Guilt, joy, and other thoughts

On Tuesday I will have been on Iona for three weeks total, almost half my time here! It’s amazing how quickly the time has gone. The past two weeks have been full of working in various places in my new job as a general assistant. The Iona community has two main centres on the Island, the Abbey and the MacLeod centre, both of which need lots of help in their kitchens and with housekeeping (cleaning and laundry mostly). As a general assistant I float between the two centres, giving help where it’s needed. However, the MacLeod centre kitchen has recently lost both its head cook and a volunteer, so I will be a full time volunteer at the MacLeod centre kitchen for at least the next two weeks.

As volunteers, we work 7 ½ hours per day, with one full day and one half day off per week. When I’m not at work I spend a lot of time reading, wandering around the island, going to the daily worship services (morning and evening), and hanging out with the other volunteers. I was slightly frustrated for a number of weeks with what I perceived to be a lack of spiritual and intellectual stimulation. The community is very busy and very fast paced, always focussing another task to be done and always caring for the weekly guests who arrive on Saturday evening and stay till Friday morning. But I’ve realized in the last few days that I was setting an inner standard and expectation of what “meaningful” relationships will look like, so I continue to try and release my own needs and simply receive what God has given through the people and structure which is set in place.

That doesn’t mean that I still don’t long for silence and solitude (which are often hard to find in this community)! I thoroughly enjoy reading in the abbey atmosphere, particularly in the abbey library, which is often a quiet and stress-free place. I’m currently reading the 4^th book in Ursula K LeGuin’s series of fantasy books, The EarthSea Cycle, and also a book entitled “How (not) to speak of God” by an Irish theologian named Peter Rollins. LeGuin paints pictures of beautiful and harsh landscapes in her writing which I often see reflected in these western Scottish isles; Rollins’ book is about Christian belief in response to the skepticism and suspicion of postmodernism, which is particularly enjoyable to read in an ancient abbey which has long been a centre of deep spiritual and theological reflection.

A volunteer in our community recently pointed out at our volunteer meeting that though the Iona community actively speaks and promotes creation care there are still hundreds of people each year to travel from all corners of the globe to visit Iona, all the while releasing tonnes and tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere due to the nature of plane travel. Nothing is really said or mentioned about the distance between the community’s spoken beliefs and what the community actually practices. This volunteer, Jason, thus proposed that we as volunteers draft a letter to the leader of the Iona community, suggesting that as part of the fee which guests are charged Iona should include a carbon-footprint fee, the proceeds of which would be donated to a climate-change organization. Depending on how far one travels to Iona, this fee would change. I think that this is a brilliant idea and I look forward to reading, supporting, and signing such a letter with such a proposal. This is a great example of the thoughtfulness which is possible to find within the volunteer community here.

It has also got me thinking about the importance of this place, Iona, which the community founder George MacLeod described as “A thin place, with only a tissue paper separating the spiritual from the material”. Do I really have to travel to Iona, costing thousands of dollars and tonnes of carbon dioxide, in order to experience the thinness of a place? It’s not a simple question and I don’t think any answer, simple or not, is readily available. But I want to try to hold my guilt and joy in proper tension, not allowing one primacy over the other. It’s important that I reflect on the cost of my trip, both to my back account and to the earth. It’s equally (though not more important) to reflect on the relationships I’m developing, the beauty of this location, and the spiritual history which leaks out of the abbey walls.  I will continue to trust and hope that God will be revealed in truthful ways, both in my guilt, which motivates me to love people and creation, and in my joy, which I experience as I walk around the abbey cloisters late at night in prayer and meditation.

My heart explodes with more to say and explore, but my books are calling me to receive what they are exploring and exploding with.

The peace of Christ,

Ethan