Theologians in Exile

I have just been listening to a new CD recording of Gaelic songs celebrating the work of one of our island's great poets, Murdo Macfarlane. He lent the expressiveness of his native Celtic tongue to his poetry, with the result that since the 1970s several singers and folk groups have taken up his work.

Some of his most moving poems and songs were composed while he was working in Canada. Like many others from the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, Murdo had emigrated in search of employment, and some of the sweetest compositions in praise of the homeland arose out of the pain of exile.

I can't listen to these songs without thinking of exile songs of Scripture like the 137^th Psalm, with its longing for Jerusalem, and home; or the valedictory discourse of John's Gospel, with its anticipation of the house of many mansions.

Nothing makes the thought of home more sweet than the remembrance of it, or the longing for it. To that extent we really are strangers and pilgrims here: exiles from the homeland, longing to see the king in his beauty and the land of far distances. We are called to sing the Lord's song in a strange land, indeed; ours is the theology of the road, and we are learning only as those whose citizenship is in a better place than this.