Not just for the self
What an intriguing article by Kenneth Steven in August’s Life and Work about the retreats he leads to Iona and particularly the spiritual understanding he has gained from the Hermit’s Cell! But I wonder if in his research into Celtic History Kenneth has been able to authenticate the purpose for which the Hermit’s Cell was originally built.
My own first moving experience of the Hermit’s Cell was as a teenager in 1946 when George MacLeod led the Canongate Christian Workers League to the site so that he could urge on us his passion for a discipline of private prayer if we were to keep fighting the good fight. And I remember that an older couple who had attached themselves to our group broke away, saying that it never was a Hermit’s Cell, just a sheep-fank.
At that time, the circle of stones formed a wall about three feet high, but sadly there remains today just a ring of rocks on the ground.
It was actually a spiritual problem about the hermit’s piety that I myself was left with after that first sharing of prayer at the site and this was that Jesus’ pattern for a Godly life was certainly not that of a hermit focussing on his own purity – or the ‘enlightenment’ for one’s mind of some ‘spiritual retreats’.
Jesus was no loner. He sought not to escape from the troublesome world but to engage with the troubled and the trouble-makers.
So it was a great relief when the saintly Ralph Morton taught that a principal purpose of a Columban ‘hermit’ taking a turn at setting himself up on his own at a remote spot would be to make himself available so that people in trouble could come secretly to see him, in absolute privacy, perhaps in the dark. After all, you just cannot love God without loving your neighbour as yourself.
It is as important as ever for pilgrims and people going on Retreat nowadays to realise that the ‘hermit’ on Iona was there not just for the self but for the other.
As John Chalmers reminds us in his meditation, we need light to shine in the darkness of our self-absorption.
Rev Jack Kellet, Innerleithen