Tuesday, June 10,2003
So I take the little boat to Mull (I am the only Iona passenger), where we pick up a boatful of others, and then to Staffa. A fun ride. Part of me is apprehensive about going on the sea, and another part revels in it, adjusting to it like riding a horse, and enjoys the whole trip first to last. Maybe someone who died at sea is less prominent than he used to be when on the water.
Staffa from the south looks like a ship heading west, one of those low-lying cargo ships you see sometimes, where the bulk of it is in the stern and the front is just a prow cutting the water. We get off, clamber around for an hour, and get back on for the return trip. Interesting, but I haven’t had any mystical experiences in Fingall’s Cave. Just used people’s cameras to take pictures of them, and took some of my own, and was fortunate enough to wind up in the cave alone for a while. We return not to Mull but to Iona: Those from Mull are getting two or three hours to see Iona before their return trip. Hah! Tourists! I live here, for the moment. (-:
My laundry is ready, in my room. I buy a big candy bar and ask for a quiet place to read or write (my room has no convenient table) and am given the keys to the lounge at another building. So I ask my friend –
“David, before I go looking for shops and maybe supper, any thoughts on today? For today has seemed a bit touristy.”
“There’s no harm that will do you. If you fear shallowing out – do a Monroe tape if nothing else. Meanwhile enjoy your time here. You are not required to take orders in any sense of the word, just only be here at this time.”
I go out, and walk toward the 12th century abbey that is the main religious structure on the island. I go to the Iona Community shop across the road, thinking to do some shopping for certain people, but I succeed only in buying books for myself: a volume of Thomas Merton’s Journals, and Iona: God’s Energy: The Spirituality and Vision of the Iona Community, by the current leader of the community.
In the community shop, an interaction that will lead to important consequences. A woman who is sitting in a window seat by the book section of the gift shop complains to someone of being tired, and when she is alone I go up to her and say that where I’m from, we know how to give people energy, and I’ll be glad to do so if she wishes. She asks if I’m talking about Reiki, and I say those are just words, it’s all the same energy. She sort of humors me, saying I can try but people have tried to do this before and it never works on her. Now, interestingly, as I work, I do not feel any sense that she is rejecting the energy, nor do I pick up the kind of know-it-all-ism you get from some people that ensures it won’t work so they won’t have to adjust their belief system. In fact, I can feel the flow – but she claims nothing happened, and that she’s just tired because she’s tired, etc. A mechanistic understanding of it. So we left it at that, and although I notice that she goes back to work and seems less tired, I say nothing about it. I buy my books and leave, wondering how open to reaching out this community is.
Then into the restored church itself. As I start walking the first side of the cloisters, something emerges from within, and I am in tears. But then my automatic clamp clamps, and that is all I know about it.
I make a supper of some oatcakes and a tin of herring fillets. Last night’s supper was too expensive by far, I decide, and so this makes up for it. It isn’t yet six. I could still go out, as there are hours of daylight left, but I have walked my feet off. Instead I begin to read Iona: God’s Energy, and after a while I pull out my journal and ask what relevance it has for me. Where’s my potential contribution? The author’s description of spirituality makes me ask why a church – even a seemingly ecumenical church – must be so rejecting of those who have so much to offer. The need is there on both sides, and often the willingness, and occasionally the understanding. Where is the common path?
“I had begun to fantasize some connection – perhaps based on my little interaction with the woman at the center’s store – but it is like Findhorn in a different way. Not my community.
“But damn it, there’s a far deeper issue than merely me. The question is, how is society to be regenerated? Not by a closed sectarianism, not by a spirituality so personal as to omit the community. But – mostly – not by any attempt to require belief in certain “givens.” Not by reliance on someone’s interpretation of scripture as the final word.
“This fellow Matthew belongs to a church that celebrates the Sabbath on Saturday. It is an important thing to them. Why? Who cares? They would say, “God cares,” and scarcely anyone would agree both that 1) God cares, and 2) God agrees with their interpretation. So they condemn themselves to isolation from the other churches. And those others do the same thing, insisting on doctrinal points of no significance unless one can accept that God laid down in scriptures rules for conduct, rules for precise application, tests of obedience. And this is precisely what churches do think, and there’s the source of their irrelevance. They prevent the emergence of a common accepted path. So if they will not, others will – or won’t.
“What is the significance in all this for me? When I read that the Iona community is mostly spread out, I thought, “perhaps we can create a Monroe community, an extended, geographically diverse community, dedicated to mutual support of certain values, that our exploration may be supported by society and may produce results in that society. But so far, at least, I cannot see how this can be. Perhaps I shall receive a dream showing me the way.”
Ha! Little do I know! The way forward is going to be indicated not by a dream but by something in waking life, rooted in my initial gift of love that was my offer of energy to the tired woman.
I go to bed early, but I lie in bed, twitching, unable to sleep. Too much coffee or, more likely, chocolate. I notice an undercurrent as I think about the day: a week from now I will be getting ready to return. I tell myself I must make this trip come to something. How?
“I see in the intro to Dancing in the Water of Life – volume five of Merton’s journals, purchased today – that Merton saw a private and a public function to keeping a journal; hence, to writing; hence, to the spiritual search, though this is not expressly said. One gets oneself honestly situated, then one passes whatever one knows to the public.
“Perhaps from genuine humility (of which I have more than many suspect), perhaps from diffidence or even false modesty (no shortages there either) I have tended not to contribute to the public dialogue. Partly from lack of knowledge of how things work, partly from the fact that my life is realer to me than the lives around me. But perhaps it is time, and past time. Or perhaps it is not, and perhaps it never will be!”