Strange this St Patrick’s Day not to be in Ireland. I would have preferred to be in Washington listening to President O’Bama discussing his Irish roots. But instead I was on Cumbrae in the College of the Holy Spirit passing the time with our Faith and Order Board.
Cumbrae is an extraordinary place – ten minutes on the ferry from Largs. The College sits beside the Cathedral of the Isles. Both are gems of Butterfield’s architecture built in 1851. Our small church has great difficulty sustaining them. But it’s hard to walk away from such treasures. Go and take a look if you can.
For reasons too complicated to explain, I was staying in a guest house overlooking the shipping channel. So I sat in the window of my room this morning dealing with my e mail. As Liaison Bishop for Mission to Seafarers in Scotland, I was able to send an e mail to our Chaplain reporting that shipping on the Clyde is far from dead – four ships in an hour.
There was a woman in Larne, who was a native of Cumbrae, who first told me about that prayer. The late John Paterson thought it hilarious – from the particular to the universal.
How splendid. Like that very Irish discussion about where the ‘mainland’ is!
Did you maintain the tradition there of offering prayer for “the islands of Great and Little Cumbrae and the adjacent islands of Great Britain and Ireland”?