INDEX to All 5 Parts of our “Pilgrimage to Iona” series:
Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5

     Welcome to the final chapter of our 5-part series: A Pilgrimage to Iona! For today’s VIDEO, there’s a link below.

    Let’s Clear Up one point of confusion that has been voiced by readers: In our story about the pilgrimage, Rick Miller and Beth Miller are not related, although they have the same last name. If you’ve followed our story throughout the week, hopefully you “know” Beth now as the wise and resourceful leader in our fellowship of pilgrims. Perhaps if we stepped into the pages of “The Lord of the Rings,” a trilogy of novels mentioned more than once on Iona, Beth would be a cross between Aragorn and Galadriel—wise leader and visionary. You might envision Rick Miller as the Legolas in our company of pilgrims—quick, quiet, wise and resourceful. And, no, they’re not related by blood or marriage.

    At this point, we know you’re packed for the journey and eager to go … So, on with our Spiritual Adventure …

CHAPTER 5:

“The Island’s Final Spiritual Riddle” 

“Is a chapel in a graveyard a strange place to end a pilgrimage? I think not.”
    Simon de Voil, guide on Iona’s strenuous walking pilgrimage

Iona is small.
    Even before the orb of the sun has broken over the shoulders of Mull’s mighty peaks –-
    Even before the winds of day can disturb the silver sheet of water that separates Iona and the abandoned granite quarries of Fionnphort, making it seem inconceivable to a newcomer that four experienced men could have drowned in this placid little sound within recent memory -–
    Even before the sheep stir and call in the pasture beside the abbey –-
    Even before a proper cup of strong tea is brewed or served –-
    Our fellowship of a dozen American pilgrims is pushed into community with Others –- the dozens of pilgrims who have arrived from other lands.
    Each week, pilgrims are herded into the two-story stone residence hall, where the abbey staff sorts everyone into 20 monastic cells. Pilgrims are packed sometimes three and even four into these tiny rooms with the most basic of fixtures: narrow beds, one chair per room, one wooden chest and a wee table no bigger than a footstool tucked between the beds.
    Then, before dawn in this cramped residence, we find ourselves forced into this new community — in the showers.
    The showers are so few and so small that morning showering is a slow procession. “Like lining up for a little eternity, isn’t it, just to get a drizzle of warm water down our backs in a phone booth so small that you can’t even scrub your back,” one pilgrim from Liverpool says.

    It was hard enough dealing with the awkwardness and messiness of living with the dozen pilgrims I knew so well from home. Now, the reality of living shoulder to shoulder with people from around the world is a jolt.
    I poke my head into the narrow anteroom that leads to the one men’s shower on our floor and find a line of other men so tightly packed that I cannot fully open the door.
    A man from Fornby in a fleecy robe and a thick towel around his shoulders sees that I am surprised and hesitant about this cramped situation and he grins cheerily. “Queue up, young fellow!” he calls.
    I cannot back out now. So, stepping into these confines, my towel and soap and shampoo tucked in the crook of my arm — I glimpse in my mind’s eye the yawning chasm that now separates me from the comfortable bathroom I enjoy back in the States.
    Just then, a tall Swiss psychologist, Ernst Meier, leans forward in the line two places in front of me and smiles back in my direction. “David!” he calls out.
    “Ernst,” I say and nod politely, thinking: What is European protocol in a shower line?
    “David, last night when we were talking, do you remember what we talked about?” he asks. “You told me that some of your family comes from Switzerland and you told me of this village that is yours: Jegenstorf. And, you will remember that I said I did not know this village at all.”
    “Yes,” I said nodding. A man from Liverpool is nodding, too. Ernst now has the attention of the entire line of waiting men.
    “Well, I have looked into this!” Ernst says, pointing a long finger at me.
    “You have?” I ask. I am stunned. Over the years, I have casually told thousands of people that my family tree has a good share of Swiss within its trunk. And never before has anyone “looked into this.”
    “Yes,” Ernst says, quite seriously as if he has just run a battery of tests for some exotic disorder. “And I have found this Jegenstorf, too. It was something of a search, because you said your home was near Zurich. And it is in the canton of Berne, actually. But I tracked you down.”

