Sunday, June, 21, 2026 - Listening For Love
Listening for Love
There were several reasons I wanted to travel to the island of Iona to participate in a time
of study and reflection within the life of the abbey and the Iona Community.
The first, of course, was spiritual. The week I spent with the Iona Community was
centred especially on Saint Columba, an Irish monk who carried forward the Celtic
Christian tradition associated with Saint Patrick and brought that faith across the sea to
Scotland and its people.
June 9 is remembered as the Feast Day of Saint Columba. I had chosen that week because
we would be reflecting on Columba’s life, leadership, and pilgrimage.
His leadership was rooted in three qualities that became the focus of our time together:
• Faith.
• Courage.
• And cheerfulness.
Those three words offered a way of understanding Columba’s journey. They also became
a way of understanding our own. But I must confess that there was also a family reason
for going. I am, after all, a MacLean.
Beside Iona is the larger island of Mull, the historic home of the Clan MacLean and of
Duart Castle. The castle had been lost to the clan and had fallen into ruin.
But in the early twentieth century, Sir Fitzroy Donald Maclean, the clan chief, bought it
back and began restoring it. There was also another Sir Fitzroy Maclean. He was a
soldier, diplomat, adventurer, and an early member of the Special Air Service. He is
sometimes named as one of the possible inspirations for Ian Fleming’s James Bond.
So Fitzroy, and certainly the fictional character he may have inspired, possessed a rather
particular kind of licence. Given the history that brings us together today, I am grateful
that the MacLean licence has evolved. We are now licensed to preach.Which is probably
safer for everyone concerned.
But my journey to Mull and Iona was more than family tourism. It was a pilgrimage.
On Iona stands MacLean’s Cross, a large Celtic stone cross along the old pilgrims’ road
toward the abbey. Very early in the mornings, before the common life of Iona fully
began, I would go outside alone and sit at the foot of that cross. There, family history and
faith history seemed to meet. The cross carries the name of my clan. But it also stands
along an ancient road of pilgrimage toward the abbey and the legacy of Columba.
In that quiet place, I reflected on the stories I had inherited, the faith that had shaped me,
and the pilgrimage still ahead.
A pilgrimage is more than a trip to a sacred place.
It is an outward journey that opens an inward one.
• We travel across land or water.
• But we also travel through memory.
• We remember where we have come from.
• We ask what we are carrying.
• And we listen for where love may be calling us next.
The people of Israel knew something about pilgrimage. They had travelled through
wilderness and uncertainty. They had known hunger, fear, loss, conflict, and hope.
Moses had led them for many years. But now leadership was passing from Moses to
Joshua. The story would continue, but in new hands.
As the people crossed the Jordan River, they carried twelve stones from the riverbed and
placed them at Gilgal. Joshua told them that one day their children would ask:
“What do these stones mean?” And when they asked, the people were to tell the story.
They were to remember how God had carried them. They were to remember the people
who had travelled before them. They were to remember the fear of the crossing and the
faith that brought them through. The stones were not placed there to keep the people
looking backward. They were placed there to give them faith for the road ahead.
That is what memorials can do at their best. MacLean Cross does not ask me simply to
admire my ancestors. The ancient crosses of Iona do not ask us simply to romanticize the
past. The stones beside the Jordan do not call Israel to remain forever beside the river.
They ask us to remember, and then they ask us to continue the pilgrimage.
Saint Columba’s journey to Iona was also a pilgrimage. He left Ireland and crossed the
sea toward a small island at the edge of the known world. There was no promise that his
work would succeed. No guarantee that a community would grow. No certainty that
people centuries later would still gather there to pray. Columba crossed the water. He left
what was familiar. He travelled toward what was unknown. That takes courage.
In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus says: “Do not be afraid.” Jesus does not say that there is
nothing to fear. He does not promise that discipleship will be easy, safe, or comfortable.
In fact, he is honest about the cost. Following him may create tension. Telling the truth
may bring opposition. Choosing love may require sacrifice. Faith may ask us to leave a
familiar shore. It may ask us to walk a road we did not choose.
Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is deciding that fear will not have the final
word. That does not mean that nothing painful will happen. It means that nothing can
make us invisible to God.
We are known. We are seen. We are held.
And because we are held, we can take the next step.
At the centre is cheerfulness. Not shallow happiness. Not pretending that everything is
fine. Not smiling when we are hurting.
Cheerfulness is the deep spiritual freedom of those who know that fear does not rule the
world. There is something of that same spirit in the Order of Good Cheer at Port-Royal
during the winter of 1606 and 1607. The French settlement had already learned how
difficult survival could be. Winter brought cold, isolation, illness, and uncertainty.
Samuel de Champlain understood that people needed more than food. They needed
companionship. They needed music, stories, laughter, and the shared work of caring for
one another.
The gatherings included Mi’kmaw leaders and neighbours, among them the respected
leader Membertou. And on this First Nations Sunday, it is important to tell that story
carefully. The French had not arrived in an empty land. They had entered Mi’kma’ki.
The Mi’kmaq already possessed deep knowledge of the land, its seasons, its food, and its
ways of survival. The newcomers benefited from that knowledge. So this was not simply
a story of Europeans arriving and creating community. It was also a story of people
receiving wisdom and help from those who were already at home on the land.
Port-Royal was the first permanent European settlement in what is now Canada.
