Columba sails to Iona
Irish monk plants a monastery on a Scottish island
Columba is an Irish nobleman, a scholar, a monk, and apparently a man with a considerable temper. Around 560 AD he is involved in a dispute over a copy of a manuscript that escalates into a battle in which hundreds are killed. The details are complicated and partly legendary, but the outcome is clear: Columba leaves Ireland.
He leaves under conditions that some accounts describe as penitential exile — sentenced to win as many souls for Christ as lives were lost in the battle. He sails north with twelve companions, looking for an island from which Ireland cannot be seen.
He finds it: Iona, a small island off the southwest coast of what is now Scotland, three miles long and one mile wide, the westernmost point of the world as the Irish knew it. He can look out from its western shore and see nothing but ocean.
He builds a monastery.
Iona becomes one of the most important centers of Christian mission in the early medieval world. From Iona, Columba and his monks evangelize the Picts — the people of northern Scotland. From Iona, Aidan will be sent to Northumbria in 635 AD to plant the monastery at Lindisfarne that will evangelize northern England.
Columba spends thirty-four years on the island. He is found dead in the chapel on June 9, 597 AD — the same year Augustine lands in Kent, at the opposite end of Britain, sent by Gregory from Rome.
The island he loved is still a place of pilgrimage.
“In Iona of my heart, Iona of my love, instead of monks' voices shall be lowing of cattle; but ere the world come to an end, Iona shall be as it was.”
— Columba, attributed prophecy, c. 6th century
“Now the LORD said to Abram, Get out of your country, and from your relatives, and from your father's house, to the land that I will show you.”
Columba left Ireland looking for a place where he could not see it. He was not escaping his responsibility — he was removing himself from the immediate context of his failure, in order to serve somewhere that his history could not follow him.
Sometimes the most faithful thing we can do after failure is to go where we cannot see what we have broken — not to forget it, but to let the work of repair happen in a different place, with different people, with the full weight of what we owe pressing us into greater dedication.
Columba went to the edge of the world and built something that is still standing.
What might be possible in a different place, with different people, if you brought the full weight of who you are now — including what your failure has made you — rather than the person you were before it?