Eucharist for the under-fives : Toddler Church Communion

One of our priorities at Holy Cross, Davidson’s Mains has been reconnecting with local families. The church used to have a flourishing Sunday School but, as in other places, this mode of ministry died out in recent decades. With our Children’s Minister, Izzy Armstrong-Holmes, we worked to make our church building and Sunday Eucharist child-friendly …

Sung Prefaces for the 1982 Scottish Liturgy

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 …

Why we pray to the Saints, by MEM Donaldson

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 Trip to Ukraine

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 …

Saint Balthere (Baldred of the Bass) 5 : Saints of the Forth

For the last post in this series on St Baldred of the Bass I want to bring together all the historical material from the previous posts and ask who he really is. More precisely, what is his spirituality and how is he relevant to those of us today who are Christians or live in the …

Saint Balthere (Baldred of the Bass) 4 : Saints of the Forth

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, …

Saint Balthere (Baldred of the Bass) 3 : Saints of the Forth

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 …

Saint Balthere (Baldred of the Bass) 2 : Saints of the Forth

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 …

Saints of the Forth : Saint Balthere (Baldred of the Bass) 1

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 …

‘The Old is Good’ (Luke 5.39) : Mission with Ancient Liturgies

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 …