Celebrating St Columba Day 2007 at Pyengana

With few expectations, the God-inspired activity - Celebrate St Columba Day with stories, songs and a walk to St Columba falls - was a wonderfully nourishing and satisfying experience. Listening and speaking; sharing stories of loss and longing; sharing not only the bread and wine...but scary sharing of ourselves with strangers and seeing the face of Christ in the unknown, surely a moment of sheer joy which gladdens the heart.

An important element of the vision for the event was to use it as a starting point to re-engage at a deeper level with the local community.

Significantly, the church of St Michael and All Angels is positioned in splendid isolation on the Tasman Highway, a symbolism, I suspect not lost on the locals, who may from time to time express negative and positive feelings about the perceived lack of connectivity between church and people in their day to day lives.

Responses filtering back have been wonderfully encouraging and humbling. Forty seven people attended the service which had splendour, tradition and real warmth and the Revd Kent Small's stories of the life of Columba captured the imagination and the hearts of the people.

The dynamics changed over lunch, 45+ people, not the same group, but some different smiling faces were there. Mairi and David sang beautiful Irish and Scottish songs during lunch which moved some to tears. Again, informality was the norm. Our hosts, Jon and Lyndal Healey could not have been more helpful in both the planning and the quality of the meals.

We approached St Columba Falls in the late afternoon chill and gloom worthy of an Iona pilgrimage in winter which was a most appropriate conclusion to a risk taking but enormously satisfying day for everyone. For those who are fretting at missing out, we have been inundated with requests to make it an annual event.

Isabel Telford

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