As every year since 1994 (with a single gap in 2022 because of covid) 4 public lectures were given at Pluscarden over the Tuesday to Thursday after Pentecost: 21 - 23 May.
Our speaker this year was Dr. Linden Bicket, lecturer in Literature and Religion in the School of Divinity at Edinburgh University. Her subject was "Scottish Catholic Literature and the Transfiguration of the Commonplace."
These lectures were helpfully illustrated by power point slides.
Dr. Bicket began by seeking a definition of Catholic Literature. For that she ranged widely, to include such figures as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Graeme Greene, Flannery O'Connor, Francis Thompson, Evelyn Waugh and many others. The focus of her talks though was to be the often neglected Catholic literature of Scottish writers of the 20th century. In particular she chose to speak about George and Ann Scott-Moncrieff; George Friel and Muriel Spark, and finally George Mackay-Brown.
Dr. Bicket is a most engaging speaker; enthusiastic and knowledgeable; well able to hold the attention of an audience, and to leave it wishing for more.
She claims not to be a theologian as such. Nevertheless, she presents works of literature that are able to nourish or challenge or broaden hearts and minds in such a way as to help lead people towards God. As George Mackey Brown wrote of his own conversion: "It was literature that finally broke down my defences".
At the end of the lectures our resident sculptor Philip Chatfield presented Dr. Bicket with a stone slab he had carved for her, quoting a verse from a poem of George Mackay Brown she had quoted in one of the lectures.
The reference to a boot washed up by the sea was particularly evocative for Philip, who was once shipwrecked, and lost his socks and boots in the process, though he did save his life.
Beachcomber - by George Mackay Brown
Monday I found a boot –
Rust and salt leather.
I gave it back to the sea, to dance in.
Tuesday a spar of timber worth thirty bob.
Next winter
It will be a chair, a coffin, a bed.
Wednesday a half can of Swedish spirits.
I tilted my head.
The shore was cold with mermaids and angels.
Thursday I got nothing, seaweed,
A whale bone,
Wet feet and a loud cough.
Friday I held a seaman’s skull,
Sand spilling from it
The way time is told on kirkyard stones.
Saturday a barrel of sodden oranges.
A Spanish ship
Was wrecked last month at The Kame.
Sunday, for fear of the elders,
I sit on my bum.
What’s heaven? A sea chest with a thousand gold coins.