    I try to nod graciously. His turns of phrase are compelling. He tracked me down?

    “You see, here is the problem: Your village is a place that people like us —” and then he chuckles and shakes his head at his own phrase. “I say, ‘Like us,’ and what does this mean?” he says, now mocking himself as he repeats again: “Like us?”
    He continues, “I mean, people like me from the big cosmopolitan centers, you know, like I am from Zurich, very cosmopolitan, or even Berne — people like us from these places would not even know about a village like your Jegenstorf.”
    I am thinking: MY Jegenstorf? I’ve never been there. This is the stuff of family mythology since my childhood.
    “It is a small place, very rural and they have these distinctive houses there. Do you know this?” he asks.
    And, oddly enough: Yes, I do know the houses. How do I know them?
    Then, he actually clears a space in this jammed anteroom. Somehow the queue of robed and towel-draped men — like latter-day monks — parts sufficiently that Ernst can spread his long arms side to side. He dips his knees and looks up at me, lowering his entire frame so that his body forms a low triangle with his arms spread out.
    And, oddly enough: I know that shape. I know what he is modeling.
    “The houses are built like this, aren’t they?” he asks me. “With these long, long roofs like my arms here that nearly touch the ground on each side.”
    He is miming a family home that I have never visited, but that flashes forward in my mind — a Kodachrome snapshot taken decades ago by the first relative in my family to return to Switzerland, after most of a century had past, to find the family homestead.
    Ernst is showing me that home in a shoulder-to-shoulder anteroom in the cells of Iona.
    All I can say is: “That is it! I do remember, now, seeing a photograph of that when I was just a boy.” And, I am seeing it again in Iona.
    “Yes,” he says, kindly. He rises. A man from Fornby now shoulders his way out of the little shower and it now is Ernst’s turn in the booth.
    “Well,” Ernst says. “What I would tell you, David, is this: You should travel there. It would do you much good, I think. That is a pilgrimage for you, isn’t it? You really should go home again.”
    But — in that moment, I have.

    Hot showers are essential, if difficult, on Iona because pilgrims often get wet and muddy.
    The core of a week at the abbey is a one-day walking pilgrimage across the length and breadth of the island itself. This ritual dates to the Rev. George MacLeod’s revival in 1938, when he brought both clergy and craftsmen to the island to rebuild the monastic portions of the abbey that the Duke of Argyll had not reconstructed in his revival of the church just before World War I.
    MacLeod searched Iona for the most memorable geologic and historical points of interest on the 3-mile long by 1-mile wide island. Then, he wrote a guide to reflections that should be read to pilgrimage groups at each point. Often, he performed this delicious challenge himself, even to the extent of standing atop Iona’s highest peak, called Dun I, spreading his arms wide and inviting his weary band of followers to envision Jesus himself standing on this peak in one of the gospel stories.
    “Oh, some of George’s meditations, like the one on the peak of Dun I, were said to be grand scenes, indeed,” the Rev. Malcolm King, current rector of the abbey said. “He was the master of such things.”

    And, ever since MacLeod established that muscular and spiritual challenge for visitors to the island –- each week, pilgrims continue to spend one full day on a seven-mile-long course: hiking, climbing, slogging and occasionally crawling across the rocky ridges and deep bogs of Iona. And, just when the newcomers seem winded or overwhelmed with the weight of their muddy boots, the Iona guides to this day pause for religious meditations suggested by MacLeod.
    This is much like the Muslim Hajj in which the basic pilgrimage is the journey to Mecca, but the heart of the experience involves a strenuous walking course to points of sacred reflection. At one point along the arduous course, Muslims even pick up stones and throw them in a physical demonstration of their rejection of evil.

