a spiritual history can be revealed to those who know nothing of it by
facts and descriptions. The approach may be through the obscure glens of
another's mind and so out by the moonlit way, as well as by the track
that thousands travel. I have nothing to say of Iona's acreage, or
fisheries, or pastures: nothing of how the islanders live. These things
are the accidental. There is small difference in simple life anywhere.
Moreover, there are many to tell all that need be known.
There is one Iona, a little island of the west. There is another Iona,
of which I would speak. I do not say that it lies open to all. It is as
we come that we find. If we come, bringing nothing with us, we go away
ill-content, having seen and heard nothing of what we had vaguely
expected to see or hear. It is another Iona than the Iona of sacred
memories and prophecies: Iona the metropolis of dreams. None can
understand it who does not see it through its pagan light, its Christian
light, its singular blending of paganism and romance and spiritual
beauty. There is, too, an Iona that is more than Gaelic, that is more
than a place rainbow-lit with the seven desires of the world, the Iona
that, if we will it so, is a mirror of your heart and of mine.
History may be written in many ways, but I think that in days to come
the method of spiritual history will be found more suggestive than the
method of statistical history. The one will, in its own way, reveal
inward life, and hidden significance, and palpable destiny: as the
other, in the good but narrow way of convention, does with exactitude
delineate features, narrate facts, and relate events. The true
interpreter will as little despise the one as he will claim all for the
other.
And that is why I would speak here of Iona as befalls my pen, rather
than as perhaps my pen should go: and choose legend and remembrance, and
my own and other memories and associations, and knowledge of my own and
others, and hidden meanings, and beauty and strangeness surviving in
dreams and imaginations, rather than facts and figures, that others
could adduce more deftly and with more will.
In the _Felire na Naomh Nerennach_ is a strangely beautiful if fantastic
legend of one Mochaoi, Abbot of n'-Aondruim in Uladh. With some
companions he was at the edge of a wood, and while busy in cutting
wattles wherewith to build a church, "he heard a bright bird singing on
the blackthorn near him. It was more beautiful than the birds of the
world." Mochaoi listened entranced. There was more in that voice than in
the throat of any bird he had ever heard, so he stopped his
wattle-cutting, and, looking at the bird, courteously asked who was
thus delighting him. The bird at once answered, "A man of the people of
my Lord" (that is, an angel). "Hail," said Mochaoi, "and for why that, O
bird that is an angel?" "I am come here by command to encourage you in
your good work, but also, because of the love in your heart, to amuse
you for a time with my sweet singing." "I am glad of that," said the
saint. Thereupon the bird sang a single surpassing sweet air, and then
fixed his beak in the feathers of his wing, and slept. But Mochaoi heard
the beauty and sweetness and infinite range of that song for three
hundred years. Three hundred years were in that angelic song, but to
Mochaoi it was less than an hour. For three hundred years he remained
listening, in the spell of beauty: nor in that enchanted hour did any
age come upon him, or any withering upon the wattles he had gathered;
nor in the wood itself did a single leaf turn to a red or yellow flame
before his eyes. Where the spider spun her web, she spun no more: where
the dove leaned her grey breast from the fir, she leaned still.
Then suddenly the bird took its beak from its wing-feathers, and said
farewell. When it was gone, Mochaoi lifted his wattles, and went
homeward as one in a dream. He stared, when he looked for the little
wattled cells of the Sons of Patrick. A great church built of stone
stood before his wondering eyes. A man passed him, and told the stranger
that it was the church of St. Mochaoi. When he spoke to the assembled
brothers, none knew him: some thought he had been taken away by the
people of the Shee, and come back at fairy-nightfall, which is the last
hour of the last day of three hundred years. "Tell us your name and
lineage," they cried. "I am Mochaoi, Abbot of n'-Aondruim," he said, and
then he told his tale, and they knew him, and made him abbot again. In
the enchanted wood a shrine was built, and about it a church grew, "and
surpassingly white angels often alighted there, or sang hymns to it from
the branches of the forest trees, or leaned with their foot on tiptoe,
their eyes on the horizon, their ear on the ground, their wings
flapping, their bodies trembling, waiting to send tidings of prayer and
repentance with a beat of their wings to the King of the Everlasting."
There are many who thought that Mochaoi was dead, when he was seen no
more of his fellow-monks at the forest monastery of n'Aondruim in Uladh.
But his chronicler knew: "a sleep without decay of the body Mochaoi of
Antrim slept."
