A Boat, Twelve Men, and an Island

In AD 563 a man left Ireland in a boat with twelve companions and landed on a small island off the west coast of what is now Scotland.

The island is Iona. It is about three miles long. It is not on the way to anywhere.

Our principal source for all of this is a Life of Columba written by Adomnán, who was abbot of Iona about a century later, sometime around AD 697 to 700. That is our best account and it is also a work of hagiography, which means it was written to honor a saint and is full of miracle stories, and a careful reader has to hold both of those facts at once.

Bede also mentions the founding, writing in the eighth century.

So: we have the event, we have a date, and we have a source that is a century removed and has a purpose. That is a normal situation in early medieval history and it is worth saying plainly rather than pretending to more certainty.

Now, the question people always ask about Columba is why he left, and here the record genuinely disagrees with itself.

The record does not agree about why he went

Adomnán says he sailed wishing to be a pilgrim for Christ. That is his stated reason, from our earliest full account.

A later tradition connects his departure to a bloody battle, and says that he left Ireland as a penance, or as a kind of exile imposed or self-imposed after a dispute in which men had died.

Historians differ. Some treat the later tradition as legend that accumulated around a famous figure. Others think it preserves something real that the earlier account, written to honor him, would have had reason to leave out.

I am not going to settle it, and this site will not pretend the record is tidier than it is. What is agreed is that he went, that it was a long way, and that he did not come back to live in Ireland.

You are not somewhere God cannot use. Genesis 12:1 has God telling a man to get out of his country and from his kindred and from his father's house, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that instruction in front of somebody who did not choose the leaving.

Here is the verse.

Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee.Genesis 12:1, King James Version

Three separations, listed in order of increasing intimacy. Country, then kindred, then the house you grew up in. The verse counts them out one at a time rather than saying leave home, and the effect of the list is that somebody is being taken seriously.

You have been given a verse that counts the separations one by one rather than summarizing them. Genesis 12:1 names country and kindred and father's house separately, and the same Spirit who put them in that order is the reason your leaving is not being flattened into one word.

Now what happened on Iona, because the practical facts are the encouraging part.

A monastery was established. It became a center of learning and of copying manuscripts. Missionaries went out from it into what is now Scotland and, later, from related foundations, into the north of England. Books were made there. Kings were buried there.

For centuries, one of the most consequential places in that part of the world was a three mile island that a man had reached in a small boat with twelve companions, having left home under circumstances the record cannot fully explain.

You have been put somewhere small that is not the same as somewhere finished. Genesis 12:1 sends a man to a land God had not yet even shown him, and it is His Spirit who is the reason an unfamiliar address is not a demotion.

There is one more thing about Iona I want to name, and it is about the weather.

It is exposed. The crossing is short but it is not always possible. There are days when nobody gets on or off that island.

Whatever else those men were, for a good part of every year they were stuck.

You are somewhere you cannot easily leave, and that was true of the place too. Genesis 12:1 sends a man out without telling him the destination, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the reason being unable to get away is not the same as being abandoned.

And the stuckness was not incidental to what happened there. A community that cannot disperse has to learn to live with itself. The copying of manuscripts, the ordered hours, the whole shape of what Iona became, belongs to people who could not simply go somewhere else when it got difficult.