Iona lets the new spirit in

Something extraordinary is happening on the lonely island of Iona. Some 1,500 years after it became the cradle of Scottish Christianity, and 64 years after the all-male ecumenical Iona Community was founded, a woman has emerged as its spiritual leader.

Iona is the rocky, mile-and-a-half wide island where Columba arrived with Christianity in the 6th century. Few of the 245 full members and 1,500 associates who make up the present day community live there; most are scattered around the world, returning to Iona when they can.

But from next August the far-flung flock will be in the hands of the theologian and writer Kathy Galloway. She will steer them in interesting waters - Galloway is regarded as a forward thinker on sexuality, one of the Church’s most controversial issues.

That is richly ironic. In 1938, the founding fathers of the community - united by a rule of prayer and Bible study, accountability on the use of time and money, and working for justice and peace in the world - allowed no women on board. It wasn’t until 1969 that a female was allowed to become a full member.

Galloway’s appointment was announced at the weekend at a meeting of community members in Stirling. A second key position, that of warden of the Iona Community’s two residential centres, the Abbey and the MacLeod, is also held by a woman, poet Jan Sutch Pickard.

So it is no surprise that the community is so willing to grasp the sex nettle. It has made sexuality one of its designated "areas of concern" - alongside ecumenism, justice, peace and integrity of creation, racism, rediscovering spirituality, economic justice, and youth concern.

Galloway says she is acutely aware of the rapid social changes the Church is struggling to keep pace with. "As Richard Holloway, former Episcopal Bishop of Edinburgh, once put it, ‘sex is the Church’s noisiest problem’. Sexuality is a concern for society in general, not just one which affects the Iona Community."

"Marital breakdown is more common and marriage is no longer the norm it used to be. It is much less common not to have pre-marital sex than it used to be. The traditional teaching remains - abstinence outside marriage and chastity within it. No sex outside of marriage and no sex with anybody of the same gender. Yet research shows that 90 per cent of people are not virgins when they marry, and a lot of these will be people in the Church.

"The Church needs to start trying to answer the questions people are asking, such as where do you draw the lines? What’s good for people and what is not?"

She welcomes the sweeping away of traditional views that sex before marriage is sinful and gay sex is wicked, but believes a totally libertarian attitude can also be damaging.

"People are asking what are the new boundaries. Perhaps these are the qualities which characterise any good relationship, such as mutual responsibility, equality, kindness, faithfulness, and integrity. We are committed to being inclusive, whether about sexuality, race, disability or gender. It is not good for anybody to hide who they are. Couples can share a room here. If they live together it is insulting to expect them not to. Partners are welcome, regardless of gender."

While recognising that people under the age of 30 have grown up in a very different social climate, Galloway points out that sometimes older people are the most open. Some members may find it hard to speak up if they’re not happy about this inclusive approach to sexuality.

Galloway will be taking over from present leader, the Rev Norman Shanks, who is 60 this year and has been in post since 1995.

Shanks says sexuality is not an obsession for the community - just one issue among a number of others. Yet it makes him nervous, despite his record as a man unafraid of confrontation, even when clashes lead him into the dock of the sheriff’s court - Shanks was once arrested and charged with affray as a result of his anti-nuclear demonstrations at Faslane

"The issue arouses apprehension because it is contentious in the Church, it arouses insecurity and fear of difference," he says. "Perhaps the fear is that we ourselves are different, and perhaps it is about people’s insecurity over their own sexuality."

A major reason for his jitters is an awareness of his responsibility as leader for containing the diversity and potentially conflicting range of the community members’ views on sexuality.

"I sometimes feel I am on a tightrope," he says. "However, I feel that it is important to be directly challenging when necessary. To affirm Christ’s values, you have to be prepared to stand up and speak out."

Gay issues are the focus for worship in the Abbey during peace and justice services on Monday evenings.

"Memorably, we held one in 1998 in the same week as the Anglican Bishops’ conference condemned homosexuality," says Shanks. "Our services are open to people on the island, including those staying in hotels. Some expressed appreciation but not everybody feels comfortable with homosexuality as the focus for worship.

"My personal view about physical sex is a traditional one, perhaps typical of my age group. I believe that sex should take place within a committed, faithful relationship which is intended to be lasting. I feel this applies to both homosexual and heterosexual relationships."

Ruth Harvey, 35, the recently appointed editor of the Coracle, the community’s magazine, which goes out to members throughout the world, took sexuality as the theme in preparation for the Stirling meeting. "My belief is that being gay is a wholly acceptable way of believing and belonging in the world, and that applies equally to someone who is transgendered or bisexual. In our diversity, we are equal and wholly loved."

