5 December 2024
Good morning,
With graduations over, we are turning our attention to Christmas! St Salvator’s Chapel Choir, organists and brass players, chaplains, readers and I are preparing now for the University Carol Service, which is on Saturday 7 December, at Holy Trinity Church on South Street, beginning at 7.30 pm. This is always a wondrous evening, shimmering music rising to the barrel-vaulted ceiling, a beautiful, ancient stone church packed with students, staff and others, and a chance to explore the timeless nativity story for our time. My address, which may owe something to Britpop legends Oasis, is called (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? Doors open at 6.45 pm – and it can get busy, but there’s always room for everyone.
In the meantime, we return to the story being told day by day in this Advent Calendar.
Feathers
Part 5
The story so far: The promise of a child for Maryam has been confirmed by a pair of pregnancy testing kits.
Maryam was ill-prepared for this eventuality. Seven months ago, her father had sat down with her before leaving for St Andrews. He ran through advice mingled with explanation in that usual way of his, covering money, the need to study hard, the sort of students to steer clear of (fast girls, workshy boys) and the importance of staying in touch with her mother, who would miss her more than she might realise. “And of course,” he added, “you won’t do anything to embarrass your family. We have brought you up properly and we expect you to take those values with you to the UK.”
Was that, she now wondered, her father’s clear injunction that she shouldn’t get mixed up with boys, and avoid anything so problematic as pregnancy? If so, he hadn’t gone on to say what she should do if such a circumstance befell her. She didn’t think his ear was a sympathetic one in which to pour her situation.
Nor perhaps was her mother’s. Maryam and her younger sister and brother knew that beneath their mother’s exterior was a form of love. But it was bruising to bear so many verbal blows about her frizzy hair, puffy complexion, creased top, less than stellar tests at school, and choice of companions for whiling away the holidays. Maryam wasn’t sure, in her somewhat fragile state, she could willingly put herself within range of her mother’s critique. If she disapproved so strongly of Maryam’s attempts to cook pilau, what would she make of unexpected motherhood?
Perhaps she could tell one of her friends, like Millie. Millie was a lovely English girl studying French and Spanish, and Maryam always felt easy in her company, chattering about the mini-dramas of Sallies life and the next deadline. But they’d never quite opened up to each other in the ways Maryam had seen in movies, with tearful embraces following the deepest of confidences. Maryam was conscious she had a private centre she’d yet to expose, and she suspected Millie was the same. Would she overload this friendship in sharing her news, and could she expect Millie not to tell the others? She couldn’t bear to go into the dining-room suspecting that everyone was sneaking a glance at the pregnant first-year. It wasn’t fair, just yet, to ask a friend to hold her secret.
Dining-table, San Fruttuoso, near Portofino
Yours,
Donald.
Revd Dr Donald MacEwan
Chaplain