Avdat

What I did last summer

I wrote up this little article about my Iona experience for the church newsletter.  No mention of vomit-filled shoes naturally, but you can't say everything in one little article!

            On June 6 I traveled to Scotland for ten days as part of a continuing education project sponsored by Columbia Theological Seminary.  I attended a conference on Celtic Christianity at the restored Abbey on the island of Iona, off the west coast of Scotland.

            Iona is an important site in the history of Scottish Christianity.  The Irish monk Columba came to Iona in 563 AD to establish a monastery.  Monks fanned out from there all over Scotland, converting its inhabitants to Christianity.  The monastery had its share of ups and downs.  It was plundered by the Vikings in the 9^th century, and rendered obsolete when Scotland became Protestant in the 16^th century.  But it has endured as a religious and historical pilgrimage site.

            In the 20^th century, George MacLeod, a Scottish Presbyterian minister, began a unique project.  He brought together seminary students and skilled tradesmen to restore the ruined abbey.  He wanted to bring the gospel and the church into closer contact with the problems of ordinary working class people.  He was also experimenting with new forms of Christian community.  Out of MacLeod’s experiment came the Iona Community, whose members live all over the world, devoting themselves to peace, social justice, and worship renewal.  Members are accountable to each other for the use of their time and money.  While the government now owns the abbey, the Iona Community is responsible for the worship services and seminars that are conducted there.

            In the week that I was there, I worshipped twice a day, attended seminars in which we read Irish and Scottish prayers and poems from the Middle Ages, went on a hike across Iona, visited the spooky and awesome island of Staffa, where Mendelssohn was inspired to write his Hebridean Overture, and hung out with people from all over the English-speaking world.  It was a great experience. 

            People in the Middle Ages lived a lot closer to nature than we do, for good and for ill.  More so for them than for us, the Creation was a realm which revealed God’s plan for redemption, but could also be a menacing place in which divine protection was needed.  We who labor on keyboards and not in fields can find a more holistic spirituality in the writings of the saints who’ve gone before us.  And, in an age in which nature may be bucking human attempts to keep it on a leash, we need the wisdom of our ancestors in faith whose use of the Creation was bridled by a reverent awe.

            Our stereotype of monasteries is that they are places where people go to flee from the problems of the everyday world.  But the monasteries that Irish monks established on Iona and elsewhere were on the front lines of mission. 

            In a book the Session recently read about healthy mainline congregations titled Christianity for the Rest of Us, one of the more curious details was that congregations that are growing in numbers and vitality tend to require a lot of potential members in terms of time spent in worship, Bible Study, prayer and volunteering, before they can join the church.

            What both examples teach us is that high-commitment Christian communities can have a higher impact on transforming society than low-commitment communities can.  In some sense, we do need to be a people set apart from the world, but only in order that we can better serve the world. 

            In the 21^st century we are still seeking new models of Christian community that can faithfully advance the cause of the gospel in the world.  Fortunately we have history to learn from, and the Holy Spirit to lead us into the future.

Traveling companion

I was in a gloomy mood. I'd just said goodbye at the train station to some new and lovely friends.  But the train station was in Glasgow, a few thousand miles away from home.  No family was there to greet me. 

At the time it'd seen like such a good idea:  round off the pilgrimage to Iona with a weekend of sightseeing.  And save some money in a hostel!  But I was unenthusiastic about bunking with a bunch of strangers.  What if my roommates were psychos?  Or more probable:  what if I awoke the next morning to find my shoes filled with a stranger's vomit?

I needed a travel companion.  And I found one in a Border's on Buchanan Street, Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island.  How clever to stick a British Isles travelogue in a bin close to the door through which many foreign tourists were sure to pass?  I was a sucker.  Having howled my way through The Mother Tongue and A Walk in the WoodsI grabbed it immediately, a precious gift of levity for my homesick heart.  And so, as President Bush made his valedictory tour of Great Britain, I on the same weekend made my maiden voyage through the streets of Glasgow, and, accompanied by Bryson, toured the streets of Dover, Oxford, and Edinburgh as well.

Bryson is an American who's lived, married and raised a family in Great Britain.  Before he and his family relocated to the States for a time, he decided to tour his adopted home and write about it.  He begins with not so fond memories of his arrival in the land, a cold, rainy night spent outdoors, and then some uncomfortable time in a B&B run by a Nurse Ratchet figure allegedly named Mrs. Smegma.  Misery loves company.  Thanks to Bryson's hilarious writing, I woke up in my hostel room in a much better mood.  Plus there was no vomit in my shoes.  Just the peaceful sound of snoring Aussies.

