Columba and the End of Nature

There are occasions when understanding shifts without anticipation. One such shift happened to me in an unremarkable setting. I was not standing on Iona’s exposed island shoreline in Scotland or gazing into the cold and blue churning of the North Atlantic Ocean. I was in Salt Lake City, worshipping quietly in an Antiochian Orthodox parish during the Divine Liturgy. I was completely sober, not fasting, and not seeking anything unusual. The space was familiar: incense rising, icons reflecting candlelight, chant unfolding at its measured pace, and the long continuity of a Eucharistic prayer that anchors centuries of practice.

In the middle of that liturgy, something in my awareness changed. It was not a vision in any conventional sense. Nothing appeared to my eyes, and no scene unfolded in imagination. It aligned instead with what Teresa of Avila calls an intellectual vision. Teresa distinguishes several ways of perceiving spiritual reality. She describes corporeal visions engaging the senses, imaginary visions engaging mental imagery, and then a third category where insight arrives without sensation or imagination. In her words, “lo que tenemos por fe allí lo entiende el alma, podemos decir, por vista,” meaning that what faith usually holds without clarity becomes, in that moment, understood by the soul as if seen. Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, alternately describes the phenomenon as “pure intelligence flowing”.

Teresa elsewhere notes that this form of knowing allows the “eyes of the soul” to apprehend something of how divine power and love permeate reality. She emphasizes that it is not constructed by the mind. No imagery appears. The insight arrives fully formed, as though processed by a deeper faculty before consciousness becomes aware of it. That is the closest way I can describe what occurred for me that day.

For a brief period, a deeper region of understanding seemed to rise above my ordinary interpretive habits. I sensed a coherence linking emergence and decline. Evolution and erosion, flourishing and extinction appeared not as competing narratives but as movements held within a larger continuity. This did not diminish ecological grief or reinterpret suffering as inconsequential. If anything, it clarified the weight of loss. Yet beneath that grief I sensed that the full arc of nature’s life, including its apparent endings, rests within what I understand as the steady regard of God.

Nothing suggested reversal or simple resolution. Instead, the impression conveyed that decay does not provoke divine panic. The awareness was quiet and composed.

Contemporary ecological thinking often frames our situation as a descent. Species disappear, glaciers shrink, forests burn, and uncertainty grows. These observations are accurate and ethically pressing. But during that liturgy, my perception briefly shifted. I did not see restored ecosystems or alternate futures. What came was a sense of symmetry: the generosity that allows life to arise also allows forms to pass away. Creation and un-creation happen within the same horizon.

From this perspective, the end of a particular ecological arrangement is not an anomaly. It is part of how finite systems participate in a wider circulation. Living things arise, persist for a time, and then return their substance to larger processes. This does not absolve destructive behavior. It does not lessen our responsibility. It simply recognizes that devolution is not pure negation. The transformation of forest into soil or reef into limestone belongs to the ongoing life of the earth.

My experience in the liturgy offered a brief sense that both growth and diminishment are comprehended in a deeper continuity. Some time after this experience, I revisited Columba’s well-known prophecy about Iona. I had encountered it before, but it acquired new resonance.

In Gaelic the prophecy reads:

“An I mo chridhe, I mo ghraidh,
An àite guth mhanach bidh geum bà;
Ach mu’n tig an saoghal gu crìch,
Bithidh I mar a bha.”

Translated:

“In Iona of my heart, Iona of my love,
Instead of monks’ voices shall be the lowing of cattle,
But before the world comes to an end,
Iona shall be as it was.”

This brief text contains a striking ecological horizon. Columba acknowledges that the island will not always sound like a monastery. The chants of monks will give way to cattle and ordinary life. Historically, this occurred. Viking raids ended monastic stability, and later political and religious reforms reshaped the island. The monastic soundscape faded.

Yet the prophecy adds a second movement: the island will one day return to its earlier state. “As it was” seems to reference not the height of Christian learning but an older ecological condition, a time before monastic settlement.

For a founder of a major monastery, this is remarkable. Columba does not imagine his institution as permanent. He imagines the land restored to forms older than his own work. His prophecy centers the island, not the monastery.

This perspective resonates with the symmetry I sensed during the liturgy. Cultural achievements matter, but they are not final. They participate in cycles of formation and release. Columba’s affection for Iona includes imagining it without human intervention.

One of the most revealing elements in the traditions surrounding Columba is the emotional tenor of his community. The stories describe a man who often perceived difficult futures: approaching storms, political reversals, personal losses, and even the nearness of death. When he spoke of these things, the monks were not indifferent. Their reactions were marked by unease and, at times, genuine sorrow.

