Communion and Community

From the LOCH A TUATH NEWS November 2000

I was told it would be raining, howling with gales and the worst October weekend on record. Instead, our communion services enjoyed unprecedented good weather from Thursday through to Monday. When rain fell on Monday we had begun to forget what it looked like. And thoughts of rain went completely out of our mind on the Monday morning, when we heard a first-class sermon on the glories of Heaven by the Principal of our College.

Communions, of course, come and go, and each one is memorable and poignant in its own way. Each communion season recalls those which have gone before, and has its own share of experiences and memories. I cannot recall, however, ever conducting a wake at a communion weekend; the passing of Peggy Morrison, one of our oldest members, on the Sunday of the Communion was in itself significant. So too was the swift passing of Kenneth Morrison, Stornoway, within a week of the Communion, and then of Norman Macleod, Gress immediately thereafter.

All of which is a salutary reminder of the importance of people. It is not bricks and mortar that makes our communities or churches what they are, but people. You can try to hold on to buildings, but once the people go, the places change beyond recognition. Communion seasons are bound up to such a great extent with the people whom we got to know around the things of the Gospel, and with the memories of the just.

I knew an elder once who told me that he would never tell a minister that he enjoyed a sermon from him, in case it would swell the minister's head too much; I also recall hearing the counsel often that we should not make too much of ministers; they are only men, after all. Now, all of this is true, and our faith at last rests, not on men, but on Jesus Christ.

Yet I am firmly of the opinion that we often fail to do justice to the doctrine of Providence, which governs all the events and meetings, all the high points and low points, of our lives in this world. God gives us the people: he ordains that in our small corners, we should interact in our lives with just those ministers, just those elders, just those men and women, just those boys and girls. He sets a premium upon them, using men to build up his church, both through what they are, and even in spite of what they are.

And both COMMUNITY and COMMUNION have within them the idea that, being many, we are at last one: one race, one family, one circle, one bond. We are to live, not estranged from one another, but for the good of one another, and in the knowledge that what we do affects others, and what others are, affects us.

So, when we lose people, whether through death, or betrayal, or departure, or as a result of the ordinary course of nature, we are impoverished. Both we and the world around us are the poorer. We must learn to live and love while we have the opportunity. Sometimes it is only when we lose those we love that we realise what they truly meant to us.