THOUGHTS TO PONDER

I’m looking forward to a return visit in June to Iona, having spent a memorable week there last summer.  It happens that on 9th June the Episcopal church celebrates the life and ministry of Columba, who founded the first monastery there and who died on the island in 597. It’s impossible to visit the Hebridean island and not be touched by its very special atmosphere.  Not just its sense of history, for not only are many of the Scottish kings buried there, but it has been a place of pilgrimage and interest for countless visitors over the centuries.  It’s a ‘thin’ place, where the demarcation between earth and heaven seems almost to disappear.

Columba (meaning ‘a dove’ in Latin) was a priest who left Ireland in the 6th Century.  With twelve others he set out to cross the Irish Sea , not in one of the fast ferries of to-day which can cross in an hour, but in a coracle made of wood and hide.  His biographer, Adamnan, records his decision to build a monastery when he reached the shores of Iona.  It became the centre of Celtic Christianity, and from it Columba, as Abbot, sent out monks on missionary endeavours and to build Christian communities throughout Scotland and Northern England, where another of his brother monks, Aidan, established a monastery on Lindisfarne, off the coast of Northumbria.

It’s difficult not to be challenged by the commitment and risk-taking of Columba and his fellow-monks.  He was of noble birth and might easily have opted for a life of comfort as a chieftain in Ireland.  His decision to share his passionate faith in God with the world beyond his ‘ken’ has impacted on Scottish Christianity ever since.  And more recently had Lord George McLeod not had the vision of the restoration of the abbey and cloisters in the 20th Century, Scotland would surely have been the poorer.  Instead, with a team of young clergymen working alongside experienced craftsmen, the abbey was rebuilt and rededicated with an ecumenical focus and commitment to a radical expression of worship. So the prophecy of Columba has been fulfilled:

‘Iona of my heart, Iona of my love

Where now is the chanting of monks,

there will be lowing of cattle.

But ere the world come to an end,

Iona shall be as it was....’

Mary McMahon