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Religion: A Light at lona

7 minute read
TIME

From Ireland in his little coracle the missionary-saint, Columba, sailed to the isle of lona in the Inner Hebrides, off Scotland’s west coast. There, in 563 A.D., on lona’s misty, rainy four square miles, he established a base in the great Celtic Christianizing that swept eastward from Ireland to Britain, across to the Continent — and as far south as Vienna.

lona became holy ground and the burial place of kings. Says Historian A. J. Toynbee: had it not been for one of history’s incalculable shifts, lona, instead of Rome, might have been the Christian capital of western Europe.* In the 13th Century Benedictines began to build an abbey on lona. Before he died, St. Columba had made a prophecy:

In lona of my heart, Iona of my love,

Instead of monks’ voices shall be lowing of cattle,

But ere the world come to an end,

lona shall be as it was.

To the U.S. last week came a handsome, witty Scot who is making St. Columba’s 1,400-year-old prophecy look better & better. Under his guidance the grey stones of the abbey, fallen into ruin after the Reformation, are rising again, and Iona’s fertile soil has once more become dedicated ground. Sandy-mustached Rev. George Fielden MacLeod, 51, is no medievalist nor sentimental ruin-regarder. His purpose is hardly less ambitious than St. Columba’s: to eventually awaken Scotland and England to a new concept and practice of religion. To many a Scottish Presbyterian, he seems a worthy successor to the Celtic saint himself.

Mystical Hard Heads. Sir George F. MacLeod, Bart, was a Winchester-and Oxford-educated captain in the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders of World War I, holder of the Military Cross and the Croix de Guerre. He knew that he wanted to be a minister. After graduate study at Edinburgh, he was ordained in the Church of Scotland† in 1924 and was soon assigned to starchy St. Cuthbert’s Parish Church in Edinburgh. Uncomfortable in such ultra-respectable Christianity, he switched to Glasgow’s famed Govan Old Parish Church, in the heart of one of the worst slums. But the church’s Christian witness seemed to him no more effective among the poor than among the plushy; after eight years he resigned his pulpit and went to Iona.

There, in 1938, George MacLeod began to gather about him a group of young ministers and laymen. Together they evolved their own Rule of faith and worship—a Rule which makes them seem at once as mystical as Franciscans and as hardheaded as Stalinists.

Separateness & Union. The rebuilding of Iona’s ruined abbey will take them, they figure, about seven more years. The abbey chapel had already been restored by popular subscription. MacLeod and his men have set out to rebuild the rest of the monastery.

For three months each summer, masons, carpenters and other craftsmen from the Scottish mainland work, pray and live together with the 30-odd “young ministers of the Community. The rebuilding of lona is a means to an end, and has a twofold purpose: 1) to learn “what it means to be ‘corporately separate’ for the 20th Century. By our worship and our common life on the island we get something of … a microcosmic but concentrated foretaste of what a ‘Congregation’ should be”; 2) “to sit at meat with craftsmen brothers who . . . are in touch all winter with the mainland industrial pressures and . . . are not slow to tell us … how separated—in the wrong sense—has become the church, and how incomprehensible to them is our ecclesiastical language and fastidious ‘otherness.’ ”

Craftsmen and clerics alike obey a strict and simple regimen of devotion during their three months on Iona. Throughout the rest of the year both groups follow a daily Rule, and meet at intervals. While the Iona craftsmen spend their nine months on the mainland at their regular jobs, the ministers—each of whom has signed up for two years—go forth to preach in small towns, organize community projects in crowded industrial cities, or work in parishes that’ are trying to apply the lona principles.

Body & Soul. Those principles add up to no comfortable, carpet-slipper religion. One of Founder MacLeod’s favorite quotations is from Dostoevsky: Love in practice is a harsh and terrible thing compared with love in dreams. MacLeod says: “Our present tragedy, with ‘one world dying and the other powerless to be born,’ is that the church is too ethereal in its instructions, and the world is too material in its constructions. Jesus Christ, the

God-Man, is the mystery that can alone explain . . . our world.”

“Community men” meditate much on the meaning of the Incarnation, which they feel obligates all Christians to minister to men’s bodies as well as to their souls. This obligation carries through to the body politic. “It is wrong,” says George MacLeod, “to pray only for ‘Margaret suffering from tuberculosis,’ if you know too well the noisome tenement in and by which the suffering began. If we work with Margaret in prayer, we must work with Margaret’s father in the housing issues at the next election.”

Dr. MacLeod feels that the Churches of Scotland and England have paid only stammering lip service to the vigorous promptings on this score from the late William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury. Says he: “They have been willing to listen to the Temple bells, but not to beat the Temple drums.”

The Iona Community is not afraid to experiment with its logical conclusions. Last summer it held a week-long conference on divine healing (addressed by blind Godfrey Mowatt, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s representative on the Council of Healing, and said to be gifted with the power to cure by laying on of hands). And recently lona has organized a Christian Workers League, whose members seek to work on the corporate bodies of trade unions, capturing control of them with the same infiltration tactics used by the Communists.

Prayer & Poverty. During the nine years of its existence, lona has attracted some 180 “minister associates” in the Church of Scotland; some 380 “women associates” who meet at intervals and observe a modified Rule of living, and approximately 7,000 worldwide “friends,” who contribute a yearly $1 and receive the Community’s semi-annual publication, the Coracle.

But the inner core of lona is still the Community, composed of the ministers who enroll for the two-year course of training and pledge themselves to devote half an hour each morning to prayer and Bible-reading. All members also seek to keep their personal expenditures down to Britain’s national average income—$720 a year for a single man, $320 more for a married one, plus $240 for each child. Members’ accounts are kept openly and discussed among themselves at regular intervals—items over and above the national average can be justified if they are “for the glory of God.”

Dr. MacLeod strenuously rejects suggestions that Iona is “a return” to anything. Says he:

“As feudalism was the earthly seeding-bed of Thomas Aquinas, as emergent capitalism was the forcing house of Calvin, so our scientific, political, economic structure, without precedent, whose birth is our present agony, will be the seeding-bed of new discoveries of God’s approach to Man, and of the manner of our response. . . . Like Christian in his Progress we are inclined to say ‘We do not see the Gate, but we think we see a light.'”

* “It may be suggested, without extravagance, that our modern Western Civilization would probably have been derived from an Irish instead of a Roman embryo either if Colman instead of Wilfrid had won the Synod of Whitby in A.D. 664, or again if Abd-ar-Rahman instead of Charles Martel had won the battle of Tours in A.D. 732.”—A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History. f Scotland has been Presbyterian since the Scottish barons, inspired by John Knox, bound themselves in covenant (1557) against Catholicism and in support of the Reformation. The church became the “established church” in 1707. Stubborn Scots argue that the King of England (titular head of the “national church”) becomes a Presbyterian as soon as he crosses the Tweed.

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