With great sadness, we report the death of James Elrick on 30th August 2007 in the Spinal Injuries Hospital, Glasgow, to which he had been transferred from Woodend Hospital in Aberdeen. James fell in his own home in April severely damaging his spine, an injury which left him paralysed and unable to do anything for himself. His condition was beyond medical help, apart from palliative care.

His Funeral Service was conducted at Aberdeen Crematorium, on 11th September, by Revd. Cal Courtney, who delivered the following appreciation.

James Davidson Elrick was born at Mount Street, Aberdeen. He attended Skene Square School, then Ruthrieston School, when his parents moved to Kaimhill in 1941.

On leaving school, he became an apprentice electrician and after that he went into refrigeration with a local firm, Currie and Thomson. That firm was taken over by Turner of Glasgow. James then became the area manager for the North of Scotland and also a Director of the Company, which eventually became part of the Hussmann Group. James spent many hours driving around the country and the strain eventually took its toll. He suffered heart problems and needed a by-pass and a new valve.

During retirement, he helped other heart patients by forming a cardiac support group, giving aid by meetings, talks and social outings. He also did voluntary work at A.R.I. by attending committees and being a ‘patient’ at students’ examinations.

Holidays in the U.S. Rockies were one of his great loves. He did a lot of tours and made a lot of new friends with whom he still had contact.

He was very committed to his parents, his brother and sisters and also to the younger members of the family. He was an excellent uncle.

Illness happened a lot during his retirement years, but there were no complaints.

He was a gentleman. A generous man, giving a lot of himself and his time to helping others. A man who will be sadly missed but so fondly remembered.

We express our sincere sympathy to the members of his family.

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READING

by Sue Good

It was my grandmother who introduced me to reading. I think it may well have been in self-preservation, as she looked after me all day and I probably drove her to distraction with my questions. Whatever the reason, she taught me to read and I never looked back. I was just like the wee girl in this story:- she had just learnt to read and was practising her new skill as she and her mother walked down the High Street past all the shops. “Butcher”, she spelt out and then “Fishmonger”. Then they passed the gents’ outfitters. “Menswear” she said, then excitedly, “yes that’s right, isn’t it Mummy? Men swear, don’t they?” That was a bit of a digression – now back to reading. During all my childhood years I can’t ever remember a time when I didn’t have a book on the go. I know that when I was about 10, a visit to the local public library, which was very close to our flat, was a daily occurrence. You were only allowed to borrow one book at a time in those days, so Mum and I used to take one each home, read them that evening and then go back the next day for another. It’s interesting to compare that with a survey of children’s reading habits in 1977, just 20 years later, which found that children aged 10+ read an average of three books a month, with 13% not having read a book at all in the month preceding the survey. I suppose by that time there were more distractions around.

I never thought of my experience as anything but normal at the time, although perhaps it might be thought a sort of an addiction. Here’s a quote from An American psychologist called Victor Nell. He wrote a thesis called Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure

The introduction is titled “The Insatiable Appetite” and it begins with these sentences: Reading for pleasure is an extraordinary activity. The black squiggles on the white page are as still as the grave, colorless as the moonlit desert; but they give the skilled reader a pleasure as acute as the touch of a loved body, as rousing, colorful and transfiguring as anything out there in the real world. And yet, the more stirring the book the quieter the reader; pleasure reading breeds a concentration so effortless that the absorbed reader of fiction (transported by the book to some other place, and shielded by it from distractions), who is so often reviled as an escapist and denounced as the victim of a vice as pernicious as tippling in the morning[,] should instead be the envy of every student and every teacher.

I don’t think I was ever the envy of any students or teachers, but I never have lost the addiction to and fascination with the world of books. When I left school I went to work in the local library, although if I’d hoped to spend lots of time sitting around reading, I soon learned my mistake. At least we had first pick of the books and an unlimited supply. There’s nothing particularly deep or intellectual about my choice of reading, though, then or now. On balance probably 75% of what I read is fiction, but I will read most types of fiction. Detective stories, historical, light romance, heavy romance, contemporary, occasionally classic, even science fiction, they’re all grist to my mill and I think fiction has a lot to offer in terms of raising ones awareness of all manner of widely different subjects. The range of titles available to me has opened up enormously since I joined Read it Swap it, the internet book swap group. How it works is that you list books you have read and have available for swapping. Other members will then request a title from you and you pick a book from their list in return. I’ve had some very interesting swaps, perhaps of books by authors I would never have considered before. One of the films I’ve never liked is Rebecca and consequently I’ve never actually read any of Daphne Du Maurier’s books before. So it was something new for me to try her short “what if it had happened this way?” novel called “Rule Britannia” where the story begins after the UK pulls out of the Common Market shortly after joining, wreaking economic havoc. America, the public are told, is stepping in to help re-stabilise the country and put the UK back on the road to prosperity with the help of the American army.