I am reminded of the story of Mochaoi when I think of Iona. I think she
too, beautiful isle, while gathering the help of human longing and tears
and hopes, strewn upon her beaches by wild waves of the world, stood,
enchanted, to listen to a Song of Beauty. "That is a new voice I hear in
the wave," we can dream of her saying, and of the answer: "we are the
angelic flocks of the Shepherd: we are the Voices of the Eternal: listen
a while!"
It has been a long sleep, that enchanted swoon. But Mochaoi awoke, after
three hundred years, and there was neither time upon his head, nor age
in his body, nor a single withered leaf of the forest at his feet. And
shall not that be possible for the Isle of Dreams, whose sands are the
dust of martyrs and noble and beautiful lives, which was granted to one
man by "one of the people of my Lord?"
When I think of Iona I think often, too, of a prophecy once connected
with Iona; though perhaps current no more in a day when prophetical
hopes are fallen dumb and blind.
It is commonly said that, if he would be heard, none should write in
advance of his times. That I do not believe. Only, it does not matter
how few listen. I believe that we are close upon a great and deep
spiritual change. I believe a new redemption is even now conceived of
the Divine Spirit in the human heart, that is itself as a woman, broken
in dreams, and yet sustained in faith, patient, long-suffering, looking
towards home. I believe that though the Reign of Peace may be yet a long
way off, it is drawing near: and that Who shall save us anew shall come
divinely as a Woman, to save as Christ saved, but not, as He did, to
bring with Her a sword. But whether this Divine Woman, this Mary of so
many passionate hopes and dreams, is to come through mortal birth, or as
an immortal Breathing upon our souls, none can yet know.
Sometimes I dream of the old prophecy that Christ shall come again upon
Iona, and of that later and obscure prophecy which foretells, now as the
Bride of Christ, now as the Daughter of God, now as the Divine Spirit
embodied through mortal birth in a Woman, as once through mortal birth
in a Man, the coming of a new Presence and Power: and dream that this
may be upon Iona, so that the little Gaelic island may become as the
little Syrian Bethlehem. But more wise it is to dream, not of hallowed
ground, but of the hallowed gardens of the soul wherein She shall appear
white and radiant. Or, that upon the hills, where we are wandered, the
Shepherdess shall call us home.
From one man only, on Iona itself, I have heard any allusion to the
prophecy as to the Saviour who shall yet come: and he in part was
obscure, and confused the advent of Mary into the spiritual world with
the possible coming again to earth of Mary, as another Redeemer, or with
a descending of the Divine Womanhood upon the human heart as a universal
spirit descending upon awaiting souls. But in intimate remembrance I
recall the words and faith of one or two whom I loved well. Nor must I
forget that my old nurse, Barabal, used to sing a strange "oran," to the
effect that when St. Bride came again to Iona it would be to bind the
hair and wash the feet of the Bride of Christ.
One of those to whom I allude was a young Hebridean priest, who died in
Venice, after troubled years, whose bitterest vicissitude was the
clouding of his soul's hope by the wings of a strange multitude of
dreams--one of whom and whose end I have elsewhere written: and he told
me once how, "as our forefathers and elders believed and still believe,
that Holy Spirit shall come again which once was mortally born among us
as the Son of God, but, then, shall be the Daughter of God. The Divine
Spirit shall come again as a Woman. Then for the first time the world
will know peace." And when I asked him if it were not prophesied that
the Woman is to be born in Iona, he said that if this prophecy had been
made it was doubtless of an Iona that was symbolic, but that this was a
matter of no moment, for She would rise suddenly in many hearts, and
have her habitation among dreams and hopes. The other who spoke to me of
this Woman who is to save was an old fisherman of a remote island of the
Hebrides, and one to whom I owe more than to any other spiritual
influence in my childhood, for it was he who opened to me the three
gates of Beauty. Once this old man, Seumas Macleod, took me with him to
a lonely haven in the rocks, and held me on his knee as we sat watching
the sun sink and the moon climb out of the eastern wave. I saw no one,
but abruptly he rose and put me from him, and bowed his grey head as he
knelt before one who suddenly was standing in that place. I asked
eagerly who it was. He told me that it was an Angel. Later, I learned (I
remember my disappointment that the beautiful vision was not winged with
great white wings) that the Angel was one soft flame of pure white, and
that below the soles of his feet were curling scarlet flames. He had
come in answer to the old man's prayer. He had come to say that we could
not see the Divine One whom we awaited. "But you will yet see that Holy
Beauty," said the Angel, and Seumas believed, and I too believed, and
believe. He took my hand, and I knelt beside him, and he bade me repeat
the words he said. And that was how I first prayed to Her who shall yet
be the Balm of the World.
