Still on Visual and Still in Glasgow

More Visual: More Glass

Glasgow Cathedral.

How appropriate for this time of year.

And what a compelling thought: A palette of beauty and order from earth and sun and water as the first expression of human creativity.

30/365: Scotland as Viewed from from British Airways

Our church Session celebrated its annual (sort of) Robert Burns party this past week-end. I will spare you the raucous behavior, the poetry readings, and the dramatic presentation and evisceration of the haggis. Let's just go back to Scotland.

22/365: This One IS For Paul

Glasgow Cathedral Guild Window

In honor of Paul, who will retire from his distinguished ~ we think ~ teaching career at the end of this week: Let's begin the celebration!

A Year of Churches

I've been thinking about that "Why church?" question that I want to address in the new year, and I've taken a look back at where I've been this year. It's been rather an amazing twelve months. (Most of these images enlarge reasonably well with a click.)

December 24, 2005: The United Methodist Church to which we belonged for many years and where we still spend Christmas Eve. When the congregation raises its 500 candles at the close of the service, the sight from the balcony is awesome.

The Chapel of the Martyrs, Paris, July 7, 2006: I spent an hour in this place where St. Ignatius and his first companions made their first vows together, thereby creating the Society of Jesus. I was nearing the end of my year long Ignatian Retreat-in-Everyday-Life experience, and I count that as the most moving hour of my personal 2006.

St. Chappelle, Paris, July 7, 2006: We visited in the late afternoon and returned for a Vivaldi concert that night. Listening to The Four Seasons in St. Chapelle was the perfect ending to a moving day.


Chartres Cathedral, France, July 2006: I posted many of my Chartres images last summer. Each time I look at them, a different one captures my imagination. I've already noted that one of the things I love about a great cathedral is the way in which it incorporates everything. Look at all the different forms stone takes in this one corner on the south exterior!

Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris, July 2006: There are few experiences comparable to spending a day in the shadow of this extraordinary building. Of course, Notre Dame de Paris is awfully symmetrical, in contrast to the glorious conglomeration that constitutes Notre Dame de Chartres.

Iona Abbey, Scotland, July 2006: A completely different encounter with the sacred. From the Druids to the Celts to the Benedictines and Dominicans to the Calvinist Reformers to the Iona Community ~ we have all been there and it seems that we all still are.


Glasgow Cathedral, July 2006: Another day in the company of Catholics and Protestants, with an afternoon spent in a solitary walk around and through a cemetery full of Celtic crosses and Reformation proclamations. A rather exhausting place to be, actually, for someone whose idea about differences in belief is that we are called to handle them graciously and generously.

Ursuline Convent Chapel, southern Ohio, September 2006. I was there for a reunion with my boarding school classmates of 7th~9th grade. Who could have imagined the journey that I was beginning there, that sullen Protestant girl sitting in the pew and glaring at the priest through the endless Latin of pre-Vatican II masses?

******

Oddly, the one church of which I have no photographs at all is the one to which I belong and where I spend so much time! I'll have to rectify that situation this year, now that I have smashed the travel bank to smithereens.

Advent 11: On the Question: Why Church?

Glasgow Cathedral

I came across this a few days ago, and it presents part of the answer:

"The postmodern mind is haunted. A great religious tradition is the home of wisdom. It is the public locus in a culture where the great eternal, spiritual questions are kept alive and kindled. Kept clear of unworthy answers, they invite each epoch to journey toward the inner and outer frontiers of its possibility and potential. This is the enthralling task of theology: to probe those frontiers anew in each generation. Never was there such possibility for ground-breaking conversation and exploration. But it is not happening. The hunger is intense. The keepers of the treasure are frightened, discouraged and blind to the nourishment of which they are custodians. The hungry ones now think less and less of revisiting religion as the granary of divine nourishment. The keepers of the food and the victims of the hunger pass each other by with little recognition of the enriching possibilities they have to offer each other."

John O'Donohue
Spirituality as the Art of Real Presence
Here

Glasgow Cathedral (1197) ~ July 2006

Raised and/or befriended by agnostics, Catholics, Protestants and Jews, it has forever been my fate to stand amid the tensions linking disparate faith communties. On Iona, I was constantly aware that I prayed in the ruins of a Catholic community destroyed by Reformation Presbyterians and then 500 years later recovered and rebuilt by a Protestant community. The Glasgow Cathedral is the only one on mainlaind Scotland left completely intact in the wake of the Reformation chaos that produced my own Presbyterian church. (The Glasgow Cathedral is Church of Scotland today.) In the cemetery above it, the words below a towering statue of John Knox, Reformation leader of the Protestant church in Scotland, attest to the torture and incineration of Protestants by Catholics during that period of unrest. Neither side, to put it mildly, emerges without blemish.

A cathedral, on its best days, is a haunting blend of light and shadow, reflecting perfectly, it seems, the community of Christ both then and now.

Glasgow ~~~ July 2006 ~~~ Click on Image!

Iona VI - Older Stuff

OK, so no one liked the newer botany and bird sculptures.

I did.

But the Iona Abbey Cloister has lots of things in the realm of hundreds of years old, too. Chief among them are the gravestone slabs, unfortunately removed from their original locales but easy to see as they are displayed on the cloister walls.

