Haggis and hagiolatry
By STEWART LAMONT
PLEASE don't call me blasphemous, but this
week a fascinating comparison came into my head as I noticed that this week's
column coincided with Burns Night.
The feast of Rabbie Burns is more than just a
meal. It is an event of supernatural dimensions to be able to unite Scotsmen of
all religious denominations and none, teetotallers and stocious dram drainers,
poetry lovers and philistines, to say nothing of all social types and classes.
For a nation that has the prickly thistle as its
emblem and is second only to the Irish in its thrawn inability to agree about
anything important (our system of government is an excellent topical example),
we have a devotion to Burns that borders on the miraculous.
There is scarcely a Scot that cannot quote a few
lines at least from the national bard, and I am continually amazed by the capacity
of some unlikely poetry lovers to recite screeds of Rabbie's verse. We hum the
songs he penned and are all able to sing something in his praise. The fact that
the facets of his character we choose to admire are sometimes widely different,
and often downright contradictory, seems to matter not in the least.
The glassy-eyed homunculus who adorns the Burns
societies' annual saturnalia of haggis and hagiolatry differs considerably from
the bawdy bard who provides an excuse for a sports club to bevvy to excess. The
minister who proposes the toast of the immortal memory in orange juice may decide
to see with Nelsonian eye the love poems as allegories akin to the Song of Solomon
and depict them as a flawed attempt to come to terms with divine love.
The Rabelaisian writer (or even the Voltairian
one) may see the bard's lechery and addiction to alcohol as a model upon which
to base his own wail against the dying of the light.
It matters not a whit. Contradictions abound,
and the Humpty Dumpty put together from these immortal memories would not survive
outside the incubators of supper rooms. It is a haggis of a person, and like the
legendary creature called the haggis that we like to encourage unwitting Sassenachs
to go and attempt to shoot, it cannot fly and is as real as the dodo.
But why should we be bothered by this? The fact
that Burns provides a good excuse for a good night out in the church hall is not
contradicted by his own hostility to the church of his day. The all too obvious
weakness of Burns for the pleasures of the flesh does not make his idealism less
admirable or his expression of it any less true.
What we make of him and what he was must remain
a paradox, and is none the less for it.
It is tempting to make some comparisons with another
man who died in his early thirties and is celebrated through a ritual meal. They
both shared the ability to express the finest thoughts of philosophy, yet both
lacked formal education. They both are immortalised by their words, and suffer
from having them quoted in some strange contexts. They both are the focus of unity
among some very diverse groups.
It is not a blasphemous comparison at the end
of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity to take a cool look at what Christians
have done with the ritual meal centred on their founder. The breaking of bread
is itself occasion for tearing up common ground.
For some it is solemn sacrament with wafer and
incense and held high for the carefully confirmed faithful alone to grasp. For
others it is a memorial and the occasion to jangle guitar chords in joyful celebration.
Such diversity makes it difficult (at times impossible) to achieve unity and that
(like it or not) is the way things stand at present between Prots and Papes.
Another analogy with Burns lies in the way that
biographers perceive Jesus. The most famous four (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John)
all took a different slant, but when you throw in a few of the gospels that didn't
make the ''authorised version'' and were kicking around the early Church for the
first 100 years you begin to see a different picture.
Were they any less true? The fathers of the Church
clearly thought they were, but how did they know? I prefer to see them all as
attempts to make something of the experience they had of their faith. Jesus Guru
contrasts with Jesus Guerrilla. Jesus the Sufferer with Jesus the Healer. Jesus
the Prince of Peace with the man who prophesied doom for a generation of vipers.
If we can live with the contradictions in Burns, then can we not live with those
in the perceptions of Jesus?
Before you dial the Heresy Hunters I should make
it clear that I do not consider Burns and Christ to be of similar substance. The
difference can be summed up in a sentence: Burns died from his sins, Jesus died
for ours. They both may be men for a' that, but divinity does make a difference.
Sat 25-Jan-1992
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