Iona Community, Scotland

Work and life are good here at the Iona Community.  Two of the season’s busiest weeks are over, Youth Festival and Community Week, and the Community’s two centers have returned to quiet but bustling normalcy.  A normal week here means about 90 guests staying in the Abbey and MacLeod Center (on average, a group from the UK, Canada, and North Carolina), and for me and Nellie, my fellow children’s worker, about seven sessions for children from Saturday through Thursday.

It took me a while to get into the groove of the children’s program here, because well, there wasn’t much of a groove to fall into.  Because the children’s worker positions are volunteer and for the summer season only, children’s workers must reinvent the wheel every summer and create the program when they arrive on the island.  Nellie and I are working on significant handover notes so that our successors have the resources to build on what we’ve done this summer (the first piece of common sense I’ve learned in the world of program development? Take notes, save your notes).

A few stumbles aside, I’m very thankful for having stepped into a position where I can have such control over programming for kids.  Iona has such a multilayered history and present that I’ve really enjoyed mapping out how to make the kids’ experience here site-specific.  I’ve also learned that doing so is easier said than done.  You think it comes naturally to run activities that are nourishing, educational, and adventuresome, especially somewhere like Iona, but now I recognize there’s a reason that people spend their lives researching exactly how to do it well…

But I’m learning.  I don’t have a teaching background, which I think would help me know how to communicate effectively with kids of so many different ages, but week by week I’m taking in what kinds of little structures and patterns enable kids and adults alike to learn and build something together, to feel close to where they are.

The sun has been setting earlier and earlier and the nights are darker, which means that I’m getting close to the end of my time here.  I leave on September 4th and will go back to Bryn Mawr on September 6^th, a week after classes start.  So far Iona has given me a series of burning orange sunsets and affirmation of my faith in a radical, liberation-driven Christianity.  By my conversations with guests and staff members I feel encouraged to continue exploring theology as a way to get people to chip away at racism and homophobia.  I feel encouraged by Iona’s liturgy, books left out on breakfast tables, the ritual of everyday, and the justice work and workers that surf in and out of the island’s centers like the tide.  So far I feel encouraged to have faith.

“Once, Jesus was talking to the Pharisees about spirituality, or was it economics?, and he used the analogy of a cup, saying ‘Did not God, who made the outside, also make the inside?’ (Luke 11:40).  Our spirituality is our profoundest motivation, those instincts, intuitions, longings and desires that move us, animate us, inspire us – literally, breathe through us…If you like, it’s the inner life of the cup.

But our spirituality is not just interiority.  It is also our choices and actions; it is where spirit is given flesh, where intention becomes action, where we practise what we preach.  Our spirituality shows up just as much in how we spend our money, our time, our abilities, as in how we say our prayers.  If you like, it’s how we use the cup…If you like, it’s whom we share the cup with.”

Kathy Galloway, former leader of the Iona Community, 2001

I arrived at the Iona Community three weeks ago Sunday and by now I’m already immersed in an entirely different orientation than I’m used to.  On Sundays through Fridays, minutes are posted near the volunteer housing area with a list of news headlines (which murderers are being pursed around Britain or which UN sanction is being trifled over).  But other than that, it’s our own world here.

Iona is many things to many different people.  Visitors in search of celtic crosses or a breezy walk pass through on historic tours or with their feet in the sand.  The weather is at times golden, at times green, and often gray.  Guests of the Iona Community, the ecumenical organization I’m volunteering with, propel themselves into community life for one week after groggy flights from around the world.  They stay at the Benedictine abbey where I eat or the 1960s-era MacLeod Center, where I sleep.  They wash dishes, clean toilets, worship, and learn alongside volunteers and resident staff members.  For those staying on the island for longer – volunteers who come for six weeks to six months and resident staff who stay for up to three years – Iona is the product of the regular and rich patterns of our days.  There is a morning service, lunch, dinner, an evening service, work, walks and seven cups of tea in between.  The guests come Saturday, there’s a ceilidh on Monday, a pilgrimage on Tuesday, football on Friday.

