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| St Columba with St Martin's Cross (not to scale) |
Depicted in an icon of St Columba
by Maria Elchaninova-Struve, St Martin’s Cross was installed in its
present location on Iona in about the year 800 AD. Martin is distinguished among
other things by the fact that the word ‘chapel’ derives from his costly scarlet
cape, which he cut in two with his sword to give half to a shivering
beggar. A relic of this cape was later housed in a small church, which became
known as a ‘capella’, hence ‘chapel’. Not that many people, even Christians,
know that; and indeed it’s safe to assume there are even folks surnamed
Chappell or Chapple who are none the wiser.
In a similar way perhaps, neither Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle nor his great uncle and godfather, Michael Conan, appear to
have been particularly conscious of their 7th century namesake,
St Conan. A follower of St Columba, Conan’s missionary endeavours were
concentrated on Argyll and the Isles, and he became Bishop of the Isle of Man.
His name is recalled in ‘Innis Chonan’, an island in Loch Awe on the Coast of
the Gaels (Argyll’s original meaning). In this connexion, the name ‘Innes’
given to Arthur’s younger brother is a less helpful clue than it might seem,
since ‘Conan’ was conferred exclusively on the older sibling. Yet it is
nonetheless a singular coincidence that Conan Doyle should have finished his
first Sherlock Holmes mystery, ‘A Study in Scarlet’, in 1886. Walter Douglas
Campbell completed the construction of St Conan’s Kirk, a delightful Romanesque
Revival gem on the northern shore of Loch Awe, in the same year. In other
words, the first appearance of the greatest of all crime-fighting masterminds
coincided with an unprecedented flowering of interest in St Conan, in one of
the last places in the world where deerstalker caps have never gone out of
fashion.
St Conan’s Pilgrim Way, the brainchild
of Calum (Columba) MacFarlane-Barrow, is a trail of evidence, as it were,
leading from Dalmally at the north-eastern extremity of Loch Awe, to Iona. It
was established in 2015 to mark twenty-five years of the Craig
Lodge Community, which gives young people an opportunity to spend a ‘spiritual
gap year’ in the service of Our Lord and His Mother, amid the extraordinary
natural surroundings of that part of Scotland.
Curiously however, the pilgrimage also
has a political dimension, and one which can’t easily be brushed aside. This is
because Dalmally was the birthplace in 1938 of John Smith, leader of the Labour
Party from 1992 until his death in 1994. In accordance with his wishes, Smith
was buried in St Oran’s cemetery on Iona – but not only that. The Craig Lodge
Community sprang into life on 14 September 1990, the feast of the Triumph of
the Cross. However, the 2015 celebration took place on Sunday 13th September,
which would have been John Smith’s 77th birthday (and happened
also to be the day after Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader).
For St Conan’s Pilgrim Wayfarers, the
chief significance of all this lies in the fact that Smith was a Christian in
public life who not only talked the talk, but walked the walk. Paying tribute
to her late colleague in the House of Commons, Margaret Beckett quoted him as
asking:
“Why would anyone
bother to go into politics, unless it's to speak up for people who can't speak
up for themselves?”
Besides having the courage to vote to
protect the lives of unborn children, he also opposed moves to make divorce
easier, changes to the law on Sunday trading, and deregulation of drinking and
gambling. His understanding of what lawmakers can and cannot do, and what they
should and should not do, was second to none. If he had lived to be PM, as was
expected at the time of his death, Britain would almost certainly be in a
markedly healthier state, both politically and morally, than it is today.
With marching
orders to tackle St Conan’s Pilgrim Way over the next five days, a dozen
pedestrians from different walks of life gathered at Craig Lodge on Monday 23rd April
2018. In the evening, after praying the Divine Office and Rosary in the chapel,
a member of the Craig Lodge Community called George was congratulated on his
saint’s day, and we sat down to the first of many enjoyable meals together. One
of our number, Ollie, explained that he had chosen ‘Columba’ as his
confirmation name because the great Irish monastic was party to the first
recorded sighting of the Loch Ness monster.
Repairing to the
sitting room, further invaluable historical details were provided by Craig
Lodge spiritual director Canon William Fraser. Columba was exiled from Ireland
as punishment for his part in an outbreak of savage violence, arising from his
sense of injury at having to surrender a copy of a Psalter he’d made, to the
‘copyright owner’. In fact it’s sobering to reflect that he almost certainly
would have been excommunicated, if St Brendan of Birr hadn’t spoken up on his
behalf. Redounding perhaps more to Columba’s credit though, we also heard about
the exquisite artistry of the Book of Kells, long associated with Iona and
believed to have been dedicated to his memory. Calum then produced a map and
gave us a preview of the next day’s walk. A rumour that heavy rain was forecast
was dismissed as ‘fake news’.
