The Fish Woman

There is an encounter with something over the shoulder of the Beloved; we can't see it very well because we so desperately want someone we can hold.

When St. Columba was building his abbey on Iona in 567 A.D., he couldn't get the footers to stay put. Each night a terrible storm would rise up and blow apart the day's work and killing whoever was on the watch. Columba decided to set up watch himself one night. You must imagine that howling dark, with the winds of the North Sea blowing in a terrible gale, the sea thrashing and crashing amid huge boulders at the shore. And what does Columba encounter? A fish-woman, who comes to Columba and tells him that the abbey construction is disturbing an ancient energy who must be appeased. (There are numerous folktales from Celtic lore where the act of digging into the ground disturbs a water-spirit, often causing a rupture in the ground from which waters rise to drown the population). Oran is sent down into the abbey footers to appease this spirit; his body becomes a text of encounter between upper and lower worlds.