After that, the story is mostly concerned with the resistance movement, centred around the household of Mad, a retired actress, with passing references made to similar resistance around the country and the problems caused by those willing to blindly collaborate with the US-UK plan to turn the nation into something of a theme park for American civilians to come and gawp at.

The interesting point here is that, despite being over 30 years old, the basic topic is still disturbingly relevant - the central plot, and the reasons why people resist a hostile invasion force, even when it invades in the name of their own good, have arguably more force in today's world than they did when the book was written, even if the UK wasn't the place to be invaded.

Sticking with the American theme, just after we spoke about the bi-centenary of the abolition of slavery earlier on this year, I received two swaps of books by modern day American writers about life in the nineteenth-century deep South. Kindred by Octavia Butler told the story of Dana, a modern black woman who is transported backwards in time to the antebellum South to rescue the son of a white plantation owner from drowning. She returns time after time to the plantation to protect the boy, who will eventually become her ancestor and each time her stay is longer and more dangerous. The device of bringing a modern-day character into a historical setting makes her exposure to a life so alien to her own time very much more powerful and when Dana’s white husband is also transported to the plantation you can appreciate how little separates the attitudes of those in power nowadays from the plantation owners of the earlier time and just how easy it is to revert to an acceptance of a system that’s all around you.

Valerie Martin’s novel Property was also about plantation life in the 1820s, with a truly repellent main character who spent a great deal of time and money pursuing a runaway black house servant, despite being convinced that the servant had destroyed her relationship with her husband. In fact it was her own bitterness, together with the system in which she was trapped, that eventually destroyed both her and the slaves whom she regarded simply as being pieces of her property. In both books I felt I could understand the lives, the times, the prevailing attitudes a great deal more easily than I would have done by reading a work of non-fiction about the period.

There are after all, lots of precedents for using stories for teaching purposes. You only have to think of the parables in the New Testament and the many creation myths from all parts of the world. Re-visiting traditional story-telling has become a popular event at festivals, but personally I always find I retain more of a story if I can read it as well as hearing it. I think the theory is that the more of the senses you involve in the telling of a story, the more easily it is remembered.

In Cal’s service around Easter, he mentioned the concept of the Rapture in the Bible. This is the idea that when the end time comes, all those Christians who truly believe in Jesus will vanish and be taken up to meet with God, leaving everything material behind. This will happen in the twinkling of an eye. Those that are left behind will then pass through a seven-year period of trials and tribulations, complicated by a person known as the Antichrist, who will have great charisma and will try to take over the world. The only hope for those left behind is to accept God’s forgiveness, be born again, resist the Antichrist and stay faithful to God. All of this is figured out from a chapter in Matthew’s Gospel and a short passage in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, but mostly the ideas are interpreted from the extremely odd book of Revelation, the last book in the bible. The strange thing is that more Americans believe implicitly in that interpretation of the Rapture than do in the theory of evolution. The wars in the Middle East and the rise of terrorism are seen as the beginning of the end times. So it’s hardly surprising that a whole series of novels about the Rapture has become a major seller in the States. The 16 books have become best sellers, grossed over 65 million dollars, inspired a film, lots of audio and video and titles especially for kids, including what they call “graphic novels”, but which I suspect you and I would call “comics” The series is called “Left Behind” and I have the first volume. An American airline pilot is flying across the Atlantic when dozens of his passengers literally disappear. There is chaos throughout the world as people disappear from moving cars, trains etc, all children under 12 vanish and the pilot’s own wife and son are taken, leaving just him and his student daughter. He gradually comes to realise what has happened, although there doesn’t seem to be general acceptance that this is the Rapture. Because of the book’s thriller style it’s surprisingly interesting, although obviously there are chunks of biblical quotation and the sort of “born-again” jargon that I don’t find very appealing. The concluding chapters where the Antichrist makes his presence known are a little bit contrived, but apart from that I quite enjoyed it. I’m not sure whether I could plough my way through the other 15, even if I could get hold of them, but it’s a good example of works of fiction being used to illustrate the power of good and evil in a very classic way.

