This post was written by Andy Murray, whose own blog, Ragged Theology (raggedtheology.blogspot.co.uk) is well worth following. I’ve mentioned him here before because it’s largely his fault that I fell among bloggers at all. His passion for Christianity as social justice is inspirational; I think Thomas Guthrie would have approved.

I love Edinburgh. Every working morning, I come out of Waverley Station and glance at the Mound, the Scott Monument, and the Castle and remember how fortunate I am to live in one of the world’s most beautiful cities. I battle through the tourists, taking in the breath-taking views, as I struggle to get to the bus stop. But as with every city, Edinburgh has a dark side. My own charity, Safe Families for Children Scotland, works with families in crisis so I get to see plenty of children in desperate situations. The number of looked after children in Edinburgh has reached record levels with many having to be placed out of authority and sibling groups split up. While millions of pounds are spent on taking kids into care, a tiny amount is spent on prevention. The results of this strategy are seen in prisons with a huge number of prisoners who have a care background. Safe Families recruits, trains, supports and matches volunteers from a range of churches to families in crisis. Our strap line is ‘hope starts here’ and we see time and again how the introduction of a volunteer can bring hope into a desperate situation. We see it as grace in action – loving with no strings attached.

Begging and homelessness are also a very visible reminder that behind the beautiful buildings and wealth of Edinburgh, there is a large group which has missed out on the city’s progress. Every night of the week 50-60 rough sleepers will gather in a church hall in Edinburgh ready to be fed by a local church team and provided with a bed by Bethany Christian Trust, a 35-year-old homeless charity. Hundreds of church volunteers, dozens of church venues, and a willing group of Bethany staff provide a lifeline to men and women desperate for help. Every year the shelter is funded largely by the free will offerings of churches and individuals.

There was a time when the church was at the very heart of poverty relief and the fight against injustice. We see clues to this in the architecture and sites of Edinburgh. Towards the West End of Princes Street we see the imposing statue of Dr Thomas Guthrie. Under one arm he has a Bible while under the other arm a fearful looking ‘ragged child’ looks out. It is like the portrait of Guthrie in the National Portrait Gallery in Queen Street entitled ‘A Mission of Mercy’. He stands at the top of the Lawnmarket patting affectionately one of the many ‘ragged children’ while behind him stands one of the ‘Dram Houses’ that Guthrie so hated. Dr Guthrie’s great legacy, as the statue states, is that he was ‘a friend to the poor and to the oppressed.’ His great friend and mentor, Thomas Chalmers, stands close by in George Street. One of Scotland’s foremost social reformers, Chalmers, like Guthrie, is now an unknown and unrecognised relic from Scotland’s Christian heritage.

The fathers of the Free Church never saw the false and unbiblical divergence between preaching the gospel and helping the poor as we do today. Largely the Christian church (and the Free Church in particular) have franchised out to the government their responsibilities to love the widow, the orphan, the poor and the stranger. Most Deacons’ Courts have become finance and fabric committees without any serious attempt to deal with the poor around the congregation. Many ministers and elders seem to think the government have largely solved poverty and need through the welfare state so the church no longer has a role. Not unlike the Victorian era, the church has ceased to fight injustice and is no longer the conscience of the nation. We have become part of the establishment rather than seeking to fight against the injustice and corruption of the rich and powerful.

Thankfully, when Guthrie came to Edinburgh from his rural parish in Angus in 1837, he was willing to take the civil and religious establishment head on. Thousands of children were living on the streets of Edinburgh or in squalor. As if this wasn’t bad enough, most of the church not only ignored the situation but some even argued it was God’s will. Like today, rather than investing money in care and welfare, huge amounts of money was spent in prison and punishment with little effect. It was the same in London when Wilberforce took on the slave trade. Some of his fiercest criticism came from the religious establishment. As Metaxas says in his excellent biography of Wilberforce: ‘Many thought God had ordained the poor’s situation, that it was part of the natural order, and that they should therefore be kept where they were, in their misery. To help them was tantamount to shaking one’s fist at God.’

