DISTILLERY OF THE SOUL
Christy and I just returned from a 2 week Celtic pilgrimage to Scotland. We spent the most time on an island called Iona. Iona is like the influential birthplace of a way of life in Christ known as Celtic spirituality.
Celtic way of life is marked by the following characteristics:
all of life is sacramental, meaning I Can find God in all things, even in the ordinary
an appreciation of time that is redeemed by God and therefore no need to rush thru life
a deep desire for the importance of silence and solitude in life
the important of having soul friends to walk thru life
embracing all the emotions God has given us to tell us about our soul condition
yearning to explore and learn
a slow more contemplative stance toward my life with Christ, best imaged in scripture when John rests his head on Jesus chest; its like he is listening for the heartbeat of God
Iona is known as a thin place where heaven and earth meet. To be honest, I had heard so much of how Iona is such an amazing place, where you will sense God like nothing else yet I left home with a tempered down expectation and a prayer of holy indifference that God would meet me however He wanted to.
Iona resides in Scotland, which is best known not for its spiritual vigor, only 5% of people go to church in Scotland, but rather its whiskey and the unique distilling process it goes thru to become Scottish whiskey. Scotch is made exclusively in Scotland and must be aged for at least three years, while whiskey can be made anywhere in the world and has no minimum aging requirement. Additionally, Scotch tends to have a smokier flavor due to the use of peat during the malting process. Single malt whisky is made from three basic ingredients: water, malted barley and yeast. The water and barley are mashed together first, and then the yeast is added to create alcohol. So there you go, a little lesson on whiskey. There are distilleries everywhere and more people hit the pubs in Scotland than church.
As I thought about my time on Iona which was marked by getting covid and being in bed for 1.5 days, I reflected on how it felt like this island was a DISTILLERY OF THE SOUL. Key word in there being still. Just as whiskey is aged slowly, and has 3 ingredients, Iona is a place where we are invited to SLOW down, to let our souls settle into stillness. It seemed to offer me 3 ingredients as well to distill my own soul.
CREATION-Iona is wild. Wind whips up at any moment, rain replaces sunshine, the full force and felt sense of the orchestra of God’s weather playing all of its notes is a daily occurrence. Walking around one part of the island might feel like your on the NW coast of Oregon, another part draws you into the clear blue green waters that like Hawaii, and another part invites you to hike the lush green hills populated by regal purple heather along the trails. Everywhere you look and walk gives you a sense of God in creation, of what awaits us someday when He fully restores heaven and earth to it’ original state. This ingredient of creation brought a smallness in the stillness and a gratitude of how beauty turns ones soul toward him.
DISTRACTION or lack thereof. One of the greatest ways the island seemed to distill my soul towards settledness was that it offered a respite from distraction of choice. The only way to get on and off the island is by ferry boat. And in terms of shopping, eating, and groceries, there are only 3 streets of commerce on the entire island where everything closes by 4-5 everyday. As an American who has been entitled to choices and one amazon click away from anything I want, I realized how much the stillness of my soul is disturbed by distraction and frankly too many choices. Couple that with the fear of missing out on something, I am always looking for the best choice or one that I haven’t thought of. When faced with hard emotions via challenging circumstances, I can distract myself however I want back home, but on Iona there really wasn’t much to distract and the menu of choices was reduced significantly for a week. I realized the sense of God, the thinness of heaven and earth is so often clouded and foggy due
to so much distraction, choice and information in my life. Thin places can show up anywhere in our ordinary life. We just need space.
TIME-KAIROS-There is a time we know daily called Chronos, the kind of time that feels like we never have enough, life is passing by, and our culture says I should be at a certain place with my life, time that demands me to produce. KAIROS time is a type of time rooted in a trust of God that when I am just being, and not producing or doing, I can trust him. This type of time invites me to let the aging process of my soul do its work, ask its questions, bring the deepest hidden parts of me to God. My soul is like a bourbon barrel that contains all of me and if I would just let it sit and let time and the eternal three in one do their work, stillness or dis-stillness might be more inviting.
My soul felt like it was going through a distilling process for that week and it offered me an invitation to keep pursuing stillness in my daily life, the life filled with meetings, deadlines, fund raising, bills to pay, unknowns coming my way, emotions like grief and joy, gain and loss. What’s interesting about Iona it is a place that people come to be still, to find God, to experience new rhythms of life, to let their soul settle in a way that they can hear what the trinitarian God has to offer them. Part of what makes Iona so unique is that it has been and is a place of pilgrimage where for centuries people have come to sow prayers, questions, and longings. You can sense the tilled ground of those things when your there, that thinness. But you don’t have to go to Iona for your soul to experience its own Distilling. Stillness is a way and place of sowing your own roots, prayers, cries, longings, desires, and ear to hear the Spirits whispers. Over time, your very soul can become a thin place.
So as you ponder your own life today....
How is creation around you drawing you into a sense of smallness and gratitude?
What is distracting your soul most these days?
What is your inner posture toward time?
What are you noticing in you when you become still?