Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Monday Book – The Sinner

Posted on by
Reply

The Sinner – Stuart MacGregor (J Philip O’Hara 1973)

There are many facets to the city of Edinburgh – cultural, historical, academic and poor suburbs. I lived most of my life within easy distance and rode the thirty minute train journey most weeks in the late 1950s and early 1960s to go to jazz clubs and folk clubs. It usually involved climbing the steps from the station to the high street, stopping at the pub halfway, then on up to Bunjie’s coffee bar and finally to number 369 and the jazz club before racing for the last train home.

MacGregor’s book is set around that time and captures the atmosphere well.

There are really three strands to the story – the main character is Denis Sellars who has an on-off relationship with Kate and is a folksinger. Then there is a debate between traditionalist folkies and entertaining folkies. There are many thinly disguised real people who emerge in this strand. Denis is caught in the middle and his brother is being groomed as an entertaining folksinger.

I could fairly easily recognize many of the ‘real’ people who were referenced and I worried about that, as I don’t think they were as ‘right and wrong’ as MacGregor suggests. My memory is of a much more understanding time and Hamish Henderson (who is one of the thinly disguised ones) always encouraged guitar wielding youngsters like me.

I do believe, however, that he captured a particular atmosphere of cultural Edinburgh at that time really well. That I recognized!

The relationship with Kate was also believable and, I’m sure, would chime with many of my generation.

MacGregor was a medical student at the University of Edinburgh, helped start one of the first folksong clubs in Scotland, and wrote songs and poems. After graduating, he married and moved to take up a job as a doctor in Jamaica. He died in a road crash around the time this book was published.

I was amused that the cover looks like a reference to Bob Dylan’s second album.

His best known song is ‘Coshieville’ a bittersweet love song set in a small hamlet in Perthshire when the hydro-electric dams were being built – here’s a nice performance –

What if….?

Posted on by
2

NB: This blog is written for a specific group of people. Thank you for being polite if you are not in that group of people.

Dear Non-vaccinating on Religious Grounds People,

What if you’ve got it backwards? What if your refusal to vaccinate because it is evil is actually putting you on the Satanic scrub list to remove you from Earth at a time when righteous voices of care, compassion, and Christianity are needed more than ever? (Non-Christians will have a field day with that. I’m not talking to them. Ignore their judgement. Stick with me here, fellow believers.)

We are called to be the Salt and Light for the world. If we don’t get vaxxed, if the Delta variant takes out younger, stronger people as well as the wisdom of our Godly Elders, how much prayer is the world losing? It was bad enough losing the prayer warriors; now we also lose the innocent children, the strong warriors, the middle-aged women of Proverbs 31?

Last week the world was diminished by the loss of one of the sweetest Christian men I’ve ever known, a guy who smiled when people screamed at him, who answered with kindness when people cut him off in traffic. All over America, all across the world, about one in ten Christians (according to some nebulous polls) have stopped asking “What does God tell me to do about the vaccine” and accepted “God said no” as someone else’s astroturfing, trouble-stirring, theology-knotting twist on Apocalyptic thinking.

Who told you that you were naked? God asked Adam and Eve in the garden. (Why were you listening to a snake? Why did you listen to the snake instead of me?) Go back to your prayer closet. Ask God again: not the preacher on youtube, not the Ice Age Farmer, not the lady who sat behind you at the Bill Gothard seminar. Ask God. Ask God directly, through Jesus the intercessor we all believe in.

Something is horribly wrong when the removal of voices for the truth is accepted–nay, preached–as God’s will. God wants all the righteous to die? Go back to your prayer closets. Try again. The world is diminished when your voices are lost.

Who told you the vaccine was evil? Were you raised for such a time as this, and are on the wrong side of the mirror we see through, darkly? Go pray. Thank you.