Several accounts describe the monks asking him, almost pleadingly, not to continue. They did not deny his insight. They simply recognized the emotional cost of knowing more than they could hold. Their response reflects a basic truth about human life: that clarity, however truthful, can become too heavy when it arrives without preparation or support.

What stands out is Columba’s response. He is not portrayed as a figure who revels in foresight or forces disclosure. Instead, he is shown listening to the vulnerability of his community and adjusting his speech accordingly. In some stories he offers only the outline of what he perceives. In others he withdraws into silence. The restraint is deliberate. He seems to understand that knowledge lands not only in the mind but in the nervous system, and that the ability to absorb it varies from person to person.

This is not sentimentality. It is a form of pastoral intelligence. It demonstrates a recognition that truth, if delivered without discernment, can harm rather than help. In these fragments of memory, Columba appears less as a seer dispensing information and more as a caretaker preserving the emotional stability of those who entrusted themselves to him. His gentleness is about proportionality, not softness. It is an instinct to safeguard the fragile places in others while still honoring whatever insight he carried.

Columba’s prophecy occupies a distinctive place in Celtic Christianity. It hints at a form of ecological eschatology. Traditional Christian eschatology often centers human destiny. It asks about salvation, judgment, and the future of the Church. Columba’s words widen the frame. The eschatological image becomes a landscape. The “last things” involve the ecological state of the island itself.

This shift has implications. It implies that the land has value beyond its role in human religious life. Iona’s meaning is not exhausted by monastic activity. The island participates in a horizon larger than our projects. It also suggests that holiness does not depend on our continued presence. The land has a future that exceeds our shaping.

This is both grounding and sobering. It affirms the land’s dignity while reminding us that our structures, even sacred ones, are not the final form of things.

One of the places where this becomes especially visible is the graveyard on Iona often called Reilig Odhráin. Medieval tradition holds that numerous kings of Scotland, Ireland, and Norway were buried there. These were individuals who once governed kingdoms and commanded armies. They shaped political landscapes and carried the weight of sovereignty.

Today their graves lie low to the ground. Visitors cross that place quietly, sometimes without recognizing who is underfoot. Rulers once anchored in power are now part of the island’s soil. Their histories, once expansive, now rest beneath the steps of pilgrims and tourists who do not always pause to notice.

This reality embodies the pattern Columba named: human structures rise and fall, and even the powerful are eventually woven into the ecological life of the island. The kings’ graveyard stands as a tangible reminder that the land outlasts our structures, and that returning to the earth is part of the long continuity in which nature and human culture participate together.

When I place my liturgical experience alongside Columba’s prophecy and the quiet presence of the kings’ graveyard, a shared pattern emerges. Contemporary conversations about “the end of nature” emphasize irreversible collapse. That framing is not incorrect. The urgency is real. But contemplative reflection reveals a second layer.

Nature is not solely a system we attempt to preserve. It is a partner in a long story. If ecological forms end, that ending may be part of a transformation rather than annihilation. Forms change; continuity remains. That continuity does not negate grief, but rather gives grief context.

In Columba’s prophetic mind, his beloved and holy Iona is not destined to be a museum of religious achievement. It is instead released from its monastic calling and allowed to return to its earlier rhythms in a movement of restoration. The kings’ graveyard further underscores how even the powerful become part of the island’s ecology. And my experience in the liturgy suggested a similar pattern operating across scales far larger than one island.

I feel the need to underscore again that this perspective does not reduce responsibility. It intensifies it. It becomes an acknowledgment that our work is meaningful but provisional.

I do not claim to understand perfectly how all these elements fit together. I can only acknowledge that, in a liturgy in Utah, I sensed both the seriousness of natural history and the steady presence beneath that seriousness. The responsibility is real, and so is the underlying continuity.

If Columba could imagine Iona as monastic and post-monastic, cultivated and wild, structured and returned to itself, then perhaps we can cultivate a similar balance in ourselves.

A memory from earlier in my life returned to me as I reflected on these themes. I was on retreat at the Esalen Institute, and one of the other participants, a Buddhist monk, knew I was Christian. He asked me to explain the Christian understanding of resurrection. I answered with words that surprised me. I said that the resurrection is God remembering nature. The phrase felt accurate as soon as I heard myself say it. In Christian hope—and in the hopes held within several other traditions—the end of nature is not erasure. It is held in a larger memory. After the full course of emergence and decline, the life of the world is not forgotten. It is carried into a future we cannot yet describe. This remains for me one of the quiet anchors of faith: that the same regard holding the rise and fall of ecosystems also remembers them, and does not let them slip into oblivion.