Anyone who has read this blog for long knows that I am enamoured of the Celtic stonework in the nearby cemetery where I walk several times a week. It's pretty astounding to see Celtic carvings hundreds of years old on their original island home. These reflect the intricacy of traditional Celtic design and the combination of war (the sword, second from bottom image), sea (the ship, bottom image), and nature inherent in the island life of the last millenium.

They say that Macbeth is buried on Iona, and Duncan, too -- along with a series of Scandanavian kings who sought a holy resting place. No one knows where they lie. No one knows what stories these stones tell.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Macbeth (V, v, 19)

Iona V: Contemporary Cloister Art

The Iona Abbey Cloister may have risen from the ruins of the Reformation, but the capital carvings are decidedly contemporary. I can't identify the botanical ones myself, but I was entranced by the birds ~ especially, of course, the gannets.

Transportation (Round Robin Photo Challenge), or. . . Iona V

OK, so I'm cheating, just a little. The subject of the current Round Robin Photo Challenge is Transportation, and a ferry is, indeed, one of my favorite forms of transportation ~ because the destinations that require ferry transport are my favorite destinations. Hence the first photo, of the ferry that runs between the Hebrides islands of Iona and Staffa.

The reamining images are of Staffa as one first sees it (it's actually much longer than it is wide); the volcanic rock formations that many visitors go to see, formations mirrored across the sea on Ireland and, therefore, the basis of a story involving a mythological Giant's Causeway across the Irish Sea; the most important residents of Staffa; and the seals who watched us come and go. Most of the photos enlarge reasonably well with a click.

Iona World IV

I anticipated some personal challenges on Iona. After an intensely interior year focused on an Ignatian approach to spirituality, how was I going to manage a week of equally intense community life? And Ignatius was, paradoxically, a man of the cities. How was I going to bridge the distance between Paris, a Jesuit hometown, and Iona, the pastoral island "thin place" to Celtic saints?

OK ~ figured it out. I took a volume of Gerard Manley Hopkin's poetry and writings with me -- Hopkins having been that Jesuit, largely unknown in his lifetime, who penned those expansive nature poems. And so when I got up before 5:00 am on Iona to watch the sunrise and walk to the beach, the language echoing in my head served to connect all my experiences:

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

As it happened, among the first things I saw on the beach were oystercatchers -- including a frantic pair of adults, indicating to me that they must have a young one nearby. I've only seen oystercatchers during their winter layover in northern Florida, but I was soon to discover that they summer in northern Scotland. They were all over the place -- at least, all over the beaches where I walked every day. I did find the one little one, but limited myself to only a few photos and didn't make any effort to disturb what must have been others nearby on other mornings.

It wasn't until I came home that I read up on Brigid, a woman swirling in mystery and somewhat lost to mythology. A goddess of the Druids? A Catholic saint? She looms large in the Celtic world and, it seems, the oystercatcher is her sacred bird. According to legend, she sent oystercatchers out to guide sailors safely home.

Everything, in the end, has a way of merging. Celtic Brigid and Jesuit Hopkins. Oystercatchers and kingfishers catching fire. There are gannets, too, over the Irish Sea. I didn't find Iona to be an easy place, but with Hopkins in my pocket and oystercatchers among the rocks, I was all right.

Adult Oystercatcher

Little Oystercatcher ...or...maybe it's an adult Ringed Plover? Thanks, Virginia, for the correction! Anyone know for sure?

Brigid Window in the Iona Abbey Church

Iona III - Friends

It's good to spend time in a place where the cows take walks on the beach.

Almost Home

The week on Iona is behind us -- a week of community (which some of us -- ahem -- experienced differently than others), of pilgrimmage, of moving worship among centuries old stone, of ceilidh dancing and late nights in the pub, of sheep baa-aaa-ing and cows munching on lilies just outside the window at sunrise, of terns and oystercatchers and gannets, of conversation on the sand and over the dishes, and of new friends from Scotland.

In Glasgow for one last day, where I have visited the cathedral and -- wonder of wonders -- found a FABULOUS cemetery and therefore taken many more photographs of many more Celtic crosses than I had planned.

I have no idea how many new images I have collected but they must number well into the hundreds. I'm thinking I may need a new blog just for the photos of July.

Back home tomorrow and in a few days I'll start writing about this trip.

It Might Really Happen

I've been working on hotel reservations this afternoon. If anyone has any Paris favorites in the 4th-6th, let me know. We have places to stay, but I am more than willing to entertain suggestions, especially for the vicinity immediate to Notre Dame. Or we could venture forth from the Left Bank and go to Montmartre (in the 18th) if I had any idea about where to stay.

Mon mari et moi will meet in Paris; he gets to fly direct but I am going through Glasgow. We'll spend four nights there, so far at a hotel in the general neighborhood of Notre Dame; then head to Chartres for two days so that I can immerse myself in the cathedral for 24/2; then back to Paris to stay in a St. Germaine des Pres hotel we've enjoyed before. Then he'll return to les Etats-Unis while I go back to Scotland and on to Iona for a week with a group from church.

There are gannets off the coast of Scotland! Check out these amazing photos!

It's seeming too good to be true, but it could happen. . . .