Iona Revisited

This coming Sunday at church we are celebrating our Iona pilgrimmage with an Iona-centered service and Iona music in the morning and a program in the evening complete with Iona food and a ceilidh. I, sad to say, won't be there because, not sad to say, we're leaving tomorrow for Oregon to visit the Lovely Daughter, but I did write a contribution
for the evening Powerpoint:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil...

Gerard Manley Hopkins

I reached Iona as I was concluding a year-long journey through the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises and just following a week of intensely interior spirituality in France. It was a challenge for me to plunge into a place of equally intense community. I often retreated to one of the many places of refuge scattered across the island ~ wandering across the rocky beach with the oystercatchers in the early morning hours, sitting among the stony ruins of the nunnery to journal on sunny afternoons, trudging down the dirt roads late at night as the sheep shuffled around and the corncrakes issued their rusty calls. Iona is a good place to be in community,
but it is also a good place to walk in solitude with God.