CELTIC CHRISTIANITY
Belgic Confession.
You probably have never heard of that confession. Actually it is one of the mainstays of the Reformed Faith. Here’s what it says about us knowing God: “We know God first by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book…. As the Apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20: “all these things are enough to convict men and to leave them without excuse.”
Wow!! Looking at creation and seeing God at work there is more important than the Bible.
So how does the church go about ‘knowing God’? Does it encourage creational knowledge? Does it tell the world that dishonoring creation – driving a car, for instance – is enough to damn people? Does the church encourage field trips in to nature? Does it give seminars on specific aspects of creation, all to encourage “knowing God”?
We know the truth. The church has fully implemented Descartes’ dictum COGITO ERGO SUM, I think that’s why I am: logic before observation. It has promoted intellectual reasoning – sermons – over direct creational engagement.
It was not always so. Enter CELTIC CHRISTIANITY.
In my church, St. Andrew’s Tweed, hangs a large Celtic Cross, crafted by one of our parishioners. As Presbyterians we are acquainted with this religious symbol, but do we know its significance?
The orb, the circle at the centre of the cross, is said to represent the sun and the light of the world, and expresses the desire to hold together the revelation of God in creation and the revelation of God in the Scriptures. Together they reflect the practice of listening for the living Word in nature as well as in the Bible. A typical Celtic prayer is: Almighty God, Sun behind all suns… in every friend we have the sunshine of your presence…
That God is present in all creation was certainly the conviction of the ninth-century philosopher, John Scotus Eriugena, perhaps the greatest teacher of the Celtic branch of the church ever produced. His name simply means John, the Scotsman from Ireland.
He taught that Christ moves among us in two shoes, as it were, one shoe being that of creation, the other that of the Scriptures, and stressed the need to be as alert and attentive to Christ moving among us in creation as we are to the voice of Christ in the Scriptures.
One of his prayer was, “Show to us in everything we touch, in every one we meet your presence.”
Like the Celtic Christian teachers before him, the thoughts of John the Irishman, were particularly shaped by the mysticism of the Apostle John, who tells us that “God is Love.” The realization that God is also a love affair is summed up in the doctrine of the Trinity. Celtic Christians, a 1000 years ago expressed this in this poem:
The Three who are over my head.
The Three who are under my tread.
The Three who are over me here
The Three who are over me there.
The Three who are in the earth near.
The Three who are up in the air.
The Three who in heaven do dwell.
The Three in the great ocean swell,
Pervading Three, O be with me!
When God created, he called it good after each phase, and very good when it was all completed. This basic goodness in creation is a special feature of Celtic Christianity. Says the Irish John: “God’s divine goodness is the essence of the whole universe and its substance. Evil is opposed to the existence of creation and where goodness is creative, evil is destructive.”
All this was written long before we experienced the evil of pollution, of global warming, of Climate Change and a melting Arctic, which, we can now clearly see, is the devil at work.
As so often happens in the church, true reformers and true radicals are not tolerated by the ecclesiastical authorities. In 1225 the main writings of John the Irishman, were condemned by the Pope and in 1685 they were placed on the Index, the papal list of forbidden writings. But the Celtic influence persisted. The people of the many islands off the Scottish coast, the Hebrides, living in isolation for centuries, retained much of the Celtic religion in their traditions.
There is a story of a woman from the island of Harris who suffered from a type of skin disease and was exiled from the community to live alone on the seashore. There she collected plants and shellfish, and having boiled them for eating, washed her sores with the remaining liquid. In time she was cured. She saw the grace of healing as having come to her through creation and so she prayed:
There is no plant in the ground
But it is full of His virtue,
There is no form in the strand
But it is full of his blessing.
Jesu, Jesu, Jesu!
Jesu who ought to be praised.
There is no life in the sea,
there is no creature in the river,
there is naught in the firmament,
but proclaims his goodness.
Jesu, Jesu, Jesu!
Jesu who ought to be praised.
There is no bird on the wing,
there is no star in the sky
there is nothing beneath he sun,
but proclaims his goodness.
Jesu, Jesu, Jesu!
Jesu who ought to be praised.
John, the apostle, had a fine ear for God’s creation. Listen to the opening words of the gospel of John: “In the beginning was the word and the Word was with God and the word was God. Through him all things were made.”
If God were to stop speaking the whole created universe would cease to exist. In the rising of the morning sun God speaks to us of grace and new beginnings and the fertility of the earth is a sign of how life wells up from within, from the dark unknown place of God.
John, the Irishman, a millennium ago, also tells us that God is in all things. God has not created everything out of nothing, but out of his own essence, out of his very life. That is the light that is in all things,
“the light which is the light of angels,
the light of the created universe,
the light indeed of all visible and invisible existence.”
Says this Irishman: “the way to learn about God is through the letters of the Scriptures and through the species of creation.” He urges us to listen to these expressions of God and to conceive of their meaning in our souls. So it is no wonder that the national color of the Irish is green. They were the Green Party as long as we have recorded history.
The attitude of The Irish John and Celtic spirituality in general is diametrically opposed to the materialism we have in our world, shaped by Roman Catholic and Protestant dualism. The bible is very clear on this. Take Col.1:15 -20, a passage exemplifying the Celtic Spirit more than any other. This is what it says: Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.
