Andy James

wandering the web since 1997

Presbyterian minister in Atlanta.
Music lover.
Found beer in seminary.

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Iona

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Iona Abbey from the ferry

I spent much of the last week on the Isle of Iona off the west coast of Scotland, living and working and worshiping at Iona Abbey. When my friend Teri invited me last fall to join the trip she was planning with a group from the church she serves, I almost immediately decided to go along. I have heard about Iona from numerous friends, and we have used the resources produced by the Iona Community and the Wild Goose Resource Group numerous times at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone, so this trip was a long-awaited opportunity to experience this legendary place that has been an important part of my spiritual journey even before I actually journeyed there.

The trip and the place did not leave me wanting. The particular week we attended is known as “Wild Goose Week” because it is the time when members of the Wild Goose Resource Group attend and lead worship and other events. These special events were certainly a big draw for me, but in the end, the overall experience of living in community in this place was actually more formative.

Iona Abbey has a long history as a place of Christian faith and practice. Legend holds that Saint Columba arrived on Iona in 563, establishing a center of Christianity on the island that was used as a base for evangelism throughout Scotland. It is thought to be the place where the historic Book of Kells originated. After the Reformation era, the Abbey was abandoned, but it was reconstructed over the last 100 years and today serves as the spiritual home of the Iona Community, an ecumenical group devoted to justice, peace, and the integrity of creation.

the Toasting Trio

As a guest at the Abbey, I was expected to participate in the full life of the community there, joining in twice-daily worship services and assisting in various tasks necessary to provide for the daily life of guests and staff. I found this to be surprisingly fulfilling, with the worship services providing  much-needed spiritual nourishment for my time on the island and beyond. The work was even enjoyable, as I made some new friends in our shared daily tasks of preparing toast for breakfast!

The programs were also very helpful and enjoyable, with the highlight of most days being a “Wee Sing” with the inimitable John Bell. I learned a lot about making space for worship and did a good bit of thinking about how to revitalize and reinvigorate worship. Members of the Wild Goose Resource Group also led most of the worship during the week, and they brought their deep well of creativity and interest to the gathering.

nearing the Abbey as the pilgrimage comes to an end

One day also meant a full seven-mile pilgrimage around the island. Over 100 people made their way around the island, stopping at important and beautiful spots to pray and reflect on the journey. This was one of the most meaningful parts of the week, and I expect that I will reflect further on it in a future blog post.

My time on Iona was truly a wonderful one. I did not find the immediate and deep spiritual connection I expected, but over the week I developed a better link to the spirituality of this place. The long history of nearly 1500 years of Christianity in the very place where I lived and worked could not escape me, and over the week I felt this connection deepen all the more. It was a joy to join the countless saints who have gathered in this place over the centuries to worship and work for God’s deeper presence in the world, and I look forward to going back sooner rather than later!

You can browse through some of the many photos from this part of my journey in the gallery below.

The Old and The New

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I’ve always been a fan of new things. I’m often accused by family and friends of a preference to throw things out and replace them rather than getting them repaired, and their accusations are based in a good deal of truth.

modern sculpture amidst the ancient cloisters at Iona Abbey

All around Scotland, though, I’ve seen countless examples that might just change my mind. The old things that have survived here have an incredible beauty and usefulness that is noticeable and wonderful. Old castles and churches still stand after hundreds of years. Some foundations that date back well over one thousand years are still being used to support more recent construction.

The sense of history and place that results from this is incredible. Yesterday I worshiped in a church building that has stood in one way or another in this place for well over twelve hundred years. As we received bread and wine at communion, I felt strangely and wonderfully connected to countless saints of the centuries who have shared this feast so many times before in this very place.

the crossing and central worship area in St. Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh

However, what is even more amazing to me is the ways in which so many of the wonderful old places I have visited in Scotland have been adapted to fit changing needs and times. During the Reformation era, many of these churches were cleaned of their “popish” tendencies, with stained glass and icons removed and the buildings made far simpler. In more recent times, many of these buildings have been adapted once again to fit the changing needs and context of the church. In St. Giles’ Cathedral (the High Kirk of Edinburgh), the four “wings” of the church that once housed separate chapels now face the central area of the building where the communion table and pulpit are now housed. In the Abbey Church on Iona, the ruins of an ancient abbey have been reconstructed to house a modern transient monastic community that encourages an engaged spirituality with a center on this small, remote island and yet with a strong sense of presence in the everyday life of elsewhere. Even in the old castles at Edinburgh and Stirling, we saw evidence of how the castles changed over the centuries, first with changing tastes of individuals and generations and later with their repurposing as more modern military compounds.

Iona Abbey

I think I’ll leave my second visit to Scotland with a better sense of how space can be adapted and adjusted to meet these kinds of changing needs. I don’t think I’ll change my attitude toward the old substantially, as I suspect I’ll still prefer new things to the old. Still, maybe I can be less inclined to replace what can be repaired, out of a heightened awareness of the past and an attention to the limited resources that we have for the future. I think our culture can benefit from a bit more of this – a better sense of the importance of place, a stronger hope for repairing rather than replacing what is broken, and an attention for the future that builds on the best of where we have been and seeks only to make it stronger.

The Wonder of Nature

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I spent the past three days exploring the Highlands of Scotland with my friends Donald and Sheena of Portmahomack, Scotland. Their home was a wonderful base for several explorations of better-known places like Loch Ness and lesser-known places like Cromarty and Dornoch Firths.