My pattern has been a mix of wonder, pain and growing in my three weeks here.  I have missed loved ones from home dearly, but have felt very welcomed into the ever-changing permuation of volunteers.  I have struggled with my reaction to being in a homogenously Christian environment, but have begun to make connections between religious life and the secular world I’m used to at home and at school.  I have been challenged by the task of designing a children’s program without the resources of a whole school or summer camp in hand, but have found joy in learning by way of the successes and failures that happen along the way.  

For me, all these moments have found their apex in the experience of the island itself.  When I am walking up the path worrying about a children’s activity gone wrong, I’ll encounter a sheep whose baah is hilarious and I’ll forget my anxiety.  Flinging my coat on my back coming out of the MacLeod Center, late for dinner at the abbey, the sun will be considering its descent over the nearby island of Mull.  It will coat the sky with perplexing purple and yellow shadows over the sea and I’ll feel amazed.  During my first week, while jet-lagged and still a little confused about where I was and why I was there, I climbed the tallest peak on the island in the early morning.  After sitting for a while, curled up against the morning wind, I was prepared for the climb back to ground and for the nine weeks to come.   I hope to take home with me these eyes to see the physical world around me and the ears to hear what it’s saying.

The island’s sweet variety of stones, wildflowers, and colorful sky is a lot to wrap your head around not because it’s grandiose but because it is subtle.  Yesterday I picked up one of many books lying around about the history of the island, published in 1920.  I found the author’s description of what it’s like to be here frighteningly apt.  He writes:

“On a clear summer day, and particularly when the wind is in the north the beauty is idyllic.  Soft cirrous clouds veil the blue vault of heaven.  Over the wide, white sands the sea glistens green as an emerald; farther out it is of vivid blue, barred with purple.  The granite cliffs of Mull glow rosy across the Sound, and the great mountains beyond cast their deep-blue shadow on the still waters.  There is a wealth of colour, not gorgeous, but exquisite, appealing less to the senses than to the spirit, and creating a sense of peace that is balm to the world-weary.  The pilgrim, the antiquarian, the artist: Iona casts her spell on all.” (Iona: A History of the Island with Descriptive Notes by F.M. McNeill)

The wind that pushes people to and from Iona is as strong as the gales that hit the old glass windows of the abbey during lunch.  I meet new guests each week and volunteers arrive and depart every Wednesday.  Such constant leaving and coming, community building and dispersing is perhaps what took me so long to get oriented at Iona and to know exactly what to write on this blog.  Time, light, and life here all are different from in my other world.  When I first arrived, soon after the summer equinox, the sun never fully set.  You could see it even in the wee hours of the morning as a blue glow in the western corner of the island.  The sheep were stone still, chewing and breathing impercepibly, sprinkled across the grass.  I feel grateful that I’m learning from them, and from the pattern of days in the community, how to be still.

Yesterday, Great Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron dealt with the frightening results of a report on the Bloody Sunday Killings in Northern Ireland by apologizing.  As I read about crowds celebrating the release of the report and Cameron’s statement, strings of comments commending him for his sincerity, and two books about a different public figure, the Salem witch judge from my last post, I feel awe at the difference simple, honest apologies can make in history.

Now, my dad’s in the public relations business.  For many years our lights were kept on by the tricky mechanisms by which companies and governments control their images.  That’s why I’m taken aback at how candid, how easy, and how effective Cameron’s statement seemed yesterday.  You very rarely hear anybody be as honest as to say “what happened should never, ever have happened”, but he did. He continued, “And for that, on behalf of the government — and indeed our country — I am deeply sorry.”  You don’t hear it often because it’s really hard to do.

We live in a world of tough justice and rampant suing, all of which will probably happen now because of the report that British killings of 17 protesters in Derry were unjustified.  But first Cameron’s apology allowed for a moment of rare emotional catharsis for Britain and I think that’s important.  The results didn’t get buried in a behemoth of cover-ups and vague answers, which would have made the unbearable 12 years it took for the report to complete an even larger band aid to pull off.  I am reminded of how difficult it is to begin processes of reconciliation, how very resistant people as well as governments are to admitting they were wrong after war, after genocide, after discrimination.  When bad things happen in relationships, in families, when mistakes happen or feelings are deeply hurt, it can feel nearly impossible to apologize like you mean it.