Actually this idea of a cataclysmic event, followed by seven year of trials and tribulations, an evil person who seems to be winning and a final triumph by the forces of good might sound very familiar to anyone who has been following an even more popular series than “Left Behind” J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has all of these elements, even down to the seven year period of trials. This is a series that never stops building on all that’s gone before and the inventiveness of the magical elements in the story is pretty impressive. The characters are well-drawn, in fact if I compare them with those in the Left Behind series I find that they are somewhat more believable. There was quite a lot of objection from evangelical Christian circles to the series originally, since God does not make any sort of appearance, but if you read between the lines, these are very moral stories and Harry Potter himself shows a great deal of concern for others, enemies included, even sometimes to the point of incredulity. The characters develop and flesh out throughout the series and the plot becomes darker and more mature. The fact that so many adults read and enjoy Harry Potter is a great testament to the quality of the writing. Researchers are beginning to say that Harry Potter is introducing many more reluctant readers to the pleasures of reading, but I rather wonder whether such a very active and fast-moving story is going to lead people into appreciating much more slow and gentle books. I recently read both Middlemarch and North and South and although I enjoyed both of them, I can see that not an awful lot happens in them. They are also the sort of book that is tainted by the labels of “good” and “improving”, the ones that were on the “must read” list at school. I must confess that to me most of Dickens is on that list and Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and Vanity Fair. All stuff I know I should have read, but can’t really imagine doing so for pleasure. In fact, just this week I came across a little book summarising a hundred classic books as haikus. Haiku is a Japanese poetry form that is very simple – it is just three lines, first line five syllables, second line seven syllables, third line five again. So here’s the haiku that tells you all you need to know about Wuthering Heights:-

Wild. Strange. A bit damp

Heathcliff waits for Cathy’s ghost

Women. Always late

I don’t think I need bother reading the whole thing now.

I hope I’ll always keep reading, eyesight permitting. There are many large-print books around, although I suspect not enough and I daresay I can resort to a magnifying glass if necessary. There are always audio books too, although they have an awful tendency to send me to sleep. Perhaps there is a new invention in reading just around the corner like special reading glasses that automatically adjust to your particular eyesight requirements. I hope so, because reading is just one of those pleasures I’d hate to lose. In fact, if I ever do indulge in thoughts of what hell might be like, I know one thing. There’ll be no books there. Heaven, on the other hand, will be a gigantic library.

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ANNIVERSARY THOUGHTS

By Bill Stephen

One of the iconic and most enduring images of our congregation is a photograph of the Revd. Alexander Webster preaching on the Broad Hill at the beach. He is a tall, black-clad, figure with a shock of white hair. His right hand out stretched, he is addressing an audience of about seventy, facing him in a semi-circle. His listeners are mostly men, somberly dressed in their Sunday best. The side of the Broad Hill is certainly not the most convenient or comfortable site for an open-air meeting. The audience is obliged to stand on an awkward slope and the speaker can only look at one section at a time. However, hill-side meetings have a long and significant history for unorthodox preachers: Jesus of Nazareth preached on the Mount of Olives and the persecuted Covenanters met on windswept uplands to avoid the King Charles’s troopers in the 17th. century. Alexander Webster, on his bare hill-side was not only asserting his claim to a radical ancestry but was also drawing attention to our Unitarian roots, for on that very same spot on Sunday 27th October 1833, the Revd. Archibald Macdonald, formally constituted the Aberdeen Unitarian Congregation. Prejudice had driven Archibald Macdonald and his followers out of the city and on to the flanks of the Broad Hill on a chilly afternoon. None of the hotel proprietors were prepared to risk accommodating this non-conformist preacher who wished to undermine and overset the established institutions of the Kirk and so he marched down to the beach and by the time he had taken up his stance on the Broad Hill, he was surrounded by two thousand people eager to share in this new message of hope and universal salvation.

The original congregation, led by a local businessman, George Taylor, was small, but they succeeded in opening their first church in George Street in 1840. For the next forty years, however, their history was a constant struggle to survive. They made a bad mistake at the very beginning with their first minister, the Revd. John Easedaile, a man of outstanding ability and dedication to the Unitarian cause. Although they were desperate to release themselves from the stultifying effects of their Calvinist up bringing, they underestimated its influence. Their minds were set hard in the Calvinist tradition, and when Easedaile proposed choosing his readings from sources other than the Bible and refused to conduct a communion service, they were appalled, and so parted company with one of the most enlightened minds of their generation. Shaking themselves free of the Calvinist straight-jacket was difficult and painful. They were frightened of the freedom they longed for. Without the authority of the established church, how could you tell what was the right road to take? There seemed to be many irreconcilable views, some adhering closely to tradition, others pursuing more daring ideas. At this time, they had not accepted the important principle that a liberal congregation can embrace a variety of different stand-points, quite harmoniously. This lack of tolerance was yet another relic of their Calvinist past and an indication that they were as yet unable to see themselves as a caring community, but were still just a group of individuals.. As a result, the membership waxed and waned alarmingly. Minister followed minister in rapid succession. The threat of bankruptcy and closure hung over them like the sword of Damocles but, fortunately, their numbers always included a group determined to promote the ideals of a liberal religion, in spite of their theological confusion, penury and the repeated attacks of the Church of Scotland clergy.

