This book recalls our Celtic tradition not only for our past or even for our present but equally importantly for our future.
Recently I visited Clonmacnoise, the great city of early Irish monasticism, which is today a world heritage site. To visit this extraordinary place is to breathe in a special spirit. These ruins open many questions about our identity today.
The Celts were not content to be chaplains to the tribe. They wanted to be prophets to the society. For too much of recent Irish history our politics have demeaned our religion. The Celts believed that our religion should enhance our politics. I grew up in Ireland where there was an orthodoxy of religion. Perhaps, though, today we need an orthodoxy of humanity. The Celtic Church points to how an orthodoxy of religion could illuminate an orthodoxy of humanity.
Apart from their relevance to the wider society, the Celtic Christians have much to offer us to reflect on in our spiritual and personal lives. Their spirituality was very scriptural and it is interesting to read the prayers they composed and observe in them their great love of the scriptures. They were also very imaginative, as is evident in their rich artistic legacy including the Book of Kells, the Derrynaflan Chalice, remnants of wall paintings in certain churches and the very high crosses. Could the church today benefit from an infusion of such creativity and imagination?
I had the privilege of exchanging occasional correspondence with Seamus Heaney. On the first of September 2013, before the All-Ireland semi-final between the two titans Kerry and Dublin in Croke Park, the GAA displayed a photo of Seamus two days after his death and asked for a minute’s silence. You could have heard a pin drop and at the end eighty thousand people clapped for over a minute. In what other country would a football crowd clap for a poet?
The inscription on Seamus’s tombstone is: ‘Walk on air against your better judgement.’ One of the phrases he used in his ‘Republic of Conscience’, was ‘the Celtic Marvels’. In poems such as ‘Postscript’, he alludes to the richness of the Celtic imaginative tradition. He saw his role not to be a propagandist but to be someone who ‘weighed up’ rather than ‘weighed in’. However, he acknowledged that the Celtic tradition had the capacity to ‘catch the heart off guard’. In his poem ‘Man and Boy’, he uses the phrase ‘Blessed be’ a number of times, which has striking echoes of his Celtic roots.
Indeed, in his final note to me, he observed that ‘the biggest shift in my lifetime has been the evaporation of the transcendent from all our discourse and our sense of human destiny’. While he had moved away from the faith he was born into, he had never shut the door on it. Seamus’s final words to me were:
‘And yet I cannot disavow the inner expansiveness of consciousness, a sense of grace and God-filled space and a universe drenched in radiance nor can I disavow words like “Thanksgiving” or “host” or “communion bread”. They have an undying tremor and draw, like well water far down.’
Indeed, it is telling that Heaney’s very last words were in a text message to his wife: Noli timere – be not afraid. These are words Jesus repeats many times in the gospels.
More than Words
Beatha teanga i a labhairt.
The life of a language is in its speaking.
In the Celtic tradition, God was understood as appreciative of and protective of every single human life. The Celtic description of a disabled person as God’s own person (duine le Dia) is a good illustration of that point. In the Celtic tradition, old life, injured life, disabled life: every life is God’s own life, God’s special gift and task.
One of the big buzz phrases today in social and political life is the democratic deficit – the frustration ‘ordinary people’ have because they are denied any real power in the society they live in, with little or no say in the decision-making processes. For the disabled person, the possibility of making decisions for themselves is often little more than a pipe dream. Decisions about their welfare are often taken by people who have no direct experience of what it is like to be disabled.
Much lip-service is paid to people with disabilities, which fails to yield any practical benefits. The problem is resources, or more precisely lack of resources. Many medical and technical advances have presented new and exciting treatment options – the use of art and music therapy to help people cope with mental illness is just one such innovative example. However, across the globe there is a major shortage of funding, which leaves many disabled people seriously disadvantaged. It is too easy, though, to talk about action for disabled people in terms of aspirations. What is needed are specific targets and specific action programmes.
For all our talk of equal rights, a significant minority of people living throughout the four corners of the world have not achieved legal, economic or cultural parity. The economic, political and cultural disadvantages suffered by these ‘outcasts’ are serious violations of justice.
