Journeys in Community pages 9b.qxp_Layout 2 21/07/2020 17:46 Page 24
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Journeys in Community
Being a child of God in Community: Iona 1975 (Ruth) Hands held tightly across the row of six bodies, bent bold against the gale, we are gripped close by our teacher as we stride home through the wild wind. She stops at MacLean’s Cross. ‘Look!’ she says, peering through the murk across the Sound of Iona. ‘Look! The waterfall on Mull is being blown upwards!’ And it surely was – powering water, pouring up. For the first 10 years of my life I lived in intentional Christian communities, the last five of these as part of the Resident Group in Iona Abbey. We were there as a family. But where most of my contemporaries lived with a small group of relatives in a house, and went to school with many more children, our lives were lived back to front. We lived with up to 50 folk in a restored Benedictine Abbey, and I attended a school of five pupils – the majority of whom were my relatives. That blustery winter morning in 1975 we were no Celtic poets scribbling reflections to God’s glory in the margins of our journals, as the holy men on our island home had been some 1300 years earlier. But we were just as awestruck by divine power and passion as the rain streamed down our faces, and ‘up’ the cliffs of Mull. Few unrelated playmates meant we fell back on inner resources. The wildness of the barn and the beach became our playground, the feral foraging along the seashore our play. I remember a glorious evening as an eight-year-old spent alone by the jetty, getting first the hems, then the knees and then the waist of my trousers wet. I kept going, up to my chest, my chin in the Atlantic, until I was part of the ocean, fully clad, fully alone, up to my neck in creation. An Ezekiel moment of both awe and terror. The island of Iona is a sliver of beauty: windswept, holy Atlan-