Bryson is good at making the minutiae of life fascinating and funny.  So he does with British place names and people names.  It's hard to decide which is funnier, Bryson's made-up locales, or some actual town names he reports.  It reminded me of a game our choir director played with us once.  She'd read three country music song titles, and we had to decide which one was fake.  Hint:  If the Phone Don't Ring Baby, It's Me is a real song.

Tea time, says Bryson, has made the British some of the kindest people in the world, apologetic to a fault, capable of taking extraordinary delight in simple pleasures.  Brits, says Bryson, suffer from an inferiority complex, but why should they?  They won the war they needed to win, dismantled their empire (peacefully, for the most part), and built in its place a social welfare system that's the envy of the world.  Their train system is efficient, comfortable and a real deal for the taxpayer.  Plus there's all this old stuff, everywhere!

But not as much as there used to be.  Bryson's description of any given town includes its lovely architecture and a seething critique of those modern glass and concrete monstrosities that have elbowed lovely Victorian, Georgian and older styles out of the way.  It became a game with me.  Which new adjective would Bryson hurl at the horrible post-war construction he took in on his road trip?  Criminal?  Obnoxious?  Hideous?  After reading Notes from a Small Island, one could be forgiven for concluding that post-war urban planners did more damage to Britain's architecture than the Luftwaffe.

Bryson can be wickedly funny in his descriptions of others, and himself.  Cheap but elegant might summarize his preferred accommodations.  I have close relatives who've hiked the entire Appalachian Trail, and they were greatly disappointed with Bryson's A Walk in the Woods because he only made it as far as Tennessee.  But after reading account after account of Bryson storming out of a B&B at the first sight of a little mildew in the sink, it's a real wonder he attempted such a feat in the first place!

Glasgow was one of the last stops on Bryson's trip, and his take was essentially the same as mine:

It has all this new-found prosperity and polish, but right at the very edge of things there is always this sense of grit and menace, which I find oddly exhilarating.  You can wander through the streets on a Friday night, as I did now, and never know when you turn a corner whether you are going to bump into a group of tony revelers in dinner jackets or a passel of idle young yobboes who might decide to fall on you and carve their initials in your forehead for purposes of passing amusement.  Gives the place a certain tang.

Fix the foolishness

I reach into my "They'll know we are Christians by our love" drawer and pull out... a palm frond!

Dozens of Greek and Armenian priests and worshippers exchanged blows at one of Christianity's holiest shrines on Orthodox Palm Sunday, and used palm fronds to pummel police who tried to break up the brawl.

The fight came amid growing rivalry over religious rights at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built over the site in Jerusalem where tradition says Jesus was buried and resurrected.

It erupted when Armenian clergy kicked out a Greek priest from their midst, pushed him to the ground and kicked him, according to witnesses.

When police intervened, some worshippers hit them with the palm fronds they were holding for the religious holiday. The Eastern Orthodox churches follow a different calendar from Western Christians and celebrate Easter next Sunday.

Two Armenian worshippers who attacked the Greek Orthodox clergy were briefly detained by Israeli police. Scores of Armenian supporters then protested outside the police station during the questioning of the two, beating drums and chanting.

The Holy Sepulcher is shared by several Christian denominations according to a centuries-old arrangement known as the "status quo."

Each denomination jealously guards its share of the basilica, and fights over rights at the church have intensified in recent years, particularly between the Armenians and Greeks.

Here's one of my favorite pictures of the Holy Sepulchre.  Our tour guide told us that in the mid-19th century, somebody put this ladder up to do some repair work, which was subsequently interrupted.  Then the Greeks, Copts, Armenians and other claimants to the church agreed that no part of the Church could be changed unless all agree to it.  So the ladder has remained there to this day, a small monument to Christian disunity. 

And perhaps it's the most valuable relic on the whole site!  After all, it is wooden.  How does a wooden ladder survive 150 years of exposure to the elements without some sort of divine intervention?

No monks exchanged body blows when we were there in May of 2006, but some in our group saw a fight between two tour guides.  Each was vying to get their respective groups closest to Station 12, the part of the Church which encloses Golgotha.  It was reported to me that one guide was shoving the old ladies in his group up to the railing. 

When I think about my visit to the Holy Sepulchre, and reads news stories like the one quoted above, I can't help but wonder if the cast of Clean House needs to make a road trip to Jerusalem.  Mark will probably want to start by getting rid of this chandelier.  It shouldn't be too much of a problem.  The Church boasts a rather roomy (by Old city standards) courtyard in which Trish can set up a Yard Sale.  Speaking of lighting, Matt will want to brighten up the dreary interior by installing some skylights in both domes.  Expensive? Yes.  But Trish will make a killing selling relics to the tourists.  And we'll leave it to Niecy to crack monks' heads together.