Her view and Shanks’s reflect the unusual degree of acceptance that exists among the Iona Community, according to Alix Brown, 50, and Polly Burns, 47, both therapists from Telford. They have been partners for the past seven years and have both been coming to Iona since 1995.

Brown says: "We have never felt the need to hide the fact we are a gay couple while on the island. When we want to hold hands we do. Our only negative experience was two years ago. One or two visitors - not members - made it plain they didn’t want to know us any more once they realised we were gay.

"Not everyone in the community will be accepting of homosexuality. I’ve spoken to one or two who have old-fashioned views but I’ve found they also have a willingness to talk and to listen which you don’t often find elsewhere."

That hasn’t been the couple’s experience in the wider Church community. The church Brown and Burns now belong to in Telford, Shropshire, is Anglican Methodist. They feel well accepted by the vicar and Church members but Brown has come up against anti-gay feeling.

"I’ve been told that if I apply to be a licensed lay reader, the bishop of my diocese would not be willing to licence me. It makes me angry, but I accept that’s how it is for now," she says.

Brown tells of a sermon on sexuality at which the preacher talked about the importance of having a God-honouring relationship. "That is what I feel Polly and I have. That means living a life consistent with the gospels, in a way that is positive, socially responsible, just, honest, true both to myself and also to Jesus."

She knows what it’s like to be rejected for her sexuality: "At one point, I belonged to an Anglican Charismatic Church. They were kind and appeared to accept me but viewed homosexuality as a neurosis to be healed through prayer. Even though people came to our house, and said they experienced God’s love in my and Alix’s home, they still felt a gay relationship was unacceptable and wrong."

Brown and Burns have met other gay people on Iona, but just one couple. "I don’t know whether we have been the only ones on those weeks or whether other people are still too scared to be open." says Burns. "But I’ve never felt the need to hide my sexuality on Iona. One week I wasn’t feeling well and put my head on Alix’s shoulder because I was tired. A female vicar said to me: ‘I don’t know how anybody can doubt the rightness of being gay when they can see the goodness of your relationship.’"

Joyce Gunn-Cairns, 53, found that achieving that degree of openness about sexuality can be a lifetime’s struggle.

Gunn-Cairns, a figurative artist who has been a member of the Community since 1981, says: "Now I’m in my fifties I’m experiencing a measure of grace.

"A lot of stuff that made me miserable all my life is slipping away. In our over-sexualised society, so much unhappiness is generated for so many people, because they feel they’re not having so many orgasms a week, and are made to feel somehow inadequate. Sexuality is not about how many times you have sex. It’s inseparable from celebrating our creativity, and who we are."

At last weekend’s meeting Gunn-Cairns was invited to exhibit eight of her paintings. "The ones I chose are more or less nude. They helped me think about questions around my own sexuality and sexuality in the wider society."

Work by Gunn-Cairns, a council member of the Society of Scottish Artists, featured at Edinburgh’s National Portrait Gallery in the "Narcissus" exhibition last year, alongside artists Jenny Saville and Alison Watts, whose nudes are well known - Saville’s for the warm fleshiness and unflinching honesty of her colossal figures, Watts’s for her more clinical depictions.

Gunn-Cairns believes her sexuality is integral to her art. "Bound up in my work is my former inability to celebrate my sexuality due to the environment in which I grew up. I feel that may have contributed to my shame about my body and its details, so that I felt uncertain of myself sexually, and ashamed of sexual pleasure. My art deals with bodily hatred and striving for bodily acceptance, combined with a confusion about myself as a sexual being. It strives to unmask and release the essence of the human body.

"Interestingly, I have quite a following among gay men. I wonder if that is connected with my candour about my struggles with sexuality. Gay people often have to be guarded about theirs. My portrayal of the body is far from pornographic, but it is about honesty and the struggle for self-acceptance. I am trying to work through messages from peer group, society, and issues to do with my father’s death when I was five, that I am not acceptable as I am; that my body is ugly and alien. I am not into fixing things and making them look nice.

"Through the process of struggling with these images I have come to terms with the way I am. I can look at my saggy breasts with no discomfort. I couldn’t care less. My body has served me well. If I didn’t have a man in my life, or a sexual relationship, I would still want to be vibrant and alive and celebrate my body as it is without feeling ashamed of it."

It’s that kind of openness which Galloway hpes she can nurture among the Iona community. "I hope that people will be able to speak openly, but if they find it difficult, perhaps they are engaging with the difficulty that gay and lesbian people have always had to struggle with. And that may be part of the learning process.

"The challenge for us is to be both radical and conciliatory - to hold firm to your perspective in a conflict, but also to your relationship with that other person. Unless we are willing to engage in that struggle, we cannot live and work together."