Canon Alasdair Coles writes:

CANON Ian MacRae Michael died very late on the evening of 9 March; the record shows the tenth, the ward being busy when the note was finally made. He had been a priest for 47 years. Born in 1940, he was 85 years old. Details — numerical and otherwise — mattered to him.

His path to ordination was neither swift nor conventional, and all the better for it. Born in 1940 in Shetland, and educated at Banff Academy and the University of Aberdeen, where he took his MA in 1962, he went on to Hertford College, Oxford, completing his D.Phil. in 1966 on the limitations of eigenfunctions in representing reality — demanding work at the intersection of analysis, operator theory, and mathematical physics. He was confirmed in the Scottish Episcopal Church on 5 November 1967 — a date that he could, as with an arrestingly large number of others, produce without hesitation — and spent the following years as a lecturer at the University of Dundee. He came to the altar by way of academia; and it showed, in the best sense, throughout his ministry.

The call, when it came, was responded to with characteristic deliberateness. He went to Westcott House, Cambridge, in 1977, was ordained deacon in 1979 and priest in 1980, and served his title at All Saints’, King’s Heath, in Birmingham. From there, he went to St Paul’s Cathedral, Dundee, as Vice-Provost (1982-88), before becoming Vicar of St Faith and St Laurence, Harborne, in Birmingham, where he served for 15 years (1988-2003). He was Rural Dean of Edgbaston from 1991 to 1998, and was made an honorary canon of Birmingham Cathedral in 2000, and Canon Emeritus on his retirement. His vocation, as he himself might have said, did not read like a career plan. One thing led, quietly, to another.

After retirement in 2003, he returned to Scotland, holding permission to officiate in the diocese of St Andrews, Dunkeld & Dunblane from 2004. He was not without his battles: episodes of depression and, in his final years, the near-total loss of his sight, curtailed his public ministry latterly without diminishing his gift for friendship or his engagement with those around him. He ministered in St Andrews, bringing the weight of long experience worn lightly: he never traded on it, never performed it. He simply turned up, listened, celebrated, preached, prayed, and encouraged.

Ian was, to everyone who knew him, first and foremost a friend. His attentiveness to others was not curiosity, but charity. He listened with a patience that was both rare and unmistakable. He remembered what we ourselves had forgotten that we had said, or even forgotten that we had felt. His memory was not merely remarkable: it was compassionate. At our monthly ministry meetings, we would tease him about his astonishing command of dates. Someone would ask about a long-past festival; he would lean back, give his characteristic “Oh!” and within seconds produce the answer. He delighted in it — and we delighted in him. His cousin Lola Michael Russell recalls meeting him again in London after many years apart; when she remarked on the gap, Ian said simply: “Ah yes, that would have been July 1956.”

That same clarity of mind belonged also to his priesthood. He was a wise confessor. What was entrusted to him was received, absolved, and truly laid down. He perceived much, but displayed little. What he saw he turned not into leverage, but into prayer. He was judicious without ever becoming judgemental.

He held fast to a word given to him by a Westcott House tutor: “Always remember, whatever happens, that you are a man greatly beloved.” He carried it quietly, and shared its wisdom generously, as he carried and shared so much. Some years ago, he gave Lola a small figurine of the sleeping St Joseph — who dreamed — telling her that he kept one himself and found it helpful when a problem needed to be slept on. It was entirely characteristic: a gesture at once practical, tender, and theological.

He is survived by his cousins Lola, who knew him throughout her life, and Roderick MacRae, whose friendship with Ian came later; a post-war division in the family had kept them apart for decades, a breach healed only within the past ten years through Ian’s initiative — to the deep delight of Ian and the extensive MacRae family alike.

Ian treasured a phrase: Oceani divisi, eucharistia conjuncti — divided by the oceans, united by the eucharist. At every altar where he stood, he knew himself joined to those on the further shore. He is there now.