Iona
by Fiona Macleod
A few places in the world are to be held holy, because of the love which
consecrates them and the faith which enshrines them. Their names are themselves
talismans of spiritual beauty. One of these is Iona.
The Arabs speak of Mecca as a holy place before the time of the prophet,
saying that Adam himself lies buried here: and, before Adam, that the Sons
of Allah, who are called Angels, worshipped; and that when Allah Himself
stood upon perfected Earth it was on this spot. And here, they add, when
there is no man left upon earth, an angel shall gather up the dust of this
world, and say to Allah, 'There is nothing left of the whole earth but Mecca:
and now Mecca is but the few grains of sand that I hold in the hollow of
my palm, O Allah.'
In spiritual geography Iona is the Mecca of the Gael.
It is but a small isle, fashioned of a little sand, a few grasses salt with
the spray of an ever-restless wave, a few rocks that wade in heather and
upon whose brows the sea-wind weaves the yellow lichen. But since the remotest
days sacrosanct men have bowed here in worship. In this little island a
lamp was lit whose flame lighted pagan Europe, from the Saxon in his fens
to the swarthy folk who came by Greek waters to trade the Orient. Here Learning
and Faith had their tranquil home, when the shadow of the sword lay upon
all lands, from Syracuse by the Tyrrhene Sea to thc rainy isles of Orcc.
From age to age, lowly hearts have never ceased to bring their burthen here.
Iona herself has given us for remembrance a fount of youth more wonderful
than that which lies under her own boulders of Dun-l. And here Hope waits.
To tell the story of Iona is to go back to God, and to end in God.
But to write of Iona, there are many ways of approach. No place that has
a spiritual history can be revealed to those who know nothing of it by facts
and descriptions. The approach may be through the obscure glens of another's
mind and so out by the moonlit way, as well as by the track that thousands
travel. I have nothing to say of lona's acreage, or fisheries, or pastures:
nothing of how the islanders live. These things are the accidental. There
is small difference in simple life anywhere. Moreover, there are many to
tell all that need be known.
There is one Iona, a little island of the west. There is another Iona, of
which I would speak. I do not say that it lies open to all. It is as we
come that we find. If we come, bringing nothing with us, we go away ill-content,
having seen and heard nothing of what we had vaguely expected to see or
hear. It is another Iona than the Iona of sacred memories and prophecies:
Iona the metropolis of dreams. None can understand it who does not see it
through its pagan light, its Christian light, its singular blending of paganism
and romance and spiritual beauty. There is, too, an Iona that is more than
Gaelic, that is more than a place rainbow-lit with the seven desires of
the worId, the Iona that, if we will it so, is a mirror of your heart and
of mine.
History may be written in many ways, but I think that in days to come the
method of spiritual history will be found more suggestive than the method
of statistical history. The one will, in its own way, reveal inward life,
and hidden significance, and palpable destiny: as the other, in the good
but narrow way of convention, does with exactitude delineate features, narrate
facts, and relate events. The true interpreter will as little despise the
one as he will claim all for the other.
And that is why I would speak here of Iona as befalls my pen, rather than
as perhaps my pen should go: and choose legend and remembrance, and my own
and other memories and associations, and knowledge of my own and others,
and hidden meanings, and beauty and strangeness surviving in dreams and
imaginations, rather than facts and figures, that others could adduce more
deftly and with more will. -from Iona, by Fiona Macleod, 1910.
Sacred Sites
The Druid Grove
The Druid Path