A Thin Place Observed

My fascination with Iona, a wildly windswept and ruggedly beautiful island off Scotland's western coast, began almost 10 years ago when I met an extraordinary man who invited me to join him in his somewhat eccentric life's work as a stacker of rocks. My friend had served for many years as a Presbyterian minister, got married and divorced, raised a family, and retired--all very normal.

Then, during the early years of his retirement, he went to Iona, and the island changed him. He saw visions and dreamed dreams. He heard voices and discerned a new calling that led him to a rural part of northeastern Pennsylvania, where, for reasons known only to him and to the spirits of Iona, he started stacking rocks with the passionate zeal of a true believer.

I never stacked rocks with my friend, but my interest in Iona was cultivated by other stories I began to hear about persons who had visited Iona. These were tales of transformation in large and small ways, and after a few years my desire to visit the Isle of Iona was in full bloom.

In the Celtic Christian tradition, it is understood that in some places the veil that separates the eternal from the temporal grows thin and becomes permeable, so that in such places, the things of heaven are felt and experienced with greater clarity. These places are called "thin places," and Iona is one such place.

I wanted to go to Iona, not just as a regular tourist, but as an intentionally religious tourist--a pilgrim--and I wanted, not so much to be overcome by the place and permanently changed--God forbid that I should ever find myself stacking rocks in and around my condominium. Rather, I wanted to observe the island, to discover what it is about the physical and spiritual landscape of the place that makes Iona so important and powerful for so many people. What it is about the rocks or the hills or the beaches or the history or the energy of the place that makes it so spiritually intense, that makes Iona a thin place.

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