Richard Francis, author of Judge Sewall’s Apology obviously became very close to his research about the man who confessed in Old South Church that the 20 executions in the Salem witch trials were simply wrong.  He writes eloquently about the effect of Sewall’s apology in his introduction:

“For all of us, it’s difficult to say we’re sorry.  An apology means repudiating an aspect of our past selves; in that way, it’s a little like suicide.  And those in public life find it almost impossible ever to admit they have made mistakes and errors of judgment.  They fear doing so will suggest weakness and unreliability, a poor capacity for decision making, ultimately a fatal crack in the facade of leadership…But there is another way of looking at it.  Apology can be a creative act.  It can liberate both an individual and his or her society.  Apology frees you from the past and gives you access to the future.”

Judge Sewall’s Apology Richard Francis, HarperCollins 2005

I feel struck by Francis’s description of apology as “creative”, in the sense of it’s ability to give people, governments, or businesses the ability to create new bridges after others have been burned.  Often times to say we’re sorry is the only thing will save us, or anybody else.  But only if we act on it too.

There’s a wicked cool connection in my family history that has been glowing with relevance for me recently.

Way back in my line of great-great-grandmothers is one of the so-called Salem “witches”, hanged on Salem, Massachusetts’ Gallows Hill in 1692.  She’s been my default fun fact in icebreakers for years, and now I want to write my senior thesis about one of the judges who convicted her. And I happened to be in Salem this weekend.

I leave for Iona on June 24th but was visiting my aunt and uncle, their kids Eliza and Gus, and my good friends Kevin and John who are working in Boston. It’s another coincidence that my aunt and uncle who live in Salem aren’t actually related to my grandmother-witch, who comes from an apparently impudent Puritan strain on my mother’s side.

John, Kevin and I haven’t hung out significantly together since we were a trio eating vats of tomato soup and brainstorming screenplays in my kitchen when we were fifteen.  I had an awesome weekend seeing them, the whole of which included a cold and buggy beach walk, a crust punk party, my first legal beer (Urban Wheat Ale), and my uber-fascination with walking the streets of Boston and Salem, which are not only loci in my family history but also form a cross-section of events surrounding early American religion and race.

My ancestor-witch? Susannah Martin.  Her crimes, according to a book my uncle cracked open, “malefic” (re: devilish) behavior.  That is, afflicting people with bites, scratches, and swoons, appearing in the shape of an animal, etc.  One description of her trial appears in Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World.  Mather, the most influential figure in American Puritanism, doesn’t appear to have thought much of my great-great grandmother.  Of “Goody Martin” he wrote, “[she was] one of the most impudent, scurrilous, wicked Creatures in the World.”

Susannah was sixty-seven and a widow, living in Amesbury, Mass. and evidently bothering her neighbors there.   She was hanged in mid-July, 1692, less than a mile from where my aunt and uncle live in painfully cute yellow house…

Now here’s where my nerddom really  takes off.

Judge Samuel Sewall, a Boston  merchant, orthodox Puritan and  Harvard man, was the only magistrate  involved in the witch trials to publicly  apologize for the convictions.  In 1700,  eight years after the trials, he also  printed the first protest against slavery  in New England, one of the earliest anti-slavery essays printed on American shores.

I’m not interested in Sewall just because of my DNA, though that certainly makes early Boston compelling to me.  But after stumbling across Sewall’s essay, “The Selling of Joseph” last semester, I was reeling with questions about his notions of liberty, race and God.

Surprised by the early date of Judge Sewall’s emphatic plea, I realized that it is his hyper-devout Calvinism that leads him to his conclusion about slavery: that it is against God’s will because all people are sons and daughters of Adam, saved by the “last Adam” (Christ), and therefore have “equal Right unto Liberty” on earth.  While he shows signs of racial prejudice, Sewall reads the story of Jesus to be a story of political liberation.  Sewall also shows a penchant for prophecy, not unlike James Cone.  And he wasn’t just some nut.  Scholarship says that Sewall’s way of interpreting scripture was coherent with the most orthodox thinkers of the day.

