14 December 2024
Greetings,
This evening is the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols at St Leonard’s Chapel, beginning at 8 pm. This beautiful chapel near the Cathedral, accessed from South Street or the Pends, will be candlelit, as we sing familiar carols, and hear St Leonard’s Chapel Choir sing gorgeous Christmas music. Come in good time to be sure of a seat in the main chapel, though seating will also be available in the ante-chapel. All are welcome.
I am also delighted to let you know that the film of last Saturday’s University Carol Service, featuring St Salvator’s Chapel Choir, is now available. It’s been beautifully produced. Here is the link, which you are welcome to forward to friends and family.
Feathers
The story so far: Maryam, in the early weeks of pregnancy, is visiting her academic sister Lizzie, six months ahead of her in expecting her first child.
Part 14
Maryam spent half the summer with Lizzie and Zach. She helped with the housework and shopping and cooked dishes from home with aubergines, spinach, chickpeas and pomegranates, cumin and coriander, which Lizzie was sure both babies loved. They certainly grew. Zach shared his story of encountering a strange visitor one day, in the remotest of his rural churches tucked way up a glen, who told him his wife of many years, now in St Andrews coming to grips with Biology 1001, was expecting their first child. The mystery man disappeared over the moor, but not before leaving his name in the Visitors’ Book, A. Gabriel, a feather making the place.
Maryam spoke to Joe every evening, hearing of his work on the cottage, looking forward to their new life. He came to visit once or twice, getting to know Maryam as much as Lizzie and Zach. Maryam had her reading lists for next semester’s modules and spent her mornings in Perthshire on her laptop, exploring Wealth, Poverty and Global Institutions. The readings were a revelation. She’d known of course, growing up, that not everyone at home had her family’s advantages, but for the first time she put things together: hydrocarbons, European involvement in the early 20th Century, the strings multi-nationals attached to the offer of jobs, how money flowed, workers brought in from elsewhere, the nature of government’s power, who paid taxes, even connecting all this with her family and the people who worked in her home when she was a girl. What sort of world was she bringing Josh into? How would he make his way amid such overarching powers? How could he make a difference?
In the afternoons, she and Lizzie would go for a walk or doze to music. Their babies seemed to be soothed by Lizzie’s Dad’s records, rarely moving as they heard old songs from before they’d all been born – James Taylor, The Beatles, Joan Baez, Marvin Gaye, Carole King, Bob Dylan. There was a 60s vibe to their lives, dressed in smocks, doing what they felt like. As the music seeped into Maryam, she began to hear echoes of her studies in the lyrics, and when she was cooking, warm Middle-Eastern spices spreading through the house, she would sing phrases now and then which Lizzie would overhear.
“All babies together, everyone a seed,
Half of us are satisfied, half of us in need…
And when the broken-hearted people living in the world agree,
There will be an answer…
Rockets, moonshots,
Spend it on the have-nots…
Give to me your tired and your poor
Your huddled mases yearning to breathe free
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore
Send these, the homeless
Tempest-tossed to me…
We are not afraid, oh Lord
We shall live in peace…
When you’re down and troubled
And you need some loving care…
How many years can some people exist
Before they’re allowed to be free?
How many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?…
The long black cloud is coming down…
For the loser now will be later to win…
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a changing…”
Mural, central Genoa
Yours,
Donald.
Revd Dr Donald MacEwan
Chaplain