Iona Dawn: through Holy Week with the Iona Community
Iona Dawn: through Holy Week with the Iona Community Neil Painter ed., (Wild Goose Publications, 2006), ISBN: 1-905010-11-0
This book comes out of the experience of people who have lived, prayed and worked as part of the Iona community but have now left to live on the mainland in faith communities, hospitals and social projects from Glasgow to Australia, St. Alban's to Brazil and South Africa.
Each day of Holy Week is given a Bible Reading accompanied by a short meditation, a prayer and some questions for reflection. The meditations come out of the writer's experience working in the West Bank, in a hospice for the dying, in an AIDS project in Africa and other encounters with human suffering.
The Iona Community was founded in Glasgow in 1938 in the midst of Depression-era poverty and hopelessness. The rebuilding of the monastery of Iona offered hope for the rebuilding of society. From its inception the community has offered a mixture of poetic wisdom found in the Celtic Christian tradition and the extraordinary beauty of the island and prophetic social realism as a response to the radical call of the Gospel.
The meditations and questions of this little book do not lead us into a safe, sacred space in which to think about Holy Week. Rather they suggest a way of praying with the mystery of Christ's death and resurrection that leads us with him into the darkness of human limitation and suffering and on into the light of hope.
This is not just another devotional Holy Week book but one that does not shrink from asking hard questions of God and human experience while radiating the faith and hope of Iona.