O.P. Kretzmann was president of Valparaiso University when I started there as a freshman. By the time I graduated he had retired to the role of Chancellor and his health was failing, but most Monday evenings a room full of invited seniors literally sat at his feet to learn what we could from this remarkable man about living as Christians in the modern world.

I recently found my long packed away notes from OP’s seminar, Christianity and Modern Problems. There weren’t many. Some Mondays a note on his office door would tell us that Dr. Kretzmann would not be meeting his class that night because he was ill. But on those evenings when we did meet, it was with a man who embodied Valpo’s motto, “In Thy light we see light.” He held those words from Psalm 36 before us as expectation, if not obligation, to do something with what we had learned there, without regard to the line of work we intended to pursue. I always felt the words were especially directed at those of us who would live as laypeople in church and world.

He was fond of citing literature as well as scripture. My notes record his paraphrase of the words Eliot ascribed to Thomas More in Murder in the Cathedral: “The last and highest treason is doing the right thing for the wrong reason.” Defining Christianity as a living relationship to living persons, OP counseled us to apply the principles of love to life. In doing so, he added, remember to allow for a certain degree of self-love: “Consider your own soul—its dignity and value.”

Clearly OP’s favorite metaphor for the Christian life was that of the pilgrim. He adopted the image to title the column he wrote for The Cresset when it began as a publication of the Walther League. In 1944, the League issued an anthology of Kretzmann’s columns in a small volume entitled simply The Pilgrim, one who walked and talked with God.

Some years ago a friend decided to call me Pilgrim instead of the name I share with her. She thought the word fit my spirit. But last month I came to a new understanding of the nature of the pilgrim and of her journey, her pilgrimage.

My best friend and I celebrated a significant birthday last fall. Friends since our first day on Valpo’s campus, when we learned we shared the dubious distinction of being preachers’ kids, we’ve traveled together over the past ten years. We decided to go this summer to Scotland and Ireland.

The popularity of all things Celtic in the United States pales in comparison to the centrality of Celtic history and tradition in the lands of its origin. But though very hard to avoid, we were not interested in Celtic kitsch. We went instead in search of the holy. We traveled to the Isle of Iona off the west coast of Scotland, where in the sixth century St. Columba launched his efforts to Christianize Scotland as a “pilgrim for Christ.” The illuminated manuscripts of the four gospels known as the Book of Kells, now at Trinity College in Dublin, are reported to have been written on Iona in the seventh and eighth centuries. The 900 year-old abbey that overlooks the sound and the adjacent graveyard that holds the remains of generations of Scottish kings stand in silent testimony of the Christian witness begun by Columba centuries earlier.

Scottish clergyman George McLeod, founder of the ecumenical Iona Community, spoke of Iona as a “thin place,” where the gap between human and transcendent is at its narrowest. A haunting quality resides in the hushed stillness of the island. Iona is not an easy place to get to—seven hours from Glasgow via train, bus and two ferries—yet many who make the journey return again. We found ourselves among the youngest in the hotel dining room. Just what draws these pilgrims? Some come for a day trip, some for a longer retreat. As many as a thousand a week walk from the ferry slip up the hill past the ruins of a nunnery to the abbey, yet only a few choose to live there with the sheep and the stones and the often bitter winds of the north Atlantic.

American historians are humbled—as well we should be—by travel to Europe. Houses of worship such as the Iona Abbey had fallen into ruin long before the oldest churches in this country were ever imagined. The Abbey’s tower, now surrounded by scaffolding that Historic Scotland has constructed to preserve one of the country’s most sacred sites, looks across the water to the island of Mull and the Scottish highlands. Tall carved stone Celtic preaching crosses in the churchyard and along the road remind the pilgrim that this was—and remains—a place of purpose.

The single-mindedness of those who settled on this lonely place, who established a headquarters and then set off to evangelize a pagan people, who tirelessly not only copied scripture onto dried animal hides but beautifully illustrated each page—all this was the purposeful activity of faithful pilgrims who carried the message of the gospel by various means to those who had never heard it.

We visited majestic cathedrals in Glasgow, Dublin and Limerick, where we heard the timeless prayers of evensong both spoken and sung, but the most palpable and lingering memory is of our time in Iona, where we prayed for peace with other pilgrims in an abbey whose cloister walk housed a bench on which two words were etched: Be still.

Daniel Taylor, in his delightful little book, In Search of Sacred Places: Looking for Wisdom on Celtic Holy islands, defines pilgrimage as physical travel with a spiritual destination. Taylor described his experience of Iona in words that echo mine: “It is a place that makes me slow down—down to a walk. It is a place that invites me to reflect—on why I am here, on who was here before me and what they were up to, and on what I am supposed to learn from them about God and the sacred.”

I doubt OP ever visited Iona, but if he had, he would have found purpose in his pilgrimage. He once wrote about the Psalmist’s words: “There must be some continuing light by which we may hope to find our way . . . .” That light shines brightly in thin places.