For those of you who have been following this blog, you know that each of my sabbatical/renewal adventures were linked to one of my five senses. My trip to Scotland was predicated on using my eyes to see sacred places.
St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh was my first encounter with the Church of Scotland and sacred spaces in this part of the United Kingdom. I wasn't sure what to expect from a Presbyterian Cathedral. Like most cathedrals, it was cavernous with various carvings and side chapels. The Thistle Chapel was the most ornate and beautiful with loads of detail, including a small carving of an angel with bagpipes. It is the home of the Order of the Thistle, Scotland's great order of chivalry with its roots in the Middle Ages. There are 16 stalls for the 16 named Knights of the Order with their heraldic crests on canopies above.
And, of course, when we were on Iona, we worshipped daily in the Abbey Church. To look up at the stone ceiling, arches, and buttresses and realize how ancient parts of the church were and how many people before me had worshipped there each time left me awed.
We saw other Church of Scotland churches as well on our travels, a number of them unfortunately boarded up and for sale. In fact, you can go on a website and find listings of all the churches in Scotland on the market. The Church of Scotland seems to be facing the same problems of large buildings and dwindling numbers as the moderate church here in the US. In both places, the evangelical right has usurped the name "Christian" and in many ways given us moderate folks a bad rep.
When I wrote the grant proposal for this sabbatical, I had a very romantic view of hiking in Scotland. First of all the Brits call it "walking," and perhaps that is what threw me off. In my imaginings, I saw Joe and myself walking on country lanes through small towns and hamlets, stopping by and photographing small churches on the way. The roads were always flat, and the sun was always shining. In reality, that didn't happen at all. It rained every day, and we were hiking across lonely moors and up and down Scottish mountains. There were no little villages and hamlets along the way, with the exception of the deserted ruings of a croft here and there.
And so I found myself looking for the sacred in my surroundings instead of in churches. And perhaps that is as it should have been since this part of the world developed its own unique brand of Christianity - Celtic Christianity - which was grounded in our close relationship with the natural world around us - the streams and hills, the wind and stormy weather.
If Jesus had lived in Scotland, he would not have talked about the lilies of the field but rather the heather on the hillsides. The living water of which he spoke to the Samaritan woman would not have been water drawn from a well but rather water gushing in rivulets down a mountain. When Elijah found God in the stillness, here in Scotland, he would not have been standing at the entrance to a cave but rather he would have been sitting in the lush green grass in a stone hermit's cell surrounded by hills and silence.
And so I found the sacred in the wind and the rain. I found it in the sapphire color of the sea on Iona. I found it in the purple of the heather. I found it in the rocks on Iona, some of which are some of the oldest rocks on earth - 2 1/2 billion years old! John L. Patterson wrote this about Iona: "The rocks of Iona are little older than the ocean from which they rise. The Reverend Edward Craig Trenholme in The Story of Iona (1909) has written: ‘When our planet from a glowing mass of combustion like the sun, shriveled into a globe with a solid crust and the first oceans condensed in the hollows of its hot surface - then it was that the Archaean rocks, of which Iona and the Outer Hebrides consist, were formed on the sea bottom. They contain no fossils, for, as far as is known, no living creatures as yet existed in the desolate waste of waters or on the primeval land. They are hard, rugged and twisted, and in Iona as elsewhere marble had been developed by the vast heat and pressure they have undergone.'
When we were on Iona, a 12 year old from Australia in our group shared at our final reflection time when she had felt most alive that week. She told us it was when she was on top of a hill, by herself, dancing and feeling the wind that always blows on Iona on her face and whipping back her long hair. How could you not feel alive, she said, when the glory of God was so obviously all around you?
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