We hope consciously to bring our city lives with us to Iona. So we and our group of mostly first-time Iona guests will encourage each other to engage with the questions underlying our visit. Some will be treating this as a pilgrimage, and we will try to tease out what that means for them. Is it a physical pilgrimage: a journey to a 'holy place' where the journey is incidental – it is the arriving which matters; or is it more an allegorical pilgrimage – an 'internal' journey on the ongoing search for the connections and meanings behind things? These questions may seem tangential to the search for God in the city, but they are related. For on Iona we want to spend time thinking about what makes a place 'holy' and whether there is any sense in which those places from which we came might also be described that way. We want to consider whether the urban can be a site for pilgrimage, to ask whether it is possible to discover 'heaven in the ordinary.' If every place is potentially a holy place, potentially a place of pilgrimage, then the boundary between the physical and the allegorical begins to blur – and our week on Iona ceases to be an end in itself but a resource to help us on our way back home.

So the everyday is something less than totality, society in its entirety, and something more than any isolated practice like work, culture, leisure, domesticity, technology, consumption, and so on. Lefebvre calls it a level since the everyday mediates between the whole of society and the varied fragments of life. At this level, material necessity in the form of social and natural needs and desires enter into perpetual conflict with the alienated means for satisfying them.

The concept of the 'parish' arose from ideas of exile. Paroikia (1 Pet. 1:17) is translated as 'exile' (Revised Standard Version) and 'living away from home' (Jerusalem Bible) or 'strangers' (New International Version). How sad that many today see the notion of 'parish' as equivalent to a place which exists only for the 'settled'.

What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event, the untoward, the extra-ordinary: the front page splash, the banner headlines... The daily papers talk of everything except the daily... We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep.

The modern meeting [is] a fertile ground for bullshit. For the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, 'bullshit' is language that simply evades conventional categories of truth and falsehood, and is thus much harder to pin down than lying. Bullshit is likely to occur 'whenever a person's obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic are more extensive than his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic' Modern meetings are precisely these sorts of occasions, requiring you to give a smooth impersonation of someone who knows what they are talking about. They often value unanchored thought, sometimes called 'blue-sky', 'outside-the-box' or 'upside-down' thinking to suggest its lack of boundaries and constraints. During a brainstorm or 'thought shower', the facilitator may remind the group that 'all ideas are good ideas' or invite them to 'run a few ideas up the flagpole and see if they get a salute'. People are actively encouraged to play roles and change their views according to their different areas of responsibility ('with my resources hat on ... '). Fluency, even if it is made up of bullshit, is more valued than awkward silence, even if it inspires thoughtfulness. Bullshit is always more likely to occur when business culture stresses the importance of enthusiasm, passion, creativity, energy, buzz rather than, say, the ability to ground ideas in knowledge or logical thinking.

The modern meeting remains the most formal occasion in our daily lives. It has introductory rites (apologies for absence, matters arising), a liturgy (agenda items for discussion) and concluding rites (any other business, date of next meeting). Everything is recorded for posterity in the holy book known as 'the minutes', which are typed up, circulated and agreed at the next meeting. The meeting takes place in a designated space (the meeting room), and is presided over by a kind of priest or elder (the chair) who may begin with a recitation (on PowerPoint). The participants break bread together (triangular sandwiches or shortbread biscuits) and dress in ceremonial garb (business suits and ties). Like many rituals, the meeting is rooted in the politics of daily life but aims to transcend the difficult issues of power and status through the use of formality and ceremony.