It is Remembrance-tide. Yesterday crowds stood still in Glasgow city centre to observe the two minutes' silence at 11.00h on the 11th month. Many young people, notably Rangers' Football Club supporters held aloft banners deploring and condemning the war-mongering remembrances and distancing themselves from remembering those who fell in both world wars and subsequent conflicts. Is this a good sign? Does it mean that the young adults nowadays, for whom we fought, no longer wished to be fought for? Maybe so. At my great age though I still feel we should remember those in past eras who fought to defend us against oppression and so they helped keep us free from invasion and domination. Remembrance Day may well fade into oblivion in time. Today in the Church Calendar we remember Machar, about whom little is known. What information we have is found in the Aberdeen Breviary. The RC Church chose to keep information about him and the other Celtic 'saints' hidden as they were not of course RC. Machar is said to have been a companion of Columba when they arrived at Iona in their wee boat. It is also speculated that Machar may well have been another name for Mungo, patron of Glasgow. He did build a cathedral at Aberdeen, in the bend of the river Don, symbolic of a bishop's cromach (crozier). Indeed, St Machar's 'Cathedral' still stands, albeit it is not a cathedral, per se, but simply a parish church of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland.
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