Like Isaiah and Micah, Guthrie saw the connection between worship and social justice (Isaiah 58). The prophet Micah ministered at a time of great corruption and injustice. Israel’s sins ranged from sorcery and idolatry (Micah 5 v 12-14) to deceit and fraudulent dealings (Micah 6 v 10, 11). Justice had broken down particularly in the distribution of land. The land intended for the inheritance of all God’s people was seized by the rich and the powerful (Micah 2 v 1-5 and Numbers 27 v 1-11). God’s people had ceased to be the conscience of the nation and instead had become complicit with the rich and powerful. Micah condemns Judah’s religious leaders for their disregard for justice and truth. He tells them in Micah 6 v 8 ‘He hath showed thee O man, what is good, and what the Lord requires of thee: surely to do justly, and to love mercy, and to humble thyself, to walk with thy God.’

The Hebrew word for justice is mishpat which emphasises the activity of ‘doing justice’. This word comes up over 200 times in the Old Testament. The mishpat or justice of a society in the Bible is based on how certain groups of people were treated. In the Old Testament, this included widows, orphans, the immigrant or the poor. Thus, in Zechariah 7 v 10-11 we read; ‘Thus says the Lord of hosts, render true judgements, show kindness and mercy to one another, do not oppress the widow, the fatherless, the sojourner, or the poor, and let none of you devise evil against another in your heart’. Why should we stand up for the poor? Why should we fight injustice? Because God commands it but also because it is the very character of God. In Psalm 146 v 7-9 we read; …who executes justice [Mishpat] for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets the prisoners free; The Lord opens the eyes of the blind. The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down; The Lord loves the righteous. The Lord watches over the sojouners; He upholds the widows and the fatherless, But the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.’ Micah calls on God’s people to practice justice. To stop stealing land, to treat people humanely, and to stop oppressing the widows and orphans.

Even more than that, the people of God are to love mercy. The Hebrew word used in Micah for mercy is hesed – faithful or unfailing love. It is not enough to do justice – we are to delight in doing it. Doing justice and loving mercy is the fruit of walking humbly with God. When we walk with God it means that we come to know him intimately and desire what he loves and desires. The people in Judah had forgotten God and had become self-absorbed. This led to oppression of the poor and a lack of love for the marginalised. People were selfish not loving. But when people walk with God in intimate fellowship Him they are infused with the love of God. They love God and love their neighbour. They love the first and second table of the law.

Justice and love aren’t just a nice idea, they are the fruit of the gospel. The more we understand of the grace of God, the more we will do justice, and love mercy. We don’t need to decide between preaching the gospel and loving the poor. God asks us to both. When we fight justice, and love the poor it doesn’t dilute the gospel it makes the gospel more attractive, the church more authentic and Christians become like beacons in a dark society. We fulfil the command of James 1 v 27 ‘Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this, to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.’ The gospel calls for activity. We are called to love those have nothing and can offer nothing in return. As Dr Guthrie says ‘Religion does not consist in doctrinal or prophetical speculations; nor lie like a corpse entombed in old dusty confessions. She lives in action, and walks abroad among mankind – calling us to leave our books, to shut our Bibles, to rise from our knees, and go forth with hearts full of love and hands full of charities.’

Last Sunday, I heard two sermons. This is not unusual. Like generations of Lewis folk before me, unless I’m ill or off the island, I go to the searmon in the morning and to the coinneamh at night. The distinction is an historical one because, actually, it’s the same building, same format and – frequently- the same preacher at each service. It is the revered ‘da cheann-latha’, which is unfortunately expressed in English as being ‘out both ends’. And, I know that, to my atheist friends, this is a devotion too far.

I know, because when I’m tired, or below-par, they will tell me to give church a miss. ‘Don’t go to the evening service’, they’ll say. No one ever suggests that I should do less housework (perhaps because they’ve been in my home), or less studying, less going to the cinema, or dog-walking. And I know why.

