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Iona

Tissue paper thin, he said, was the barrier between the spiritual and the material on Iona; tissue paper thin the wall between heaven and earth. I felt that closeness early in the morning, stood in icy, clear green waters that lapped tropical-seeming white sands, and watched a sea-otter feed. I felt that closeness sat on Dun-I, ‘the hill of Iona’, as we watched the sun rise over Mull. But most of all I felt it in the community that has made Iona once again the destination and source of pilgrimage across the world. ‘He’ was the Rev George MacLeod who, in 1938, brought ministers to work as labourers for craftsmen rebuilding the ruins of Iona’s thirteenth-century Benedictine abbey, and establishing the Iona Community.

Many come to this island expecting to find monks, or the entire Community living there. But that is not their purpose, indeed no one may work on Iona for the Community for more than three years at a time. Just as the Celtic monks who lived there in the early centuries of Christianity would spend time training on Iona, and then journey across England and northern Europe to make God known in a hostile world, so today Iona Community members are spread across the globe “seeking new ways of living the Gospel in today’s world.”⁽¹⁾ The 200 Community members share a commitment to prayer and Bible study, economic sharing, planning their use of time, meeting together and working for peace and justice. But even among those who have only lived on that island for a week, few can help feeling, as the ferry draws them towards home, that something has changed, whether it is a refocusing of ideals that were faltering, or an entirely new vision.

Fifteen of us went from York for their ‘student week’, to stay with students from other universities and across the world. The timetable was leisurely, yet challenging and sometimes emotionally exhausting. On Sunday, after morning service and sharing oatcakes in the cloisters in order to get to know people, most of our day was free. Free to wander at will in glorious sunshine across the virtually litter-less, lock-less island, and a few of us spent ages sat on a hill-top overlooking Martyr’s Bay, where I had watched the otter that morning, where a group of monks were murdered by Vikings.

That evening the ‘getting to know you’ session included, for me, standing back to back with a theology student from Bangor, hands to hands with an English student from Warwick, cheek to cheek with Matiya from Malawi: at 51 he is one of the oldest people in his country, for life expectancy is 48 in the seventh poorest nation in the world. Apart from Wednesday, the weekdays followed a regular pattern, and all the days began with worship in the abbey at nine. After the closing responses we would remain standing to leave so that the work of the day flowed directly from our worship. “Why is it that church life has often been divorced from day to day life, and prayer torn away from the details of life and work? The Benedictines of Iona did not so divide life. Their prayer, work and study were inseparably interwoven, all forming one offering to God.”⁽²⁾ So we proceeded to our morning chores, be that cleaning showers, clearing up from breakfast or preparing lunch. The food there is mostly vegetarian, wherever possible fairly traded or produced by co-operatives.

The first morning session involved discussion between all the guests on ‘Making Sense of …’ successively God, the Church, the World and Christ, and the constructiveness of this discussion depended largely on the make-up of each group. Feeding debate on the World we were given quotations from a World Council of Churches document such as: “every week during the 1980s, more people were detained, tortured, assassinated, made refugee or in other ways violated by acts of repressive regimes than at any other time in history; every day a species becomes extinct; every hour, 1500 children die of hunger-related causes or every minute the nations of the world spend 1.8 million US dollars on military armaments.” In the group I was with later, the fact raised in these discussions that had ‘shocked’ and ‘sickened’ most was that the Church of England is a major shareholder in British Aerospace, Britain’s major arms manufacturer.

These sessions were followed by workshops in which we could follow up the themes through discussion in greater depth, through prayer, drama, craft, or music with Francis who is from the Philippines, working on Iona for this year. Music was a major feature of our Iona experience, something very special, if not so close to the Wild Goose songs some of us had expected, and there were chances for outside worship and the workshops for ‘Big Sings’ in the afternoons. Francis is so talented, seemingly absent-minded, he charmed us all; at home in the Philippines his life has been in danger, his friends killed for things they have done for their faith.

Our afternoons were free to walk across the island, paddle in the Bay at the Back of the Ocean, pray in the chapels (or out of doors of course), take an abbey tour, watch videos (no ordinary TV for there was no aerial!), or sometimes follow up on morning workshops. Evening activities varied, including a ceilidh, Scottish dancing and a disco, a concert put on by guests, a university challenge, an ‘introduction to Iona’ and also an introduction to the healing ministry of Iona prior to a healing service. The evening services were more specifically focused and challenging than morning worship. They included the theme of Justice and Peace on Monday, and on Thursday there was a service of commitment, or recommitment, to Jesus and all that Jesus identifies himself with: “to the brothers and sisters who journey with Jesus, to the suffering and the poor, and to a care for the earth, sea and sky which God called into being through the Word.”⁽³⁾

Wednesday had a different structure because this was the day of our pilgrimage between sacred and historic sites on Iona. We began at the thousand-year-old St Martin’s Cross, its unending interweaving vine pattern pointing to the intertwining of heaven and earth. Thence to the still ruined Augustinian Nunnery. “History has provided us with an almost total focus on the Abbey. The lack of historical attention to the Nunnery reflects the neglect of women in a society and church of male domination for centuries. Hand in hand with the subordination of women has often gone a neglect of the earth, and an abuse of the human body.”⁽³⁾ The theme of disrespect for creation was picked up in the marble quarry where abandoned, rusting scaffolding spoke of a disrespect for the environment, but also of industries dead, jobs lost. The beach where St Columba traditionally landed in 563 to found the first community here is not of white sand but pebbles. Here we were invited to throw into the sea a stone to symbolise a regret, a trait, a fear we wished to cast behind us. We ended in St Oran’s chapel, the oldest building on Iona, traditionally at the site of the graves of many kings and lords of the Isles, and certainly that of John Smith. A place to remember deaths and new beginnings.

New beginnings were very much a theme of our final communion on Friday night, and our power to choose, to change and to love through God’s power. Next morning we watched the sun rise again, this time while eating porridge prior to an early start for home. And this time there were no clouds to obscure our view: a fitting blend of the sublime and the mundane with which to leave Iona.

Jo Chamberlayne

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Last modified: 25th November 2005