So why did protests to slavery like Judge Sewall’s fall out of favor in only a few years, when instead the mindset represented by a slaveholder’s vehemently supremacist response become victorious in the mainstream?  How did Sewall’s piety compel him to issue such a powerful protest for the rights of black slaves to basic liberty, as it also did for him with regard to women’s and American Indian rights?

I don’t know yet.  But I do know that Sewall never read Locke (nor other Enlightenment philosophers), whose social contract would become the gospel for America’s decidedly deist founding fathers and documents seventy-six years after he printed his essay.  He read sermons and scriptures; he looked for signs in the weather and the sea of the end of the world.  He wasn’t a “modern man”, yet it took until the mid-eighteenth century for Americans to take moral arguments against slavery seriously.

Sewall was radically religious and also radically liberal.  He was a privileged, well-educated man yet his vision of the liberating Christ was deeply uncompromised and political.  This is why I wonder what liberation theology might be able to recover from his vision today. It’s essential to most liberation theologies (black, Latin American, queer, etc) that one take a view of God from the perspective of the oppressed.  While maintaining this key piece, how might those who are not oppressed, ones often in positions of political or economic power, feel the same prophetic urgency to their politics?

If Sewall’s God is white and Cone’s God is black, can Sam and James want the same things? If it’s essential to black theology to know the black God and essential to queer theology to know the queer God, how can someone who is black and not queer or queer and not black interpret the Gospel as the breaking down of all categories, all social restrictions and weights, without undermining the particularity of their own experience?

It’s all a difficult, amazing puzzle I’m just beginning to unravel.

Ancestor Susannah's memorial, cousin Gus's speeding blur

Salem's historic Common

this street is probably named after Samuel Sewall's son, or brother Stephen, clerk of the witch trial proceedings

When East Indies and China trade came in through the Salem Custom House in the late eighteenth century, the seaport city was as prosperous as Boston. (This is not my aunt's house, though it looks like it!)

Witch kitsch dominated Salem businesses for years, but now new, fashionable places like this cafe are sprouting

Ipswich, Mass

John in search of ticks

Crane Beach, Ipswich

today's Harvard. Sewall was elected president of the college but declined, though he was always passionate about Harvard's future.

Kevin contemplating public transportation

Old South Church, whose congregation was founded by dissenters from Boston's First Church in 1669. In 1697, Samuel Sewall stood in the original Old South building while the minister read his apology for the condemned sentences in the witch trials. This weekend, rainbow flags blew on the campanile for LGBTQ Pride Week.

John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats is a musician who has made carvings in my brain.  I recently found this video of him singing a song from his 2009 album, The Life of the World to Come.  Once a psychiatric nurse in California, here he looks like an assistant professor who’s found a piano in the English department basement.

Above all Darnielle must be a writer, because when people talk about Mountain Goats songs it’s often a vague exercise in numerology. There are so just so many.  Too many to count (though 525 in this database).  He strikes me as someone plucked out of a trajectory of everyday people of plain chins and T-shirts to write songs because he can’t not write them.  Poems on legal pads poking out of dashboards.  Poems scrambled onto receipts blown away by fans in convenience stores.

We’re not alike in any way.  But when I listen to John Darnielle sing I feel like we’re the same, in the way of sitting next to someone on a train platform in the painful tenderness of waiting.  He is rarely polished, and maybe I can relate to that because when I play guitar or piano or sing, I probably don’t look so good either.

So watch this video.  I hope that in the world to come, drenched as it will be with oil on the coasts, people will find Mountain Goats songs and listen to them on vintage CD players or tape decks.  It seems like a lot of songwriters are almost embarrassed about the virility of what they do.  They censor themselves, tiptoeing around the cavernous efficacy of words plus music.  John Darnielle isn’t embarrassed.

I don’t often hear people equating religion to music or language but I think they’re helpful comparisons.  More often than not, we hear different comparisons: religion v. science.  Myth v. fact.  Superstition v. proof.

But when I try to explain why despite every problem religion has caused I care about it, I’ve found that first I have to make it clear that what I’m not talking about is not some opposite of modern science.  In The Case for God, Karen Armstrong’s project is to explain to a skeptical public how “belief” and “faith” went through a transformation of meaning since the 1500s.  As Descartes and Locke became the principal gods of metaphysics, religion became a counter-narrative that increasingly butted heads with scientific claims about nature.  As “what you see is what you get” became the key to advanced science and industrialism, faith in a sacred reality became faith in fiction.  Belief in an unprovable, infinite love of God became belief in myth.

