Living and Breathing Faith: Day 19

{We are almost halfway there…that is, day 19 of our 40 day journey in Lent 2021. I am posting pictures and descriptions of church sanctuaries, noting that due to the pandemic many of us miss being present in such places set apart for worship, devotion, and prayer.}

Iona Abbey

Here is the Iona Abbey Church on the Isle of Iona in Scotland. The Celts refer to this whole island as a “thin place,” one of those too rare locations where the spiritual and physical realms touch, or blend, as if separated only by the most fragile veil. When one has a pilgrimage at Iona, one understands.

We spent a week at Iona, staying in the Abbey proper, hiking the weekly day-long “pilgrimage” around the island, worshipping in this medieval church, going to daily programs (akin to a continuing education course), and learning the songs of the Wild Goose Music Group. We ate the simple and very healthy meals in the refectory, and did our assigned chores without complaint. I shot video of the pilgrimage, something I really should put up on YouTube. We’ll see about that.

There is a resident community at the Abbey, as well as visitors who sign on for short lengths of time to live on the grounds and take part in the shared life there. Of course, there are also tourists who stop by for informal tours of the Abbey and the beautiful isle itself. It was St. Columba who came to the island in 563 A.D. to found a Christian community. The full history of Iona Abbey is worth an on-line search, and I won’t go into that here, except to note that the Abbey Church I photographed during our stay dates from the 13th century. (And it is thought that the Book of Kells originated in the Iona community.)

Here’s what I found especially impressive about worship in this space. First, there is the history. Look where we are. Look what has led us here. We are very aware of the dedication of those who have revitalized the crumbling Abbey into a vital, living and breathing faith community. (I keep using that ‘c’ word, but looking at synonyms for community isn’t helpful. Sect? Fellowship? Cult? Society? No.) And in the midst of that long heritage, there are the contemporary songs of Iona, the prayers focused on the here-and-now, and leadership shared by clergy and laity of various traditions.

During the week, one service centers on healing, another on justice and peace. The Iona Community believes that prayer and politics belong together as do confession (because we all play a part in the injustices of the world) and commitment to action. To that end, there is a service of commitment too, with the explanation coming from the Iona Abbey Worship Book:

…the call to commitment to Jesus is at the same time a call to commitment to all that Jesus identifies himself with…to the brothers and sisters throughout the world who journey with Jesus…a commitment to the suffering and poor of the world with whom Jesus inseparably identified himself…to caring for the earth, sea and sky which God called into being through the Word.

That worship time can never be seen as separate from the rest of the Iona journey. There’s a thin place between the worship offered in that sacred space and the servanthood offered in our life away from Iona. As the songs we sing linger in our memories and our hearts (so singable!), the words remind us wherever we go beyond the Abbey that Christ goes with us, pushes us, pulls us, walks beside us, points us toward places of ministry.

This closing prayer comes from Celtic Prayers from Iona, by J. Philip Newell:

Bless to me, O God 
the earth beneath my feet. 
Bless to me, O God
the path on which I go.
Bless to me, O God
the people whom I meet.
O God of all gods,
bless to me my life.

 

Lenten Windows: Thin Places

We enter the last two weeks of Lent, and I post another of the forty photos of windows I’ve looked through, into, and at. Usually by this time in Lent, I’m growing a bit desperate to keep at it. But this year, I continue to enjoy looking.

Today’s “window” view is different from previous posts. The window I’m writing about isn’t the one in view in the lower left. It’s the window through which I’m looking. Which probably looks just like the one at the lower left. Both windows, the seen and the unseen, look out from the Iona Abbey. Iona is a tiny island off the southwest coast of Mull in the Inner Hebrides. It’s known as the “cradle of Christianity in Scotland.”

In 563, an Irish pilgrim we know as St. Columba arrived to form what he hoped would be the perfect monastic faith community. Ages passed, history happened, and the stone church built around 800 A.D. (that replaced wooden buildings ravaged by time and Vikings) was rebuilt from 1200-1400 and, again, history happened*, and in 1938 the Rev. George MacLeod founded the Iona Community which thrives today as a spiritual residential community, retreat center, and conference host.

Joan and I lived within that ecumenical community for only a week-long “programme” one summer, but its influence on our lives continues to inspire. Living in the Abbey buildings, worshipping in the Abbey church, eating, singing, and conferring with the others in retreat that week — and then joining in the weekly pilgrimage around the island, a day-long hike we’ve documented in a video — this experience convinced us that the Rev. MacLeod was right in describing Iona as a “thin place.”

A thin place. That is, where the divide between heaven and earth, between the spiritual and the physical, or the sacred and secular, is very, very thin. A one-time member of the resident group Neil Paynter wrote (in an Iona-published devotional book titled This Is the Day:

Iona is ‘a thin place’ as George MacLeod said, and just as the barrier between the spiritual and the material is like tissue paper in places, emotional and social barriers between people can thin and dissolve and tear away. There’s an intensity to living , working and worshipping together that can quickly open people up, and sometimes make them feel vulnerable…There’s the magic and wonder and beauty of nature all around which can suddenly open people’s eyes to the sacred beauty and uniqueness of others around them.

Iona Abbey and its various buildings and components (i.e., a Glasgow office and headquarters for its “Wild Goose Worship Group” and publishing house) is no warm spiritual cocoon, however. That ‘thin place’ understanding at Iona applies to the so-called divide between one’s personal faith and ‘social action,’ or our own inner peace and issues of global ‘peace and justice.’

To illustrate that point, Ron Ferguson (in the same book quoted above) recounts a story from George MacLeod:

A boy threw a stone at the stained glass window of the Incarnation. It nicked out the ‘E’ in the word HIGHEST in the text, ‘GLORY TO GOD IN THE HIGHEST.’ Thus, till unfortunately it was mended, it read, ‘GLORY TO GOD IN THE HIGH ST.’

High Street being the main drag in Edinburgh.

So, MacLeod proclaimed the cross must be raised not only on the church steeple, but in the marketplace, both cathedral and Main Street. Faith must be lived in the midst of un-faith, hope amid the hopeless, love amongst the unlovely (my words, not MacLeod’s). Services at the Abbey included prayers for healing, for justice and peace, and for commitment to serve ‘the least of these.’ And those of us ‘in retreat’ or studying in a ‘programme’ for the week? We had work assignments, from assisting in the kitchen and serving meals at table, to helping with maintenance in the residence. (My job was cleaning the showers.) You see, a thin place between being served and serving.

Years after our brief time there, when I was looking for ‘a church to retire to,’ I visited a church where the liturgy, so refreshing and poetic and yet down-to-earth, clearly was from an Iona worship resource. I was immediately at home there, and we’ve settled there. (A previous post about my home church tells much more!) The songs of Iona accompanied our worship in the Abbey chapel. Even along the day-long pilgrimage over the island we stopped at various sacred sites and sang together. (John Bell and Graham Maule are the earthly source of the thin-place songs.)

The view out our Abbey window looked out at an historic place, with grass often trimmed by local sheep and the waters plied by fishing boats and played in by dolphins. The hot water bottles supplied by the Abbey community kept our feet warm at night, and the presence of the Holy Spirit among a beloved and loving community kept hearts warmed with renewed faith. And we are forever grateful.

[*As usual, you can find the historical and theological foundations of Iona by doing a simple web search.]

St. Columba in stained glass