Sounds of Iona April 2025

In April’s Sounds of Iona, Ruth Harvey discovers that ‘the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.’ 

In our daily prayer we ask that the gifts of ‘courage, faith and cheerfulness’ given to Columba be granted as ‘a like spirit’ to all. I wonder how that reads to you, even at this present time? 

We are hard-wired to take care in times of danger. Opening our newsfeeds may not seem a particularly dangerous or courageous act. Yet recent events have led members to say to me: ‘every morning I’m afraid to open the mail, or the news, asking: what has happened now?’  

Standing strong in the face of overwhelming turmoil takes courage. Alison Phipps, in her daily poems in solidarity with all suffering in the Middle East, takes us to that place of courage. She names in starkly bleak, deeply true language, the horror of the literal and existential threats facing us all. Her words unfold the strength and the courage being demonstrated daily in the face of exterminating violence. 

‘So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing’ 

Share deeply

Over the last few months as a Community we’ve been asking: How do I understand ‘God’ working in my life and in the world? What does prayer mean to me? What happens when we pray? The hallmark of these conversations, hosted on site and online with a total of around 200 people so far, has not been the conclusions we reach, but rather the quality of the listening we display. It is in the depth of sharing that we come closer to our understanding of the mystery of the divine. It is in the depth of our relationships that we see more fully the glimmers of gold, the light of Christ, in one another. Doubt, and the glorious edges of belief are woven into the fabric of faith.  (And a wee side note of joy here – our Worship Resource Team have produced a most beautiful Iona Abbey Song Book for use during the 2025 season in the Abbey. Full of known and unknown Wild Goose Resource Group songs and songs from our friends and allies, this is a forerunner to a fuller volume in future.) 

‘So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.’ 

Walk cheerfully 

George Fox encouraged us to ‘be patterns, be examples…wherever you come, that your carriage and life may preach…Then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone’.

Being true to ourselves leads to cheerfulness. I wonder if Fox was pointing to that notion of congruence, of integrity. Let your life witness on the outside what you believe on the inside, and your integrity will shine. John Paul Lederach calls this ‘voicewalking’ or living by an inner vocation. There is in this a sense of conviction, of hope that, even in the face of all that is bleak, what we can do is live with ‘courage, faith and cheerfulness.’ 

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love for the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the hope and the love are all in the waiting….
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

East Coker III in The Four Quartets, by T.S. Eliot 

Photo credit: B Forsyth/Iona Community