    In MacLeod’s walking pilgrimage, to this day, men and women stumble over rocky crests and slog through knee-deep bogs to reach the rocky beach where St. Columba and his 12 monks first landed in 563.
    Pilgrims tend to flop down on this beach, despite its lack of sand, and feel the red, white and gray, ocean-worn rocks rattle as we try to settle our weight comfortably on this punishing surface. Rocks are not an ideal bed for over-taxed muscles and sore ankles.
    Our guide, Simon deVoil, a young Scottish staffer at the abbey, lets us squirm and even invites us to eat some sandwiches packed for us that morning in the refectory. But he keeps our focus on the rocks all around us.
    “We want you all to select two of these rocks!” he says at length. “The first stone you pick up will represent all that we pray to cast away from us and leave behind today. So, I’d pick a good sized one, if I were you –- to throw away as much as you possibly can at such an opportunity, right?”
    We chuckle and search the shore for appropriate rocks.
    “Then choose a second to represent spiritual gifts we plan to take home,” he says. “But don’t take too many –- we’ve lots of pilgrims and we don’t want to walk away with the whole beach, now, do we?”
    I laugh again at this line. Then, I watch the other pilgrims around me. This is only the middle of our week on the island and I see pilgrims picking up rocks as big as melons to cast away from them. I see pilgrims pocketing four, six –- even 10 stones to carry home.
    There’s a whole lot of spiritual work unfolding here, after all.
    Pilgrims reach way back and fling their rocks with abandon! It’s a wonder that no one is knocked down in the process. And I remember a Muslim friend who came back from the Hajj with a bandage just behind his ear and he explained to me that an especially high-spirited pilgrim somewhere behind him had unintentionally knocked him cold in the stone-throwing phase of the Hajj.

    Of course, there’s far more than throwing and saving stones.
    We sing. Scriptures are read. We pray.
    There are many reflections involving the geography and geology of the island. An amber-colored pond high in the ridges at the south end of the island, once the source of Iona’s drinking water, is the site for a meditation on the precious nature of water for billions of humans all around the world.
    But we begin to realize that the spirit of this walking discipline is not really in the words or music. There’s something else working in the complex chemistry.
    At some point throughout the day — and that point differs for each of us — we find ourselves just a little annoyed as this realization dawns on us. I begin to suspect: Is this yet another riddle?
    Exactly where in this sodden, boggy, rocky, ankle-twisting landscape is the Spirit?
    And, then we grow weary. Even the fittest among us grow weary.
    Gradually, we realize that at least part of the energy within this spiritual exercise lies in the humbling experience of bruising ourselves — in pride, if not always in muscle. It lies in falling down in the slick ooze of the bogs, scraping our shins on sharp-edged ledges and tripping on the knot-like stems of heather.

    Finally, when the abbey itself actually is within our view — just an easy walk — Simon de Voil waves his arms and leads us away from it to our final point of meditation. No, not inside the abbey where there are comfortable seats on which we could rest. No, he herds us all into the centuries-old stone chapel of St. Oren in the Iona graveyard with its stone floors and lack of seats.
    We stand on aching muscles.
    Now, this is no longer a riddle, but a cruel joke! This is some cheesy attempt to revive the medieval Dance of Death — those grim artworks designed to bring Christians to their knees with visual reminders that the figure of Death comes to dance with each of us.
    Simon solemnly intones: “Is a graveyard a strange place to end a pilgrimage? I think not.”
    Then, he leads us in a weary rendition of the hymn that affirms: “The world is not my home forever.”
    Is that truly the end?

    Not quite.
    Several more waves of revelation await us.

    The first comes as we pull off sodden clothing, wash, gulp down Motrin and ponder how fragile we are as humans when grappling with even the smallest of islands.
    Each wave of Others who cross Iona, even in this narrative that you have been reading this week, claims to understand something about this island and, by making such a claim, to control Iona in some way.
    On the contrary, humans work on Iona like waves crashing on the craggy rocks. Intellectually, we know that each roll of the brine does reshape the rocky shore — but imperceptibly, of course, and this realization that we feel in our sore muscles is one of the truly Celtic revelations in our long quest: We are part of a Creation that should humble us in our fleeting dance across its shores.

    The second revelation comes at dinner as the pilgrims tell their stories over the long oak tables. And this, too, is Celtic because it is a lesson about the spiritual goodness of community. This lesson stumbles from our lips — all of our lips — as a heartfelt litany in the refectory as we remember and affirm these things:
    “You!” we call to a companion. “Yes, you! You pulled me from that bog where I might have lost my shoe and what was left of my pride forever! Thank you!”
    “You had that stick that helped me regain my footing!”
    “You showed me how to rest on the heather!”
    “You laughed with me!”
    “You brought me ice for my ankle!”
    “You pulled me up on that ledge when I know I would have gone head over heels!”
    “You! Thank you!”

