Requiem in Stones

Creative nonfiction
by Richard Wile

“On what would be my daughter Laurie’s thirty-second birthday, I sit on a ledge by the shore of Columba’s Bay on the island of Iona, off the west coast of Scotland. Waves break on the rocks, ethereal light shimmers around me, and huge white clouds lie low over the water. Some fifteen hundred years ago, an Irish monk landed on this shore with twelve brothers and established the monastery in which Western Christianity was born. Long before Columba arrived, however, Iona was home to Druid and other pagan religions. Some books call this island a “thin place,” where the connection between God and humanity, the eternal and the temporal, is most apparent.

The stones on Iona have a lot to do with that feeling. On Columba’s Bay you are surrounded by stones: yellow, pink, violet, white, gray, and green, sometimes all marbled together in one rock. Some of these stones are almost three billion years old. Holding one of them is the closest I have ever come to imagining eternity.

Sheep bleat in the distance, and four teenagers giggle and scream as they wade in the chilly water. Up and down the rocky beach, more young people in shorts and backpacks—perhaps thirty altogether—pick up stones or sit on stones, walk on stones or throw stones into the bay. Earlier this morning, Laurie’s stepmother and I joined the weekly pilgrimage around Iona’s various holy sites led by staff of the Iona Community, an ecumenical Christian organization. This week is the Community’s annual Youth Conference, and instead of the meditative walk I imagined, Mary Lee and I have found ourselves on a gallop, the young people racing up and down hills and jumping over rocks like mountain goats, while we plod along behind, catching up at the various stations along the way, always arriving at the tag end of a prayer.

Since Laurie died fourteen years ago, only months after first being diagnosed with a rare and virulent cancer, I am sometimes more aware of her continued presence in my life than at other times. On the pilgrimage around Iona, I see her in these young people, the way they bounce when they run, the intensity in their eyes when they talk, their uninhibited laughter.

As always, my pleasure in my daughter’s company is tempered by the loss of her physicality. Even if I can occasionally feel her touch, I cannot hold her. I cannot see her face become more interesting as it ages. Emptiness starts to burn, and I lift my eyes to the hills—to the sunlight shimmering over lichen-covered rocks.

Jennie, our student guide, calls us together. “As part of our pilgrimage,” she says, raising her voice above the sound of the wind and the waves, “we take two pebbles from the beach. One we throw into the sea as a symbol of something in our lives we would like to leave behind, while the other we take back with us as a sign of a new commitment in our heart.”

I watch the kids turn and race down over the rocks. I follow, not sure just what I want to leave behind, until I pick up a black and white and red stone, flat and jagged at one end. I feel once more the sharp-cornered ache that I will never—at least in this lifetime—have recompense for the loss of my child. At the water’s edge, I put my index finger around the stone, and dipping my shoulder, skim the rock across the water.

Jutting out into the ocean in front of me, a rocky promontory is layered like a birthday cake, yellow turning to black, then dove-gray, crowned with green-brown grass frosted with pink heather and yellow wildflowers. Splashes of yellow lichen pattern the gray rock. I’ve read that in order to attach firmly to the rocks, lichen manufacture solvents capable of dissolving stone, and it occurs to me that even the ancient stones of Iona dissolve, wash to the sea, and recycle back into rock or some other organic form.

That these stones can be both eternal and transitory is something I can’t fathom, but I decide it is the koan I should take back with me, along with a green heart-shaped stone I’ve just picked up.

I put the green heart in my pocket, turn, and clamber up the fifty or so yards of stones rising at an almost forty-five-degree angle between the water and a field. The stones shift, slide and sink under my feet. Once, I stumble and fall to my knees. Finally, I give up trying to walk straight up and begin to weave my way back and forth. When I reach the top of the final tier of stones, I turn again and look once more out over Columba’s Bay. I feel Laurie nudge me with her elbow—hear her voice in my ear: “Pretty neat day I painted you, huh, Dad?”

The surf crashes and the layers of stone shift in a chorus of clanks, thuds, clatters, pings, rattles, and taps, a Sanctus that pulls at me as Mary Lee and I trek through the boggy fields, over shimmering hills, past the cairn of Cul ri Eirinn, where Columba turned his back forever on Ireland, and across the Machair, where fairies are said to dance in the moonlight.

The pilgrimage around Iona ends at Saint Oran’s Chapel, at the earliest surviving standing building on the island, built in the late Twelfth Century. The worn stone walls appear white against the backdrop of Iona Sound and the hills on the Island of Mull. Tombstones and daffodils surround the small building, which has a single arched doorway, and by the time Mary Lee and I arrive, the young people huddle at the entrance, listening to the sound of several guitars playing from inside.

By the end of the pilgrimage, many of the young people have become couples, holding hands or standing with their arms around each other. I think about Laurie’s never having had a real lover, of never having married or never having children of her own.