And since then I have learned, and do see, that not only prophecies and
hopes, and desires unclothed yet in word or thought, foretell her
coming, but already a multitude of spirits are in the gardens of the
soul, and are sowing seed and calling upon the wind of the south; and
that everywhere are watching eyes and uplifted hands, and signs which
cannot be mistaken, in many lands, in many peoples, in many minds; and,
in the heaven itself that the soul sees, the surpassing signature.
I recall one whom I knew, a fisherman of the little green island: and I
tell this story of Coll here, for it is to me more than the story of a
dreaming islander. One night, lying upon the hillock that is called
Cnoc-nan-Aingeal, because it is here that St. Colum was wont to hold
converse with an angel out of heaven, he watched the moonlight move like
a slow fin through the sea: and in his heart were desires as infinite as
the waves of the sea, the moving homes of the dead.
And while he lay and dreamed, his thoughts idly adrift as a net in deep
waters, he closed his eyes, muttering the Gaelic words of an old line,
_In the Isle of Dreams God shall yet fulfil Himself anew_.
Hearing a footfall, he stirred. A man stood beside him. He did not know
the man, who was young, and had eyes dark as hill-tarns, with hair light
and soft as thistledown; and moved light as a shadow, delicately
treading the grass as the wind treads it. In his hair he had twined the
fantastic leaf of the horn-poppy.
The islander did not move or speak: it was as though a spell were upon
him.
"God be with you," he said at last, uttering the common salutation.
"And with you, Coll mac Coll," answered the stranger. Coll looked at
him. Who was this man, with the sea-poppy in his hair, who, unknown,
knew him by name? He had heard of one whom he did not wish to meet, the
Green Harper: also of a grey man of the sea whom islesmen seldom alluded
to by name: again, there was the Amadan Dhu ... but at that name Coll
made the sign of the cross, and remembering what Father Allan had told
him in South Uist, muttered a holy exorcism of the Trinity.
The man smiled.
"You need have no fear, Coll mac Coll," he said quietly.
"You that know my name so well are welcome, but if you in turn would
tell me your name I should be glad."
"I have no name that I can tell you," answered the stranger gravely;
"but I am not of those who are unfriendly. And because you can see me
and speak to me, I will help you to whatsoever you may wish."
Coll laughed.
"Neither you nor any man can do that. For now that I have neither father
nor mother, nor brother nor sister, and my lass too is dead, I wish
neither for sheep nor cattle, nor for new nets and a fine boat, nor a
big house, nor as much money as MacCailein Mor has in the bank at
Inveraora."
"What then do you wish for, Coll mac Coll?"
"I do not wish for what cannot be, or I would wish to see again the dear
face of Morag, my lass. But I wish for all the glory and wonder and
power there is in the world, and to have it all at my feet, and to know
everything that the Holy Father himself knows, and have kings coming to
me as the crofters come to MacCailein Mor's factor."
"You can have that, Coll mac Coll," said the Green Harper, and he waved
a withe of hazel he had in his hand.
"What is that for?" said Coll.
"It is to open a door that is in the air. And now, Coll, if that is your
wish of all wishes, and you will give up all other wishes for that wish,
you can have the sovereignty of the world. Ay, and more than that: you
shall have the sun like a golden jewel in the hollow of your right hand,
and all the stars as pearls in your left, and have the moon as a white
shining opal above your brows, with all knowledge behind the sun, within
the moon, and beyond the stars."
Coll's face shone. He stood, waiting. Just then he heard a familiar
sound in the dusk. The tears came into his eyes.
"Give me instead," he cried, "give me a warm breast-feather from that
grey dove of the woods that is winging home to her young." He looked as
one moon-dazed. None stood beside him. He was alone. Was it a dream, he
wondered? But a weight was lifted from his heart. Peace fell upon him as
dew upon grey pastures. Slowly he walked homeward. Once, glancing back,
he saw a white figure upon the knoll, with a face noble and beautiful.
Was it Colum himself come again? he mused: or that white angel with whom
the Saint was wont to discourse, and who brought him intimacies of God?
or was it but the wave-fire of his dreaming mind, as lonely and cold and
unreal as that which the wind of the south makes upon the wandering
hearths of the sea?
