By John Bloom

Iona is a chilly, barren, salty, wind-whipped little island off the coast of western Scotland that seems almost entirely inhabited by the ghosts of madmen—first Druids, then Irish monks, then Viking murderers, then monks again and, for 300 years, nuns as well, although most of the nuns seem to have vanished without a trace. Even though the marble quarry has been abandoned for a hundred years, and there’s not much life left in the crofting or fishing trades to speak of, there are 90 people who still live on the island, most of them engaged in catering to the many pilgrims who come on day trips to poke around among the ruins.

I’m not big on sacred places—dirt is dirt to me, and I’m the first to bolt from any tour involving a cathedral or a monastery (“See that sidewalk café over there? I’ll be the one with the double espresso—you guys have a ball with the lecture on the transept fresco”)—but my visit to Iona a couple of decades ago remains vivid in the memory, partly because it was just so deserted and exposed, like the very end of the earth, like no one could have lived there, ever, even for a day, and yet they did. Kings from three nations were buried there—but here’s the best part about that: no one knows where on the island the kings were buried.

Part of the reason Iona makes such an impression is that, to get there, you have to take a ferry from the coastal town of Oban—and it’s not a luxury ferry, it’s the kind that creaks and shudders and rolls with the waves—and then you take a long bus ride across the Isle of Mull (if he’s in the mood, the bus driver might point out the largest sheep ranch on the island, owned by the band Genesis—probably no longer true, although they did have a reunion tour last year), and then you take an even smaller ferry from the western end of Mull to Iona, and this ferry is more like being in a bass boat in the middle of a hurricane, with salt spray stinging your eyes and soaking into your clothes.

After being beaten up by the trip over, the first thing that strikes you about the island is the silence. Very few places on the earth are silent. But Iona is a true derelict, so neglected, so unpreserved, that it lives on only in the cultural memory—most traces of actual habitation were long since blown away by the unrelenting elements. All you hear is the wind sawing and wheezing, so omnipresent that a conversation ten paces away is blotted out entirely. The group I was with—about 12 of us from the bass boat—included several who crossed themselves as soon as they touched land, so I assumed they were Catholic, even though the Anglicans, the Presbyterians, and for that matter the pagans would all have equal claims on the space.

For the past 1400 years Iona has been most famous as the place Columba landed when he came from Ireland, bringing Christianity to Scotland. I have no idea why this moment is so transcendent to so many people, but there’s nothing left of Columba’s monastic settlement. Most of the famous Celtic crosses on the island date from much later, and they can’t even get an accurate date for the abbey church—the centerpiece of the old buildings—because it’s been rebuilt so many times after being destroyed by war or weather or the wandering away of its patrons.

All of these memories were summoned up by Iona: A Pilgrim’s Guide [1] by Peter W. Millar, a slender little volume from 1997 that was just updated and reissued by Canterbury Press so that the many tourists to the island—I get the impression there are more today than when I was there—will have a sense of what might have happened near the patches of earth they’re standing on. Millar is a Church of Scotland minister who was formerly the warden of Iona Abbey and now lives in Edinburgh, and he has an obvious affection for the place, which he calls “a place of holiness and healing ... a place where all may feel at home and accepted in God’s love.” I think what he’s suggesting is that Iona a sort of sanctuary island, although, as I said, my own experience of it was not holiness or healing but desolation.

At any rate, the book is kind of New Agey, peppered with quotations from Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, traditional Kenyan prayers, Gaelic blessings, Russian proverbs, Sojourner Truth, Yoruba poets from West Africa, the usual sprinkling of Celtic sayings, Biblical citations, and even the wisdom of a few Anglican divines, not to mention a prayer from “Oszaki, a Japanese leprosy patient”—well, you get the idea, indicating to me that at some point Iona went from being a haunted ruin to a place where the organizers of Burning Man could be showing up any day now. The island has been marked off into 16 separate “sites,” and once a week during the warmer months—although there’s no such thing as a warm month by stateside standards—there’s an official five-and-a-half-hour pilgrimage walk, and at each of the 16 stations there is “a brief reflection and prayer, and sometimes silence or songs.”

The journey ends at St. Oran’s Chapel, the oldest structure on the island, which, like almost everything else on Iona, can’t be accurately identified as to purpose or original use. The best guess is that it was built in the 1100s as a tomb for Clan Macdonald, although it apparently became a chapel, an oratory, and as late as 1957 simply a roofless pile of bricks. It’s assumed, however, that it sits in a graveyard. All of Iona is a graveyard. Let’s hope that the 90 hardy Ionians choose, in their efforts to give the increasing number of pilgrims something to look at or study or talk about, to offer them the island itself, empty and unforgiving and nurturing of nothing but that soughing omnipresent wind, which, after all, we know to be Spirit.