What does this mean? It means that, when God planned the creation, he started with duplicating himself in the form of Jesus Christ, in the form of the ultimate in creation, the human beings we are. Christ is the first human being, the firstborn of all creation. We are his image. In other words, we look like Christ. We, as women and men, as boys and girls, are the highest order in of God’s creation, but we come from the lowest material, the ‘Ur’ stuff of creation: clay. We are made of that material. The word ‘Adam’ means clay. God fashioned us, the human race, from the clay of the earth, a mixture of dry dust and water. He, as the Master Sculptor, created us, fashioned us, shaped us, molded us, in the image of that perfect, divine creature, God’s alter ego, Jesus Christ. That is what verse 15 says.
Verse 16 continues in that vein: “For by Christ all things were created.” Remember Christ, the first human being, did this. Made in his image, part of his body, we can read this also: For by us, as human beings, as the body of Christ, all things were created.
However, because we have strayed from the path of Christ, have not seen creation as the Real Word of God, we have gone in exactly the opposite direction, a direction to which the Celtic Christians objected. For this reason, by placing so much emphasis on God’s world, they were persecuted by the church, with the result that reason, doctrine, church dogma, human wisdom, became the measure of faith.
We now see the result. We see a world plagued with pollution, plagued with poverty, plagued with a plurality of pains. We see a world where the idol of economic growth takes priority over any creation friendly act, so that now many people see a world depleted with whatever is precious. All this rests upon the wrong interpretation of Genesis 2:15, where God gave humanity the charge to look after God’s creation. Curiously the word here for ‘taking care’ is the same as in Joshua 24: 15, where Joshua, the man who succeeded Moses as leader of Israel, vouches “As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” The same Hebrew word that of taking care of God’s creation and serving the Lord is used in both instances.
This serving is reflected in the prayer of St. Patrick, the great Irish evangelist. His prayer is typical:
I bind myself today
The virtues of the star-lit heaven
The glorious sun’s life-giving ray.
The whiteness of the moon at even,
The flashing of the lightning free,
The whirling wind’s tempestuous shocks,
the stable earth, the deep salt sea
Around the old eternal rocks.
Again the closeness to creation, but also the sense that Christ is in everything, including ourselves, based on this very bible passage in Col.1:19, where it says that God was pleased to have all God’s fullness dwell in Jesus.
Christ be with me, Christ within me
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.
Celtic Christianity does not see a great gap between heaven and earth, no, the two are seen as inseparably intertwined.
A long time ago Presbyterian Record had a review on a book called: “The Celtic Way of Evangelism: How Christians can reach the West.”
The author outlines five proven Celtic Church practices he believes are needed today.
(1) We need to move from the ‘lone ranger’ approach in the church, where the minister is the all and in all, to partnership forms of ministry.
(2) We must create ‘neo-monastic church communities’ as places of formation for modern Christians.
I know that this is difficult in our subdivided world, where each is on his/her own in our own dwelling. Monastic means communal living, as in a convent or monastery, but then for families. It is something that need to be explored and, who knows, the future may impose this sort of living on us. Curiously in the October 9 2003 issue of the New York Review of Books, discussing Father and Son McNeil’s book, The Human Web, the authors recommend the formation of primary communities:” Religious sects and congregations are the principal candidates for this role.”
(3) We must develop imaginative/ contemplative prayer patterns.
I have been a member of our prayer group for years and recommend this.
(4) Practice open and full hospitality as our prime response to those who are seeking.
We are all very private people and not prone to open our houses and hearts to others. In our busyness, we think we have no time for this.
(5) Rediscover that belonging comes before believing for those new to the faith.
These are new times. We see every day what the current way of Christianity is bringing to the world: destruction and pollution. In 1966 Dr. Lynn White addressed the American Academy for the Advancement of Science. His topic: The historical roots of our Ecological Crisis. I quote: “The church has taught that God planned this earth explicitly for man’s benefit and ruled no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man’s purposes. Christianity, in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and Asian religions not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends.”
We now know that this approach has been destructive for our planet. I sincerely believe that Celtic Christianity provides a better answer to today’s way of serving God than any church way yet confessed.
The Celtic cross expresses this to plainly. The orb, the circle at the centre of the cross represents the sun and the light of the world, and expresses the desire to hold together the revelation of God in creation and the revelation of God in scriptures.
This is our Father’s world, which we will inherit as his children. Treat it as such, because it is ours to live in forever.
That, perhaps, means that we must go where we can live close to the soil, that God-given substance out of which we were formed, rather than the city. The nurture of the soil brings us closer to God. Have the entire family engage in growing food, rather than factory-stuff. Engage in low tech and localism.
The closer we are to green spaces the healthier our life and more open we are to the voice of God in our lives.
DEEP PEACE OF THE RUNNING WAVE TO YOU
DEEP PEACE OF THE FLOWING AIR TO YOU
DEEP PEACE OF THE QUIET EARTH TO YOU
DEEP PEACE OF THE SHINING STARS TO YOU
DEEP PEACE OF THE GENTLE NIGHT TO YOU
MOON AND STARS POUR THEIR HEALING LIGHT ON YOU.
DEEP PEACE OF CHRIST THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD TO YOU.