Iona: The Tucked-Away

One cannot get to Iona by happen-stance; it requires intention and patience. One must fly to Glasgow, Scotland, an interesting and rough-shaggy place in its own rite. I found Glasgow (pictured to the left) to be eerily similar to Edinburgh, but with more warnings of "don't cut through the park (by the - stunningly beautiful! - university) at night", and more...nitty-gritty realness. After that 13+ hour flight (for those of us coming from the West Coast of America), you must take a ten or so minute nervous-feeling bus ride (could just be that I'm STILL not used to the 'wrong' side of the road) to a train station where you must hop a train to Oban (pictured in a previous entry), being selective of which train car you park it for the 3 hour journey up the northern coast of Scotland; the first two cars continue to Oban and the last 4 or so split off and go to another Scottish city further inland. The journey is beautiful, taking you through sighing hills of green, thrashing trees of strength and beauty like Switzerland (with more rain). Once in Oban, you'll find the 45 minute ferry ride to the Island of Mull a rather peaceable relief from the churning of train tracks, only to be met with yet another arduous albeit scenic toss-and-jolt: the bus ride across the Island of Mull is an hour long on a narrow-even-for-a-single-lane road with passing" sections" (big enough only for cars - not buses - to pull into). The pictures are abundant for the taking, though, and the windows even created some cool glare into the shots. It was on this ride across Mull to Iona that I wrote a poem called "Beauty"; I was bold enough (apparently) to share it during "circle time" with the group of 8 wonderful women I had the privilege of sharing this past 9 days with. After my reading of it, three approached me and asked if I would read it again so they could write it down! (I started to cry).
Anyway, after the Mull bus, you take a short (10 minute) ferry across the Sound of Iona to the Island of Iona. You'll see the Iona Abbey up to the right, small crofts, shops and cute houses lining the (west) coast, and the ruins of the Nunnery more centered, as the rocking ferry slides into its dock to let you off to begin your at-least-one-mile trek to wherever you're staying. Only some locals are allowed to have cars on the island (and even then, the permits are hard to obtain) because the 150 (11 of them children) inhabitants on this 3-mile-by-1-mile island understand the delicate and, these days somewhat precarious balance their "thin" (in terms of the "already-not-yet" veil between divine and earthen) place is in. Here it is; the place of longing. The place I'd set my heart out for nearly 8 months ago, the place that sparked this summer's trip: Iona.

"Not all of my books are wet because God is good"

I don't have much time here because the internet is a pound per 20 minutes and I feel ridiculous having to pay to use my own computer (plus, I've got a lot of journaling to do), but I did want to quickly update. The Hebberman's dropped me off at a train station in Stirling and I caught a train to Glasgow where I had to switch to get to Oban (which means "little bay" in Gaelic), where I'll be staying at a hostel overnight with the women from SPU. At the Glasgow Queen Street Station, I met up with my fellow pilgrims from SPU! Their plane was delayed in Philly because of a huge storm and ALL of their packs where soaked clean through (so the room in our hostel has become one big drying rack). Oban is an incredibly beautiful Scottish-with-a-twist-of-Irish town on the west coast of Scotland; the first picture of Oban from a tower on a hill looking southwest, and the other is Oban from that same tower looking east.
The train ride from Stirling to Glasgow was 45 minutes, and the train ride from Glasgow to Oban was about 3 hours. Tomorrow, it will take about a day (two ferries, a bus ride and a mile walk) to get to Iona. It feels something like coming home to be with these people who I retreated with on Whidbey Island in April...probably because this is the journey that started this whole summer trip, and it is the trip that brings my summer adventures to a close. It is thrilling, nostalgic, exciting, painful, different and beautiful to be with these people. In some ways I feel very different around them - not only the "I'm always the different one feeling", but also the "I'm different than the last time I saw them because I am so much more....myself.
It breaks my heart with the goodness of God to think that I am actually going to Iona - the place, the trip, the pilgrimage that was a year ago, not yet heard of, 6 months ago, an application and, upon acceptance, a deeply-longed for dream. Words about God are so much more real to me now - words like "God loves you," and "God hears you" and "God will take you home." Words that we often throw around in Christian settings but...wow. As one of my good friends said, "Until you KNOW God is good, everything else is bullshit." I would add, "Until you know God is REAL, everything else is a lie." Thank you Lord Jesus for this wonderful water to my soul.
Ok, I'm not sure when the next time I'll have internet is...it may not be till I'm back in Seattle.