TO MARK THE FOURTEENTH CENTENARY of St Columba, here at Balmerino, we go back much further than the medieval monastery. In fact these celebrations are part of the preparations for the 2nd Millennium which puts it into the wider Christian context. And from that point of view Balmerino gives us an interesting intersection in the historical paths by which Christianity came to this country.
First with regard to St Columba, I have to declare an interest. I have had some kind of a spiritual accompaniment or link with Columba all my days. Historians regard the period as a minefield, but I have wandered down quite unharmed. Not being an historian, I got top marks in secondary school for an essay on Columba.
My first primary school was dedicated to Dallan Forghaill who wrote the great "Elegy of Colum Cille", Amra Choluimb Chille. When I was nine or ten, long before I learned that St Dallan was a chief poet and a classic figure of the bardic class, I had made the pilgrimage to his chapel on the little island of Inniskeel on the Atlantic coast of Donegal. There he had lived until he was
martyred by sea raiders.
Dallan's Elegy may have been written before the death of Columba. It is the earliest source and therefore, not surprisingly, my feelings for St Columba respond much more to the image given by St Dallan than to the political figure of the Irish Annals, or to that of the biographer Adamnan upholding the abbatial importance of Iona, or to that of Bede the Venerable writing over 100 years later. The picture of Columba as the man of God living the hidden monastic life, with the occasional missionary foray, rings much more true to his vocation than the high profile semi-political king-maker and nation-builder of the other chronicles.
Dallan's Columba is above all a scholar¹s saint. He emphasised not his miraculous powers but his learning. He also refers specifically to Tayside. "His blessing turned them, the mouth of the fierce ones who lived on the Tay, to the will of the king". I don't know exactly what he means by describing these tribes of the Tay as "fierce mouthed". It is intentionally obscure and difficult because, the story goes, Columba would only agree to Dallan writing about him in that incomprehensible bardic style. The roots of obscure 'Irishism' go a long way back. My guess is that Columba made a notable pastoral visit to Tayside and was welcomed by the Christians already there.
ReputationI am going to bypass the historical researchers and the literary analysts, who after all have every reason to question the meagre fragments of actual history in contrast to the abundant hagiography. I am going to bypass them or transcend their narrow interest by beginning with a significant question.
If some one had so many miracles and wonders attributed to them as Columba, how did he get this reputation? If some one had so much sanctity and scholarship credited to them as Columba, how did he get this fame?
If someone had his relics carried into battle to guarantee victory as often as Columba, how did he get this influence? If one can find all this and more attributed to St Columba in the hagiography, then one can ask the question what was the spiritual stature of the man? This must have been a mighty man to be placed in the light of so many great deeds and associated with almost every step of progress of evangelisation in Scotland, whether or not he was directly involved! And that surely is the clue.
Spiritually he could well have had a part in the building up of the Body of Christ because of the power of his prayer, because of the merit of his holiness. Because of that inner prowess of soul, which is open to every Christian, his life could go on bearing fruit beyond his death.
Think of another centenary marked this year. The first 100 years of a very different example of that fruits of the inner life, St Theresa of Liseaux, who died in 1897, said she would spend her heaven doing good on earth.
Pre-HistoryBalmerino's prehistory demonstrates in a special way this inner aspect of things and gives us the opportunity to celebrate this fourteenth centenary of St Columba as being also a time to honour all those named and unnamed saints who implanted the Gospel, bit by bit in the various parts of this land.
It is strange that in Adamnan's 'life' the close colleagues of Columba and his relatives do not get mention; St Catan, St Moluag, St Blane, St Machar, St Donnan. Independent operators, so to speak, are named as friends, St Kenneth and St Cormac and others include St Kessog in the Trossachs with Monk's Island on Loch Lomond, St Serf in the Ochils with his island retreat on Loch Leven. St Ternan probably worked out of Abernethy, St Kenneth at St Andrews, St Adrian on May Island and his Firth of Forth neighbour St Baldred of the Bass Rock. St Regulus, St Fillan, St Mucolinus and so on.
These are only names to most of us, which may be as well in view of the countless anonymous monks, nuns, hermits and servants of God who all shared in the building up of the Body of Christ in these parts. Balmerino is interesting in this regard because the evangelisation of these parts cannot be claimed by either St Columba or St Ninian. Balmerino has always been linked with Abernethy just six miles to the west and the significance of Abernethy is that it became the centre and key to the story of the conversion of the Pictish people of this eastern and northern part of Scotland.