    Then, there is a third revelation — and, now, we think we are completely off the boundaries of the neatly printed schedule of abbey programs that hangs each day on the refectory wall. As the week has unfolded, men and women — Catholics, Anglicans, Protestants and people of no specific religious denomination at all — have felt drawn to end their day — even after the nightly 9 p.m. abbey service — with night prayers.
    And where do these pilgrims spontaneously gather?
    It’s only known by word of mouth, so it’s not immediately discernible that night prayers are even taking place. I don’t find my way toward this circle until the night after our long hike, well into the week.
    And, where?
    The pilgrims gather, as they feel so moved — with no formal organization — in St. Oren’s chapel in the cemetery. That is the very place I had dismissed as a cruel joke, a literal dead end.
    And their numbers swell through the week as relationships form and the Spirit works on people to restlessly draw them toward more and more acts of communal worship — so that even the 9 p.m. abbey service cannot  quench their desire just to pause and pray together.
    By the time I finally catch on and head toward St. Oren’s, I have to crowd into the little chapel. Candles glow, but so low that it is not entirely clear who is praying close at hand — until Ernst moves to the front of the chapel and says that, finally, he feels moved to share one of his most treasured gifts from the mountains of his homeland.
    He opens his mouth and, in a resonant bass, he intones a centuries-old, Swiss-German invocation of God’s and the Virgin Mary’s protection on farmers in the unforgiving landscape of the Alps — farmers from tiny towns like Jegenstorf, perhaps.
    Then, and only then, do I recall something Malcolm told us, plain as day, on our first night at the abbey. They were words that I jotted in my notebook with the dutiful discipline of a journalist who jots down everything, in case it might mean something later. But they were words that I immediately dismissed as meaningless — until this moment in St. Oren’s chapel.
    Now, sitting in the glow of Ernst’s bass voice — echoing centuries of faith from the Alps — I realize what Malcolm meant when he said: “You will learn here that we are something different on Iona. We are not a hotel. We are not a retreat center. We are a community. And, in time, you will discover this.”

     Do you see the final riddle, yet — and its answer?
    On the final morning on Iona, Ernst sprinkles salt on his porridge in the Scottish manner. He has learned this from some of the staff on Iona, he says proudly, and rather likes it this way.
    Then, he tells his new friends around the table that he has decided to take a break in his years-long habit of setting out on quests for spiritual revelations around the world.
    Already, he has been to Asia to live for a time with a shaman and to the rain forests of the Amazon to look for tribal healers. He has trekked along the pilgrimage routes to Spanish shrines.
    “Oh,” he says, shrugging. “Ohhhh, there is perhaps one more pilgrimage I want to make in Tibet someday — but that will be some day, I think. Because, now, I may not feel so moved to make these trips — at least not for a long while.
    “There is something about this place. Iona. This place, I think, will have a long, as we say in  German, a long nachklingen,” and he flattens his hand and moves it slowly through the air like a calm wave flowing from person to person. “Iona will go on and on among us for a long time like the lingering sound of a perfect note.”

    Before boarding the ferry at the Iona jetty, we move into the abbey one last time and together we pray these words from the liturgy of parting: “For the path that lies before us now, and our futures in your hands, we thank you, Living God.”
    The entire abbey staff walks the narrow road with us to the jetty and stands, shoulder to shoulder, as the steel ramp of the ferry rises.

    And this is the final spiritual riddle of Iona:
    Yes, Iona is small.
    And, yes, Iona is as big as the world.

