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It’s not the abbey like something out of a children’s history book, all damp gray rock weathered by centuries of wind and salt. It’s not the probably haunted graveyard full of winding paths and crooked stones.
It’s not even the sea, which rolls against the broken edge of the world with a ceaseless fury, or the wind, which never truly stops, but only abates into grazes and whispers.
It is none of this that makes me fall in love with St. Columba’s—or rather, it’s none of this alone. Instead it is the absolute, undeniable certainty that this is a place where hearts are tested. This is a place where everything but God is stripped away.
They say that Irish monks are different, special—that it was in these stark green fringes that Christianity survived the nastiness of the Early Middle
