Homecoming
Unitarian Coastal Fellowship
December 7, 2014
1
Homecoming. This morning Rev. Sally shares first thoughts on returning
from her three month sabbatical, and we celebrate taking up our shared
ministry again. Following the service, Rev. Sally and the sabbatical
committee will host a first conversation about the sabbatical experience:
what did we learn, what challenges and opportunities lie ahead? There will
be sandwiches and cookies for all who stay, so please plan to add your voice
to this important conversation.
Reading:
On the Island of Iona, looking one day through a lost-and-found bucket, I
found a beat-up copy of a book called Chasing the Wild Goose: The Story of
the Iona Community. Stuck in the book as a placemarker was a boarding
pass, dated in July, for a flight between Charlotte and Philadelphia – the
same route I took to and from Scotland. That seemed somehow auspicious,
so I took the book and read it after I left Iona. Sometime in the past month,
the book has disappeared – and I like to think it has made its way into
someone else's life. I ordered a new copy for myself. Our reading this
morning comes from the prologue to the book, written in 1987 by Ronald
Ferguson who was Leader of the Iona Community from 1981 to 1988.
They come in their thousands every year from all over the world,
clutching guide books and poly [plastic] bags. They are church leaders and
unemployed teenagers, theologians and workers, tourists and pilgrims and
sceptics. They bring with them experiences, questions, problems and, most
of all, yearnings. Might there be, in this ancient place of power and
pilgrimage, a word from the Lord – or even just a word?
Iona is a small, rocky island in the Scottish Hebrides. Three and a
half miles long and a mile and a half broad, it is not imposing. …
The peace of Iona whispers to many. Iona has been described as “a
thin place,” only a tissue paper separating the material from the spiritual.
Many people have tried to express the experience – and have come back
again and again.
Some come in search of healing, as many before them have done,
dragging with them the physical ailments or emotional disorder of their
lives, looking for a healing word or new courage to bear the pain. Still
moer come drawn by the work of the present-day ecumenical Iona
2
Community which, having rebuilt the living quarters of the Abbey, seeks to
live the Gospel of justice and reconciliation in today's troubled world.
Yes, and many are tourists, clutching souvenirs, unsure whether to
scoff or to pray. Among them are the post-Christian children of a
fragmented and disquieted era. They are rightly suspicious of Celic
romanticism, medieval nostalgia, authoritarian clerics and trendy priests.
They know there are things not right with the world they live in, not right
with their own lives, but they are pretty sure that the old faith is as
redundant as they often feel themselves to be. Pretty sure...Yet their feet
have travelled this well-worn pilgrim way, walking with uneasy detachment.
The feelings become even more mixed as the words spoken at the ancient
shrine of piety turn out to be not just historical words, but contemporary
syllables. [Chasing the Wild Goose, pp. 15-16].
Sermon:
To get to Iona, my cousin Jane and her partner Rob drove me across
Scotland from their home in Perth to the ferry port town of Oban. We
passed fields with grazing sheep and cows. The road snaked alongside
rivers and skirted hills where the bracken was going yellow. We stopped at
The Famous Grouse Distillery for morning tea (and “passed” on the
distillery tour and the whiskey-tasting). We stopped for lunch at the base of
Ben (mount) Cruachan, at the side of Loch Awe. It was two days after the
vote on Scottish Independence, and signs and flags saying “Yes!” and “No,
thanks” were still visible in house windows and pastures and plastered to
poles in the towns.
In Oban, we had time to stretch our legs and walk along the pretty waterfront
before I checked in at the ferry terminal, and Jane and Rob left to drive back
across the country to get home before dark. Standing with my suitcase,
waiting for the ferry, an Australian woman struck up a conversation: “Are
you going to Iona?” she asked. “I am.” I replied – “You, too?” She was.
Elaine and I talked as we waited, and together we boarded the big
Caledonian-MacBrayne boat (big enough to accommodate cars and tour
buses and hundreds of foot passengers). We talked through the 45-minute
ferry ride to Craignure on the east coast of the Island of Mull, and through
hour-and-a-quarter-long bus trip across Mull to Fionnphort on the west
coast, and then through the short, cold ferry ride across the Sound of Iona to
Iona itself. By the time we arrived, it was nearly dark. Peter met us at the
pier, helped to load our luggage into the Abbey van, and then led us as we
walked in the dusk up the village street, turned at the ruins of the old
nunnery, and made our way along the road. And then we saw it.
