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A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Canon Stephen Shipley

Good morning.

How would you define a Saint I wonder? One of the cleverest answers I’ve come across is ‘Someone whose background hasn’t been adequately researched!’ You certainly couldn’t say that though about the saint we remember today.

Columba was an Irish monk who in the year 563 sailed to the tiny island of Iona, off the west coast of Scotland. There he was concerned with building up both the monastery and its life of prayer and of enabling the monks to be instruments of mission in a heathen land. He converted kings and built churches, Iona becoming a starting point for the expansion of Christianity throughout Scotland. Within a few years of his death on this day, 9th June 597, Columba’s life and work had begun to be celebrated by Irish poets and later chronicled by abbots from Iona. When people wrote the life of a saint in those days, what interested them was the number of miracles they performed, yet there’s plenty of evidence that Columba was also a man of strong passions and not just good ones.

He may have been warlike. On the other hand, like other Celtic saints, he had an affinity with animals and there’s an account of his rescuing a hurt crane on one of the beaches. Yes, he had his fiercely autocratic side, but ultimately he achieved what he did because he was recognised as a leader and people were prepared to follow him. As this country – indeed the whole world – begins to adapt to a new way of life after the pain and misery of the corona-virus pandemic, we too look to our leaders for that combination of integrity and humility which will once more build up trust and confidence.

Lord, send your healing power into the doubts and anxieties of the world that all may come to know your loving purpose.

Amen.