An Evening at the Beach with St. Columba


Perhaps I need to go through withdrawal before I can actually sleep in.  It's a humorous thought...I need to work harder at resting!

The Celtic Daily Prayer for today, May 28th, 2013.  The meditation for the day really spoke to me.  It is from Anne Morrow Lindbergh's A Gift from the Sea:

It is not the desert island, nor the stony wilderness, that cuts you off from the people you love: it is the wilderness in the mind, the desert wastes in the heart through which one wanders lost---a stranger to oneself and estranged from others too.  If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others.  How often in a large city, shaking hands with my friends, I have felt the wilderness stretching between us.  Both of us were wandering in arid wastes, having lost the springs that nourished us, or having found them dry.  Only when one is connected to one's core is one connected to others, I am beginning to discover.  And for me the core, the inner spring, can be be refound through solitude.



I spent the afternoon with Adomnan's The Life of St. Columba.  St. Columba was the founder of the Iona Abbey and numerous other monasteries in Ireland and Pictland.  The Book of Kells was likely produced on Iona.  It was also the springboard that launched the Lindisfarne Abbey on the island off the coast of England, the place where I will spend next week in retreat at The Open Gate Community
( http://www.lindisfarne.org.uk/theopengate/)