February 4, 2008
Lyon College News Bureau

Lyon College will participate in a Kirkin’ o’ the Tartans service at the First Presbyterian Church of Jonesboro. The service will be at 10:50 a.m. Sunday, Feb. 10. A complimentary potluck lunch will follow the service. The Lyon Pipe Band will lead the procession of the tartans and perform during the service.

The church is located at 719 Southwest Drive in Jonesboro.

The word “kirkin’” comes from the Scottish word for church, kirk. Though the ceremony is a modern American tradition, its origins trace back to Scottish history. The Scots – both Catholic and Protestant – observed Sunday as the Lord’s Day, a day of rest and worship, when they wore their dress kilts, which were made of finer quality wool than their everyday attire.

Because of the significance of the family tartan in uniting the clans, a special event was held each year where the Scots, dressed in their finest tartans, rededicated themselves to service to God.

This service was known to have taken place during the time of the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s. However, following the failure of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, when the English defeated the Scots, the Disarming Act of 1746 forbade them from wearing their tartans. That gave birth to legends that Scots secretly took swatches of their tartans to church in the 18^th century when the wearing of tartans was illegal. At a predesignated time in the service, clansmen and clanswomen would touch their concealed tartans while the minister blessed the cloth in Scottish Gaelic.

Those legends bloomed into reality on April 27, 1941, in Washington, D.C., when Presbyterian minister Dr. Peter Marshall presided over the first formal Kirkin’ o’ The Tartans ceremony. Marshall was also chaplain of the U.S. Senate, chaplain of the St. Andrew’s Society and subject of both a book and a movie called A Man Called Peter.

Central to the theme of “kirkin’” is the presentation of the Tartans of Clan, Region and Regiment, symbolizing rededication of Scots everywhere to God’s service.