I have been to Farne Island, off the coast of Northumberland, in very heavy rain. Leaning over the cliff behind St Cuthbert’s chapel the smell of fish was overpowering; there must have been at least fifty cormorants perched up and down the cliff below. The island’s desolation is beautiful, even in the rain, even with the cormorants.
It rained on Iona too, but not on the evening we arrived. We landed in perfect weather, the sea silkily blue and quiet, the sky clear and the air as sweet and soft as we remembered it. It was in the morning that it rained. We set off all the same to find the hermit’s cell, marked as such on the map. The kind young man in the shop had suggested that we should go round the hill, because it was less likely that we would get lost. The hill was steep and boggy, he said, and there was no path. If we went round we could walk on the flat ground beside the sea before turning up into the rocks. We might get lost there too, but it was easier walking.
Following his directions we came to the white shell beaches of the Bay at the Back of the Ocean, where there were oyster-catchers, a single sandpiper, and a few eider ducks sitting motionless on the glassy sea. Past the first rocky outcrop we turned inland and crossed the uneven sheep-grazed turf towards the higher ridges. The rain had turned into a gentle drizzle. The rocks receded before us, repetitive shapes of grey in the still grey air whose soft touch was damp on our faces. Here a tiny stream, there a patch of swamp, with bog cotton growing in it and sea pinks at the edge. We climbed, the sea behind us. A solitary walker said, yes, she had been to the hermit’s cell once, it was over there somewhere, beyond the next ridge, or the one after that, a little to the left perhaps, and higher up. We began to flag, separated to widen the search, lost each other, added our faint cries to the crying sheep, despaired.
I sat on a tussock and two minuscule rock pipit chicks floundered helplessly in a ditch at my feet. Removing myself hurriedly to a nearby rock, I watched the parent bird, beak full of food, hopping and chirping a foot or so above them, failing to find them. The other parent bird chirped in agitation from the rocks. Time passed. The chicks presumably drowned. Should I have lifted them out on to a rock where the parent could see them or would I only have made matters worse? Wasteful nature cared not at all, and I was lost, and this was the desert.
If it was St Columba, or one of the twelve monks who came with him from Ireland to lona in 565, who had made the cell among these grey rocks, on this yellowish turf sprinkled with tiny flowers, among the rock pipits and the white-rumped wheatears, it would have answered his need for self-abnegation as perfectly as the sands of the Sahara did for St Antony or the northern forest of Temnikov for St Seraphim of Sarov. It was nowhere, bathed in the pure light of nothing. Each rock differed only subtly from each other rock, each swampy patch could have been the one I had walked through ten minutes before. There were crows, but faraway on a higher ridge; they did not have the look of crows that bring bread to hermits. The sea was out of sight, guarded by rocky distance, the pearly clouds concealed the sun. One might dissolve into the soft atmosphere; the seasons would change, cyclical rather than progressive; only one’s bones, showing through the flesh, would mark the physical journey towards the stark skeleton whitening among the stones.
We struggled on, of course, and in the end we stumbled upon a small circle of stones and convinced ourselves that this was the place. Then we limped back and were revived by soup and walked quite easily along to the abbey to be amazed by sound. Sir John Eliot Gardiner, the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists were on their Bach Cantata Millennium Pilgrimage and had come to lona for the day of Bach’s death. To be more accurate it was the day before his death; they were giving the concert that afternoon as well as on the following morning because so few people could be fitted into the abbey. The logistics defied the imagination. All their instruments and equipment had had to be transported from the mainland to the island of Mull and from Mull across the sea to lona. Three days earlier they had been in Mühlhausen, two days later they were to be in Anspach. Tickets for the concert were free, because Iona is a holy island.
The cantatas they sang for Bach’s death day were among his most sublime, being on the themes of death, fear, faith and holy joy. The last chorale was sung outside the abbey, in front of the west door. Afterwards, in the low evening sunlight, incongruous on this remote northern island, a tall man in a frock coat stood smiling and bowing, a neat group of superlative musicians looking slightly shy behind him. Together with the audience scattered around the grassy mount in the churchyard we acclaimed them, thinking of St Columba, thinking of Johann Sebastian Bach, thinking of our mysterious species’ extraordinary need for something to praise, something to glorify.
St Columba, or St Columcille as he is known in Ireland, set off with twelve monks for Iona in 565. It seems he had no idea of being a missionary. There had been some kind of quarrel, possibly over a question of copyright. It seems the saint may have copied a particularly beautiful psalter without the permission of the bishop to whom it belonged. The local king forced him to return the copy to the owner of the original, but later St Columba, himself the son of a princely family, defeated the king in battle and won back the psalter. But as a monk who had taken up arms, he had to be exiled, in penance.
He had already founded monasteries in Ireland and he continued his work among the Irish who had settled in western Scotland, his reputation for peace-making and holiness spreading wherever he went. It is said that when at last he was weakened by age, St Columba was resting on a rock when the old white horse which brought the milk every morning to the monks of Iona came and laid his head upon his breast. The horse wept and foamed copiously, but the saint would not allow the monks to lead him away until he had given the affectionate beast his blessing; and the next day St Columba died.