A spiritual place to touch every heart WONDERS OF SCOTLAND

A spiritual place to touch every heart WONDERS OF SCOTLAND

RICHARD HOLLOWAY IONA: championed by Richard Holloway AT THE end of his play about the martyrdom of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, TS Eliot closes with a chorus which includes these lines:

...wherever a saint has dwelt, wherever a martyr has given his blood for the blood of Christ, There is holy ground, and the sanctity shall not depart from it Though armies trample over it, though sightseers come with guide-books looking over it From where the western sea gnaws at the coast of Iona, To the death in the desert, the prayer in forgotten places by the broken imperial column, From such ground springs that which forever renews the earth...' It is intriguing that the reputation of the saint who made Iona famous is higher today than the martyr of Canterbury celebrated in Eliot's play. At the end of last year, a distinguished historian nominated Becket as one of the ten worst Britons of all time, because he divided England by quarrelling with King Henry II about the rights of the Church. Columba, by contrast, is credited with using the influence of the Church to unify Scotland - and all "from where the western sea gnaws at the coast of Iona". Though he grew to love it, Columba's arrival on Iona in 563 was an act of penance for his part in the battle of Cul Drebene in Irish Dalriada. By the time of his death in 597, on the island of his long exile, Columba had created a spiritual tradition that reverberated down the centuries. Hundreds of years after his death, when Iona suffered the Viking attacks that destroyed the monastery and dispersed its monks, his influence was still powerful. Columba's bones were taken from the island by Kenneth MacAlpin, the King of Scottish Dalriada, and used as a unifying symbol in the creation of a new Christian kingdom of Scotland. Appropriately, Iona became the burial site of the early Scottish kings. A nunnery and an abbey were built again on the island in the early part of the 13th century. Sadly, though the abbey survived till the Reformation, like many of Scotland's medieval churches, it did not survive the Reformation itself. It lay in melancholy ruin till 1938, when the redoubtable George MacLeod used its restoration as a metaphor for the need to rebuild community life in a socially divided Scotland. Iona is a place that lends itself to powerful and evocative metaphor. Though he was of the royal blood, and had finely-honed political instincts, Columba was a monk, so he would have loaded his exile on Iona with theological meaning. He would have seen his situation as a metaphor for the human condition. The New Testament taught him that on earth the Christian had no abiding city and was exiled from the true homeland of life with God. Mysteriously, Iona still has the numinous power to evoke both sides of that ancient polarity. For generations of pilgrims, it continues to elicit the primordial human longing, what R.S.Thomas called "the glimpsed good place permanent". Part of this power has something to do with Eliot's characterisation of the place as holy ground, its association with a famous saint; but much of it has to do with the nature of the place itself. Into this small Hebridean island, one mile wide and three and a half miles long, there is packed a concentration of what theologians call liminality or sense of a threshold or brink between this world and...what? People will answer that question according to their own philosophy or religious world-view. For some, like the great Columba himself, Iona offers a glimpse into an eternity that suffers none of the changes and chances of this fleeting world. But even for those who do not share the ancient human longing for heaven, Iona is charged with something that is found on few places on earth. It touches something in the heart of those who long for a humanity that will cherish the fragile and beautiful planet on which they pass their lives. That's enough to make Iona one of the spiritual wonders not only of Scotland, but of the world. Web links National Trust for Scotland http://www.nts.org.uk/ Historic Scotland http://www.historic-scotland.gov.uk/ John Muir Trust http://www.jmt.org/ VisitScotland http://www.visitscotland.com

Related topic Wonders of Scotland http://heritage.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=1372 This article: http://heritage.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=1372&id=179502006