A number of questions present themselves about the place of disabled people in our world today. In our society, are all people equal, or are some, like those with disabilities, seen as less equal than others? How many disabled people are institutionalised? How many have a home of their own? How many have access to the specific, particular education that they may require? How many have a job? The Celts knew how to cherish those who we might view as disabled. By our actions, and often inactions, we often do not.
Dying and Behold We Live
The Celtic understanding of the cycle of life and death is crucial to the inner growth of the soul. In the Celtic tradition, each new day is seen as a new beginning, a gift from God. Today this insight needs to be retrieved. Ours is an age which is obsessed with youth. The growth of the cosmetic surgery ‘industry’ reveals that so many people seem petrified of ageing, let alone dying. We need a new culture of dealing with the reality of death. The Celtic tradition has many insights to offer to this debate. Columbanus wrote in one of his sermons, ‘I am always moving from the day of birth until the day of death.’ St Brendan echoed a similar sentiment. Death is not the end of the story, but another phase in the soul’s journey, an entrance into the wider life, endlessly stretching out. As Christians we ought to be forefront of the development of this new understanding of death as we profess to believe that the eternal life in which we pray to be resurrected has long begun. It is striking that the Celtic phrase for dying was dul ar shlí na firinee (literally, to go on the path of truth).
Amongst Women
In the sixth-century, St Brigid’s foundation was unique in that it was a double monastery for women and men. Each group followed the same rule and used a common church, with the government of the whole community held jointly by the abbess and the bishop-abbot. The Celtic Church of this time was one of those rare periods in Irish history when women were given a meaningful role and could claim to have equality.
Pope John Paul II’s Mulieris Dignitatem (The Dignity of Women, 1988), noted that one of the recommendations of the 1987 Synod of Bishops was for a ‘further study of the anthropological and theological bases that are needed in order to solve the problems connected with the meaning and dignity of being a woman or a man.’ Unfortunately, that challenge has not been adequately taken up. There is a need for a new approach which takes account of the need to build new relationships of mutuality and reciprocity between women and men in the Church. Today, people’s faith is threatened by many factors including poverty and family break-up. Many women, though, feel that their faith life is endangered by a patriarchal church.
Despite a massive amount of essential equality legislation, many women echo the type of sentiments expressed by Mary Robinson in her inauguration speech as Irish president in 1990: ‘As a woman I want women who have felt themselves outside of history to be written back into history, in the words of Eavan Boland, finding a voice where they found a vision.’
The Celtic Web of Life
The Celtic understanding of the divine was never merely of a transcendent presence, but also an immanent reality in the world of people’s everyday lives. While they did retain the traditional Christian doctrine of a transcendent God – that is, the God who watches us from a distance – the Celtic Christians laid particular emphasis on the immanence of God: the closeness of God to us and an involvement with nature and with the world, a vital presence in the world, animating all of creaturely life.
Of course, this stress on the immanence of God’s ongoing creative project in everyday life did lead to distortions in the same way as theologies which placed heavy emphasis on the transcendence of God neglected the immanence of God.
A Window into God
The Celts saw creation as offering a window into God. Columbanus stated, ‘If you want to know the Creator, understand created things.’ This heavily experiential understanding of God was beautifully summed up by An tAthair Donnchadh O Floinn as a ‘breathing in and breathing out of God’. Seamus Heaney has written about the legendary story of St Kevin, one which tells of him praying with outstretched hands for so long that a blackbird came to make a nest and lay an egg in one of them. According to Heaney, at that moment Kevin was ‘linked into the network of eternal life’. Another legend is about the monk who had a fly who kept the page of his manuscript open as he designed it.
In Celtic times, for example, it was believed that all wells had their source in one great well deep inside the centre of the earth. These were sacred places, protected by protective feminine spirits. In this tradition, a rainbow was understood as a love letter from God. John Macquarrie claimed that the Celts were ‘intoxicated with the love of God’. Patrick Kavanagh had a similar insight in his poem ‘Auditors in’.
Caring for the Earth
Bíonn siúlach scéalach.
Travellers have tales to tell.