That’s why I work against the grain of hundreds of years when I say to friends that I like to study religion as a language instead of religion as a fact.  Portuguese or Igbo are not correct or incorrect, music is not proved or unproved.  Instead of psychological terms to explain that we feel happy, we sing.  Notes and adjectives are the finite things with which we can express what feels endlessly complicated inside.  They’re symbols that you use, not that you defend.

Of course, just like they argue about the meaning of words, people argue about the meaning of religious symbols.  While saying “blue” or “love” may express a general universal, there are always particulars to work out.  And unfortunately in religion, the imposition of one interpretation over another or one religion over another has been dangerous and even deadly.

So why the specificity?  Why for some people are Jesus, Moses, Esther or the Prophet Muhammad more useful ways of framing their lives than secular self-help books?  What’s the value of plot points, mythos instead of logos, in the modern world?

Stephen Crites, formerly a professor at Wesleyan, believes mythos matters because experience happens to us through narrative.  When he says that the “formal quality of experience through time is inherently narrative” he means that the way we act out our lives, like musicians blowing through holes or painters striking brushes to a canvas, is through storytelling.  It’s impossible to describe what anything means to us without telling a story, without choosing a beginning, middle, end, and a line, a melody that runs through it all.  Physicists and biologist have to describe what happened in an experiment and what it means with narrative.  Infinity is not our language.  As finite beings we speak in finite terms.  Without narrative we swim without direction, lost in a slough of a thousand meanings.

Crites claims that narrative can even function to create our consciousness, rather than just to describe it.  That’s why he says people in traditional folk cultures lived “in” their sacred stories.  They were not myths but dwelling-places, so essential to experience that “men’s sense and self and world is created through them”.  Crites distinguishes a sacred story as a story you live instead of a story you tell.  A writer may spin a world of fantasy and characters, but people’s ritual reenactment of sacred stories takes place in their own world – the stories live in their own bodies.

At Bryn Mawr, freshmen go through a sequence of initiation traditions that to outsiders seem totally inane.  But for many Bryn Mawr students, from beginning to end the traditions formulate their college experience.  In the Roman Empire mystery cults initiated people into stories that they would live, ways of framing their lives, as an alternative to state-standardized religion.  In God of the Oppressed, James Cones writes that when people in the black church sing, preach, and tell stories, they are talking about another reality, a reality “so high you can’t get over him, so low you can’t get under him, so wide you can’t get around him.”

Sacred stories are different from science.  They function on different planes.  We’re people who need meaning as much as we need proof.  Religion, although not the only way, is a language for expressing it.

Current Location: Wild Rose, Wisconsin

Wild Rose

Since my last post, my girlfriend Riki and I drove more than a thousand miles across the country, activists challenged the Israeli flotilla surrounding Gaza, and my visa for Scotland got approved.

It’s certainly bizarre how time and space shrinks when you’re living in the woods.  My family’s lake house in Wisconsin is probably the one place where I feel entirely at home.  When we arrived, after two days in Riki’s Honda station wagon on the way from York, PA, I walked out onto the dock and felt choked up when I saw steam rising from the lake after the recent rain.

For the past two days we have slept and read and chatted with my dad and sister, enjoying the smells of the old cabin my great-grandfather built and that has become a ritual vacation spot for my father’s family of seven kids.  It’s surreal to be here without the activity of fourteen cousins, twelve uncles and aunts, and an indefinite number of dogs, but because I’ve come to Gilbert Lake for a week or two every year of my life, being in Wisconsin always feels right.

Internet access is spotty here and the only small, old television that used to be housed in the cottage has been replaced by a few iron knickknacks.  I am temporarily ridden of my addiction to checking the news.  But in my news, I’ve finally received word that my UK visa was approved, and it’s already in the mail.  That means I’m officially, certifiably, going to be spending the summer at Iona.