It stood in Mi’kma’ki, in the place we now call Nova Scotia. Nova Scotia means New
Scotland. For someone who grew up on the East Coast and whose family roots reach
back to Scotland, that creates another small circle within this pilgrimage. The story also
has a connection with theatre. In November 1606, Marc Lescarbot presented Le Théâtre
de Neptune near Port-Royal to welcome Poutrincourt home. It is often described as the
first recorded European theatrical production in Canada, and Halifax’s Neptune Theatre
still carries its name. But it was written from a European colonial point of view and
placed words into the mouths of Mi’kmaw characters.
So even as we remember its place in Canadian theatre history, we must also listen for the
Indigenous voices it did not allow to speak for themselves. Still, its very existence tells us
something about cheerfulness. These settlers were facing a difficult winter and yet they
created theatre. They told stories, they gathered in community, they made room for
imagination, celebration, and hope.
Then, in a toast attributed to Baron de Poutrincourt, came these words:
“We meet tonight to witness an event that will, I pray, go ringing down the years as
marking the sure founding of the Order, which God and France shall ever serve as beacon
to our goal.”
Some of that language belongs clearly to its colonial time. But beneath it is still an
important hope: That something created in a difficult season may become a light for years
to come. That community can become a beacon. Cheerfulness, then, is not foolishness.
At Port-Royal, it was part of survival. It was the choice to share food, stories, music,
laughter, responsibility, and hope.
Faith helps us trust that there is a way forward. Courage helps us take the next step.
Cheerfulness gives us the shared joy, imagination, and hope that help us keep going.
This is also part of the spiritual legacy of Iona. Prayer and justice belong together.
Work and worship belong together. Grief and song belong together.
We are sustained by companionship, by beauty, by hospitality, and by the surprising joy
of discovering that God is already present among us.
In community, we recover faith. In community, we discover courage, and in community,
we learn again to listen for love. At the centre is not fear. At the centre is love.
The courage of faith does not always look dramatic. Sometimes courage is simply the
decision to begin again. During my time on Iona, I shared accommodation with three men
whose stories taught me something about the different forms courage can take.
There was Brian, in his seventies.
He was a lay preacher who had come to Iona to strengthen his faith and renew his
commitment to the Methodist preaching circuit he served. His courage was the courage of
continuing. Of returning to the source of his calling. Of offering himself again to the
work still before him. Brian renewed the pilgrimage.
There were also Rob and Tom, both in their thirties.
Rob was the son of two clergy. He had recently returned to his faith. As an adult, he had
chosen to be confirmed and to claim faith for himself. His faith was no longer only
something connected with his parents or his childhood. It had become his own decision.
His own commitment. His own journey. Rob reclaimed the pilgrimage.
And then there was Tom.
He carried with him the memory of his grandfather. In 1963, Tom’s grandfather, who
was then a theological student, took part in a re-enactment of Columba’s journey from
Ireland to Iona. They rebuilt a boat. They made the crossing. They entered, in their own
way, the danger, uncertainty, and faith of that ancient voyage. Tom had taken that
inherited story and created a one-person play told from the perspective of his grandfather.
In Tom, memory had become vocation.
He was looking back toward the memorial stones of his own family history. Not so that
he could remain in the past.But so that he could find courage for the present.
Tom reinterpreted the pilgrimage.
Brian renewed it.
Rob reclaimed it.
Tom reinterpreted it.
Each looked backward but none remained there. Each listened to a story that had shaped
him. Each asked what that story meant for his life now. Perhaps that is where courage
begins. When we understand that our lives are part of a story larger than ourselves. When
we listen to the courage of those who came before us. When we ask what love now
requires of us.
So we return once more to the stones beside the Jordan. “When your children ask, ‘What
do these stones mean?’” the people are to tell them the story. The stones hold memory.
But they also create responsibility. They remind each generation that faith is never ours
alone.
Faith is received. Faith is interpreted, and faith is entrusted to us for a time. The ancient
crosses of Iona remain. MacLean Cross remains along the pilgrims’ road. The stories of
Columba and those who followed remain. The memory of the Order of Good Cheer also
remains.
But on this First Nations Sunday, remembering cannot simply mean telling the story in
the way it has always been told. Our memorial stones must also remind us of stories that
were ignored. Stories that were silenced. Stories told only through the language of settlers
and churches. They must remind us that this land was not empty. Wisdom was already
present here. Community was already present here.
Faith, story, family, ceremony, and care for the land were already present here. The
pilgrimage before us now is not one in which the church assumes that it knows the road.
It is a pilgrimage of listening. It asks us to walk side by side with our First Nations
brothers and sisters.
Not ahead of them, not speaking for them, but listening to their voices, honouring their
stories. Receiving their wisdom and facing honestly the pain caused by the church and by
colonialism. Listening for love means listening even when what we hear is difficult.
It means allowing truth to unsettle us. It means understanding that reconciliation is not
something we announce or complete quickly. It is a long pilgrimage of relationship,
repentance, justice, humility, and renewed trust. Faith looks back. But it does not remain
there. Faith remembers in order to move forward.
What stones have been placed in our lives? What stories have carried us? Whose courage
has made our courage possible? Whose voices have we not yet heard? What will those
who come after us see when they look back at the lives we have lived?
May they see that we remembered. May they see that we had the courage to tell the truth.
May they see that we found strength in community. May they see that we walked side by
side with humility. May they see that we listened for love.
In scripture. In memory. In one another.
And having listened for love, may we find the faith and courage to cheerfully continue
the pilgrimage together. Amen.