They think, as I once did myself, that all that church-going must be a strain. Surely I need to switch off from it. Wouldn’t I love to break the routine? Don’t those two trips from Tolsta to Stornoway get tiring, and tiresome? And here is where I wish that I had a better way with words. These Sundays are far from tiring; they are wells of living water which irrigate the whole week. I’m not going because I have to, or am expected to, or would be talked about if I wasn’t there. Nor is there a black-hatted elder keeping a sederunt book (and if there was, it jolly well wouldn’t have a Latin name anyway).

I want to be able to say why I willingly leave the comfort of my own home to get in the car and drive for 20 minutes, twice a day, but I just haven’t the words. Only, it occurs to me that there, right there, is the reason: I am NOT leaving the comfort of my own home. In fact, much of what is attractive in the gospel of Christ is its familiarity, it’s very home-ness. And for me, it can be summed up in three precious phrases.

In the coinneamh last Sunday, we heard how Jesus deals with us in our trials; He says – as he said to Peter – ‘this is for me and for you’. This, in other words, you do not have to face alone because I will go through it with you. And He does.

These were such beautiful words, so simple and yet conveying so much of the Saviour’s love, that they caused me to think of other words that bring Him near. A few months ago now, in the searmon, the minister spoke of the disciples, frightened by a storm at sea, until they were joined by Jesus. ‘It’s myself’, He said to them. Intimate, familiar and reassuring: ‘it’s myself’. The storm hadn’t ceased, but it didn’t matter because He was there, Himself, Myself; and He might have added, of the storm, ‘it’s for Me and for you’.

My own father is the reason that I had a positive image of who God the Father might be. Sadly, not everyone understands the concept of a benign, loving paternal figure, but I was blessed in that respect. One of my abiding memories of him is how he used to carry me, as a child, down our steep staran in the winter frost. Safe in his arms, I knew nothing bad would happen to me.
When my father died, and four years later when my husband did, the minister came to our home, the same minister both times. And when he suggested that he might pray, on each occasion, he used the same lovely phrase, ‘we’ll just have a wee word’. God is so close by that this intimacy is not just possible, but somehow right.

One of the worst pieces of advice I was given after my husband died was not to ‘over-spiritualise things’. I think our tendency is, rather, to under-spiritualise. When my friends see that I’m tired, they mean to be kind and to show concern by telling me to take a break from church. They see the outward ritual, but not the inward refreshing. I can’t make them see that it wouldn’t be a rest, but a punishment to stay at home. And when I try to give a reason for the hope that is in me, they smile and say, ‘yes, but we need proof’, as though I’m a credulous child. How can I bridge that divide? Is there a way to tell them, in words that will make them understand, that I have proof? How I wish there was. Is this enough:

When I am about to be overwhelmed by fear, or sadness, or fatigue, He says, ‘this is for me and for you’; when I feel that I am alone, or abandoned, He says, ‘it’s Myself’, and whenever I need Him, I can simply say, ‘I need a wee word‘. He is not far away, but very near, and very familiar. Like home.

Our forefathers used to have a blessing for everything. Look through the amazing resource that is ‘Carmina Gadelica’, and you will see blessings for birth and for baptism, yes; but also blessings for milking the cow and for smooring the fire. I have a woodburner myself, but I can still appreciate the beauty of the words. And any maw who has ever experienced the searing pain of smoor in the eye can surely see the need of such a verse.

The point is,  spirituality was woven into their lives. God was their God all the time. These blessings for milking and smooring, and all the tasks that lay in between, spun a thread of faith through each successive day. But then, they were poor, ignorant souls and there was no Equalities Act to tell them that they shouldn’t pray near the cow without first obtaining her permission. After all, what if the cow was a Hindu? No, in their uneducated bliss, they committed their days to God as naturally as breathing. He was with them in the mundane tasks, as well as those which elevate life beyond the ordinary. And in this, they were simply living as closely to His pattern as any pastoral people outside of Eden ever could.

Now, we follow an artificially demarcated week, which would have been utterly alien to our forefathers. God’s time and theirs knitted together; but we have allowed those threads to loosen. And the tricky thing about loose threads is that there will always be someone to worry at them until they fray completely.

