Columba's Iona

Iona is a special place – especially in the Scottish history of Christianity. It is most well known for being the base from which Columba, having come over from Ireland, took the message of Jesus to so many in and beyond Scotland.

I recently read Rosalind Marshall’s Columba’s Iona, which, gently but purposefully, traces the place of Iona in the history of Scottish Christianity. The story certainly starts with Columba and there are many fascinating stories about him and the role he played. A good example is a story that is sometimes used to suggest something of his care for the environment.

“Most famously of all, perhaps, Columba ordered one of his monks to rescue a crane which had flown in, exhausted, from the north of Ireland and fallen on to the beach. The monk was told to bring the bird into the monastery and tend it until it had recovered. Some commentators have seen in this a strikingly early example of concern for the environment, while others have remarked that Columba was only interested in the crane because it had come from Ireland. Read without prejudice, the anecdote simply shows that he had a kind heart.”

However, Columba is only the beginning of the story and the book makes its way through the ups and downs of the island’s history, recalling times of abandonment and times of renewal alongside those first accounts of the establishment of a Christian community and the construction of an infrastructure that supported it.

It ends, of course, with the reconstruction inspired by George MacLeod which culminated in the founding of today’s Iona Community. MacLeod certainly recognised how special a place Iona is once suggesting that “on Iona, only a paper as thin as tissue separates the material from the spiritual and”, as Marshall comments, “this is a feeling shared by a significant number of its visitors. The dramatic scenery is a great attraction but, for believers and non-believers alike, it can be merely one element in their response, for there is often something beyond aesthetic appreciation. The blue green waters, the pebbled shore, the distant blue mountains, the peace of the abbey church and the memory of the saint himself, however he is imagined,

Photos taken on Iona in 1998

fierce warrior or friendly presence, merge in a spiritual experience which draws them back, time and again, to Columba’s Iona.”