When I was in college I became very pleased about the fact that I was Scottish. Much of this was probably just a reaction to being amongst a lot of Irish Catholics and my innate desire to be difficult. And so it is probably fortunate that in my Scottish pride period I was unaware of St. Columba, the saint whom we remembered a few days back, because he was the Irish saint who brought Christianity to Scotland. Which on some level makes the Scots beholden to the Irish, something we never want to be. It’s like the t-shirt I once saw which said, “Everyone is a little Irish on St. Patrick’s Day except the Scottish, we’re still Scottish.” But as much as it grieves me I do have to give an Irishman some credit or “shout out” as the young kids say.
St. Columba was born on December 7, 521 (1420 years before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, so that wasn’t his fault). He was born in the northern part of Ireland at a place called Gartan. He was a pretty big deal even in his time, so unlike many of the older saints we know a fair amount about his life, although some of it may be more legend than fact. With that in mind let me give you my favorite version of his story, which may contain a few of those unsubstantiated facts. It goes like this: Sometime around his 40th birthday in 562 or 563 Columba, an Irish Abbot, started a war in Ireland, which made a lot of people upset with him. So in a fit of pique he decided to leave Ireland and then traveled by boat until he could no longer see Ireland, which put him on the island of Iona. It was from here that he would go into Scotland to start converting the native Picts to Christianity. And while in Scotland he also killed the Loch Ness Monster. Well the outline of that story is definitely true. Columba did leave Ireland and sail to Iona where he set up a missionary outpost. He converted many of the Picts, who worshiped pagan gods at the time. One of his great successes was the conversion of the Pictish king, Bride son of Meilochon. And for the 1500 years or so since he did his work Scotland has been Christian. But here is a bit of sad news about Scotland. A 2011 survey found that only 54% of the population identified as Christian – which is still a majority but a rather small one (or wee one if you want to be all Scottish about it). And I am guessing that that percentage has shrunk in the intervening years. We should of course celebrate Columba but also ponder how it is that Christianity was able to conquer paganism, endure through the middle ages and Black Death but is in retreat to the current culture. And we should also ponder what is the solution? Do we need to once again launch missionaries to re-conquer lands lost to the rising tide of secularism? And if we did would those people even care, or would they be too busy binge watching Marie Kondo on Netflix to even notice?
I was listening to a discussion the other day about the role of technology versus ideas in terms of changing culture. The person I was listening to argued that we tend to look at things like what kids learn in school or what is on television as the items which steer a culture and it is true to a certain extent. But he said, for example, the automobile had more influence on teenage promiscuity than any philosophy espoused by Hugh Hefner or Alfred Kinsey. I bring this up not to say we should not be espousing proper and ethical ways to live but merely to point out that we may not exactly be sure what we are countering. In the time of Columba the equation was fairly straightforward. You had pagan people who worshiped pagan gods. To change this you had to convince them that the gods they were worshiping were not real gods and you then introduced them to the one true God as found in Jesus Christ. All that you were really doing was moving the direction of their worship to something else. But what are we exactly countering today? Are we countering a society that rejects God as a myth? Well there is certainly some of this. There is obviously the professional atheist class like Richard Dawkins or Bill Maher. But a lot of people who don’t believe do not have the evangelistic fervor of these two; they just kind of don’t care. There are others who are not necessarily opposed to religion and belief and would even say that they are Christian but just can’t really be bothered. These are the types who insist on getting their children baptized and then don’t appear in church again until the baptized kid gets married. There are also those who don’t even really think about it. And so in all of this how can we be like Columba? How can we show a world that does not even know that it needs God, that there is more to this life? I wish I had an easy solution, but I think it is going to take time to figure out.
I was listening to historian Rachel Laudan discuss food the other day and how this is really the first time in human history that much of the world has too much food. So as a result we as humanity have not really figured out what to do with this abundance, resulting in such things as the obesity epidemic. You have a species that for most of history has dealt with scarcity now trying to adapt to plenty and no one quite knows what to do. I wonder if that same sort of phenomenon is going on in our world, that is the world of religion.
There is an old argument, generally put forth by atheists that essentially posits that what belief in something higher was only there to explain the things that we cannot explain or control. And as we have come to understand more and more, especially in the last two hundred years or so, the need for God to explain the unexplainable has disappeared. For example, you used to pray for a good harvest, but with innovations in seed quality and fertilizers good harvests are more guaranteed. But I would argue that like with food people have not figured out where they need God when all of their physical needs are seemingly satisfied. Fat, dumb and happy has blotted out the longing for God in some. But I think much like creating a new relationship with food much of our society will need to find new relationship with God; understanding God not just as someone to help you on a math test, but rather to fill in all of the broken areas of our world. You do not have to look far to see all of the problems in our society. You also don’t have to look far to see all of the bad ways that people are trying to fix those problems. I mean, the heroin epidemic is happening among rich kids in the suburbs. We live in a hurting society that has tried everything except God to heal itself and we need to model and invite people into a relationship with God. For as another great saint said, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you."
The coming years are going to require new ways of explaining God to a people who think that they understand Him. Great saints like Columba figured out ways to evangelize in their contexts and we will need to do the same.