I tell this story of Coll here, for, as I have said, it is to me more
than the story of a dreaming islander. He stands for the soul of a race.
It is because, to me, he stands for the sorrowful genius of our race,
that I have spoken of him here. Below all the strife of lesser desires,
below all that he has in common with other men, he has the livelong
unquenchable thirst for the things of the spirit. This is the thirst
that makes him turn so often from the near securities and prosperities,
and indeed all beside, setting his heart aflame with vain, because
illimitable, desires. For him, the wisdom before which knowledge is a
frosty breath: the beauty that is beyond what is beautiful. For, like
Coll, the world itself has not enough to give him. And at the last, and
above all, he is like Coll in this, that the sun and moon and stars
themselves may become as trampled dust, for only a breast-feather of
that Dove of the Eternal, which may have its birth in mortal love, but
has its evening home where are the dews of immortality.
"The Dove of the Eternal." It was from the lips of an old priest of the
Hebrides that I first heard these words. I was a child, and asked him if
it was a white dove, such as I had seen fanning the sunglow in
Icolmkill.
"Yes," he told me, "the Dove is white, and it was beloved of Colum, and
is of you, little one, and of me."
"Then it is not dead?"
"It is not dead."
I was in a more wild and rocky isle than Iona then, and when I went
into a solitary place close by my home it was to a stony wilderness so
desolate that in many moods I could not bear it. But that day, though
there were no sheep lying beside boulders as grey and still, nor
whinnying goats (creatures that have always seemed to me strangely
homeless, so that, as a child, it was often my noon-fancy on hot days to
play to them on a little reed-flute I was skilled in making, thwarting
the hill-wind at the small holes to the fashioning of a rude furtive
music, which I believed comforted the goats, though why I did not know,
and probably did not try to know): and though I could hear nothing but
the soft, swift, slipping feet of the wind among the rocks and grass and
a noise of the tide crawling up from a shore hidden behind crags
(beloved of swallows for the small honey-flies which fed upon the
thyme): still, on that day, I was not ill at ease, nor in any way
disquieted. But before me I saw a white rock-dove, and followed it
gladly. It flew circling among the crags, and once I thought it had
passed seaward; but it came again, and alit on a boulder.
I went upon my knees, and prayed to it, and, as nearly as I can
remember, in these words:--
"O Dove of the Eternal, I want to love you, and you to love me: and if
you live on Iona, I want you to show me, when I go there again, the
place where Colum the Holy talked with an angel. And I want to live as
long as you, Dove" (I remember thinking this might seem disrespectful,
and that I added hurriedly and apologetically), "Dove of the Eternal."
That evening I told Father Ivor what I had done. He did not laugh at me.
He took me on his knee, and stroked my hair, and for a long time was so
silent that I thought he was dreaming. He put me gently from him, and
kneeled at the chair, and made this simple prayer which I have never
forgotten: "O Dove of the Eternal, grant the little one's prayer."
That is a long while ago now, and I have sojourned since in Iona, and
there and elsewhere known the wild doves of thought and dream. But I
have not, though I have longed, seen again the White Dove that Colum so
loved. For long I thought it must have left Iona and Barra too, when
Father Ivor died.
Yet I have not forgotten that it is not dead. "I want to live as long as
you," was my child's plea: and the words of the old priest, knowing and
believing were, "O Dove of the Eternal, grant the little one's prayer."
It was not in Barra, but in Iona, that, while yet a child, I set out one
evening to find the Divine Forges. A Gaelic sermon, preached on the
shoreside by an earnest man, who, going poor and homeless through the
west, had tramped the long roads of Mull over against us, and there fed
to flame a smouldering fire, had been my ministrant in these words. The
"revivalist" had spoken of God as one who would hammer the evil out of
the soul and weld it to good, as a blacksmith at his anvil: and
suddenly, with a dramatic gesture, he cried: "This little island of Iona
is this anvil; God is your blacksmith: but oh, poor people, who among
you knows the narrow way to the Divine Forges?"
There is a spot on Iona that has always had a strange enchantment for
me. Behind the ruined walls of the Columban church, the slopes rise, and
the one isolated hill of Iona is, there, a steep and sudden wilderness.