In the news of the world, I’m afraid for war in Gaza, and the New York Times tells me that Pope Benedict looked frighteningly glib while leaders in Cyprus launched a “furious broadside” against Turkey on Friday.  It seems trifling, when facing the onset of collapsing foreign relations, when bills cross the Senate floor daily, to pause and think about reframing historical narrative.

But I am deeply thankful to the Internet (and the power of Google’s news alerts), because the web director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture somehow read my last post.  He shared it with his staff and the museum’s founding director.  Framing our lives within contexts, within contexts that allow everyone to have voice, changes things.  It’s not as hot-botton or instantaneous as a ticker on CNN, but maybe it matters because our lives aren’t at as fast as that either.  We go to a museum, we go to class, to work, leaves change, snow comes, a birthday, a dog dies, we read an email, an article, a blog.

Riki and I leave from Wisconsin on Tuesday, after we’ve swum, tire-swung, and played languorous games of mancala on the porch.  I’m reading Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides and Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God.  She’s reading Lolita.  We made chicken kebabs and my sister made angel food cake.  Tuesday will be my 21st birthday.  It’s nice when things happen this slowly.

I was at the helm of the Bi-College News this semester, so I decided to ease off on courses.  I took Latin, creative writing, and an independent study with Dave Dawson at Haverford.  My semester visiting Professor Dawson’s office with readings in hand was by far one of the best academic experiences I’ve had in college.

I went in with ambitious goals: to decode ways in which the Reformation and Enlightenment contributed to modernity and American history.  Luckily, I had a few other guiding points to narrow things down.

There was a day that haunted me in a class I had taken a year before with Tracey Hucks, Varieties of African American Religious Experience.  Among many other powerful moments in her classroom, this particular one was when Professor Hucks read from White Over Black, Winthrop Jordan’s paradigm book about the history of race in America.  The section was about English perceptions of blackness, not from during the height of the transatlantic slave trade but from before, the time leading to Francis Bacon, Elizabeth I, and pilgrims en route to America.

“Long before they found that some men were black, Englishmen found in the idea of blackness a way of expressing some of their most ingrained values.  No other color except white conveyed so much emotional impact.  As described by the Oxford English Dictionary, the meaning of black before the sixteenth century included, ‘Deeply stained with dirt; soiled, dirty, foul…Indicating disgrace, censure, liability to punishment, etc.’…White and black connoted purity and filthiness, virginity and sin, virtue and baseness, beauty and ugliness, beneficence and evil, God and the devil.” (White Over Black, pg. 7)

For English Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and planters in the southeast, strong cultural and literary references to blackness were alive and in place so that slave-trading and slave-holding could become institutions protected by legal and political authority.  Before the Mayflower, the European mind was already subject to ideas about color that would lead to the proliferation of slavery in the New World, and for religious and scientific stories alike to justify its persistence.

In a class a year later, Blacks and Jews in America, we were talking about how on the National Mall there is an American Indian museum, the nearby Holocaust museum, a tiny African Art museum, but no African American museum.  I spoke without knowing exactly what I was going to say, stringing together conclusions I had scrawled in my notebook: “I don’t believe that white America would allow an African American museum to be located on the Mall.  Letting blacks tell their story of America would overthrow the narrative structures on which America was built and continues to exist.”

I remember the room fell silent, and overall, people looked uncomfortable and grim.  I felt uncomfortable too.  I’m white, after all.  I, and my family, have benefited from the exclusion of black Americans from this country’s story and economy since our Massachusetts Puritan ancestors to my mother’s childhood in Birmingham, Alabama.  But as someone who believes very strongly in the power of stories and public education to change politics, and also as someone who has a growing sense of religious faith, I felt it was very important that I face the truth of what I was realizing.

Moments like this have rechartered the course of my academic interests from propositions about reason and free will to the experience of being in America and the world today.  Race and inequality is something we live daily, something about our bodies as well as our minds.  They are realities that are political, economic, and as I’ve learned from reading James Cone and other liberation theologians, transcendent.

Little did we in the Blacks and Jews class know that there will indeed be an African American museum on the National Mall (or that President Bush was the one who signed it into being).  The National Museum of African American History and Culture, the newest Smithsonian museum in Washington, is scheduled to break ground in 2012 and be ready for visitors in 2015.  Check out what they’re planning.

