Reflections from the Pew 131

I’m taking a break from the “Top 10” as tomorrow is Burns Night, therefore I’m looking at Robert Burns and Religion. I hadn’t realised it is a very researched subject, click on the images for more information.

Robert Burns was a colourful and in some ways controversial character of Scottish literature. For many he was an agnostic who had not much good to say about Christians, Christianity or church. This is a distortion of the truth. Burns was critical of many aspects of the Church of his day, but he was a deeply religious person and a regular worshipper.

Though, like the writer of many of the Psalms, Burns approved the higher course, he sometimes followed the lower. He fathered several illegitimate children by different women, before and after his marriage to Jean Armour, he said, “God knows I am no Saint; I have a whole host of Follies and Sins to answer for.”

In his time there were those who preached “Fire and Brimstone” and those who preached of a more loving God. Like Jesus, Burns sought to expose the hypocrisy of the ‘unco guid’, those who made a great public show of their piety. In his poem Holy Willie, he launches an assault on the extreme Calvinism which had pervaded church life.

His “Address to the Unco Guid”, is a commentary on Jesus’ words about the need to remove the log from our own eye before attempting to remove the splinter from our brother’s eye.

He had a strong sense of social justice is shown in his peom “A Man’s a Man for a’ That”. When not away on tax business, he often conducted evening family prayers. He also wrote graces to be said before meals. The best known is the Selkirk grace. “Some hae meat and canna eat, and others would eat that want it, but we hae meat and we can eat, sae let the Lord be thankit.”

Whatever the case might be about Burns’ faith or the lack of it, he was an extremely gifted word-smith with a sharp observation of life and people, a quick wit and great sense of humour, and a perception for justice.