Then, in 1884, the Congregation at last discovered its prophet, its inspiration, its promise of a secure future, in the Revd. Alexander Webster who now embarked upon his first Aberdeen ministry.

Born in 1840 and a native of Old Meldrum, Webster had been brought up by his elderly grandmother and an Aunt who kept the local school. Both ladies adhered strictly to the Calvinist faith and young Alexander was brought up to study the Bible, fear God and observe to the letter, the spiritual requirements of the Westminster Confession of Faith, to which end he was remorselessly schooled in the Scottish catechism. Although he was subject to a harsh and unforgiving God, he was kindly and lovingly treated by his grandmother and Aunt. He wrote, “ I dreaded God too much to love him, and had it not been for my grandmother’s tenderness, I should have had nothing to redeem me from agonizing terror.”

Of all the many thousands of words he wrote and preached, this simple sentence, most tellingly, reveals the source of his spiritual insight. By the age of ten he was aware of a contradiction in the religious beliefs he was expected to accept. Jean Calvin’s God was a terrifying figure, a wrathful, vengeful monster who condemned nine out of ten human creatures to everlasting torture in Hell. Jesus, on the other hand preached of love and universal salvation. He also realised that his own family circle owed its harmony and well-being not to mutual fear but to love and understanding. People may be controlled by terror in every aspect of their lives; their minds may be moulded into a dull conformity by fear; but happiness, security, creativity and originality flourish best in a climate of love and freedom.

Troubled and confused, as it was, Webster realised that his new charge was certainly a congregation, but was not a community; and until its members felt comfortable in each others company and had confidence in the validity of their beliefs and values, they never would be. He wrote, “The congregation was a shapeless set of factions instead of a circle of friends.”

One major obstacle was the church building. It was cold, gloomy and unwelcoming. A constant source of bad-feeling and dispute, everyone complained about it, but their straightened circumstances seemed to forbid any possibility of a remedy. Webster, realising they needed a new start in a new home and a single objective upon which to focus their energy, proposed abandoning George Street and erecting a new church, on a new site. The congregation was stunned. Where would they get the money? They had been brought up in this church. Their children had been baptised in this church. They had worked their fingers to the bone to maintain this church and to keep it open. Its dark and chilly interior with its smoke blackened ceiling and rickety pews was an integral part of their lives. Leave it? How could they leave it? Never.

Frustrated on this front, he became engaged in a literary conflict with local Calvinists who were still disturbed by the presence of this liberal voice in their midst. Both sides produced books attacking the other, Webster contributing his “Burns and the Kirk” and his famous “ From Calvinism to Unitarianism”.

His own sense of community extended beyond his congregation to society as a whole. Love of his fellow men and women laid a responsibility of care upon him. He was appalled by the poverty, deprivation and despair that he saw around him and by the general indifference and complacency displayed by local councillors towards their less fortunate fellow citizens. He was particularly concerned about the very high death rate among children living in the slums along the Denburn valley. Small-pox, dysentery, typhoid, measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria regularly exacted a dreadful toll among these young people. His response was to set up the Fresh Air fortnight scheme to give them a holiday in the countryside away from the contaminated water, the smoke and foul air of the city. Aberdeenshire Farmers were persuaded to provide board, and lodgings for sickly children who were labelled and transported by train to their holiday destination to recover their health and strength. The scheme prospered and eventually he raised funds to build the Linnmoor Home for Ailing Children which is still managed by Aberdeen Social Services today, more than a hundred years after its foundation. He also served on the recently established School Board, becoming its Chairman on several succeeding years, so great was his reputation in the city for integrity and enlightened leadership. Most of the primary schools he built survive today. Calling himself a Christian Socialist he was actively involved in politics and in 1888, helped Keir Hardy found the Scottish Labour Party.

Ill-health and the congregation’s intransigence, eventually drove him from the city for seven years, and when he returned in 1895, the congregation at last understood the importance of creating a caring community and willingly agreed to support his ambition of building a new church. Inspired by their change of heart he set out upon an extended tour of England and the US to raise finds and exactly one hundred years ago he led his congregation from their dilapidated premises in George Street to their fine new home in Skene Street. Confident and comfortable in their new home, proud of their Minister and basking in his achievements, the members of the congregation pulled themselves together and entered into a period of growth and prosperity which lasted for another forty years.

