We have a fine, new, updated edition of the 1982 Scottish Liturgy but something is missing… Following a tradition that goes back to the early Church, it is common in Anglican worship to sing the dialogue and preface at the beginning of the Eucharistic Prayer, the part which leads into the Sanctus. The commonly used tones for this are ancient. The dialogue shows that priest and people together offer the prayer: ‘the Lord be with you- and also with you – lift up your hearts – we lift them to the Lord – Let us give thanks to the Lord our God – It is right to give our thanks and praise’. The prefa ..read more

The following extract is from The Islesmen of Bride (1922), a semi-autobiographical novel about an unnamed island in the Hebrides by the remarkable Episcopalian, pioneer photographer, and traveller in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, Mary Ethel Muir Donaldson (1876-1958). She recorded a vanishing way of life in lively books infused by a romantic Celticism, a Jacobite Episcopalianism and a passion for the people of the Highlands and Islands. She does not hide her prejudices, particularly against Anglo-Saxons (the English) and Calvinist Presbyterianism. MEM Donaldson travelled with her com ..read more

I have recently returned from a six-day road trip to Ukraine, delivering SUVs to the Ukrainian Army in a convoy with the excellent Scottish charity Jeeps for Peace (J4P). It feels like a month of experience crammed into a few days, but one meeting remains in my mind. In the South of the country we handed the jeeps over to the army and had a dinner with some of the troops who were to drive the vehicles to the front the next day. They looked tired, lean and tanned. With them was their chaplain, who also had dirt engrained in his hands from the trenches. He had one of those smiles where you don ..read more

The previous two posts have explored the original Balthere and his world. Now we will look at the veneration of Balthere, now called Baldred, as it was in the early sixteenth century. We can do this because of the work of Bishop William Elphinstone of Aberdeen (1431-1514) who complied the Aberdeen Breviary, published in 1510, which includes six lessons for his feast. A translation of the six readings is given below, with thanks to Alan Macquarrie. We know that Elphinstone’s team collected material from all over Scotland and so we can presume an East Lothian origin for this material, probably f ..read more

Balthere is a saint of the sea and the coastlands of East Lothian and this post will concentrate on the saint’s places, beginning with the most dramatic. In Alcuin’s poem the Bass Rock, in addition to representing the rock from the gospels, is understood as a ‘desert’ in the context of the Christian ascetic tradition as received in the insular churches (the churches of Britain and Ireland). In Adamnán’s ‘Life of Columba’ we meet the monks Báeán and Cormac who sail off in search of a ‘desert in the ocean’ (‘in oceano disertum’, i.20, 25b) or a ‘hermitage in the ocean’ (‘heremum in oceano’, 1.6 ..read more

The previous post looked at the importance of St Baldred as a local saint in East Lothian but we were left with the question: who was the real St Baldred? Fortunately we know more about Baldred than about many other early Scottish saints. He was a Northumbrian hermit whose name was Balthere, ‘Baldred’ is a later medieval version of this, and he was associated with the community of St Cuthbert at Lindisfarne. His English name Balthere suggests that he was not, as some have suggested, an Irishman or a Pict. Although East Lothian is now in Scotland, from the seventh century it was part of the Eng ..read more

For the past three years I have been learning about the saints who lived in my local area. It is a short walk from my front door in north-west Edinburgh to a place in the grounds of Lauriston Castle where I can look across the Firth of Forth to St Columba’s isle of Inchcolm, the ‘Iona of the East’. The island, with its twelfth-century Augustinian Abbey, is an ancient Christian site on the route from Iona to Lindisfarne. Nearby is Cramond Kirk, also dedicated to St Columba, which is on the site of an earlier church built in the praetorium of the Roman fort. Further down the Forth are the Bass R ..read more

There is a widespread feeling in the Scottish Episcopal Church and elsewhere that Christian mission is best served by worship in contemporary language. My experience is that this is not necessarily so and that behind this widespread feeling are some basic errors. This post will argue that not only is traditional liturgy a widely appreciated way of encountering the mystery of Christ, but it is also a powerful instrument of mission in contemporary secular western society. This argument cuts across the common division between ministry (church stuff for church folk) and mission (church stuff for t ..read more

This year has seen the removal of obligatory covid restrictions in churches, and congregations have, at varying speeds, been returning to old practices. I have seen much concern for those who still feel anxious and for those who are vulnerable or suffer from long covid. It is interesting to see which parts of the ‘new normal’ remain; there is more online worship but the peculiar enthusiasm for consecrating the eucharist through a computer screen seems to have died. My concern here is that worries about restoring the common cup to the laity are revealing a lack of formation in eucharistic theol ..read more

This is an article commissioned by the Scottish Episcopal Institute Journal and published in the Journal’s Spring 2022 issue. The journal is an academic periodical not a publicity sheet so it wanted a rigorous and critical reading of the St Andrew Declaration by scholars and clergy from the Episcopalian and Presbyterian Churches. The Declaration is still contentious as at the June General Synod of the Scottish Episcopal Church, while it was mentioned positively on a couple of occasions by those involved in it, one of our Bishops said it had introduced an unhelpful ambiguity into relations with ..read more