Many of the early Irish monks were filled with missionary zeal. Among them were people like St Kilian who went to Germany. It would be fascinating to investigate the extent to which these early Irish monks may have sown some of the seeds of the modern green movement. For example, one of the people who would have inherited the spiritual tradition of these early monks was Hildegard of Bingen, who was born in Bermersheim, Germany, in 1098, to a noble family, the tenth of ten children. From an early age, mystical experiences formed an integral part of her life, and it may have been on account of these visions that her family sent her at the tender age of eight to the care of a Benedictine monastery. In due course, she became a Benedictine sister herself and in 1141 she received the divine command to record her visions.
What is most startling to the contemporary eye is the relevance of her message, despite its antiquity, to the concerns of today. Particularly fascinating is her insight into what in today’s parlance is termed creation spirituality – best summed up in her use of the concept of viriditas or greenness, which is representative of the creative power present in nature, humankind and having its ultimate source of expression in God. Humankind, despite its special place in creation, has a special responsibility to nature, and abuse of our position would upset this dynamic of interdependence. Accordingly, she showed that humankind is entrusted with a caretaker role. Hilda claimed: ‘Although the creatures have been made in order to serve our needs, we too are answerable to them.’ These sentiments represent to a considerable extent the spiritual inheritance of Celtic Christianity and still have an important message for our lives today.
All Creatures Meek and Tall
The literature of the early Irish Christians is full of celebration of the fact that God and nature are closely intertwined. The Voyage of Brendan, for example, is the story of Brendan’s quest to find the Promised Land of the Saints. The work itself is an indication of how Christianity appropriated the indigenous culture as it borrows heavily from the Immram, a pagan tale of the seafaring Celts who had boldly explored the mysteries of the mighty and threatening Atlantic Ocean.
The Book of Kells have many pictures which remind us of Columba’s love of birds, horses, dogs, cats and many species of fish. The scribes liked to include all sorts of small pictures as they wrote. Birds fly down and land on certain words. Sometimes these drawings have a definite use. Other times they are inserted as a joke. Two handsome peacocks, with many-coloured feathers, surround Christ’s head. Peacocks often stood for immortality or life-everlasting in the art of this period. Indeed, the intricate, interwoven designs and natural motifs that so adorn the Book of Kells themselves make a bold theological statement: that a web of life connects God’s creative activity and the natural world.
In the Celtic tradition, the robin redbreast is a sacred bird, as he sought to relieve the sufferings of Christ by using his beak to pull out the thorns piercing our Lord’s head. These tales have clearly been romanticised, but they convey an important message more fully and more entertainingly than a dry factual account. They pay homage to the sanctity of the earth and all of creation, as it is imbued with the divine presence that can inspire us to live in greater harmony with the natural world.
Their Time
The future keeps arriving.
The leading theologian Hans Küng has argued that if the Church is really in sympathy with the world, a sympathetic attitude and sympathetic words will not be sufficient; a passive, more or less peaceful co-existence will not be sufficient. There will have to be pro-existence rather than co-existence, involvement rather than disengagement.
Küng suggests that the Church’s understanding of the world will be unfruitful and its links with its useless unless they lead to an active assumption of responsibility for the world. If it truly follows its Lord, the Church is called to the active service of its brethren, who are all created by the one Father. Such a Church, which only lived and worked for itself, would not be the Church of Christ. In this perspective, the Church has the gift and the responsibility of sharing in responsibility, not merely in words but in deeds also, for the world, its present and its future. Accordingly, the Church has a future; it has the future. This is the eighth day, which passes description and cannot be foreseen, the day on which God will complete his work. Küng’s vision for the Church of tomorrow has striking similarities with the Celtic community of yesterday.
Could it be that the Celtic Church had some significant emphases which we could profitably retrieve to the enrichment of our society and Church today? Their reverence for their environment; their recognition of the equality of women; their respect for people with disabilities; their emphasis on the creative and imaginative and their belief in the centrality of hospitality are as applicable for our time as theirs. For those landing in ageing’s long dusk or approaching the shores of middle age, the Celtic tradition is particularly reassuring. To those of us who are slaves to time it points us in another direction. It offers a light to our imagination and a signpost to our path.
Notwithstanding the enormous social, economic, cultural and political differences between the early years of the third millennium and the period of the fifth and ninth centuries could it be that, in some respects at least, our future is in our past?