Words really can’t describe all that we saw over the past few days. We saw several places of human-made beauty like Dunrobin Castle, a couple of places that make beautiful and wonderful things like Glenmorangie Distillery, and some towns like Cromarty and Inverness that are just wonderful examples of Scottish life at various points in the past and present.

However, the most breathtaking things of the past few days have been the beautiful natural scenes that have surrounded us every step of the way. Even the photos just don’t do them all justice – but I’ll share them here nonetheless in hopes that you can get a sense of what I’ve been seeing and doing.

Traveling Memories

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This is not my first trip to Scotland. A little over three years ago, my recently-retired friend Charles called me up one day. “Do you have a passport?” he asked. When I replied yes, he continued right away: “Do you want to go to Scotland?” I quickly learned that he wanted to go to Scotland about two or three weeks later to attend the wedding of a friend, and he felt that he needed someone to assist him along the way. Who can turn down a free trip to Scotland with a friend? So I spent a memorable week visiting Charles’ friends Donald and Sheena and attending their daughter Gillian’s wedding. (A pretty extensive photo gallery is already online.)

It was Charles’ last international trip in a lifetime of journeys to wonderful and special places. Not long after our return, Charles learned that he had ALS, often known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, and he died of it last summer. I had the deep honor and privilege of preaching at his memorial service in Queens last September.

Tonight, as I walked through Terminal 7 at JFK Airport to catch my flight to Reykjavik, I passed the gate where Charles and I spent a couple hours waiting for the flight to London that would put us on our way to Scotland. This was the first of many moments on this trip when I know that I will be thinking of Charles. I’ll spend my first four days in Scotland with Donald and Sheena, and I know we’ll be swapping stories and sharing memories of our friend. It will not be easy being on this trip without him, but I know that he would be enjoying every minute of it or at least be looking for a full report upon my return!

The last time I saw Charles in May of 2011, he and I presented a slideshow of pictures from our trip (and several of Charles’ previous trips) to Scotland at the retirement community in Dallas where he moved to be near his brother. While at that point Charles’ body was declining, his brain was sharp as ever. Sharing those memories and stories together was an incredible joy, in largest part because I know how much he loved that trip.

So as I make my way across the pond once again, I am grateful for the traveling memories along the way: for little reminders of my friend Charles and especially our time together in Scotland, for the joy of being back in a place that he so deeply loved and visiting people who knew him well, and for the privilege of making my own traveling memories in this place over the next twenty-five days that will surely go with me for a lifetime.

Why I Go to Church

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Being on sabbatical has already provided a space for me to ask some important questions about my life. What is my ongoing call to ministry, both in the congregation I continue to serve and beyond? What do I really do with all my time at “work”? How does my work impact my daily life and living?

the interior of St. Bart’s Church on Park Avenue in Manhattan, July 8, 2012

Most importantly, though, I’ve wondered a bit about why I go to church. I’ve now had two Sundays where I had no responsibilities to lead worship, and yet I still went to church. Some of my friends – in church and otherwise – were a bit astonished at this. They suggested that on my sabbatical I should actually try living like most of the world does, sleeping in, reading the Times, enjoying a favorite morning beverage in my pajamas at home, etc. While I might still try this out sometime in the eight Sundays that remain of my sabbatical, I think I’ll most likely end up in church every week.

Why, you might ask? Well, here are four good reasons.

  1. Repetition. There is something important about setting aside regular time to gather with a community – even an unfamiliar one – to sing praise, listen to God’s Word proclaimed, and spend time in prayer for God’s world. Sometimes even the most familiar words can speak in a new and different way to the experiences of the moment. All this repetition makes worship a very important part of my week, and something feels off if I miss it.
  2. Tradition/Habit. I’ve worshiped nearly every Sunday I can remember. In high school, in a time when my parents were not active in the church, I kept going. I can count on one hand the number of Sundays in college I was in town that I missed worship. For better or for worse, my life doesn’t feel the same when I’m not in a church for at least a little while on Sunday. Normally, “we’ve always done it that way” is a really awful reason t0 continue practices in the church, but in this case, I think it is a valid and reasonable way of thinking.
  3. Community. I grew up surrounded by a very personal orientation of faith, where the individual’s actions and perspective were incredibly important and participation in a community of belief and practice was not nearly as important. Over the years, though, I’ve come to believe that I can’t take this walk alone. There remain times when the faith of the community “bears me through the swelling current.” Worship reminds me that I do not walk this road alone, that I have companions on this journey whom I may or may not know, and that I can trust God to keep working and keep speaking beyond my understanding and even my comfort zone.
  4. Preaching. I’m a good Presbyterian, so this comes as no surprise. Wherever I worship, I need the Word to be proclaimed in faith, hope, and love. As I plan my worshiping communities this summer, I’m not beyond checking church websites to see who is preaching and what the text might be! Still, I trust that what I will hear is inspired by the Spirit and will open me to what I need to hear on a particular day. I found this very much to be true this past Sunday as I worshiped at St. Bart’s Church in Manhattan. Their current priest-in-charge (very similar to a designated pastor in the Presbyterian system) is also a native Mississippian, and his words about home resonated so well with me in my thinking about my home state and even my understanding of home in the Presbyterian Church (USA) after attending General Assembly last week. I couldn’t have asked for a better word in the midst of these times, and I was beyond grateful for it.

So over the course of these two months, I plan to keep up my practice of worship as best I can. There’s also the reality that I am doing reading and thinking about worship revitalization while on sabbatical, so experience worship in different styles and forms will be incredibly important all around. There will likely be a week or two where I can’t do this for practical reasons, but on the whole I plan to be quite the churchgoer for a New Yorker in July and August! Look for more on these things as the sabbatical progresses.