Webster’s ministry consisted of two related strands, liberal Christianity and community building. Religion had to be based and informed by human experience, reason and knowledge. For instance he read widely in the scientific literature of his day and tried to apply his reading to his theological beliefs. Love, compassion, caring were the bonds that pulled and held people together and so must form the basis of religious belief. Unselfish concern for others created a contented and thriving community in which the needs of all were fairly and willingly met and no one was to be set aside because of rank, race or religious belief. This was the Kingdom of Heaven for which he laboured.

Now, a hundred years after he first stood in his pulpit in the Skene Street building, what might he think of our society today, the society which has emerged from his dreams and the decisions he and his contemporaries made.

I think he would be rather confused. Certainly he would be delighted with our welfare state, our national health service,

our educational provision, social housing, pensions and provision for the disabled. These were the issues upon which he campaigned for a lifetime and would have been happy that where charity in his day had been unable to meet these social demands, the taxation system has succeeded.

Other aspects of our society would dismay him. Our secular way of life would depress him deeply. He advocated religious freedom so that everyone might have access to the universal spirit of love. Spiritual enlightenment, tolerance, compassion would flow from a liberal approach to Christianity. He had a vision of a church-going society embracing religion freely, without fear, and celebrating the gift of life in all its many manifestations. Our current history of wilting congregations abandoning churches and declining religious influence, he would consider the stuff of nightmare, and I have no doubt he would have found our removal from his great Skene Street Church almost twenty years ago, quite incomprehensible.

He died in 1918 and, therefore, was unaware of the sense of spiritual betrayal experienced by millions of people as a result of the violent and cruel history of the twentieth century. A God which allowed such barbarity was not deserving of respect and was, therefore, abandoned by millions of erstwhile worshippers, who put their faith in purely material things instead, hoping to find a kind of meaning to life in acquiring possessions and in self- gratification.

Our lack of social cohesion would also trouble him deeply. As religion gives way to secularism, moral authority declines into relativism, whereby concepts of right and wrong, good and evil, become a matter of personal preference. “One man’s meat is another man’s poison”. A whole generation is wandering around lost in a moral labyrinth, some searching for authority and guidance others revelling in its apparent absence and the pursuit of utterly selfish ends.

We also live in a multi-cultural society where people of different races, traditions, values, motivations, languages and lifestyles are trying to exist side by side as amicably as possible. But obviously different groups will pull in different directions at different times as their loyalties dictate, creating friction and social unrest. The current controversy about some Moslem women concealing their face behind a veil is a case in point, not to mention the much graver issue of the the Moslem community’s reaction to our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Alexander Webster, I think, would find a resemblance between our situation and that of his Aberdeen Congregation when he was first appointed. The problem is a spiritual one. We lack a common vision; we lack a common aim; we are all pursuing different and sometimes clashing objectives, some are religious, some political, some economic, some moral, some social. Like that 1870’s congregation, we in the United Kingdom are a very disparate and sometimes disunited group trying to find a way of functioning as a coherent community. As a nation, we are engaged in an experiment in mixed community living and there are no guide-lines for this operation. We make them up as we go along. Webster would advise, tolerance, patience, understanding and goodwill to start with. He would also urge us to uncover the spiritual needs that lie behind our traditional religious beliefs and which are unmet by a materialist life-style. The concept of Love is the spiritual source of our existence, and love is our abiding principal need; and faith in the existence and power of love is the ultimate inspiration of our great world religions. Love, compassion, the caring human spirit are the moral authorities we need to regulate our behaviour and achieve the social harmony to which we aspire.

Alexander Webster energised by his zeal for social reform and inspired by his Unitarian ideals would accept this agenda as a worthy challenge for his ministry and we in our own small way would do well to follow his lead and so keep in step with the traditions of our Unitarian ancestors.

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BILL GOOD'S BIRTHDAY

	SIXTY ODE By Sue Good So now you've joined the sixties club I'm sure you'll like it fine. I hope you'll use your free bus pass As much as I use mine! With cheapie opera tickets too And Shakespeare - all the works, You'll be as cultures as a germ--- There have to be some perks. Just now I spoke about a germ Or did I - I don't know. That's something else you'll surely find; Your memory can go! Your waistline has migrated south, Your back has gone to pot; With sneezes, wheezes, aches and pains -- Prepare to have the lot. Life's hidden depths, earth's mysteries Will make you question, "Why?" The hours that used to crawl along, These days just simply fly. But think before you crack and turn Your face back to the wall, Just pinch the dog's glocosamine. Go out and have a ball!.

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