It is commonly called Dun-I (_Doon-ee_), for at the summit in old days
was an island fortress; but the Gaelic name of the whole of this
uplifted shoulder of the isle is Slibh Meanach. Hidden under a wave of
heath and boulder, near the broken rocks, is a little pool. From
generation to generation this has been known, and frequented, as the
Fountain of Youth.
There, through boggy pastures, where the huge-horned shaggy cattle
stared at me, and up through the ling and roitch, I climbed: for, if
anywhere, I thought that from there I might see the Divine Forges, or at
least might discover a hidden way, because of the power of that water,
touched on the eyelids at sunlift, at sunset, or at the rising of the
moon.
From where I stood I could see the people still gathered upon the dunes
by the shore, and the tall, ungainly figure of the preacher. In the
narrow strait were two boats, one being rowed across to Fionnaphort, and
the other, with a dun sail burning flame-brown, hanging like a bird's
wing against Glas Eilean, on the tideway to the promontory of Earraid.
Was the preacher still talking of the Divine Forges? I wondered; or were
the men and women in the ferry hurrying across to the Ross of Mull to
look for them among the inland hills? And the Earraid men in the
fishing-smack: were they sailing to see if they lay hidden in the
wilderness of rocks, where the muffled barking of the seals made the
loneliness more wild and remote?
I wetted my eyelids, as I had so often done before (and not always
vainly, though whether vision came from the water, or from a more
quenchless spring within, I know not), and looked into the little pool.
Alas! I could see nothing but the reflection of a star, too obscured by
light as yet for me to see in the sky, and, for a moment, the shadow of
a gull's wing as the bird flew by far overhead. I was too young then to
be content with the symbols of coincidence, or I might have thought that
the shadow of a wing from Heaven, and the light of a star out of the
East, were enough indication. But, as it was, I turned, and walked idly
northward, down the rough side of Dun Bhuirg (at Cul Bhuirg, a furlong
westward, I had once seen a phantom, which I believed to be that of the
Culdee, Oran, and so never went that way again after sundown) to a
thyme-covered mound that had for me a most singular fascination.
It is a place to this day called Dun Mananain. Here, a friend who told
me many things, a Gaelic farmer named Macarthur, had related once a
fantastic legend about a god of the sea. Manaun was his name, and he
lived in the times when Iona was part of the kingdom of the Suderoeer.
Whenever he willed he was like the sea, and that is not wonderful, for
he was born of the sea. Thus his body was made of a green wave. His hair
was of wrack and tangle, glistening with spray; his robe was of windy
foam; his feet, of white sand. That is, when he was with his own, or
when he willed; otherwise, he was as men are. He loved a woman of the
south so beautiful that she was named Dear-sadh-na-Ghrene (Sunshine). He
captured her and brought her to Iona in September, when it is the month
of peace. For one month she was happy: when the wet gales from the west
set in, she pined for her own land: yet in the dream-days of November,
she smiled so often that Manaun hoped; but when Winter was come, her
lover saw that she could not live. So he changed her into a seal. "You
shall be a sleeping woman by day," he said, "and sleep in my dun here on
Iona: and by night, when the dews fall, you shall be a seal, and shall
hear me calling to you from a wave, and shall come out and meet me."
They have mortal offspring also, it is said.
There is a story of a man who went to the mainland, but could not see to
plough, because the brown fallows became waves that splashed noisily
about him. The same man went to Canada, and got work in a great
warehouse; but among the bales of merchandise he heard the singular note
of the sandpiper, and every hour the sea-fowl confused him with their
crying.
Probably some thought was in my mind that there, by Dun Mananain, I
might find a hidden way. That summer I had been thrilled to the inmost
life by coming suddenly, by moonlight, on a seal moving across the last
sand-dune between this place and the bay called Port Ban. A strange
voice, too, I heard upon the sea. True, I saw no white arms upthrown, as
the seal plunged into the long wave that swept the shore; and it was a
grey skua that wailed above me, winging inland; yet had I not had a
vision of the miracle?
But alas! that evening there was not even a barking seal. Some sheep fed
upon the green slope of Manaun's mound.
So, still seeking a way to the Divine Forges, I skirted the shore and
crossed the sandy plain of the Machar, and mounted the upland district
known as Sliav Starr (the Hill of Noises), and walked to a place, to me
sacred. This was a deserted green airidh between great rocks. From here
I could look across the extreme western part of Iona, to where it
shelved precipitously around the little Port-na-Churaich, the Haven of
the Coracle, the spot where St. Columba landed when he came to the
island.