Individual Christians are, of course, responsible for their own walk with God, and for guarding against attack. To some, perhaps ‘attack’ evokes images of countries where Christians are persecuted for their faith, where they must worship in secret, in fear of their lives. But I’m not talking of that kind of onslaught; I’m talking of the insidious creep of a worldview which thinks itself accepting, but is highly selective in what it will countenance.

1 Timothy reminds us how dangerous false teaching is. In fact, 1 Timothy could have been written for the very age that we’re living in, when it seems that the only real crime is saying that some forms of human behaviour are simply . . . wrong. To be a Christian in this society means taking a stand for what you believe, when what you believe is foolishness to everyone around you.

Some of the candidates for election to seats in Comhairle nan Eilean are Christians. Then again, so are some of the electorate. I have seen requests for those standing, who have committed their lives to Christ, to be upfront about this with voters. As far as I’m aware, they have not attempted to hide their beliefs, and so I find these demands extraordinary. What particular threat to democracy is posed by a Christian councillor that is not also posed by a secularist one? Or a feminist one? Or a socialist, tea-drinking, banjo-playing one?

By compiling lists of who the Christians are among our politicians, what are we hoping to achieve? Is it not enough to demand the impossible, that they separate their Christianity from their decision-making? We are now going down an even darker road, it seems to me, and one that has been traveled by others before us with no good result. Perhaps the question posed should be modelled along McCarthyist lines: ‘are you now or have you ever been a member of the Free Church?’ Luckily, though, the right to be a councillor AND a Christian is enshrined in the 2010 Equalities Act, which reminds those of us impolite enough to need reminding, that we mustn’t discriminate against people on the grounds of adherence or non-adherence to a particular faith.

Simply ‘allowing’ the election of practicing Christians is not sufficient, however. There has to be an acceptance that they will be followers of Christ, even when they are voting in the Comhairle chamber; true equality understands and respects this. In return, I am sure that they will serve in accordance with these words from Carmina Gadelica’s blessing for kindling the fire:

God, kindle Thou in my heart within


A flame of love to my neighbour,


To my foe, to my friend, to my kindred all,


To the brave, to the knave, to the thrall.

‘I never witnessed such countenances: starvation on many faces, the children with their melancholy looks, big-looking knees, shrivelled legs, hollow eyes, swollen-like bellies. God help them, I never did witness such wretchedness.’

Need is so familiar that we are almost inured to it. We have come a long way from the first shock of the Ethiopian famine in 1984 and the harrowing images it brought into our homes. For a time, we were unable to ignore poverty and suffering, and people’s response was immediate and heartfelt.

Except, these words do not describe the Ethiopian famine of 1984; they are actually an account of the Highland famine of 1845 – 55. More specifically, they are the eyewitness account of the Rev. Norman MacLeod, who was crossing the ford at Gramasdail in Uist, when he saw the destitute population, gathering cockles for their food. His heart was clearly moved, and he appealed to the Creator to take them into His care.

If you do not believe in God, such petitions seem void. I know that the Western Isles Secular Society (or is it Western Isles Non-believers – mo chreach, they have that many denominations, it’s hard to keep up), view prayer as an alternative to real help. Atheists think that to say, ‘I’m praying for you’ is tantamount to telling people that you are unwilling to do anything practical for them.

They say that . . . and then they also object to Christians being involved in charitable works. Groups like Hebrides Alpha should not be able to request a Christian commitment from its employees, palliative care should not be offered by a home founded by Christians; whatever next? It must be difficult, of course, carving out an identity for yourself purely in terms of what you do not believe. Such a negative position must leave you contradicting yourself frequently. I mean, telling Christians that they can’t interfere and impose their worldview on others seems to me a little bit like . . . well, interfering and imposing your worldview on others.

Charity, though, without Christians? Etymologically, the very word derives from one meaning, ‘Christian love’. This is not cold, dutiful alms-giving, but obedience to the Saviour. For He it was who said that the poor would always be with us. I don’t for one minute believe that this was meant as a discouragement, that we should resign ourselves to the omnipresence of grinding poverty. After all, He followed it up with something else – he added that we would not always have Him with us.

