Let us leaf through the archives again, a little further back this time.
We filed into the balcony rows of Central Baptist Church in the evening and sat in those high-backed wooden pews as if we were in the Globe Theatre. And indeed, the Lord’s genius in the evening nearly had me jumping out of my seat and into thin air. The parishioners of sixteen churches from the corners of Dundee filled the ornate old sanctuary to bursting, both with their presence and the iconoclastic hodge-podge of their denominational traditions. Pentecostals sat next to Baptists, and Congregationalists (I’m not particularly sure what that means) sat next to members of the Church of Scotland. We sang together, and we prayed together, and we wondered at the beautiful kaleidoscope of it all.
Unbeknownst to six rather easily-spotted Americans in the balcony, the leaders of those churches had been meeting together over tea for years, simply to befriend each other and discuss ideas and callings. The charter that they unveiled during the meeting was the prayerful work meant to call the churches of Dundee together in a unified rag-tag bunch to serve a rag-tag city. Then Jim Clark preached on Ephesians, chapter 4.
There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in us all.
On Brook Street, the air doesn’t move much, thanks to the high courtyard walls that surround everything in Scotland. But one block south, the wind stretches its northerly fingers in among the houses and whips down the lane off the firth. I turned up my collar and pulled my hat down tighter as I trod down the sidewalk next to the waves lapping in cold dark froth at the stony shoreline. I don’t think it was chance, either, that led me to absentmindedly turn my head to look back at a natural pier jutting out into the dark toward a fishing shack. There, in the lee of the pier, six white swans floated silently on the inky water, holy ghosts bobbing in the loose rhythm of the Tay.
Dundee, 2007
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