TRINITY · 9 JUNE ◆ Celtic Saint
Saint Columba of Iona
Abbot, Confessor & Apostle of Scotland · c. 521–597
Colm Cille — KOLM KILL-ya · Uí Néill — ee NAYL · Clonard — klon-ARD · Finnian — FIN-ee-an · Cúl Dreimhne — KOOL DREV-nya · Diarmait — DEER-mid · Adomnán — AD-om-nawn · Brude — BROO-day
O God, who didst turn the exile of thy servant Columba into a mission for the nations, and didst make of his penance a gift to the world; Grant that we may never despair of what our failures may become in thy hands, but may offer even our worst acts back to thee, trusting that thou art able to bring forth from them a harvest beyond all our imagining; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Columba was born into the Uí Néill (ee NAYL), the royal dynasty of Ireland, and could have been a king. He chose instead the monastic life, trained at the great school of Clonard (klon-ARD) under Finnian (FIN-ee-an), was ordained a priest, and founded numerous monasteries across Ireland before the event that changed everything. His teacher Finnian of Moville had brought back from Rome a copy of the Psalter — a new translation, perhaps Jerome’s — and Columba, with the scholar’s passion that burned in him all his life, secretly copied it by night without permission. When Finnian discovered what had been done and demanded the copy, Columba refused. The dispute went to the High King Diarmait (DEER-mid), who gave judgment in the famous words: To every cow her calf, and to every book its copy. The copy belonged to Finnian. Columba, furious, appealed to his royal kin, and the result was the Battle of Cúl Dreimhne (KOOL DREV-nya) in 561, in which three thousand men died. Over a copied manuscript. The blood of those three thousand men lay on Columba’s conscience for the rest of his life, and it was for them — as penance, as restitution, as the only adequate response he could make — that he left Ireland in 563, vowing never to return while he could still see its shores, and sailed west into the Atlantic with twelve companions until he found an island from which Ireland was invisible. That island was Iona.
The Celtic tradition called this kind of exile peregrinatio (peh-reh-GREE-nah-tee-oh) — the white martyrdom, the giving up of homeland and kin and the certainties of the familiar world as a form of total self-offering to God. The red martyrs gave their blood; the white martyrs gave their place in the world, which is sometimes harder. Columba did not choose Iona because it was beautiful or strategically placed, though it was both. He chose it because it was far enough from Ireland that the pain of exile would be real and continuous. The man who had caused a battle over a book now made of his love for books the engine of his apostolate: the scriptorium at Iona became one of the great manuscript centres of the early medieval world, and the tradition of sacred calligraphy that Columba founded ran, through his community and its daughter houses, all the way to the Book of Kells — perhaps the most extraordinary work of Christian art ever produced in the British Isles. He could not keep his hands from the page. He was still copying when he died.
From Iona he converted the northern Picts. The encounter with the Pictish king Brude (BROO-day) at his fortress near Inverness is one of the set pieces of early Celtic hagiography: the gates shut against him, Columba making the sign of the cross, the gates flying open of their own accord, the king receiving him in peace. Adomnán’s (AD-om-nawn) account in the Life of Columba — written a century after his death and drawing on oral traditions of extraordinary richness — presents a man of commanding physical presence and volcanic spiritual authority, whose miracles are almost incidental to the impression he made simply by being in a room. He prophesied, he healed, he drove out demons, he calmed storms, and he wrote verses of such beauty that fragments of his Irish poetry survive to this day. He governed Iona with the authority of an abbot and the instinct of a prince, and the tension between those two vocations never entirely resolved itself. He remained, to the end, a man of formidable and barely disciplined energy in whom grace was doing something immense and costly and not yet finished.
He died on Iona on 9 June 597 — the same year, as providence would have it, that Augustine of Canterbury landed on the shores of Kent. The two missions that would together make the English Church began in the same year from opposite ends of the island: Augustine from Rome through the south, the tradition of Columba from Iona through the north. They met, in tension and in fruitfulness, at the Synod of Whitby in 664, sixty-seven years after both men died. Columba never knew England. But every figure in the Northumbrian series flows from him: Aidan was his community’s gift to Oswald; Cuthbert was formed by Aidan; Hild was formed by Aidan; Bede learned from the tradition they all transmitted. Columba is the headwater of the river whose tributaries we have been tracing through this whole series. He is the giant in whose shadow all the others stand, and he became a giant by sailing away from everything he had ruined, in a small boat, into the Atlantic, to begin again. It is the most Christian thing about him: that the catastrophe was also the commission.
O Almighty God, who didst call thy servant Columba to leave his native land and carry the light of thy Gospel to the peoples of Scotland and the North; Grant that thy Church may never lack such fearless pilgrims, who count all things loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ, and who make of their very failures the foundation of thy glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.