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INDEX to All 5 Parts of our “Pilgrimage to Iona” series:
Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5

     Welcome to the fourth chapter of our 5-part series: A Pilgrimage to Iona! For today’s VIDEO, there’s a link below. At this point, we know you’re packed for the journey and eager to go … So, on with our Spiritual Adventure …

CHAPTER 4:
”Dangerously, We Rise; We Fall; We …”

      “It will be difficult traveling for some time.”
    The Rev. Malcolm King, Warden of historic Iona Abbey

     Pilgrimage is dangerous.
    It has always been this way.
    In another sacred place, Jerusalem, deep in the archaeological excavations beneath the lowest chapels in the mysterious Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which marks where Jesus was crucified and buried, Armenian Orthodox priests may show fortunate pilgrims a 1,800-year-old inscription etched in the rock faces that once lay exposed to ancient travelers outside of Jerusalem’s city walls. Now, an entire historic church sits on top of these rocky surfaces.
    This rarely glimpsed etching on the stones shows a Roman vessel that carried early pilgrims and words that say, in translation, “Thank God we made it!”
    The rough-hewn nature of this etching suggests great sincerity in that prayer! After all, many pilgrims in ages past died en route. Many reached their goal and never returned home to tell their story.
    Memories of past pilgrimages resurface on our way to Iona. A memory of my visit, years ago, to see that ancient inscription on those rocky surfaces in Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulcher resurfaces in my mind’s eye as our group discovers the dangerous, one-lane roads and steep hills that lie ahead of us on Mull, the enormous island we must cross to reach our last ferry to tiny Iona.
    Boats. Danger. I see the etched prayer again: “Thank God we made it!”
    I hope that we will be breathing this same prayer soon.

    It is now dusk on this, our second night on the pilgrimage road, as we slip out of the last port on mainland Scotland, Oban, on a ferry that quickly retreats from the smokestacks and fishing nets of that sea-side village. The ferry moves us, our van and all of us, toward those mountains on Mull. Once the steel ramp of the ferry thunders onto the shore of Mull, our leader Beth Miller fires up our van and rumbles in low gear up onto the jetty.
    At last, this feels as though we are nearing our sacred dot at the end of the world, but still we must cross Mull where the one-lane roads are so narrow that two vehicles cannot pass each other unless one pulls off the road and waits for the other to pass. Beneath leaden skies, we set off in the van, each dip and switchback of the road obscured by rock, stone walls, bracken and now, as night rolls over us, by coal black skies.
    Beth hits the breaks unexpectedly!
    A truck looms around a corner! It’s lights bounce crazily in our eyes as it bounds over potholes and ruts. Easing our van to the road’s shoulder, Beth waits as the truck rattles past us with inches to spare.
    Beth says to us, “Help me, now. Help me watch ahead.”
    Rick Miller our best navigator is at her side. Rick is watching, we figure. He’ll help Beth.
    But the rest of us are tired, bone weary. How can we possibly stay awake and keep watch? Another pilgrim near Rick is so tired that his head dips forward and nearly smacks the dashboard.
    The road dips and our heads dip, too, until Beth hits the breaks again for more blinding lights! This time, a tour bus passes so close that our eyes are wide and our breathing stops.
    “That definitely was a gasp,” Beth says to us collectively. “No need to gasp. We’re safe. But, please, stay awake and help me watch.”
    We try. We fail. The road curves and dips perilously onward.
    We rise. We fall.
    Lights shining!
    Whose lights?
    What is coming?

    Wake up!
    Are we on Iona yet?
    No. I shake my head silently. Looking out a window, it seems that what passes for morning sun in autumn in watery western Scotland has arisen around us. We find ourselves in a white-walled cottage overlooking the sea — or what little of the sea we can see — through the mists. We are in a breakfast room now, several of us watching these morning mists compress all light across the Scottish hills, bogs and the sea beyond into a narrow range of deep blues, grays, umbers and — greens.
    What greens! Even in this void of clear sunlight, the grass is an unearthly green — the green of jade and emeralds as if the turf glows from somewhere inside the soil.
    “There’ll be more coffee in, oh, about three minutes,” our fellow pilgrim, Rick Miller, calls from the kitchen. The sight of him is reassuring. He’s such a solid pilgrim.
    If Rick’s well; we’re well, aren’t we?
    Rick moves toward me and, together, we watch the unusual range of colors through the window.
    “You’ll enjoy his coffee!” pilgrim Dora Ziegler says. “Rick’s making French Roast just a few cups at a time and there’s already cereal and toast and all good things waiting for us here.”
    Now we are three, watching the mist. Rick and Dora and me.
    Then, I notice a fourth pilgrim, Doug Paterson, sipping coffee nearby and I finally sit near him, when Rick serves me a fresh cup of his rich coffee. Sipping from my own cup, I say to Doug: “It’s hard to describe what this feels like after what we’ve been through — so little sleep and then all of our adventures already — and then waking up here this way. It feels like — like we’re waking up in a foreign film. Maybe Ingmar Bergman,” I say, although I know that the Swedish director died recently. He’s certainly not making any new films
    I continue to ramble: “Perhaps we’re in another world. Perhaps last night on those treacherous roads, all sleep deprived from the long flight and with those awful, one-lane, blind curves — perhaps we didn’t make it. Perhaps this is our first day in a new world.”
    “Hmmm,” Doug says, shaking his head. “It couldn’t be Heaven, though, because I’m not here with Karla,” his wife, who is half a world away as are all of our spouses as we pursue this pilgrimage.
    “Nor Amy,” my wife, I say. “You’re right. Can’t be Heaven. But perhaps we’ve arrived at an inn between worlds and we have to figure out how to live together until the others arrive some day.”

