’s retelling of the Christmas Story illustrated with Ethiopia’s beautiful iconography. Cassettes of the service were distributed to housebound people. Videos and DVDs were shown periodically. By 1999, the Panel on Worship was referring to ‘multi-media worship’ as ‘highly relevant’. In 2007, CARTA proposed a paper to help Kirk Sessions discuss the issue of screens. Whilst Covid abolished the uplifting of the offering, the Great Entry and the common cup, the Kirk   creatively used the internet to make   connections which have continued apace. With the arrival of AI, Pope Leo counselled his priests to exercise their own brain and share their faith which a machine cannot do. Despite its wonders, the screen cannot replicate the intimacy ...

  8 September 2026 On Sunday, I celebrated the Sacrament of Baptism at Crail. There were a lot of children in the kirk. I talked to them about boats and the connections which Jesus had with boats and his four friends who were fishermen on the Sea of Galilee. With a square piece of paper, I was able to demonstrate how you could make a paper boat. It requires very few moves but the trick is to ensure that the creases are folded tightly. It is difficult to do this when you are standing up and not sitting at a table! But it worked well enough. In his beautiful book of childhood poetry, ‘A Child’s Garden of Verses’, the poet, Robert Louis Stevenson,   wrote a poem entitled, ‘Where go the Boats?’ It is about a child offering his boats up to the river to see where they will go. On goes the river And out past the mill, Away down the valley, Away down the hill. Away down the river, A hundred miles or more, Other little children Shall bring my boats ashore. The c...

  7 September 2026 Jesus was angry, angrier than   anywhere else in the Gospels. He was angry because   his friends were trying to stop   the children coming to see him. ‘Let the children come to me, do not stop them.’ They can teach us about God and his kingdom. Three things. Firstly, it is a gift and not something which we can achieve by our own efforts. That’s why children are right there in the midst of it. And that’s why parents promise not to give their child faith but opportunities to get to know God and be touched by his surprising love. Secondly, God’s kingdom it is an upside down world where the last shall be first. And here Jesus chooses to welcome   the little children who are suddenly made visible. They are no longer obscure, trivial or unimportant but for that moment, they illuminate the character of God’s kingdom. What a privilege! Thirdly, God’s Kingdom is characterised by joy. It is a kingdom of surprises. But perhaps the biggest surpris...

  6 September 2026 Helen Lawrenson sent me a postcard from her holiday cottage. On it, she had written a poem. It was called, ‘Washing Day’. It came on the back of a postcard of miners’ lamps taken from the ‘Lamp Cabin’ at the Beamish Museum. This is her poem: It was a good drying day and in my arms I held the basket (a blue shirt cuff hanging down over the field) when I met the deep eyes of the hind a few feet away. We stood making no sound a long moment or two – she in her coat of foxy brown, I in my red and grey. Then as if processing surprise she turned her head to bound over the fence, while I watching the long grasses sway hung the shirts up to dry. The poet captures the moment beautifully. It is an experience of awe. You don’t have to be in a holy building to experience awe. It’s a gift which is given to all those who look attentively at the natural world and savour the moment. It all happened on an ordinary day when washing was being hung...

  5 September 2026 In the tale of the little taxman, who is reaching out to whom? Clearly Zacchaeus is reaching out to Jesus in his loneliness and isolation. Why else would a chief tax-collector endure the indignity of climbing up a sycamore tree? But Jesus is also reaching out to Zacchaeus. Doesn’t he invite himself to stay at the little man’s house? And why not? ‘The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’ he says to a would-be follower. And he defines his ministry of hospitality as seeking out and saving the lost. In this ministry, something remarkable happens. A change is effected in Zacchaeus. More than that, everyone around him discovers the little man’s hidden gift. He has a generous heart! He spontaneously decides to give half of his possessions to the poor and to pay back four times as much to those whom he has defrauded. This was going far beyond the letter of the law – and it was a generous continuation of Christ’s ministry of hospitality. Zacchaeus was making r...

  4 September 2026 When JM Barrie, the Scottish playwright, became rector at St. Andrews University, he was invited to address the students. His theme was courage and the rectorial address runs to forty-five pages. It was delivered on 3 May 1922, barely three years after the Armistice was signed. By this time, Barrie was sixty-two. It is a remarkable piece of writing characterised by the courage of which he speaks. Early on, there is a confession. ‘For fifty years or so we heeded not the rumblings of the distant drum.’ he says of those whom he describes as the students’ betters! ‘And when war did come we told youth, who had to get us out of it, tall tales of what it really is and of the clover beds to which it leads. We were not meaning to deceive, most of us were as honourable and as ignorant as the youth themselves; but that does not acquit us …’ He goes on to challenge the students to do two things. Firstly, to work in partnership with their betters to make the world mor...