Pristine enough waters
Iona was the place at which St. Columba introduced Christianity to Scotland from Ireland as his penance for having illicitly copied a gospel. He allowed a 1,000 people to be killed, defending and trying to stop his keeping this gospel copy. After Viking massacres, hardships of every sort, the Chrisitan community at Iona prevailed, and since the 1950s efforts by the community and others to winterize Iona and bring water, sewage, and other municipal amentieis to the isle have created a tiny 130 person year-round community and a summer community that runs over 100,000 by the end of he season. The Iona Community and activities at the Abbey exert an organizing influence on the island whether one comes for religious reasons — and we saw many who did– or for other reasons.
In the end, the spirituality of Iona is itself affected by the profound influence of the geography, the landscape, the sea, the crags and cliffs, the pebbles and the climate, which is extreme.
Whatever one thinks of organized religion, the religious community of Iona aims to be ethical — in its commitment to ecological stewardship, its commitment to fair tade, its respect for people. So it is no surprise that Iona turns out, in very essential ways, to be a community of artists ( people as imperfect as any others but often sensitive to the winds that blow across humanity’s fortunes and plights): stone polishers and jewlery makers, weavers, visual artists — oil and acrylic painters, water colourists, ink and pen stylists — organic farmers with botanical and edible gardens, musicians, dancers, writers, poets, seal and puffin lovers, cormorant and gannet aficionados, dreamers and visionaries whose understanding of the world’s beauty has led them to make a radical futuristic commitment to preserving the earth. This isle took us three days to reach, but it is not the backwater of the world, it is its avant-garde.
So, our week’s life on Iona has been spiritual and artistic: silence or communication, our own inner voices or the voices of those around us, our touching of stones, sea washed cave walls, our hearing of the wind that wipes out your own thoughts on the top of Dun I and the whipped caps of pristine enough waters crashing into granite cliffs, marble slabs, serpentine gemstone gashes in the green, green hills.
I have needed the whole week there to let go of the things that had stopped me from breathing and creating and necessitated this healing. I have slipped back to the place where I know myself, where my fall from the edge of the cliff forces my hand to manifest sail.
We spend a day’s journey to reach Edinburgh and the high artistic frenzy of The Fringe. Ellen