    “How to Live Together Until the Others Arrive Some Day,” in short, could serve as the title for Iona’s story.
    In each age of its history, those who control its sacred sites claim that they understand its misty essence, but they really turn out to be caretakers of the sacred site until ….
    Well, consider this: In the 6th Century, St. Columba proclaimed Iona a new global center for Celtic Christian art, study and reflection. He built a monastery that blossomed to the point that  many historians credit Iona as the birthplace of the fabulous, illuminated gospels that later moved back to Columba’s Irish homeland for safekeeping and became known as the Book of Kells.
    Why did the Book of Kells need safekeeping? Because Columba’s legacy was all but extinguished when the Others arrived — in this case, the Viking raiders who all but erased Columba’s community in the early 9th Century. The Vikings were looking for territory and booty and murdered their way across Iona in pursuit of both.
    But they certainly didn’t own Iona in any meaningful way.
    In 1200, still Others built a new abbey — and a nunnery, too, this time. Iona became a haven for the Benedictine order, loyal to Rome.
    All went well there — until the Others arrived in the turbulent centuries of change after the Reformation.

     Just before World War I, the Duke of Argyll, who controlled the sacred site — which had fallen into ruins — foresaw still Others coming and rebuilt the abbey, yet again, as a global center for ecumenism — the startling idea that Christians of many denominations might like to share a sacred space.
    And so it went on Iona with other Others: In 1938, the Rev. George MacLeod organized the modern Iona Community, a new-style lay-and-clergy religious order concerned with the welfare of the poor. He brought both pastors and talented craftspeople to the island to rebuild the entire abbey structure from the ruins surrounding the church that the Duke of Argyll had rebuilt.
    MacLeod’s crews rebuilt the centuries-old refectory, library, chapter house, cloisters and the monks’ cells. All were rebuilt to house modern pilgrims who began to flock to his new Iona movement. But even MacLeod, who was virtually a force of nature himself, could not reshape this sacred outcropping of stone for all time.
    Others came, like the composer John Bell and inspirational author Philip Newell in the 1980s and 1990s to turn MacLeod’s community into something else again — a vanguard in the revival of what they called Celtic music, worship and theology. The core of their affirmation was that Creation and human life are essentially good, not sinful from the start, and that the Holy Spirit moves in community in the specific direction of the world’s poor and oppressed.

    But what’s most intriguing about this history is what transpired in the long gaps between the arrivals of these Others. Even when something wasn’t blossoming here, Iona always seems to have retained its sacred aura.
    In 1764, for instance, when the sacred sites were all but dormant, British scientist John Walker visited Iona to assess Iona’s botany and geology. He dutifully reported on soil, rock and grasses, but could not help but declare himself amazed that even the inhabitants of “lowest rank” have “a remarkable propensity to whatever is marvelous and supernatural … with numberless legends, which have been handed down …”

    Now, Iona is in the midst of one of those waiting periods again, trying to discern when Others will arrive. That’s essentially the message, these days, from the Rev. Malcolm King, a priest and one of the 250 worldwide members of the Iona Community who became rector of the Abbey in July.
    On our third night of travel, as we finally arrive at Iona and join dozens of other pilgrims from around the world, Malcolm gathers us into the abbey’s chapter house and begins to tell us about this sense he has of sweeping spiritual change around the world.
    Iona’s revolution in neo-Celtic worship with easy-to-sing, prophetic songs of praise now is common in many places and, “We’re no longer on that cutting edge,” he says. The world is changing, too, and people are not looking merely for religious rules to follow, he says. Most importantly, they are looking for spiritual community, he argues.