In seemingly
faraway Liverpool however, a dismal story of obscene institutional presumption
was reaching its sorrowful denouement. 23-month old Alfie Evans had been
granted Italian citizenship, in an eleventh hour bid to facilitate his transfer
from Liverpool’s Alder Hey Hospital to the Bambino Gesù hospital
in Rome. Yet Britain’s courts and the Alder Hey authorities remained resolute
in their determination to override the wishes of the child’s imploring parents.
At 9pm that evening, Alfie’s ventilator was switched off. Over the previous
year, although his condition was never diagnosed and it was acknowledged that
he was not in pain, doctors and judges laid repeated emphasis on Alfie’s
so-called ‘semi-vegetative state’. The weight of legal and medical opinion
therefore held that the parents’ love for their little boy blinded them to the
hard reality, that he was as much a plant as a human. And what was worse, their
‘lack of objectivity’ meant they couldn’t see when the time had come for their
baby to be weeded out.
On Tuesday 24th,
after Morning Prayer, breakfast and a group photo we set forth along the B8077,
passing a spot where Columba may have founded a monastery. Guided by Wes and
Alistair, in spite of frequent squally showers the mood was bullish as we
climbed up and over the Lairig Noe pass. Having seen the table-like rock where
McIntyre clansmen once held their parliaments, in the afternoon we encountered
stags and frogs on the way down to the shore of Loch Etive, from where we
ambled to Taynuilt.
At the Church of
the Visitation there, for a donation one could pick up a DVD of ‘Generation Hope’,
the film (now available online) inspired by bestselling 2015 book ‘The
Shed That Fed A Million Children’. Written by Calum’s son Magnus and
telling the story of school-feeding charity Mary’s Meals, The Shed That
Fed qualifies as a must-read, both on account of the importance of its
subject matter, and for its riveting twists and turns. Mind you, it omits to
mention a parliament of the MacFarlane-Barrow clan in around 1998 or 1999, at
which the author of this article was a fly on the wall. The consensus then
seemed to be that Magnus would call time on his humanitarian relief efforts and
return to salmon-farming.
Expertly driving the Craig Lodge minibus, Calum
returned us to the same quarters we’d enjoyed on the previous night, where the
aforementioned Shed could be seen as we had supper. After that however, this
pilgrim decided to make his way to the top of the hill behind Craig Lodge, in
the hope of finding a less celebrated but almost equally legendary outhouse.
The ‘beehive cell’ built by Calum around ten years before is a sort of stone
igloo, invisible from space by dint of the turf on its roof. To spend a night
inside is to get a taste of the seclusion, self-containment, simplicity and
silence experienced by the monks of St Columba’s time.
After breakfast on the morning of Wednesday 25
April we drove back to Taynuilt to attend Mass for the feast of St Mark,
celebrated by Canon Fraser. The all-but empty road leading from there through
picturesque Glen Lonan is understood to have formed part of a traditional
pilgrim thoroughfare, way-marked in the Middle Ages by stone crosses. After a
picnic lunch near some even older though less meaningful obelisks, at
Glencruitten House the Evangelical Christian community kindly gave us tea and
coffee. Leaving there, some members of our cohort should have known better than
to be sceptical of qualified solicitor Annabel’s assertion that Mull, our next
port of call, was an ‘Inner Hebride’. With the question settled in her favour,
we sauntered into Oban in plenty of time to catch a mid-afternoon ferry. At Craignure we each bagged bunks at a shiny new hostel, where we would
spend the following two nights.
Back in Liverpool meanwhile, having confounded
doctors by his ability to breathe unaided for as long as he had, this was the
day when Alfie Evans was at last given nourishment for the first time in the 36
hours since his life-support was withdrawn. He would later express his
appreciation with an unmistakable smile, captured in a photograph taken by his
father. Echoing the sentiments of millions of others around the world, Polish
President Andrzej Duda tweeted his support. However, that afternoon
a court in Manchester threw out the last appeal to allow Alfie to be moved. The
death sentence was not to be overturned.
Around lunchtime on Thursday 26 April we reached
Lochbouie on Mull’s southern shore, whose Episcopal Church of St Kilda has a
fine mediaeval cross above its porch. In increasingly perfect sunshine, from
there we clambered, clawed and cleft our way along the shoreline to Carsaig,
where the minibus was once again on hand to shuttle us back to base-camp.
Friday 27 April
2018 saw Britain reach the baleful milestone of fifty years since the
implementation of the Abortion Act. There was a bitter irony in the fact that
it was also Alfie Evans’ last full day of life, inasmuch as the denial of his
parents’ right to choose was dictated by an ideology which worships at the
altar of ‘choice’ – when that choice is exercised at the expense of defenceless
unborn children.