BeginningsThe beginnings of the work of evangelisation from Abernethy are no less obscure than those of Iona or Whithorn, from both of which it was quite independent. But its importance is confirmed by the fact that the King of the Pictish Kingdom moved his capital from near Inverness to Abernethy. Only at later stage was the royal seat and the ecclesiastical centre moved to Dunkeld, and to that place they brought the relics of Columba to reinforce its standing and precedence over Iona.
The whole point of recalling all this is to appreciate the fact that there were a great number of unsung evangelists who had already brought the light Christ into the lives of the people in many places in the east of Scotland. At least eighty men and women have been identified as being actively evangelising the country before Columba left Ireland.
These Christian pioneers literally covered the land with hundreds of churches and chapels before the Iona mission began.
DivisionsIn fact, in the debate as to whether Columba or Ninian rightly deserve the accolade of the apostle of Scotland, a very strong case has been made out for a third alternative. It is possible that it is Abernethy, rather than Iona or Whithorn, which is the true cradle of Christianity in Scotland.
At a certain level there were rivalries between the different groups. At an important point of change in the Church, as we in the post-Vatican II era can understand, these rivalries became more dramatic, as at the Synod of Whitby in 664AD. Loyalty to St Columba, a virtue in its time and place, became obstinacy against the new ways and the acceptance of Roman adaptations of the old Celtic customs.
Later centuries were to see an even greater exaggeration of these rivalries in sectarian prejudice and the rewriting of the story of our Saints and scholars to support a favoured position. Apart from all this very human context, what should inspire us today is the vision of this extraordinary communion of saints working away quietly under the inspiration of God, according to the special grace and charism of each one, and not as part of any great bandwagon or powerful institution, even as worthy as that attributed to Columba.
The edifying stories of St Columba are no exaggeration when seen as the affirmation of those qualities and gifts given by God to all these hidden saints and on offer to each one of us who believe. All the feats of sanctity, all the heroic dedication to prayer, all the spiritual power of inner life of these Saints are gifts of the Holy Spirit in every age of the Church.
Dedication
These are all the qualities of soul, more often hidden and anonymous, without which there can be no Church of any kind. Here is a spiritual dynamism in the Church which calls each one of us to recognise our indebtedness to God in an absolute manner. There is no other explanation of the course of life of St Columba and those early servants of God. Unless, like them, we feel brought to our knees, at least in mind and heart, several times each day we may wonder if we have any soul, any humanity, any of that sensitivity which is the special character of these saints.
Therefore we are not concerned to romanticise Columba or our Scottish Saints but to venerate their following of Christ, their intensity of prayer, their perseverance in living in God's presence, their practical penance and example of charity. It was because of this genuine hidden dedication of their lives that God blessed their work of evangelisation with such fruitfulness.
Or was it the other way round, that God blessed their lives with an evangelisation which they themselves would never have conceived? We have been inundated with documents and instructions on 'evangelisation' for the second millennium. The early pioneers may never have heard the word.
As for the glory, as for the external applause of Columba that seems to been cultivated by his over-zealous followers. These clerics were not much unlike their present day successors in "not letting the facts get in the way of a good story".
Well we should not let the stories get in the way of the good facts in the case of Columba himself, and go on from there to recognise the potential of the more ordinary, normal experience of the saints and of the faithful. That is the hidden life which is lived so simply and so totally in the presence of God that it begins to be literally, "life hidden with Christ in God".
ChallengeThe fruitfulness of the Saints is directly related to their purity of heart, their hunger and thirst for the true, the good and the beautiful, their union with God.
It is the great challenge of evangelisation in today's world. The Church can only bear fruit; can only bring the gifts of God; to all those who desire them if there are souls, convinced of the power of prayer and filled with the love of God and of each person. The challenge today more than ever is like the struggle of "rowing through the infinite storm", to use the graphic imagery which Columba derived from the surrounding sea of Iona.
The hymn "Adjutor Laborantium", (help of those who labour) may well have come from his pen. "I beg that, trembling and most wretched, rowing through the infinite storm of this age, Christ may draw me, a little man, after Him to the lofty most beautiful haven of life".
At Sancta Maria Abbey, Nunraw.