Silhouetted against the sky and the water of the Sound, there was the Abbey
church and the community buildings that surrounded the cloister and the tall
Celtic crosses, one right near the door and one standing a little away. Stone
buildings originally built between 1200 and 1400, standing still and calm
and somehow welcoming and almost familiar, even at first sight.
Our ferry had run late and everyone else had finished dinner, but we were
seated at two of the long refectory tables and we passed around bowls of
pasta and sauce, salad and bread, spice cake for “pudding” (in other words,
dessert) and big pots of tea. Because we were late, we were excused from
helping with the clearing and the washing-up – for that night. There was just
time to take our suitcases to our rooms, and then join the others at the
introductory program session across the road in the MacLeod Center.
The program for the week was called “The Pilgrimage of Life.” In the midst
of a hundred strangers who had all traveled long and far to get here, together
we named the elements that help to create and sustain community, even –
especially – a transient community like this one, that comes together for a
week of working and learning and then disperses. Spiritual sustenance,
interdependence, humility, trust; food, laughter, wisdom, order and
discipline, a variety of gifts and the eyes (or the heart) to see them, curiosity
and a willingness to be open, and to be vulnerable. The program leader,
Alastair McIntosh, a Scottish writer, activist, human ecologist, and pilgrim (I
would characterize him as a “wide thinker”) drew on Joseph Campbell when
he named the three stages or movements of a pilgrimage: the departure, a
time of going out, away from what is known and familiar; the initiation, a
time of encountering challenges and being transformed; the return, back to
the place you cam from, bringing new wisdom, new energy, new courage,
new questions to the building of a new, transformed community.
Leaving community and then returning; building community, sustaining
community, being community: this is the beating heart of the Iona
Community, and of the experiences they offer to tourists and pilgrims and
sceptics. I was drawn to Iona not by the lure of community but rather by the
offered program on pilgrimage, for I saw my sabbatical trip as a pilgrimage
of sorts, searching for my roots in the country of my mother's birth, where
two of my first cousins and four of their children and two grandchildren live.
And, as is the way of pilgrimages, I was surprised, and what I found was not
what I expected. I went searching for roots, and instead I found wings. For
the symbol of the Iona Community is the wild goose, said to be the Celtic
symbol for the Holy Spirit (you'll see it on the cover of your Order of
Service). And I found myself deeply moved by that wild spirit, in ways that
I – like many others, according to Ronald Ferguson – struggle to express.
6
But let me begin by telling you another story, one I heard on the second
night on Iona. It is a story in three chapters.
In the year 563, a 42-year-old Irish priest and twelve followers – all men,
mainly relatives – journeyed north from Ireland in small, open, leatherbound boats called coracles. In the late spring, on the eve of Pentecost, they
landed on a rocky beach on the small island of Iona. Legend has it that they
climbed the hill to the west of the beach and looked southward toward
Ireland – and when they were sure they could no longer see their homeland,
they set about building a monastery - wooden church, farm buildings,
workshops andsmall houses – on the island. Work and worship were
inseparable, and part of the work they undertook was missionary work.
Remote as Iona is today, it sits at a crossroads of navigation by water, and
St. Columba and his followers carried their Christian message north to the
Picts in Scotland, South to the Anglo-Saxons in England, and as far east as
western Russia [The Iona Abbey Worship Book p. 167]. The Celtic Christian
community on Iona thrived for more than 200 years until the early 800s,
when Viking raids forced the monks to abandon the island and relocate to
Kells, in Ireland. It is believed that they took with them the illuminated
manuscript now known as the Book of Kells. Thus ends chapter one.
In the 1200s, Benedictine monks established a new community on Iona,
more focused on worship and orderly community than on mission and
outreach. They built a church and community buildings of stone; not far
away, an Augustinian nunnery was also built of stone. These religious
communities were dispersed after 1560, when the reformation came to
Scotland and Catholicism was replaced by the Protestant Church of
7
Scotland. The stone buildings fell into disrepair. And thus ends chapter
two.