So, what was he saying? I believe that it was a reminder that the poor and needy are His proxy in one important sense: those who love the Saviour would not see Him suffer, would not see Him hunger, or thirst. Neither can a Christian look upon need in others, and not be moved in their heart to help. It is their privilege to help, and no man has the right to stand in their way.

The Rev. Norman Macleod appealed to the Almighty for the famine victims in the Highlands and Islands, and then he appealed to the government. Still in its infancy, the Free Church rapidly identified those most in need of food aid, able to do so because its ministers were so close to the congregations they served. ‘Breadalbane’, the boat they had purchased to circumvent problems with pulpit supply and availability of land for new churches, was pressed into service, carrying meal to the hungry corners of the region. Not one of those destitute people, I am certain, questioned the motives of the church in bringing them assistance.

In our own day, the shining example of Christian love in this regard is the Bethesda Hospice. Founded by Christians, built by charitable giving, it offers compassion, kindness, dignity – and, yes, love – to those in the last hours of their lives. They cared for my terminally-ill husband as though they were caring for the body of his Saviour. But they would care for anyone just the same. That is, after all, the essence of charity.

I recently sat in our hall in Stornoway Free Church, and listened to a presentation by Christians Against Poverty. There are people in this country right now who have to choose between eating and staying warm. We heard of a couple who ate only twice a week so that their children could have a meal every day. CAP is doing something about that. Have we honestly reached a point where people believe that work like this should be curtailed simply because it carries the label, ‘Christian’? And if we are reaching that point, what is secularism going to be doing to supply the deficiency? Or are Christians expected to carry on being charitable, and to be complicit in removing their Saviour’s name from their efforts,  lest He offend?

I pity anyone who falls for the argument that charity should not be allowed in the name of Christ. There is an agenda being pushed all the time, however, that aims to persuade us of just that. They tell us that it is our right not to have Christ’s presence insisted upon; they try to convince us that it is wrong for Christians to interfere in good works. God forbid that they should succeed. If they do, we might well say then of the secularists themselves, ‘I never did witness such wretchedness’.

Seeing into the future is one thing, but being fixated on death is quite another story. Growing up, all the tales of the second sight I ever heard – and there were many – seemed to be about just one thing: dying.

My father used to tell of a man from his village, known as Gidseoc (pronounced to rhyme, funnily enough, with Hitchcock). This fellow had no gift, as far as I know, but a pretty single-minded obsession with the other world. Gidseoc couldn’t go his own length without seeing mysterious lights, or hearing unearthly singing in a lonely spot. These uncanny happenings he shared liberally with his neighbours. My father, then just a wee boy, would listen, frozen with terror as the story reached its eerie denouement, when he would inevitably be sent out into the dark for more peats. Alone.

Being alone and frightened is not a nice thing. It doesn’t matter what you are afraid of. We all need to feel that someone else is there, going through it with us. And there are certain kinds of fear which, once you’ve experienced them, give you such empathy with other people in their loneliness and terror.

I used to be afraid of losing my husband. Whenever I would read a newspaper article about someone who had been widowed, I would cry like a leaky hose. Once, I tried to read, ‘In the Springtime of the Year’, about a young widow’s grief. Tears streamed down my face every night, until I eventually stopped reading halfway through the book. I knew that I could not cope with losing him. Or, rather, I feared that I could not.

There is, after all, only one fear anyway. We are afraid of being afraid. I thought that hearing the word, ‘cancer’ would destroy me; it didn’t. I thought that hearing the word, ‘terminal’ would destroy me; it didn’t. And I thought when I asked, ‘how long?’, that the answer – ‘days, but not days and days’ – would crush me into dust. It didn’t.

Nonetheless, the first quarter of the year will always be a little bit cianail for me. These were the three months of Donnie’s final illness. Yesterday was the second anniversary of that day when a very kind nurse handed me his wedding ring to keep forever.