    He says, “We live in a time of transition and it will be difficult traveling for some time.”
    Who is helping Malcolm scan the misty horizons from his abbey — his inn between the worlds?
    “I’m very impressed with Rob Bell, who’s from your place, isn’t he? From Michigan?” he says.
    Malcolm goes on to explain that he is amazed at how close Bell’s books, “Velvet Elvis” and “Sex God,” seem to be to the heart of the Iona commitment to breaking down barriers and building inclusive community. After all, this kind of Rob Bell-like rallying cry has been the lifeline of the abbey’s spiritual heritage for nearly a century.
    Malcolm even speaks like Rob. Or does Rob speak like Malcolm? It’s difficult to discern the direction of the connections in the disorienting landscape of pilgrimage.
    In any case, it is clear that: “Religious boundaries are coming down,” Malcolm says. “We no longer put things in separate spiritual boxes. Everything is connected.”
    Or, as Rob likes to put it: “Everything is spiritual.”

    But, forgive me, kind readers, if this particular scene in our pilgrimage is sounding too cosmic — too, well, too misty to grasp.
    We are, after all, on a quest for the concrete feel of sacred turf.

    So, here is what it really feels like as a pilgrim at Iona — quite honestly and concretely:
    On our first night at the abbey, after opening worship and an initial talk by Malcolm, Beth gathers a few of us in the nearly empty abbey and apologizes to us. She planned for a year and brought us here for the glorious neo-Celtic music and, for a few weeks this autumn, the abbey is even lacking a musical director. The staff is waiting until the spring pilgrimage season to bring in a new full-time musician.

     On our first night at the abbey, a staff member who normally doesn’t play for worship volunteered to fill in and — with a noble spirit — plinked out the melodies to hymns on an electric keyboard.
    “I’m so sorry you didn’t hear what I heard when I was here last time,” Beth tells us late that night just before bedtime in our monastic cells. “I’m so disappointed for you.”
    We are amazed that our leader feels this way!
    We rush — almost in unison — to reassure her!
    We are stunned that she has missed the significance of the revelations we’ve already had. Just one hour earlier, pilgrim after pilgrim — American, British, Swiss, German, nearly all — reported a similar revelation.
    It started for each of us when someone told us simply to step outside the abbey and the cloisters. At first, this seemed pointless in the dark of the night, but for a moment all around Iona the mists, the fog, the clouds had all vanished and the remoteness of the island even erased the distracting glow of urban lights.
    We each walked out — one by one — following what we thought of as casual suggestions to take a little cool night air.
    We’d just poke our heads outside for a moment and take a look. What could it hurt?
    Then, we looked straight up.
    Jaws went slack.
    The Milky Way stretched like a glistening stream from horizon to horizon and constellations were clear as road signs. We felt as if we merely pushed off our from our toes, we would fall upwards into the heavens. We had traveled backward through time already to reach this place, hadn’t we? We had survived the rise and fall of misty landscapes that left us dreaming in new ways, hadn’t we?
    Anything might be possible here!
    I couldn’t see any other pilgrim — just those stars. But, apparently Doug Paterson was near me in the dark, head thrown back, because I heard him whisper upwards into the gleaming night sky: “I haven’t seen stars like these in years!”
    Talk about a pilgrim’s simple prayer of thanks!
    We told Beth not to apologize to us. It was just that she had come looking for songs.
    And, instead, our gift that night was stars.

    And, this too is a dangerous truth about visiting inns between the worlds. They invite travelers to plunge into uncharted lands, to feel as though they just might fall into the heavens, especially when we are surprised by:
    Lights shining!
    Whose lights?
    What is coming?

The Last Chapter: “The Island’s Final Spiritual Riddle”