After the most glorious golden October – with, among other things, the best display of bright rowan berries I have ever seen – the weather turned like the clocks as we moved into November with night frosts, biting winds and snow caps on the high Galloway hills.

Definitely winter, and so perhaps it was an appropriate moment for my parish’s service to close “our” Jubilee Year of Mercy Holy Door at St Ninian’s Church in Whithorn. The Pope will close the door at St Peter’s in Rome tomorrow marking the finale of the Jubilee Year of Mercy, so we did it the weekend before.

Now here is an odd thing: this service was ecumenical. Here we were, in western Scotland (generally held to be a bastion of good, old fashioned Protestant-Catholic sectarianism – and not just in football), not yet a fortnight on from the great celebration in Sweden marking the 500th year since Luther banged his 95 theses up on a rather different church door, attacking, among other things, the concept of Indulgences (especially those sold for money), arguing that we could not be saved through any “works” (good deeds) of our own, nor any activities we might undertake, but through faith alone.