Fast forward to 1930. George MacLeod was the minister of the parish
church in Govan, a section of Glasgow that had long been a shipbuilding
center. The church, a Church of Scotland congregation, was old and wellrespected; the congregation included respected citizens and community
leaders. But this was the Depression and nobody was building ships – or
anything else for that matter. The neighborhood around the church was full
of out-of work craftsmen: shipbuilders and carpenters and stonemasons.
They did not come to the church – it looked to them as though the church
had nothing to offer them, and they did not feel welcome among the welldressed members of George MacLeod's congregation. The wall around the
church seemed to them to serve to keep them out. But George MacLeod had
a different vision of church, as a place that takes people in rather than
closing them out. He and a team of volunteers knocked on doors all over
Govan, invited the neighbors to church, and welcomed them in. Soon they
undertook a work project: unemployed craftsmen used their skills to rebuild
a broken-down old mill on the outskirts of Glasgow, and make it into a
holiday retreat for inner-city families. The men were glad to have work,
even if it didn't pay; MacLeod was deeply moved by the way in which
working together on a demanding common task created a community out of
individuals who seemed to have little in common.
And so, in 1938, with the mill rebuilt, George MacLeod looked around for
another project. This time, he included not only craftsmen but also students
studying for the ministry, many of whom had never spent time with men
8
who worked with their hands instead of their intellects. This would be an
experiment in training Church of Scotland ministers for ministry not in
pastoral farming villages or prestigious city churches but in industrial
neighborhoods and manufacturing towns. And part of the training would be
to work hand-in-hand with the people they would later serve – craftsmen and
laborers. The project: rebuilding the Abbey buildings on Iona. Not
restoring them, not putting them back the way they had once been, but
building on what was there and making something new and filled with life.
The church, the cloister, the chapter house, the refectory and dormitories. A
community built on lay people and clergy, young and old. A community
that lived the teachings of the church not just on Sunday but every day. Not
just in the sanctuary or the meeting room, but in the High Street, and in
every aspect of life.
The Iona Community, it is called. Today, seventy-six years later, the Iona
Community is (and I have paraphrased slightly):
 an ecumenical movement of men and women from different walks of
life and different traditions in the Christian church
 committed to the embodying [the life and the teachings of Jesus] and
to following where that leads, even into the unknown
 engaged together, and with people of goodwill across the world, in
acting, reflecting,and praying for justice, peace, and the integrity of
creation
 convinced that the inclusive community we seek must be embodied in
the community we practice
[Chasing the Wild Goose, p. 189].
9
For a week in September, I lived in the embrace of the Iona Community.
We each had a job, so we worked together. We met together to learn about
plgrimage. We joined the weekly pilgrimage walk to places of historic and
religious significance. Twice each day we worshipped togther in the Abbey
church. Listening through the trinitarian language, I was astonished to hear
a respect and an inclusivity that I had naively thought were unique to
Unitarian Universalism.
On Iona, I felt 1450 years of history converge on a worshipping community
that took shape within the week that I was there – a community that began
with Elaine from Australia and grew to include members from England and
Scotland and Holland and Sweden and the United States and India and
Germany – and that included even me, a non-trinitarian Unitarian
Universalist from North Carolina.
Sitting in that ancient stone bulding where ferns grow in cracks in the walls,
I was deeply moved by an opening litany that calls on us to speak out for
justice, for peace, for mercy, saying in effect “if we ourselves keep silent,
these stones would shout aloud.” [Iona Abbey Worship Book, The Morning
Service, opening responses, p. 15, rephrased.]
This morning, I rejoin you, and I bring you the words that I can find.
words feel hardly adequate, and the work of sharing with you what I have
learned is work that will be ongoing. But stones are more solid than words,
and so I have also brought you stones, gathered on a beach on Iona. I have
placed them on a plate, at the base of our circle of friends. Please take one,
and let it be for you a small piece of my journey, shared. And let it bring
10
into your life whatever you need that is solid, and holy, and infused with the
Spirit of Life, and Love.
And let us now, in silence, listen for the echoes of all we have heard this
morning, spoken and unspoken.
The bell will lead us into silence, and music will lead us out.
Bell
Silence
Music
Amen.