The other day someone asked in a meeting, "Does the PCUSA have a future?" I impulsively responded that the road to any Presbyterian future "goes through Iona." It sounded good, but later I had to wonder what I could have meant by that.
I have visited Iona three times. This small island off the west coast of Scotland serves as a place of informal pilgrimage for me. It takes two ferries and two buses to get there from Glasgow, usually with an overnight stay in Oban (where you can enjoy excellent Scotch right from the distillery).
St. Columba established an important monastery on Iona in the 7th century CE from which monks ventured out to evangelize the native peoples of what is now Scotland. Since Presbyterianism arose there first (albeit almost a thousand years later), many of us consider the place an essential element of our spiritual heritage. The monastery lay in ruins when a Church of Scotland pastor named George MacLeod organized its rebuilding in the mid-20th century. After burning out from his exhausting ministry with poor and working people in Glasgow, MacLeod took a trip to the Holy Land. He found his soul rejuvenated by a mystical experience he had while attending the Orthodox Divine Liturgy in Jerusalem, on Pascha (Easter).
MacLeod's contact with the mystical roots of Christianity drives him to the ruined old monastery on Iona. His rebuilding of the monastery expresses a resistance to the dominant culture which forced it into decay and dereliction. That neglect symbolizes Modernity's systematic trashing of all spiritual traditions, including those grounding Christianity, a demolition felt as well in the ruined lives of people in the coal-choked inner city. MacLeod's reconstruction opened the way to a deep wisdom and compassion that had largely been forsaken.
My conviction that the road to any meaningful future for the PCUSA goes through Iona means first driving our roots deeper into the Christian tradition of spirituality and mission, to tap nutrients we turned off long ago. Should we choose to listen, Iona remains a voice for Presbyterians (and by extension to all old-line Protestants). Iona opens a series of "portals" through which we may gain energy to equip and feed us for the next phase of our own denominational peregrination. I interpret Iona less as a delightful, tranquil, and spiritually powerful physical place, and more as a vibrant, multi-faceted metaphor to talk about getting ourselves outfitted with the resources we need to propel us forward.
The Ruins.
MacLeod found on the island a pile of disconnected stones with a few walls still standing here and there. That's what Modernity did to the old abbey, and British monasticism generally, starting with the demolition work of King Henry VIII. As such it represents the whole Western church at this end of Modernity: the result of a 500-year acid-bath in Modern culture. Will Presbyterianism -- and old-line Protestantism generally -- continue on its trajectory towards oblivion, and eventually appear as nothing more than a barely remembered, inaccessible, disintegrated shell, and historical relic?
MacLeod reminds me of the vision of another saint, Francis of Assisi, who had a dream about a ruined church. Taking it literally, he began to repair the physical church of San Damiano, near his home. His work became a metaphor for the spiritual renewal he would bring to the larger Church. In the same way, the reconstruction of this abbey on Iona may symbolize the renewal of the Church in our own time. Iona stands for a recovery of the reintegration of worship and prayer with the movement for justice and peace, where we experience the Spirit's wildness and bedrock, woven together with tradition and community,
This focus on Iona does not mean embarking upon some romantic/sentimental project of "going back" to a supposedly better time. The abbey is not an archaeological dig but a living church, serving a time very different from earlier centuries. We need rather to feed our sense of mission and ministry from a longer, deeper, and richer tradition. We need to learn from witnesses who lived prior to 1517, and even since then but in other communities. Iona then does not appear to us as just a physical or temporal place but also a principle of confluence/convergence, a path out of Modernity, a long disused conduit through which living waters may now flow again.
The "Celtic revival" of our own period can easily sink into a nostalgic escapism. We could imagine Iona as a Celtic Church Theme Park, where we lose ourselves in reverie for a lost, ancient form of Christianity. Celtic Christianity may easily become a convenient blank slate on which we may project what we will. Too much of the vast and exploding literature about Celtic Christianity merely appeals to this gauzy fantasy. As it happens, the actual sources we do have tend not to support the somewhat hippie vision of Iona. They show, for one thing, a place where monks practiced an asceticism far beyond the comfort-level of the upper middle-class Westerners who rhapsodize the most about Celtic this and Celtic that. Iona was also solidly grounded in Orthodox Christianity, even if it happened to evolve outside of Rome's orbit for a while.
Passing through the portals of Iona means a willingness to see ourselves transformed by a decidedly pre-Modern faith environment. If our approach to Iona merely reflects our personal aesthetic preferences we will not enter its portals. They harden into mirrors.