The museum will play a huge, exciting role in exactly what I feared couldn’t happen – a significant change of course in the way we tell the American story – right on the Mall.

In my studies with Professor Dawson, one of my primary concerns was to decipher what ideals lay at the heart of the European Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the founding of America.  Which ideas actually created, rather than demolished, the categories by which people were and are excluded from the American dream? It’s not the kind of thing you can answer in a semester, or in a summer.  But I think figuring it out is important.  White Americans must be politically and culturally ready for what it means to take black American narratives seriously.  White Americans must be ready to come to terms with the assumptions in our own history that permitted slavery, Jim Crow, and that continue to allow for shocking statistics of inequality based on race.  History books need to change.  The education gap needs to change.  We must understand that giving African American history and culture the place (and funding) it deserves is central to understanding ourselves as Americans, because as the founding director of the NMAAHC Lonnie Bunch says, we are all shaped “by this story, by this culture, by this history.” And if we change the narrative, it will help change our politics.

"a lie is not a shelter" Lorna Simpson, 1989 (part of NMAAHC collection)

design for the NMAAHC

The Iona Community, located in a distant, maritime corner of Scotland, is still a mental image for me.  I even haven’t heard back from the UK General Consulate, Los Angeles about my visa to spend the summer there.  After checking a couple iffy boxes wrong online, I’m hoping everything will work out…

But crossing my fingers, I’ll begin with the image.

The island of Iona is 1 mile wide and 3.5 miles long. Like the rest of Scotland’s island-speckled western periphery, Iona is made of Lewisian rocks, Europe’s oldest (named after the Isle of Lewis, where the northernmost point is about as north as you can get before you hit names like “Wick”, “Tain”, and “Tongue”).

My “Moon” guidebook to Scotland says there are four affordable hostels on Iona and a good bike hire.  But what drew me to it was a different, oft-quoted description.  George MacLeod, the founder of the Iona Community, called Iona a “thin place”, with only “a tissue paper separating heaven and earth.”

According to another George, French philosopher Georges Bataille, religion is the search for a lost intimacy.  However you think about that loss, whether it correlates with something deeply metaphorical or something real and historical, people are always searching for places like Iona where they hear that the veil between the mundane and the amazing is a little bit easier to see through.  We thumb through used CD’s searching for songs that will make us forgetful and silent like Bataille’s “water in water”, propelled from the world of clocks and emails into ecstasy.  We search for huge deserts, underwater chasms, abandoned quarries, swaths of color, prolonged notes on violins, and shots from Hubble to find thin places and thin moments, before falling back to earth.  I’m a religion major because studying a search like this one is deeply exciting at all times.

I am intrigued by the Iona Community’s quest to, in their own words, close the gap between “work and worship” by fostering community along with social justice work – uniting a busy, active life with intimacy like water in water.  In the volunteering FAQ’s I read that life at Iona, while inspired by the natural beauty of the island, is not an ascetic one.  Informed by Celtic Christianity’s view of work in the world as a form of praising God (the mindset that would inspire monks living on or near Iona in the 800s to spend hours crunched over the Book of Kells), the Iona Community proclaims that working for economic justice, the end of racism, the integrity of the environment, and equality for LGBTQ people is to “live out the Gospel in today’s world.”

Here begins my question and my journey for the summer.  How, when especially in America we are so accustomed to religion being the enemy of progressive causes, can a prophetic vision of time and space lead to a political vision of equality here and now? How in a pluralistic world in which there is a such danger that comes from a single story, can there be any power behind sacred stories? And how do we talk about them?

Assuming that my visa is in order, I’ll be thrilled to find out.

St. Columba's Bay on Iona

Haverford Religion major Margaret Ernst BMC ’11 will be working at the Iona Community, an ecumenical organization in the Inner Hebrides, Scotland. The community is located on Iona, where the Irish monk Columba introduced Christianity to Scotland in the 500s and which was central to Celtic spirituality before then. Today the Iona Community engages in work for peace, social justice, and the renewal of worship. She will be helping lead the community’s children’s program from June 25th to September 4th.