Looking Back: Iona

From August 1973

Iona

To describe Iona as ‘one of the Western Isles’ is to be as prosaic as the man who described the Queen as ‘a lady who lives in London’. Iona is not merely a place. It is more an experience.

To go to modern California today, someone has said, is to glimpse the future; and it’s depressing. Likewise, to go to Iona is one sort of journey; involving buses and boats and Oban pier.

To be on Iona, however, even for a short stay, is to feel part of a procession; to be conscious of people around you, behind and before; in a way that makes the mountains of neighbouring Mull and the smoothness of Iona’s white sands but reflections of that vista of the imagination which gives the spirit room to breathe, and stretch. Iona, like California in its own way, is not merely a place on the map. It is a point on the compass of human history. In Iona one can glimpse the past and the future; and it's exciting. In Iona the ages meet. They don’t collide.

The history of Iona – and pray God its present – is a story of God ‘trying His hand’ at some things in a small way in order to move on to doing them in the large all across the world.

Columba and his coracle didn’t start it. God had a hand in it.

The Benedictines and their Abbey didn’t just make Iona a world centre in their day. God had a hand in it.

George MacLeod and his Community are not merely a recent church experiment. God has a hand in it.

To spend time in Iona is to know instinctively that any other way of describing it is prosaic.

The story of Iona down the ages is a story of competing attractions. Men in the mists of ancient Druid days, medieval men, and modern men have all been strongly attracted to the Isle of Iona by two competing factors; the scenic and the spiritual. The picturesque and the political. Constantly competing to attract.

In Iona, God the Creator keeps making all things new. Whether you like it or not. Men, movements, and the very meaning of the church’s ministry to the world, God keeps making them new. The real beauty is that Iona has always been alive with the attraction of men becoming upset for God’s sake; men being roused for God’s sake; men being challenged for God’s sake.

In Iona the ages meet. For in Iona, uniquely, God uses the past and God uses the future to press men into new shapes of service in the here and now. The mountains, the sands, the Abbey, the visitors, the conferences, the concerts, the worship, the youth camps, the blue water, the white bread, and the red wine are all part of a continuing story.

-       Douglas Alexander

Looking Back menu

Life and Work is the magazine of the Church of Scotland. Subscribe here.