Jennie tells us that the pilgrimage traditionally ends at Saint Oran’s and the cemetery because Christians have always celebrated the fact that it was in a burial place that the resurrection faith began.

The music ends; kids scatter. I ache from my neck to my feet. Mary Lee and I enter Saint Oran’s Chapel and collapse onto a stone choir stall in front of a small white altar. The air is damp, like being in a cellar. A single light burns from a votive candle suspended from the ceiling. As the voices from outside fade away, the silence becomes deep and enfolding. I close my eyes and feel my muscles relax.

When I open my eyes again, I see leaning in the corner of the chapel behind the altar, a wooden cross probably five feet high, covered with pieces of paper. I walk over and read what’s written on one of them:
                    Pray for my daughter, Kathy, who died suddenly at 25,
                    just as she was about to enter youth ministry.

I find a pencil and a pad of Post-It Notes on the window ledge. I write Laurie’s name and the word SHALOM. I look at the cross and add a birthday prayer:
                    Watch over thy child, O Lord,
                    As her days increase.
                    Bless and guide her, wherever she may be . . .

I place my prayer on the cross with all the others.

After supper, Mary Lee and I walk on painful legs along The Path of the Dead to Iona Abbey, its granite, flagstone, and sandstone buildings and tower nestled in a field of yellow daffodils. Passing St. Martin’s Cross, the last original High Cross on the island, we enter the gothic entrance to Saint Mary’s Cathedral, walk down the Nave and find the last two empty seats in the choir stalls. On my right, light streams down from a high soaring window onto a marble communion table. Overhead, beams of timber arch like an upturned boat. Facing us, a large double gothic arch rises behind and above the choir stalls.

The congregation reminds me of a reunion of hippies: bright plaid shirts and tie-dyes and purple skirts and moon earrings. Several children wear fool’s caps. In jeans and floppy hats, the young people of the conference sit between the choir stalls at a long table covered with various collages. I read from my program that the Iona Community was founded in order to seek new ways of living the Gospel in today’s world: “. . . discovering new and relevant approaches to worship; promoting peace and social justice; supporting the cause of the poor and the exploited . . . .” I think of how much of Laurie’s abbreviated life she spent working for such groups, and I imagine her here as a counselor, working with the kids to create their collages or tie-dye tee-shirts.

A slender young man with thick horn-rimmed glasses walks to a podium in front of the double arches opposite us. He begins the service: “Out of the darkness came light.”

We respond: “And the power of God was revealed.”

The language is contemporary, but the order of service roughly follows what I’m used to: Prayers of Adoration, Prayer of Confession, A Sign of Peace, The Word. The Word—the Gospel reading—comes from Mark: the story in which three of the disciples follow Jesus to a high mountain, where he is transfigured and Moses and Elijah appear and God speaks. After which, Jesus, Peter, James, and John return to a large arguing crowd and a young man possessed by a demon. Jesus drives out the unclean spirit and quiets the crowd.

A black minister from South Africa gives the Reflection on the Word. Speaking directly to the young people, he talks of mountaintop experiences—how often we feel transfigured by weeks such as this one, everyone working together in love and harmony. But then, he says, we’re thrust back into the real world and its demons.

I look up at the granite arch on my left, at a sort of gargoyle carved into the stone, a face either in agony or fear, I can’t tell, its mouth open, about to scream. After years of raging, my demons appear more often these days as feelings of fragmentation and bitter solipsism.

The common figure, says the minister, on both the mountaintop and in the real world is Jesus, and it is Jesus who can reconcile the two experiences through his love. Tonight, he says is an Agape Service—a fellowship meal and a sacrament of that reconciling love.

As we pass bowls of raisins and seeds and chalices of water to one other, I think of the sacraments—the outward and visible signs of God’s love, the inward and spiritual grace—which have helped me live with my daughter’s death, helped fill some of my emptiness, made me more whole: everything from Mary Lee’s smile to the green stone I now hold in my hand to these young people around me, their unlined faces glowing with joy.

A man whose skin looks golden in the candlelight stands in the double arches and begins to play “Round Midnight” on a saxophone. I’ve never heard jazz played in a cathedral before.

Sacraments. Grace. Laurie’s present to me on her birthday.

When the saxophonist finishes, the young man in the glasses rises and invites the rest of us to join hands and follow the youth into the refectory for refreshments. He concludes the service:
                    God bless each of us as we travel on.
                    In our time of need
                    May we find a table spread in the wilderness
                    And companions on the road.

The organ plays. I find myself holding both Mary Lee’s hand and that of a small boy who sat with his mother in front of us, as my aching legs join the line—winding its way around the aisles and past the marble altar and flagstone walls, under the screaming gargoyles and through the gothic arches—dancing out of the cathedral.

Copyright © 2008 by Richard Wile