Iona Pilgrimage

I am back home in Albuquerque now and am still sorting through the last couple of weeks in Scotland which brought my journey to a close. This will be my last traveling diary posting and then I hope to create a couple of slide shows about Ireland and Scotland. Finally, in a few weeks, I’ll generate a summary of my experience and learning, especially for ministry possibilities here at La Mesa.

The sabbatical was everything I hoped for and more. I had the privilege of seeing fantastic landscapes, meeting marvelous people, exploring ancient human-built environments, learning in a variety of settings, participating in meaningful worship and prayer experiences, and getting a valuable distance on my life and work to return with renewed commitments and energy. And in all these experiences I experienced the closeness of the divine, as I consistently stumbled upon places, people, and events that were "thin places" of God’s expressive creativity and grace. Our pastor emeritus, Howard Paul, noted in my diary entries that I employed more than a normal number of exclamation points…which certainly is an inadequate tool for expressing my excitement and wonder throughout!!!!! (just for Howard!!!!!!!)

The last full week of my stay was on the Isle of Iona, a beautiful and historically significant place in the island cluster named the Inner Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland. This is one of the important sites of the rediscovery of Celtic Christianity and was a logical ending place for my exploration of how this ancient, but excitingly contemporary, expression of the faith could inform our ministry here at La Mesa. Prior to my visit to Iona, I had the great delight of visiting other islands of the Inner and Outer Hebrides, including Skye, North and South Uist, Harris, and Lewis. They are the westerly most inhabited islands in Scotland and are beautiful in a stark, windswept way. One of the great interests on the Isle of Lewis was the Standing Stones of Callanish, a very large circle of stones that is second in size only to Stonehenge. There were gale force winds that day, but the setting on a hill overlooking a loch is breathtaking even in the turbulence. This huge array of stones forms a cross in the midst of a circle and the slender slabs of Lewisian gneiss rise out of the heather covered earth to heights of fifteen feet. The stone circle was built in 2900-2600 B.C. Its exact purpose still is undetermined, but undoubtedly emerged from the impulses of those ancient people to honor creation and creator with their very best artistic expression…and one quite lasting!

To reach Iona, one takes a ferry from the mainland to the beautiful Island of Mull, second only to the Isle of Skye in size and diverse landforms, and then a second ferry to Iona, off the southwest corner of Mull. Many of you have been to this sacred corner of Scotland which became the center for the Celtic Christian mission that was centered there under the guidance of St. Columba. The name Iona possibly derives from a Pictish word meaning "blessed or sacred island." Curiously and providentially, Iona is also a word in Hebrew which means "dove" and the name of the man who will make Iona so famous, Columba, also means "dove" in Latin. The isle is about three and a half miles long and a mile and a half wide, so it is a very walkable terrain, although weather on the island can change very quickly and a wild Atlantic storm can blow in and grip the landscape and its inhabitants with a fury. As beautiful as the storms are, especially to a desert dweller, when the sun shines on Iona, illuminating its white beaches and craggy hills, you are witness to one of the more spectacular landscapes in Scotland.     Though it had been settled by inhabitants well into pre-history, and thought to be a special site for Druidic religious communities, it became most famous and viewed as a sacred place in Scotland’s history because of the remarkable ministry of St. Columba. He was an Irish monk, born in 521, who light have become the king of Ireland if he had not felt God’s call to a religious vocation. After a productive ministry in Ireland, establishing some thirty seven monasteries, including the famous one at Kells, he ended up sailing with a group of monks to Scotland, to carry the Christian message to a land that had fallen into pagan ways after the retreat of the Roman armies from the country. There are interesting legends about the reasons that motivated Columba leaving Ireland. One had to do with a dispute over a copy of a Bible, where violence broke out between tribes, and people died. In this scenario, Columba was exiled to Ireland to bring the faith to that land. Regardless of the reasons, it was a great loss for him to leave his home country. He stopped at other islands, but if it were still possible to see the Irish coast in the distance, he sailed on with his band of twelve monks, in their hide covered coracle to the next island.

He first touched shore on Iona in the summer of 563. The bay they landed in was rough and rocky, as Iona’s southern half is an inhospitable tangle of heather covered hills. They climbed the high spot in that part of the island and Ireland was well past the horizon. The rise is still called "The Hill of Turning the Back to Ireland." They moved north to an area called the machair, a sandy stretch o flat land with some grasses, but still not terrible habitable. Fortunately, the east and north of the island yields beautiful and fertile pasture lands, protected by a series of hills, and St. Ronan’s Bay that looks upon Mull is more protected. It was here that Columba established his first monastery, near the site of the current Abbey. From this island, Columba and his monks carried the good news of the gospel to the Celtic peoples of Scotland and northern England. There are legends of his taming the Loch Ness Monster and winning tests of power with the Druidic priests. God blessed the mission with great success, and over the years they established some hundred monasteries throughout the realm. Though Columba died in 597, Iona continued to exert great influence and became a place of pilgrimage. In fact the graveyard of the oldest extant building on the site, St. Oran’s Chapel, is said to be the resting place of kings – forty eight from Scotland, four from Ireland, and eight from Norway.

The church of Columba, tracing its roots back to the Irish mission of St. Patrick, is the earliest expressions of Celtic Christianity. It had distinctive differences from the form, structures, and theology of the church centered in Rome. Being on the edge of European civilization of the time, the Celtic mission was not structured around bishops and cathedrals, but monasteries and abbots. Monasteries were places of hospitality and learning and less hieratical in structure. They were also much more egalitarian than the Roman mission, in that women were peers in leadership, including strong abbesses like Hilda and Brigid. The Celtic evangelists respected the cultures and religious tradition they encountered, such as the Druidic religious ceremonies, and instead of trying to destroy the earlier customs, they found ways to infuse hem with Christian meaning, in the belief that they pointed towards the divine. They also were more connected with nature and honored the earth, sky, sea, and animals as expressions of God’s mystery.

