From Volume 6, Number 1, Summer 1999

The Ways of Aidan:
The Way of Columcille

He was born Colum MacFhelim MacFergus, but he is best known to us as St. Columba. His Irish name became Columcille, "Dove of the Church." However, at the beginning there was little of the gentleness  of the dove in his personality. He was a scion of great families of Ireland.  His mother, Eithne, was of the royal house of Leinster and his father a direct descendant of Niall of the Nine Hostages (the piratical chieftain responsible for the raid in which young Patrick was kidnaped and first taken to Ireland). Columcille was well aware of his noble heritage and of the rights and respect due it.

This background led him to disaster in the first recorded episode of copyright infringement. At the age of nineteen Columcille had joined the community of Finnian of Moville along with a  number of talented young men later known, with Columcille, as the "twelve apostles of Ireland." The young Colum had copied a book of the Psalms belonging to the community without Finnian's permission. When Finnian  learned of this, he brought the matter to the high King who decided in Finnian's favor with the infamous judgment: "To every cow its calf, to every book its copy." While this may have been an historic pronouncement,  giving birth to the roiled history of copyright law, Columcille did not appreciate that significance. Such a judgment was deemed an affront to his dignity, particularly as the high King was a rival to Columcille's  own family.

Columcille gathered his own kinsman and fought and defeated the King in a battle at Cooldrebhne where many lives were lost. This broke for a while the power of the kings of Tara, but it  earned Columcille the wrath of the Church. At first there was talk of excommunication, but this was amended to exile from Ireland. Supposedly, Columcille's own soul friend charged him to stay in exile until he had  won as many souls for Christ as had been slain in the battle. Though victorious in battle and surrounded by power and nobility, Columcille humbly accepted his penance, traveling to western Scotland searching for a  place just out of sight of his beloved Ireland. He found such a place at Iona.

It is difficult to assess this story in light of modern values. Regardless of its violation of the Gospel, Columcille's actions in bringing about the battle were right and justifiable in  the warrior culture of Ireland. For Columcille there came a choice of his right to himself. He must either choose Christ or culture, but he could not embrace both. In surrendering his right to himself, Columcille was  freed to fulfill the call of apostleship.

It was not that Columcille had not worked to establish new communities before his exile. His most beloved establishment, Derry, was a product of these early years. Nor is it true that  Columcille's personality underwent some massive transformation after his exile for he carried his boldness and nobility with him to good effect when dealing with the kingdom of the Picts in the Northeast or his own  countrymen in the Scottish kingdom of Dalriada. Rather all aspects of his personality and all rights of his heritage were now at the exclusive disposal of Christ his druid.

This right to ourselves is an often fatal stumbling block when living the Aidan Way in any setting or culture. The greatest problem is that, humanly speaking, there is no doubt of our right to ourselves, our dignity and our destiny. However, the seventh element of the Aidan Way, "Wholeness not fragmentation" begins with a renunciation of the self-sufficient autonomy at the root of our right to ourselves.

When St. Francis of Assisi sought papal approval for his first Rule of Life, he met with dismayed opposition over his approach to poverty. The poverty of the individual monastic was a  central element of all extant communities. Francis took the issue a step further by committing his community to the absolute poverty of its individual members. He reasoned that if community held property then it  would need to guard it and thus take a stance of hostility against the very world Francis sought to embrace. So it is with our right to ourselves. If we maintain it, we must guard that right against a hostile and  demanding world.

To lay down our right to ourselves does not, however, mean that we lay ourselves down as "Sir Walter Raleigh's cloak" for passers by to tread into the mud. Columcille was every inch a  descendant of the Ui Neill until his death. We do not give up the right to ourselves by letting it dissipate into nothingness. Instead we, with Columcille, surrender the use of that right to the High King above all  High Kings. Columcille's life incorporates so many different features that can illustrate the Aidan Way. In our insanely individualistic times, this Way is the way in which Columcille may bless us best.