The Modern Age did immeasurable harm to Christianity. Yet the faith persisted, often as a ruin, frequently inhabited by marginalized and excluded peoples. One example of this we see in the compilation by a civil servant named Alexander Carmichael of the prayers of the common people living in the Western Isles. These he collected and published as the Carmina Gadelica, or "Prayers of the Gaels."
They show a deep faith informing and reflected in everyday life and mundane activities of simple, poor working people. The people's prayer demonstrates a deep awareness of God's Trinitarian Presence in creation. Indeed, their life was saturated by prayer, which made them particularly attentive to God everywhere.
From this we learn to look for the places even in the ravages of our own time where faith persists. Even if it seems rather simple and naive to us, God seems to revel in such honesty and trust. I have seen this kind of devotion in people I have served. Part of me cringes at the nearly superstitious and quite unsophisticated nature of ordinary people's spirituality. But I always had to admit that such simplicity had a purity of heart that loved Jesus often more effectively than my over-educated, jaded, critical, superior approach.
Iona gives us access to venerable streams of Christianity... but there remains a filter, for the Reformation did happen, not just as an aberration or detour, but a worthy and necessary movement turning the Church back to the Word: Jesus Christ as attested in Scripture. Tragically, the Reformation managed to cut off the flow of the deeper tradition, leaving Protestants to scrounge around in the squalid dregs of Modernity for nourishment. We replaced devotion to the Word of God with an obsession with the Bible alone, a dry dead-end leaving us divided, malnourished, and controlled by academics and managers, not saints. And finally we caved in to Modernity which infused and permeated our whole movement, corrupting it fatally.
I will talk about Iona in terms of "portals." These appear as metaphorical windows, gateways to Iona's prior states. We receive energy and insight from each one that may enrich and inform our own mission today. We don't have to repeat what these people of the past did, indeed, we can't; but resonating with their energy we may find ways to do something akin to what they did in our own wildly different context.
The First Portal.
The first portal of Iona opens us to the spirituality of the medieval Roman Catholic Church and the Benedictine Order. These monastics lived and prayed on the island for about 500 years.
In the 6th century, St. Benedict instituted a Rule for monastics centering on the values of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Like Jesus standing up against Satan in the wilderness, monks had to renounce of all kinds of self-gratification and self-reliance, to live instead according to the Word and Spirit of God in community. They had to go against the values and goals of their society, finding themselves called instead to trust in God together in mutual aid.
They gathered seven times a day for worship, and chanted in Latin the entire Psalter at least once a week, shared the Eucharist daily, provided for themselves, welcomed strangers, and served the local population.
Modernity has fed people a very twisted view of Medieval life and spirituality. In reality, they had more together than we give them credit for. We remain indebted to people like Matthew Fox for bringing into our consciousness the work and writings of Medieval mystics like Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, and Meister Eckhart, people almost completely ignored even during my own seminary education, only 45 years ago.
From this portal we learn the value of community, simplicity, self-denial, devotion to the Word, and prayer. To follow Jesus will always involve renouncing wealth, attention, and power.
The Second Portal.
This second portal of Iona connects us to the days of St. Columba, St. Adomnan, and others, monks who arguably "saved civilization" during the Dark Ages. They copied and preserved manuscripts, including magnificent illuminated Bibles and Gospel Books. They probably wrote the famous Book of Kells on the island.
The so-called Celtic Church cultivated a monastery-centric Christianity. Abbots and Abbesses seem to have exercised more authority than the ceremonial official bishops. Monasteries took a generally circular shape, enclosing in an earthen berm individual huts for monks, along with a church and other communal buildings. They often and regularly worshiped out of doors.
These Christians invariably followed the Orthodox faith articulated at Nicaea and the other ecumenical councils. They worshiped according to a version of the Gallican Rite, developed in what is now France. They never lost or even questioned their loyalty to Rome and its Bishop, the Pope, even though Rome had retreated into an extended period of internal reorganization at this time. When Rome got its act back together, the Celtic Church, after some intense negotiation, fell into line. They were never anything but Catholic.
This portal opens us to the spirituality and theology of the Eastern Church, which are very often different from many of the standard approaches of the West. They have a much less problematic and harsh understanding of Original Sin and the Atonement, for instance, as well as a deeper appreciation for beauty and tradition.