What does one do on such anniversaries? I’m not a great visitor of cemeteries. Indeed, I’ve been to Donnie’s grave precisely once and only then to check that the Gaelic inscription on the headstone was correct. Oh, and that they’d left enough space for, ‘Agus Catriona’ (that’s some black, island humour for you right there). Well, yesterday I went to work as usual, bored some students about Icelandic nationalism and the evil eye (different classes), walked the dog and arranged some flowers. Then, I sat down and listened to a sermon, conducted in the language of Eden, on Psalm 23. It’s been a Psalm 23 kind of week. These words from the sermon reminded me of the meaning in my grief:

‘S e uan a th’ anns a’ bhuachaille. An t-uan seo a chaidh a mharbhadh ‘s a tha beo gu saoghal nan saoghal. Bidh e gan treorachadh gu beo-thobraichean uisge agus tiormachaidh Dia gach deoir bho an suilean. Cha bhi madadh-allaidh tuilleadh ann, cha bhi deoirean tuilleadh ann, cha bhi craidh no gort, no buaireadh, no Satan, no naimhdeas, no caoidh, no ionndrainn. Cha bhi cail de na nithean sin ann.
Bidh am Buachaille, an t-Uan fhein agus a’ chaoraich beannaichte, bidh iad fad na bith-bhuantachd comhla ri cheile aig na beo-thobraichean uisge sin.

And in English, for those of you in the cheap seats:

The Shepherd is the Lamb. This Lamb who was slain but who lives forever. He will lead them to wells of living water and God will dry the tears from their eyes.
There will be no wolf there, no more tears, nor pain, nor hurt, nor strife, nor Satan, nor enmity, nor mourning, nor longing. None of those things. The Shepherd, the Lamb Himself will abide by those wells of living water, together with His blessed flock, forever.

It was believed by some that the seer could share his vision with another if they stood on his foot, or placed a hand upon his shoulder.

I wish that I could do that with the Shepherd. If only I could say, place your foot on mine and see what I see. Then you’ll never be afraid of being afraid. This Lamb keeps the wolf at bay. You can lie down in peace because He is with you: if I’m nothing else, I think I’m proof of that. God doesn’t always let the cup pass from us. The painful things of life will still occur, and the things which make us afraid. However, when the nameless fear takes shape in your life, He will go through it all with you. After all, He went through it all for you.

I was given a broomstick by my late husband to mark our first wedding anniversary. It was a nod to the reputation that his home village enjoys as the witchcraft capital of Lewis. Later, my folklore students gave me a pointed, black hat. This (I hope) was a reference to the substance, rather than the style, of my teaching. Together, these two items conjure up a world of childhood stories, and whether you live in North Tolsta or North America, the witch is a familiar figure.

However, the witches of Gaelic folklore were not necessarily keen on displaying their badges of office. They didn’t fly about on broomsticks and tended to leave any hat-wearing to the godlier island ladies. Their arts were also practised more covertly than those of their southern sisters. Nor does Gaelic distinguish – as English does – between the black and the white witch. Our culture readily acknowledged the gift of the bean-fhiosaiche, the wise woman. She might have been a midwife and a healer, but these skills were respected and valued, not feared. The witch, on the other hand, was always black in Gaelic, always a bad woman.

Gaelic culture recognises something very important here – evil does not always wear a badge.I read the account of Saul and the witch of Endor with my Sunday School class recently, and was reminded of how easy it is to give children the wrong impression. Witches on broomsticks are all very well in stories, but it is so important that we all understand that wickedness is real, and often wears a benign face. Sometimes, it may even try to cloak itself in that most fashionable of disguises: tolerance.

