Friendship and the Unspectacular

Driving over altars.

As I drive down Springburn road I always try to make sure I am on the outside lane after crossing the Keppochmill road junction.  This is so I don’t drive over the site of where the original altar of St James the Less used to be before the dual carriageway paved it over.  In the name of progress no doubt and the constant flow of traffic testifies to its necessity.  Yet the heart of Springburn as a community has been hollowed out with tenements and shops and work places all destroyed and replaced with functional but fairly heartless and uninspiring ‘modern’ buildings that already show the sign of age.    I was embarrassed that the introduction to Glasgow for my newly arrived Sri Lankan friends was the faintly depressing and down at heels local shopping centre. 

And yet in the middle of it was a fresh fruit and veg stall with a vibrant and warm woman and the family were able to buy all they needed, having just arrived off the plane the night before.  Then the local pastor of a Tamil church, replanted in the old local Gospel Hall, walked by and came over and welcomed them to Glasgow.   Communities find a way of reinventing themselves, life carries on as the old is replaced with something different, almost like a natural landscape evolving over time.  What starts as a necessary change, often at great human cost and with destructive power, is transformed organically into new forms of living.  The local primary school is full of faces from different parts of the world and in place of the great locomotive works which serviced the Empire is now a glistening retail park.

The original St James was founded largely by the influx of thousands of railway workers, including lots of ‘unbaptised Irish’ according to our records, to the three great yards that defined Springburn and the surrounding area for decades.  Opposite the retail park which replaced the St Rollox works were the high rise flats which replaced the Sighthill works.  These have now been reduced to rubble, sifted into huge piles of wood, stone, concrete and earth, the great machines separating out the constituent elements of what used to house hundreds of families.  I knew these flats well, dozens of apartments accommodating postgraduate students and their families from all over the world.   Drinking cups of coffee late at night, walking up and down countless stairs to advertise English classes in the local church, being invited into many homes for meals from all over the world, and always entering flats with no names.  For some reason the students never put their names on the door.  

And now these flats are gone and replaced with plans for new flats and houses- an improvement in many ways.  The church which did such great work has been replaced, further back but still serving the community and the new building reopens this Sunday.  And somewhere in the piles of sifted rubble lies shards of the altar of the old church.  It is likely that my Sri Lankan friends will put their younger daughter in the nursery next door, and her older sister feels quite at home in the primary school.

They’ve now started coming to St James, approaching the 40^th anniversary of its move from Springburn to Bishopbriggs.   On their first Sunday the children came forward to receive the Eucharist, in front of the altar that had been moved before the dual carriageway paved it over.   As Yovana receive her wafer she noticed that her Scots pal hadn’t received one.  She broke hers in half in a most priestly of movements and shared it with her as they knelt together.    She may never know of the great rail works and the thousands of families that were the heart of Springburn, and the generations that have come and gone but she is forming her own community in a new day and sharing the gift of God on the altar of the world.

Audio file:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W4GU9ygdRCfnHXPMpjP90bLIUTf7yIJe/view?usp=drivesdk