A Place Where Two Rivers Meet

 

‘The chearfu supper done, wi serious face,
They, round the ingle, form a circle wide;
The sire turns o'er, wi patriarchal grace,
The big ha'-Bible, ance his father's pride.’

The Cotter’s Saturday Night by Robert Burns

Dear Friends,

Did you know that in the 1960’s and 70’s, several of the baddies in pro-wrestling had Germanic names, wrestlers like Kurt Von Hess or Karl Steiner. Meanwhile here in the UK we had our own Teutonic villain called Hans Streiger who disappointingly, wasn’t an Anglo-German of mid-19th Century Sugar-baker stock like my lot, he was actually the less sinister Clarke Mellor from New Mills in Derbyshire.

In 1973 at a wrestling match in the Hamilton Town House in South Lanarkshire, Streiger (or Mellor) was defeated by the equally exotically named ‘Billy Two Rivers’ but unlike Hans Streiger, Billy Two Rivers wasn’t playing a character. No, Billy Two Rivers was an authentic Mohawk person of First Nation heritage.

Billy Two Rivers is a fascinating character, a First Nation chief who found himself wrestling in the town halls and civic centres of Scotland and Northern England. He was also the father of the famous fashion designer Wayne Hemingway.

As a kid, the poetic sound of ‘Two Rivers’ always evoked images of fascinating individuals of mixed heritage and religion, standing with each foot in two rivers, forging a new identity from two different cultures.  Somewhat like all those within Scotland’s own forgotten lost tribe; us types who are both a wee bit Protestant and also a wee bit Catholic too.

For us, a profound sense of ecumenism has always come as naturally as a dreich afternoon in November; we are after all a mix of Irish Catholic, German Lutheran and Scottish Presbyterian (with a splash of English Anglicanism thrown in for good measure). Indeed, having such a family tree makes the ‘othering’ of rival denominations somewhat difficult.

For example, our weighty and well worn family Bible is the renowned John Brown ‘Self-interpreting’ Bible which dates from 1778. John Brown of Haddington was a self taught autodidact and minster in the first secession church. Just as my Ahlfeld-Ritchie ancestors, whose names are all beautifully written in the Bible, also held to the Gourock Free Church party during the Disruption of 1843.  It’s even thought that many of the Gourock’s Free Church adherents belonged to families descended from Covenanters who held their services of worship (conventicles) out on the open moors above Gourock during the ‘Killing Time’ of the 1680s

The thing I treasure most about Brown’s Bible is the fact that all of his summaries, explanatory notes, and reflections are composed specifically for the improvement of ordinary working people. His Bible has therefore remained popular among the labouring classes, to which my own hardy shipwright Ahlfeld-Ritchie patriarchs of rustic toil once belonged.

A few years back, as I was leafing through its hallowed pages, marvelling at the numerous illustrations depicting scenes from the Old Testament, a dusty letter printed onto faded newsprint fell out of the big old family Bible.

The epistle begins ‘To the members and adherents of Gourock Free Church from Pastor David Purves, 30th October 1882’.  Reverend Purves then goes on to affectionately berate the faithful of Gourock into attending innumerable prayer meetings and Bible study classes on topics such as ‘The Life of Solomon’.

There is even mention of a parish ‘Welfare of Youth Scheme’ and a Sabbath School concerned with the tutoring and advancement of the community’s young people. In the letter, we can clearly see those Scottish Free Church pillars of community, education, self-reliance and self-improvement so cherished by the likes of John Brown of Haddington.

Around the same time, just a few doors up the same street from the Free Church building, the fledgling St Ninians’s Catholic community in Gourock was also in the process of building a school for their own children unable to access an education via the State system at that time. There is a bitter irony to be found in the stark similarities shared by both of these ‘nonconformist’ near neighbours who deeply distrusted each other.

Rev Purves concludes with a powerful and moving plea to the congregation for solidarity - “all our plans and schemes of work will be only a dead mechanism without the Holy Spirit, a minister and all his fellow workers depend on upon the people’s prayers. We wait for them like the ship for the breeze.”

Depending upon each other, on prayer, on the Holy Spirit (and the persecution which subsequently follows) are the hallmarks of Christians who have freed themselves from State interference and the encroachment of rich landowners.

Just as the Scottish Free Church did, just as the Mennonites in Russia and the Byzantine Catholics in Ukraine did when they too reclaimed the precepts of ‘a people set apart’ and just as the Catacomb Church in China and elsewhere does today.

The well-known theologian Stanley Hauerwas offers an interesting take on this particular living arrangement by pointing out that throughout the last 1700 years of Christian persecution of Jews since the conversion of Constantine, the Jewish community have subsequently taught Christians what it means to live by faith and trust in God alone, without a Government, an Army or a nation state. Hauerwas often uses the metaphor of a colony to describe the Church, saying “The Church stands as a political alternative to every nation, witnessing to the kind of social life possible for those that have been formed by the story of Christ.”

Yet, does this effort to understand ourselves as ‘resident aliens in a foreign land’ require us to pull up the drawbridge and withdraw from the public square to a rural wilderness? Well no, not quite, it just means we turn up as Christians seeking to serve our neighbour, without the desire to take over society and impose our convictions and values on people who don’t share our faith.

Christians Socialists in Britain have always seen the labour and trade union movement as that space where we come together for the common good, free from doctrinal disputes. This is why Christian Socialists place so much importance on the London Dock Strike of 1889 which marks the beginning of a political ecumenism achieved by the Salvation Army and Cardinal Manning working together for the benefit of the Dockers.

If it’s not already obvious, I am of course urging my fellow Catholics to reject what Professor Massimo Faggioli describes as the ‘dominionist’ political culture of conservative integralist Catholics in America today. Those political neo-medievalists who have aligned with Trump and seek a return to political Augustinianism in which the temporal order (politics) is subordinate to the church.

Rather, we must always proudly proclaim our Nonconformity and unashamedly aspire to be the Nonconformists which we once were, rather than pursuing some silly dream of restoring Catholicism to the position of Established Church.

Most of all, we should always try to keep our feet firmly planted in two rivers and in doing so we might just understand each other a little better and defeat the scourge of sectarianism and racism in all our communities. After all, when people know each other, they don’t kill each other.