People say that the island of Iona is a "thin place." It feels surprisingly easy to access a spiritual worldview here. The distance, or boundary, between heaven and earth feels thin. It's thin enough, permeable enough, to have a phenomenological experience of the divine.
Iona is naturally lovely; nature draws us to God. The light, the wind, the water, the grasses, the wildflowers, the beaches, the stone outcroppings--the beauty of this place at any time of day is arresting, but always changing. It's not overbuilt--the buildings are sparse, the island isn't visually overwhelmed with advertising or human structures. There's a scale to the man-made dwellings on Iona that feels like a village--it draws us into a deeper, older sense of close community.
There is also a collective sense of place-making on Iona. It leans heavily into its history. Some of that history is real--Columba almost certainly landed here in the 500s CE. There was an abbey here that was a shining light of learning in Europe's Dark Ages. But it's not clear the kings of Scotland are buried here. There's not a lot of lore about the violence that happened here. The colloquial history of Iona leans into the luminous: discovery, pilgrimage, ancient burial places, deep tradition. There's a kind of story told about Iona again and again, so much that it becomes the actual story. I'm not criticizing this practice. I think we all can learn from it, as we think about place-making in the places where we are from. How do we take the best parts of our own local histories and make them part of our present-day story?
Two other things that Iona does well to efface the line between heaven and earth are mark time and engage you in community.
Time is sacred on Iona. It moves to a rhythm that unlike what most of us experience. It's marked at the Abbey by two worship services every day, at 9AM and 9AM--rising and setting, bookends. The bell rings. Services are open to everyone on the island. It's rare nowadays to have a "parish church" that marks time for everyone, but it happens here. Even if you don't participate in the liturgy, you know it's happening--you know that people are lifting prayers and songs to God twice a day every day. In "secular life," time is governed by work schedules and to-do lists; time is linear. Here, it's governed by ritual; it's circular.
Finally, at Iona, there is a sense of deep community. At the Abbey, as a guest, you are given a job the day you arrive. You must work. There are rules you must follow. There are ethical guidelines that you are told you must adhere to. But there are amazing gifts--a common table with good food, the human warmth, the practices of hospitality and friendship and service. Immediately on Iona, you are folded into community and given a purpose.
Iona might be a "thin place." But it most certainly understands how place-making, marking time, and establishing humane, just, and nourishing rules for community life all conspire together to allow human beings a deeper, more immediate access to the realm of spirit. Those three are things all of us can do within our church or other institutions to make our own hometowns a bit thinner.
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