Food for Thought: Could there be positive outcomes from Covid-19?
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This is a column by Sandy Sutherland, a retired Free Church minister.
“Geordie was one of the kindest, most generous and honest people you could wish to meet. He never spoke ill of anyone and no one had a bad word to say about him. Honesty was his middle name.”
The late Don Sutherland, friend and former work colleague of Geordie’s at Brora’s Clynelish Distillery, spoke those words in his funeral eulogy to George Menzies Sutherland.
I too had been his work colleague and I had the privilege of conducting his funeral service in April, 2009. All funerals are sad occasions and Geordie’s was no different in this regard, yet, I had never conducted a funeral where the congregation twice spontaneously burst into applause. Why?
Many reasons, but essentially Geordie gave himself unstintingly, never looking for self-glorification, to many good causes: the Red Cross, the RNLI and 50 years to the Scouting movement to name but three.
The honing of Geordie’s practical gifts began when, alongside his father, he started his working life as an apprentice blacksmith, horseshoe making and fitting included, with the late Vivan Munro at the smiddy in Brora’s Gower Lane.
After a period of time he worked with the tuner, Jocky Weightman, at Hunters Woollen Mill in Brora before joining the maintenance team at Clynelish Distillery where he went on to become head engineer.
This was a challenging roll which called for the working out of many tricky engineering problems – many in the middle of the night with no spare parts! Yet I never saw him stumped for a solution.
As in engineering so he was in life. Take, for example, the tricky situation that developed in Brora’s Annie’s Bar.
One summer’s evening (so the story goes), some locals, including Geordie, were enjoying a quite drink, when the peace was shattered by the entrance of two vociferous and condescending university students. Tensions were running troublesomely high due to too many “been there, done that, bought the T-shirt” type boasts by the visitors. Geordie, however, saved the day when he stepped in and asked the not-so-wise erudites: “Can you shoe a horse?” There was then silence in the bar for half-an-hour before an enjoyable evening was had by all.
Rather than celebrating one another’s gifts, the Corinthian Christians had become conceited concerning their own particular gifts and dismissive of the gifts of others. The apostle Paul, therefore, wrote to them illustratively likening the church as one body having many parts: “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you!’ And the head cannot say to the feet, ‘I don’t need you!’ On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem weaker are indispensable… so there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other.”
This is also true for society – not a call to be all the same, as both church and society have people performing different functions but a call to recognise one another’s worth.
Will this be one of the lasting lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic: the same care for the disadvantaged and a working together globally and locally, whatever our credentials, craft, colour or creed, for the good of all?
Later in life, on visiting Geordie in hospital, I noticed there was a dignitary in the same ward. I diplomatically asked Geordie how he was getting on with everyone in the ward. “We are all Jock Tamson’s bairns in here!” he replied. Indeed, but not all as exceptional as Geordie.