There is a witch-hunt going on in Lewis right now, and – ironically – the victims are not enemies of God, but followers of Christ. Even their very grief is being exploited. National newspapers are serving up congealed cliches of island life: remote, pious, strict, reluctant to embrace the 20th century. This is the lazy journalism of a press which cares nothing about Lewis, nor knows anything, except that we are ‘other’ than them. Sadly, there are those within our own community whose blind opposition to the church means they are happy to see the island’s reputation sacrificed in the process. Not one of their number has named this maligning of our community for what it is: intolerance of the most hypocritical kind. I cannot comprehend a belief system which preaches tolerance, but cannot bear to hear the name of God mentioned; which claims an affinity with minorities, yet denies the existence of a unique island way of life.

But like so much else that they deny, it won’t disappear just to please them. Indeed, I have reason to believe that it is especially resilient in times of siege, and even death.

In Lewis, people used to understand the difference between sacred and profane. They would not mistake the wise woman for a witch. When death came to one family, it visited an entire community, and all sincerely mourned together. The true taigh-fhaire was a nocturnal watch, kept by neighbours on behalf of the bereaved. While the closest relatives slept, it fell to others in the community to maintain a vigil until morning, when the darkness eventually surrendered to the light, as it always must.

The watchmen on the wall will be first to see the day break. No one notices the shadows flee away; that’s the nature of darkness – one minute it seems to envelop us, and the next it has been sent scurrying. And then we forget that it was ever night at all.

The problem with the Free Church is that people only ever see it from the outside. I don’t mean that those on the inside are blind, but there are certainly times when it seems as though we are mute. We stand by and let everyone else indulge us in the ‘giftie’ that Burns so earnestly wished for as he sat in church, contemplating the louse on a lady’s bonnet: ‘to see ourselves as others see us’.

How do others see us? The late Lewis poet Derick Thomson saw the Calvinist minister as a scarecrow, stealing the warmth from traditional Gaelic culture. His peers, Iain Crichton Smith and Donald MacAulay were no more complimentary about the influence of the Presbyterian Church on their native island and wrote frequently of its restrictive, life-denying effects. These men left Lewis in their youth to pursue careers in education and academia, but continued to perpetuate this view of the Free Church and its ilk for the rest of their lives.

In his millennial history of the Highlands and Islands, James Hunter gives two mentions to the Free Church. Here is a flavour of his thoughts on the subject: ‘while it is certainly hard to warm to the narrowly Sabbatarian, bitterly sectarian, faction-ridden and frequently reactionary Free Church of modern times, it is a mistake to assume that Highlands and Islands evangelicalism always exhibited only those traits.’ From this, I think we can take it that he believes ‘those traits’ were always present, but were, at one time tempered by something a bit finer. Note, of course, the use of the past tense.

Dr John MacInnes of the School of Scottish Studies describes our brand of Presbyterianism as, ‘a recluse religion, not only turning away from the seductions of this world, but actually seeking at the same time to dominate ordinary, open society’. Dominate. Not ‘influence’, not ‘inspire’, not even ‘teach’, but ‘dominate’. It’s not sounding good, is it?

And this, ‘ordinary, open society’, of which he speaks – what do they say? They say we’re stuck in the past, we’re a narrow-minded Taliban, we’re regressive Calvinists (they don’t say which denomination is the progressive one).The Free Church is still seen as that scarecrow, coming into the ceilidh-house and spoiling all the fun.

For myself, I cannot agree with this jaded view of the Free Church. My experience of it – that is, the Stornoway incarnation – has been uniformly warm, positive and loving. We share our worship and our fellowship (and a lot of tray bake) , and we laugh at times – even out loud – and occasionally in the presence of the minister. Since becoming a member of the church I have not changed my personality, or become a narrow-minded automaton: if that was what was required, no one told me and I can find no reference to it in the handbook. This church, a branch of the church of Christ, has held me up through a dark and difficult period in my life. At my husband’s funeral, one of the prayers petitioned God that the church would be a husband to me; it has been. I can pay it no greater tribute than that.

The incomparable Professor Donald Meek suggests that the Presbyterian denominations’ failure to reflect openly on their own practices has left a hiatus, which has been gleefully filled by the kind of critics I’ve already mentioned. Is it wise, though, to go on ONLY being seen as others see us? Isn’t it time we said something – even a little – about how we see ourselves in this broken society that needs us now more than ever?

