Fr Henry O’Shea OSB
At the vigil office last evening we sang: ‘Columba commanded the
winds, restored the dead and put the plague to flight, alleluia.’
At a time when we have become used to the phenomenon of fake
news and so-called alternative facts, no-one is surprised that most of
the early lives of the saints contain much that is fanciful or fictional. At
the same time, a contemporary saying remains valid which claims
that, ‘The fact that it is fiction does not meant that it is not true’. A
novel, for example, can contain many insights that are true and
helpful. While early lives of the saints may contain much gilding of the
lily, many stock images and phrases, they can also contain a reliable
historical core.
And today, were are increasingly aware that every text has a purpose.
Every text is based on intentions and presuppositions, conscious or
unconscious. Lives of the saints were and are intended to nourish and
encourage faith and belonging, to instruct and inspire the language of
love.
This is the case of the saint we celebrate today, St Columba or Colum
Cille, patron of this monastery and one of the three main patrons of
our country. He was born in 521 and died in exile on the island of
Iona in Scotland in 597. Many of the stories about him are contained
in the work of an early biographer, Adomnán, one of his successors as
Abbot of Iona, who wrote around the year 697, a century after his
death.
Every human society, regardless of whether it recognises it or not and
regardless of the yardsticks it uses, is made up of a hierarchy or
pecking-order. Just to mention a few, these yardsticks can be money,
power, inherited status and privilege, elected privilege, celebrity,
online influence, political pull.
Columba’s Ireland was one where caste and clan were of the greatest
importance. He himself was born into the highest aristocracy and
shared many of its assumptions and presumptions. Hierarchy was
taken for granted and, as in every age, the poorer and weaker paid
tribute in goods or services to the richer and more powerful. Slavery
was widespread – as St Patrick experienced some decades earlier on
his first visit to our country. But it is also true that at its best, hierarchy
imposed responsibilities and duties on those further up the ladder.
Columba took it for granted that he was a leader and he led.
The society in which Columba was a vibrant and effective leader
possessed a sophisticated cultural life, a creative and sparkling
literature that we now know was to continue to develop for a further
thousand years, providing one of the first and greatest bodies of
literature the world has seen, both in quality and quantity. And this
literary world is reflected in the stories written by Adamnán about
Columba.
True, there is much violence in these stories. But the stories also
include much tenderness – as in the story of the care for a travel-weary
crane – a bird depicted, by way in the statue of Columba in his chapel
at the back of this church. The crane, the symbol, the embodiment, of
wisdom in Irish pre-Christian tradition, can be seen to represent the
transition from a pagan society to a Christian one, a transition that
was not always smooth, not without controversy and even violence. At
least in this case, it marks a gentle transition, where the best of the old
is refined by the best of the new.
Like Columba himself: prince and warrior by birth, abbot and cleric
by the call of God and by choice, founder of monasteries, lover of
learning and lover and defender of his native culture and its literature
against Christian zealots, lover of the land- and seascape. By all
accounts, he was choleric, impulsive, competitive, bossy but also
merciful, kind, joyful and humble.
But all this leading to the great sacrifice of his actual body by leaving
his beloved land, partly, we are told, in penance for deaths caused by
a battle over the copying of a manuscript, partly as a leaving of what
was most loved for the sake of Christ, joining an already existing and
growing Irish tradition of becoming a pilgrim for Christ, the so-called
white martyrdom which often entailed exile.
Today’s readings, From the prophet Ezechiel, from the Letter to the
Romans and from the Gospel according to St Matthew, are happily
chosen. Happily chosen because, while reflecting characteristics of St
Columba in his life and personality they also provide a map for each
of us in our Christian pilgrimage.
Ezekiel reminds us of the duties of the evangelist or missionary, and of
the rewards opened to, as well as the risks run by, those who spread or
fail to spread the Gospel message and those to whom it is preached.
“If I say to the wicked, ‘You shall surely die’, and you give them no
warning, and do not speak to warn the wicked from their wicked way,
in order to save their life, those wicked persons shall die for their
iniquity; but their blood I will require at your hand.” Cheerful stuff.
And while that preaching can take the dramatic form as exemplified
by Columba’s life as founder and missionary in Scotland as well as in
Ireland. It can also take the form of the example of a Christian life
well lived in vibrant, if tranquil, faith and love. St Paul reminds us, in
his usual trenchant way, that what is demanded of us is nothing less
than the total giving of our bodies, souls and minds, that is, our whole
selves, as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.
Paul does not demand that, as in the case of Columba, we physically
remove ourselves from a much-loved land and a community that has
given us much, or even all, of our identity, but he does demand the
sacrifice of love, which he tells us is our spiritual worship. And he goes
on to list some of the attitudes and behaviour in which this love
consists: brotherly affection, mutual respect, zeal, radiance in the
Spirit, service of the Lord and one another, joyfulness in hope,
patience in times of difficulty, perseverance in prayer, generosity in
prayer and hospitality. This could be a pen-picture of Columba as it is
of our best, baptised, selves.
The Gospel from Matthew invites us to climb aboard the ship of
Christ. It may not invite us to leave our native land as Columba did,
but it does invite us to take the risk of leaving the dry, even arid, land
of our ordinarinesses, our tepidity, our mediocrity, to acknowledge, to
confess and abandon our sinful deeds and omissions, our smug
certainties and spiritual laziness. We are invited into the storm that a
genuine hearing and living of the Gospel can entail, but always with
the assurance that when we are in the boat with Christ, he will see us
safely to harbour, even if we have a bumpy ride.
As Columba, rightly known as ‘the hope of the Irish’, put it himself in
a poem now accepted by most scholars to be his:
Having thus wherewith to glory,
All the wide world might adore
The high Godhead’s sole-possession
Everywhere and evermore.
And after this, our exile show unto us the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.