Iona

I had been told that it would appear as a shining emerald set in the blue sea. As it happened, I saw a dull grey silhouette as through a layer of gauze. Braced against the prickling wind, salt in my nostrils, I squinted hopefully out past the dock. The ferry approached, ploughing sternly through the rough water. A large seal paddled comfortably off its starboard side and, when the ship docked, swam abreast of the disembarking travelers. Only the top of its snout and head were visible, a black dart on the water with gently blinking eyes, spinning like a wayward compass needle.

It is not a large island, barely one mile wide and not much longer. The few houses nestle against great tufts of stone that cover most of the surface. To the east a small channel divides it from the great isle of Mull; to the west one sees nothing but the wide waters of the Atlantic, unbroken until they wash the shores of Labrador. A tiny village is arrayed around the main eastern dock: a few homes, a grocery, a clutch of restaurants to serve the daily visitors. In the village’s center stands a quaint white house, touched here and there with nautical blue, its small front yard framed by a knee-high white fence. It looked inviting, and it was. We laboured up the narrow spiral stair-case to the room on the top floor. It was small like a ship’s cabin. We heard the wind whistling past the porthole windows, happy sailors on H.M.S. Time Machine.

Iona should delight the heart of anyone with a taste for history. From the time that St. Columba and his twelve companions landed on the shores to found an abbey in 563, the island has been an important part of Christian history in the British Isles. It was from Iona that the first missionaries were sent to Scotland and to northern England. In the Middle Ages it became a major place of pilgrimage, holding the relics of St. Columba in special honour. The small graveyard adjacent the abbey is a wonder, for though the oldest tombstones are buried or washed away by the rains, it is known to be the resting place of nearly fifty medieval kings of Norway, Ireland, and Scotland, including the eleventh-century king Macbeth of Shakespearean fame.

Just a few generations after the Abbey was founded, it was already stable enough and sufficiently wealthy to house one of Europe’s finest Scriptoria. It was here, at Iona Abbey, that the magnificent Book of Kells, undoubtedly one of the most beautiful artifacts of the Middle Ages, was made. And it was here, lured by the promise of plunder, that the Vikings launched their first raid in 795. From a small fishing vessel I saw the white sand beach on the northern tip of the island where their ships landed. They returned again and again through the course of the ninth century, and eventually the Scriptoria and its treasures were moved, but the Abbey persisted. Persisted, that is, until the sixteenth-century, when a millennium long tradition of prayer, scholarship, and Christian devotion was brought to a sudden end by the iconoclasm of the Scottish reformers.

It seemed to have been a decisive end. The abandoned abbey gradually fell into disrepair. The roof collapsed and the walls began to drop away, stone by stone. The relics of St. Columba were stolen or lost or worse. The large Celtic crosses which had covered the landscape were eroded and toppled over; where once there had been nearly four hundred, in time only three remained.

Then something happened that the reformers did not intend. In 1938, a devout Scottish layman sought permission to found a lay religious community on the island. Since that time the Iona Community, as it is called, has slowly rebuilt the abbey, and prayer and song are once more heard in the chapel, and the steady stream of pilgrims has resumed. Life has returned to the island, and that old wisdom that seeks the Highest in the barren and lonesome corners of the earth has again been proclaimed, and much good is being done.

Yet all is not as it was, and to my great surprise I walked the island with a heavy heart, for everywhere I saw what was not there. Along the ribbon of stone that wends toward the cemetery, its surface worn smooth by centuries of use, I heard the soft step of monks’ sandals; in the yard I saw pilgrims, now standing, bowing, kneeling in the grass, their foreheads pressed against the weather-beaten stone crosses and a prayer on their lips; in the cloister I saw my black-robed brothers passing silently between the pillars; in the chapel I heard the evening tones of Salve Regina echoing sweetly from the stone vaults; and behind the altar I saw the tabernacle of God. All this I saw, and knew; I had evidence and no doubt; and yet it was not there.

In this way, Iona made me sad. It was a city from which the citizens had been driven, and others now lived in their homes. It was for me a place of echoes and signs and memories, and finally a place of absence. I wish those who now inhabit the island well, and I commend their efforts to revive Iona’s life of prayer, and I wish, I truly wish, that I had seen and felt something other than emptiness. But, in spite of my wishes, my thoughts returned again and again to St. Columba and his twelve companions as they rode roughly through the waves, and saw the island come over the horizon, and loved it, an emerald set in the blue sea.

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