The monks on Iona inherited their asceticism from their forebears in the Egyptian desert, and sometimes accomplished almost unbelievable feats of physical stress, like spending a night standing with arms outstretched like a cross in a cold river while reciting aloud the entire Psalter from memory. Rather than mere punishment of the flesh, we could see in this kind of practice a desire for raw, direct, sensory experience of creation. Asceticism shows a desire to feel truly and fully alive, grateful and joyful amid the holy elements of planet Earth.
And Iona sent missionaries by sea to the lands that became Scotland and England, as well as to the European continent. At that time, the Roman Empire had recently collapsed, and pagan migrants from the east flooded across the Rhine and Danube rivers into Western Europe and settled there. The old Roman Christians had not the resources to respond to this challenging cultural and demographic shift. So monks from Iona and other Irish monasteries established communities among the people and gradually helped to bring the continent to Christian faith.
From this we learn the importance again of community gathering in cherished places in accordance with tradition, and being sent out in mission and witness. They cultivate art and preserve learning of all kinds. The Celtic monks teach us that Christianity is an adventure, an exploration of the limits of our souls, minds, bodies, and world.
The Third Portal.
The next portal delivers us to the even less distinct realm of the Druids and even earlier shamanic practitioners who held the island as holy even before the landing of St. Columba and his dozen monks. We have little reliable information about pre-Christian Irish spirituality. But the Church might learn how the Christian missionaries saw themselves as fulfilling, not destroying and replacing, the prior faith of the people. There were almost no martyrs in the Irish mission; the people seem to have gradually understood this new faith from the east to be in continuity with and inclusive of what they believed before. In effect they said to the indigenous faith, "Yes... and...."
Similar stories come to us from the Orthodox mission to the Indigenous peoples in Alaska in the 18th and 19th centuries. The people grew organically into Christianity rather than having it violently imposed upon them. The mission also sided with the ordinary people against Russian business and military interests. In other words, they showed an approach rather different from the imperialist/colonialist character of most Western missionary activity among indigenous peoples.
The Celtic mission in Europe appears to have behaved similarly, establishing small communities among the pagan tribes and simply living the gospel in an exemplary and attractive fashion. Eventually they earned the trust of their neighbors and gained converts. (Of course, in those days if you could convert the local chief or king you were golden.) Gods and goddesses were sometimes conflated with saints, like Brigid. The Christians adopted the basic calendar of their predecessors, including some holidays, reimagined versions of which made it into general observance in western Christianity, like All Saints' (Samhain) and Candlemas (Imbolc).
One lesson here is to respect and build on what a culture gives, drawing out the best to preserve, improve, and extend, realizing that God left no culture without God's Presence. Neither was God absent even from Modernity, which obviously has many positive things to offer us going forward.
A second lesson appreciates the earth-centeredness of the pre-Christian faiths. Like the Magi from the east who visited the infant Christ, they paid deep attention to nature in stars, sea, seasons, weather, plants and animals, and even supernatural beings. The Christians also understood the "thin places" among them where the curtain between the living and the dead were more porous. All creation was charged with God's grandeur and in some sense alive and enchanted. Life is inherently sacramental.
The Fourth Portal.
Finally, geologists suggest that Iona is one of the oldest pieces of exposed rock on the planet. St. Columba did not know this when he prophetically referred to the island as the first land God created. The fourth portal has us step onto the very rock that emerged from the primordial ocean. The earth herself caused this up-thrust of ancient stone into the sunlight and air. Eons before this, "the old eternal rocks" on which monks would build the Abbey hunkered and groaned miles below the surface. So even the bedrock changes and moves. So the Creator made this planet alive and active, always in motion, always becoming.
From this we learn that change is a given, different things happen according to different times and schedules; the balance between continuity and transformation must be maintained. We see an impermanence even in the most stable bedrock. And everything is not only alive, but charged with the Word and Spirit of the Creator.
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I wonder if the light that comes to us now through the portals of Iona may illuminate the Church as it lurches forward into what looks increasingly like a dark time. Do we, surveying the smoking wreckage of Modernity on a distressed planet and with dysfunctional economic and political institutions, find ourselves at a juncture similar to the centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West? Need we to call our circle to gather as on a holy island apart, where the Word and Spirit of the living God may equip us in forming an alternative polity, a community of trust and love, witnessing to the Kingdom embodied and proclaimed by Jesus Christ?
This light energizes in us a commitment to both spirituality and social justice, tradition and contemporary context, mind and body, doctrine and practice, action and contemplation, and an embrace of the network of interwoven communities, cultural and natural, in which God finds us and we find ourselves and each other.
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