Just this week, at the prayer meeting, I heard a story of an elderly minister whose habit it was, each night before retiring, to pray around his village. He brought each household to the throne of grace and thus, served the community better than the hardest-working councillor ever could. And I doubt if he thought, ‘I must pray for my people’. His heart was tethered to theirs and he held them up to his Father for safekeeping. He wasn’t seeking to dominate, or impose his view; it was a simple act of Christian love. Isn’t it time we talked about that?

‘When you learn about the people that you came from, it makes you feel ten feet tall’, said Peter MacLeod, one-time chairman of the Tong Historical Society. His organisation was one of a network of Comainn Eachdraidh (folk history societies) which sprang up in Lewis in the 1970s and 1980s. He was not boasting, but rather articulating the surprised delight experienced by people who eventually learn that they are more than just rural problems, burdening a distant government with their need for housing. As the Comunn Eachdraidh became a feature of villages throughout Lewis (and beyond), islanders began to map their own route from past to present.

Folklore has often been used as a PR tool. Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm hoped that their ‘Kinder und Hausmarchen’, published in 1812, would help to demonstrate the existence of a unified German culture. Our own Alexander Carmichael, exciseman and folklorist, collected for his ‘Carmina Gadelica’, believing that presenting the Gaidhealtachd to the rest of the world as a rich and ancient culture might help to dispel the post-Culloden propaganda that labelled the Gaels as unreconstructed philistines. In submitting evidence to the Napier Commission, a government enquiry into the social conditions of Scottish crofters, Carmichael thought outside the box. Alongside the more usual testimonies, he put forward some ancient Gaelic hymns and blessings.

Yes, read that last bit again – Carmichael wanted to present the inherent religiosity of the Gaelic people to the rest of the world as a positive trait. Smaoinich. He wasn’t saying, ‘yes, you’re quite right, they’re a shower of barbarous wretches – look at their prayers to a triune God . . .’ Different times, and yet not so different. Today, we are still having to prove that there is something about our culture that is precious and that is worth keeping. I tire of defending something, the dignity and longevity of which should speak for itself. Only last week, one of our resident secularists, bemoaning the lack of an 83rd hour in the week in which to go swimming, threw at me that there is no such thing as island culture, ‘other than Gaelic & music, etc’, she condescended to add.

No, indeed. No such thing as island culture. I don’t know what these Comainn Eachdraidh find to talk about. Lewis is just, as the lady said, the same as everywhere else in the U.K. We have no history to mention, no literary or folk traditions, no rich seam of lore, no knowledge of place names and traditional remedies, no bards, no distinctive agricultural traditions, no speech-makers, no dreamers, no unique worldview, no songs, no preachers, no island humour all our own. All we have is Gaelic and, aig deireadh an latha, as we’ve often said ourselves, ‘what good did Gaelic ever do us?’

But then, I agree with Dickens: ‘There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited’. Perhaps I could be permitted to regard island culture and particularly Gaelic that way. If it was your first language, it doesn’t just inform who you are, it IS who you are. The kindest words that have ever been said to me were Gaelic ones and the kindest people were Gaelic people. Whenever my late father would tell me of his days growing up in Doune, or speak about the people he knew then, he always reminisced in Gaelic. For him, his language, his people and his culture were one. And it’s that way for me too. That’s why it is a great hurt and a terrible offence to tell an islander that their way of life is nothing special. You might just as well denigrate their parents.

If it seems that I’m piobaire an aona phuirt, well, I make no apology. There is a negative, anti-traditional, anti-church narrative being woven before our very eyes in Lewis at the moment. People are entitled to their views, of course, no matter how ill-judged. What they must not be allowed to do, however, is rewrite history, simply because they’d like to airbrush Gaelic, or the Presbyterian tradition – and anything else they don’t like or understand – out of existence. There has to be a counter-narrative, one in which we tell our own story, in our own words. Otherwise, someone else will tell us who we are in a tongue that’s not our own, and we will eventually start to believe them. After all, we’ve been round this way before.