Our Stuff\website\iona

Extracts from IONA by William Sharp "I believe that we are close upon a great and deep spiritual change. I believe a new redemption is even now conceived of the Divine Spirit in the human heart, that is itself as a woman, broken in dreams, and yet sustained in faith, patient, long-suffering, looking towards home. I believe that though the Reign of Peace may be yet a long way off, it is drawing near: and that Who shall save us anew shall come divinely as a Woman, to save as Christ saved, but not, as He did, to bring with Her a sword."

"Sometimes I dream of the old prophecy that Christ shall come again upon Iona, and that later and obscure prophecy which foretells, now as the Daughter of God, now as the Divine Spirit embodied through mortal birth in a Woman, the coming of a new Presence and Power. But more wise it is to dream, not of hallowed ground, but of the hallowed gardens of the soul wherein She shall appear white and radiant. Or, that upon the hills, where we are wandered, the Shepherdess shall call us home."

"One of those to whom I allude was a young Hebridean priest, who died in Venice, after troubled years, whose bitterest vicissitude was the clouding of his soul's hope by the wings of a strange multitude of dreams - one of whom and whose end I have elsewhere written: and he told me once how 'as our forefathers and elders believed and still believe, that Holy Spirit shall come again which was mortally born among us as the Son of God, but, then, shall be the Daughter of God. The Divine Spirit shall come again as a Woman. Then for the first time the world will know peace.' And when I asked him if it were not prophesied that the Woman is to be born in Iona, he said that if this prophecy had been made it was doubtless of an Iona that was symbolic, but that this was a matter of no moment, for She would rise suddenly in many hearts and have Her habitation among dreams and hopes."

"Again it is said that Iona is a miswriting of Ioua, 'the avowed ancient name of the island.' It is easy to see how the scribes who copied older manuscripts might have made the mistake; and easy to understand how, once become the habit, fanciful interpretations were adduced to explain 'Iona.' There is little reasonable doubt that Ioua was the ancient Gaelic or Pictish name of the island.

St. Adamman, ninth Abbot of Iona, writing at the end of the seventh century, invariably calls the island Ioua or the Iouan Island."

Ioua is the old Gaelic word for the moon. Therefore the Iouan Island was the 'Isle of The Moon.' ( my note - G.P.) WILLIAM SHARP