Setting off from
Carsaig, a few of us made a spiritually regenerative detour to the Nuns’ Cave,
a refuge for persecuted Christians over many centuries. Ollie read out the
day’s Gospel, including the following:
“You know the way to the place where
I am going.”
Thomas said to Him, “Lord, we do not
know where you are going. How can we know the
way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one can
come to the Father except through Me.” John 14:4-6
Falling back into
line then with our assembly’s main strength, a spectacular cliff-top path took
us in the direction of the Ross of Mull and the tidal island of Erraid. It was
here in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886) that hero
David Balfour mistakenly thinks he’s been marooned. On the wildlife front,
alongside a possible sighting of a Peregrine Falcon, there was a pair of Golden
Eagles, numerous red deer, a slow worm and an adder. Just as memorable, Susan,
whose journey to Iona was really a homecoming, explained as we
passed Malcolm’s Point that her mother grew up in the same Edinburgh house which was also John Smith's family home. Later on, ‘Free Entry – Bull May Charge’ was a sign on a gate
pointed out to us by Calum as we drove from Bunessan to our new digs, just
outside Fionnphort.
In the early hours
of Saturday 28 April 2018, Alfie Evans died. His father Tom broke the news:
“My gladiator lay down his shield and gained his
wings at 02:30. Absolutely heartbroken”
Throughout their ordeal, both he and
Alfie’s mother Kate conducted themselves with formidable courage, dignity and
restraint. Their son was sacrificed to
the false deity of ‘choice’ and various other ideological golden calves,
somehow deemed worthy of greater consideration than the right of parents to
decide what is in their child’s best interests. Without doubt,
humankind has made giant scientific and technological strides, even since the
19th century, let alone the 6th and 7th centuries.
But that doesn’t mean the likes of Columba, Conan and co would have been unable
to recognise a case of cold-blooded murder when they saw one.
On another beautifully sunny day we
resumed our walk from Bunessan. Abraham-like, Ron, a member of our troop with
farming experience, scaled a fence and rescued a sheep whose horns were caught
in a bush. The ten minute crossing of the turquoise Sound of Iona passed off
without incident. After stepping ashore at Baile Mòr on the other
side, a group of us made for Iona Abbey, where we were given complimentary
pilgrim passes. Besides offering prayers of thanksgiving in St Mary’s Abbey
Church, there was time to visit St Columba’s Chapel (long believed to have been
built on his original burial site), St Martin’s Cross, and St Oran’s Chapel
with its adjacent cemetery. John Smith’s epitaph is a quotation from Alexander
Pope:
“An honest man’s the noblest work of
God”
The Apostle James (the Greater) is the
patron saint of pilgrims; lending a special piquancy to our rendezvous with
Irish Dominican priest Fr James Claffey OP. He was also the ideal person to
lead us in the ‘Rosary on the Coast’, anchored in the form of prayer revealed
by Our Lady to the founder of his order, St Dominic. We said the five glorious
mysteries on the beach at Martyrs’ Bay, named in honour of sixty-eight monks
whose blood was spilled onto its white-washed sands by Vikings in AD 806.
Foremost among our intentions was recognition for the sanctity of human life,
as it was for many thousands of others on beaches, mudflats, jetties and
marinas the length and breadth of the British Isles.
After commandeering another
well-appointed dormitory we had a restful hour or so, before returning to the
village for Mass in the chapel of the RC House of Prayer. A lone ruminant in a
field outside the window brought to mind St Columba’s prophesy:
"In Iona that is my heart's desire,
Iona that is my love,
Instead of monks' voices
Shall be the lowing of cattle;
But ere the world comes to an end,
Iona shall be as it was."
Then in the evening we sat down to a
terrific restaurant meal, with many of us opting to head down the ‘fish and
chips’ route. Moira, one of a handful of islanders who joined us, explained how
devotion to Our Lady had led her to make and organise scores of pilgrimages,
including to diplomatically ticklish destinations like Ukraine and Russia, as
well as to the Holy Land, Fatima and Medjugorje. Few, though, could have turned
out much better than our journey to Iona.
On
the morning of Sunday 29 April we bade farewell to Baile Mòr,
drove on to Craignure, sailed to Oban and arrived back at Craig Lodge shortly
before 3 o’clock. This was when the ‘Rosary on the Coast’ was actually
scheduled to take place – we’d had to pray a day early because of work
commitments etc. So anyway, those of us who were able went through to the
chapel at Craig Lodge and prayed again. And Our Lady had it covered. No one
picked up on it at the time, but being in Argyll we were as much ‘on the coast’
as anyone else.
All pilgrim names have been changed.
