There it stands, a monument to the soul of St Kilda, the commitment of the evangelicals of the nineteenth century, and the power of the gospel.
Editor’s Note: Link to short YouTube video of St. Kilda: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGDAzerQ9ns&feature=related
Well, it’s been a long time in coming, but this week I finally made it to St Kilda. It was a happy distraction from the very unwelcome fire last week that gutted my office and rendered my books unusable. After a disaster there is nothing like getting away – and St Kilda is the ultimate local getaway destination.
Since the late nineteenth century, tourists have been putting in to St Kilda. They, however, did not have the excellent services of Seatrek, or the expertise of Iain Angus and Hannah to take care of them on every stage of the trip. We did; and for our party the day was memorable.
Even the weather was kind to us; after an atrocious Summer, August bank holiday started off peaceful and calm, the beginning of our voyage full of promise. The idyllic spectacle of Atlantic dolphins and the company of a basking shark added to the drama of the occasion.
All of a sudden the archipelago appeared on our horizon: a majestic conglomeration of rock formations, home to remarkable birds, remarkable sheep, and, up until eighty years ago, remarkable people.
St Kilda has often been written on, and is continually being researched. But, as I discovered, it has to be seen to be believed. The sheer height of the stacks, around which the gannets whirl without stopping, is every bit as awesome as the most magnificent cathedrals of the world. Here, in the splendid isolation of the ocean, all things wise and wonderful call out their own praise to the Lord God who made them all.
Were these really the stacks to which the St Kildans sailed, and which they scaled to catch these unreachable creatures? Did they really stay in these steadings, perched, gannet-like, on the jagged cliffs for nine months at a time? Did they really make the precarious landings necessary to access these natural foods? And do we dare romanticise the place, when living there came at such a high price?
To linger around these islets is to be overawed by the sheer scale of the enterprise; living here, and surviving here, were feats of uncommon endurance. In this anniversary year, it is all too easy to concentrate on the difficulties for the natives in leaving the place; perhaps we ought to focus our attention on the wonder of a population who stayed in it for centuries.
Then to enter Village Bay for the first time: what an emotional experience that is. We saw the photographs and read the books, but the half was not told us. The whole place is so atmospheric and evocative – here a community lived and survived for almost four millennia, thrown together on this rock, until circumstances forced their departure. To see the houses in which they lived, the walls and cleits they laboured to build, the cemetery in which they buried their dead I found quite overwhelming.
I did have – as you might expect – a particular interest in seeing the church building, and in standing in the pulpit. After all, John Macdonald of Ferintosh, my Highland hero, was the one who, after visiting St Kilda, arranged a collection to be taken in Highland churches for the building of this particular church. There it stands, a monument to the soul of St Kilda, the commitment of the evangelicals of the nineteenth century, and the power of the gospel.
Not everyone thinks it a good thing, of course. Historians have not been kind to Macdonald or the resident ministers of the place; and even the unsuspecting tourist, visiting the museum on St Kilda, will learn that everything was good except the presence of the Free Church. All we did, apparently, was to wipe the smile off their faces, and outlaw their songs and traditions for ever.
It is not a thesis I am prepared to accept. It is belied by the evidence of the warm reception given by the population to these evangelists of two hundred years ago and even by the Christian inscription on one of the few legible stones in the graveyard. Interestingly, it is also belied by the new published autobiography of Calum MacDonald, born in St Kilda in 1908, and who says in his book (which I purchased on the island): ‘My earliest recollection as a boy is a very happy one, having a very religious upbringing in a very happy home atmosphere, as Christianity was the basic standard of family life’.
The reality is that the historiography says more about modern secular historians than it does about the Free Church ministers who served the St Kildans in the century preceding the evacuation. I am not at all willing to give credence to the popular view that the St Kildans were gullible and superstitious, easily bent to the fanaticism of fundamentalist ministers. And can we really believe that the presence of the army with its guns or the pub with its alcohol are the real markers of civilisation over the church with its gospel?
So I found it particularly moving to stand in the church building, and in a silent moment of communion, to thank the Lord for letting me see this wonderful place, and for all that it symbolises of a lost community in our own back yard.
All strength to the arm of those who are trying to preserve the place and its history, particularly in this poignant anniversary year. What must it have been like for the survivors of eighty years ago to take their worldly goods with them for ever, and leave their homes and the remains of their beloved dead in their island soil?
The world can look on and interpret this as the forces of modernism prevailing over an indigenous if remote population. We are all guilty of treating the St Kildans as exhibits in an unfortunate pageant of history. Of course they had to leave, and come to the real world.
But when one stands on the street, surveying the sweep of houses, imagining the lifestyle of a people bound to one another by the sheer effort of living on that outpost of the empire, surrounded by the ghosts of a lost people, one is forced to ask where the real world is: is it in our modern communities, in which we live our lives in splendid isolation from our neighbours, or in these ancient ones, in which such isolation was just not possible?
Maybe our modern society is the society on the edge. Maybe the St Kildans have something to teach us about making togetherness and communion the hallmarks of a genuinely Christian society.
Iain Campbell is a native of the Isle of Lewis in northwest Scotland where he serves as pastor of the Free Church of Scotland congregation in Point. He also serves as Adjunct Professor of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary. This article first appeared on his blog, Creideamh ((pronounced ‘kray-jif’), Gaelic for ‘Faith’, and is used with his permission. http://creideamh.blogspot.com/
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