Two very tangible differences created tension between the two missions. The first had to do with eh celebration of Easter. The second difference came over a seemingly odd point, how the monks shaved their heads. The tonsures of the Celtic mission were similar to the Druidic monastic hairstyles and viewed by Rome as too accommodating to the pagan culture.

In terms of theology and belief, the Celtic mission traced their roots back to the desert fathers in Egypt and early church thinkers like Irenaus. Whereas Augustine of Hippo shaped the orthodoxy of the Roman mission with doctrines like original sin, the Celtic mission focused more on the biblical stories that emphasized that human beings are made in the image of God and this original blessedness is never completely marred by human folly, pride, and sin. They saw Christ as less of a sacrifice to appease God’s anger for human sin, than as a divine reminder of our original blessedness, revealing to us what is truest about humanity, and inviting us to a life-giving, healing relationship with God. There was a struggle between these two missions for many centuries and finally the Roman mission prevailed in the Synod of Whitby in 664 A.D. Increasingly the Celtic Catholic mission was pushed out of the center of church power to the edges. The places where the Gaelic culture and language persisted continued to be a safe refuge for the Celtic expressions of faith.

Unfortunately, it was not only the Catholic Church that repressed the Celtic tradition. Protestant churches later viewed the Celtic practices with suspicion and also found ways to excise the practices. This included the Church of Scotland, the mother church of the Presbyterian Church in the states. Fortunately, a heroic figure in the Church of Scotland revived the Celtic heritage in the mid twentieth century. He viewed this heritage as a way of getting beyond the Protestant and Catholic splits and the reclaiming of something very indigenous in Scotland’s past. This man was also the founder of the Iona Community and his name was George MacLeod.

MacLeod was a veteran of World War I, who returned home from the war a hero, a pacifist, and committed his life to the work of the Church of Scotland. He was committed to the church being a catalyst for justice, especially in the urban tenements of Edinburgh and Glasgow. He served several inner city parishes and became interested in the Celtic mission and saw Iona as the symbolic center of that work that could be reclaimed for the 20^th century. At the time there was little happening on the island, as the Catholic cathedral built there in the medieval period had been abandoned and was in a terrible state of disrepair. 

MacLeod utilized the island as a training and retreat center for parish clergy. They began to rebuild not only the buildings but the connection of the modern church to the Celtic mission. MacLeod left parish ministry to lead the Iona community after a few years to dedicate him to the island’s renovation. This took many decades, but all the while, new generations of church folks were attracted to the growing spiritual freshness of Celtic Christianity and to the commitment to justice that MacLeod and his companions embodied. Over time the Iona Community became increasingly ecumenical and with a focus towards providing not just clergy, but all people of faith, with resources to live out their commitments in an increasingly complicated world. The liturgy and music of Iona has been in the forefront of the Celtic renewal. There is a kind of worldly monasticism that characterizes the lives of the members of the community, who are literally spread out over the entire globe. Their rule or discipline includes:

Daily prayer and reading the Bible

Mutual sharing and accountability for our use of time and money

Regular meeting together

Action and reflection for justice, peace, and the integrity of creation

I have followed with interest for many years the work on Iona and wanted very much to be a part of a week’s living in community and learning. The workshop I attended was exploring the worship style that has some to characterize Iona – both Celtic in nature and justice oriented in themes. Coming to stay at Iona is a commitment to community living. All guests participate in serving meals, cleaning, and other daily cores as well as participating in the study itself.

The retreats include a pilgrimage walk around the island to many of the sites Columba and his heirs made famous. There is also an optional boat trip to nearby island called Staffa that has a famous cave – Fingal’s – that is surrounded by ballast columns of stone very distinctive of Ireland and Scotland (i.e. Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland). The island also has a large population of puffins. Unfortunately, they were schooling out over the ocean and not on shore the day of our visit.

The days at Iona are infused with a variety of worship experiences. Every morning the community gathers for Morning Prayers in the Abbey. This service features wonderful music in the Celtic tradition, much of it written by John Bell, one of the most prolific composers of contemporary worship music. We already sing many of John’s work under the capable leadership of David Poole, who is also writing music and in this tradition from an American perspective. At the end of the day, there is a 9 PM evening worship, which has a different theme depending on the evening. One night is a healing service with the opportunity for the laying on of hands. Another evening the focus is on justice and the night I was there was a focus on the importance of fresh water in developing countries and the issues of access and affordability. A third evening’s focus is the music of Taize, the innovative community in France that also began in the era following World War II. The final evening was a wonderful communion service. I found each one of the services very moving, with large numbers in attendance, and a very palpable expectation of God’s presence in the midst of the community.

The workshop that I attended explored the whole question of why we worship God – what does it mean for the divine and for us? We then spent several days looking at the words, music, and movement that shape how we worship. I hope you will see some of the insights from this careful examination reflected in the worship liturgy, music, and structure at La Mesa over the coming months. I have come back with renewed energy to think about adding a new worship experience, probably midweek, to the La Mesa calendar.

This essay finishes my dairy entries, although I anticipate I will be integrating the experience for months to come. I am so grateful to everyone who supported this effort. Thanks to Howard Paul and Judy Wellington, my clergy colleagues, who provided excellent leadership and the wonderful leaders of the La Mesa congregation. I sense La Mesa is a little like St. Columbia’s coracle, out on a journey into a future that is not completely known to us, but known to God. We trust where the winds are blowing!

Peace,

Trey