Part Six HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE?
CELTIC CHRISTIANITY
The Celtic Cross
I have often argued (with very little success, I regret to say) that God’s Word is a two-pronged affair: Creation and the Scriptures. Celtic Christianity confirms this, that’s why I like it. In my church, St. Andrew’s Tweed Presbyterian, hangs a large Celtic Cross, crafted by a former parishioner, a retired captain who lost both hands in WWII. A beautiful piece of work.
A Celtic Cross has a circle where the two cross pieces meet. This orb at its very centre 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: Allmighty 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, Iohannes 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.” This realization 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!
Creation’s basic goodness
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. Gnosticism, the real American Religion, teaches that creation is evil. All this was written long before we experienced the evil of pollution, of global warming, of ozone depletion, which, we can now clearly see, is the devil at work.
Celtic Christianity was shaped by people who lived close to the earth. It reminds me of a book I have, Wisdom of the Elders, where I read on page 10: “The Native’s Mind tends to be holistic, multisensory, and boundless in scope…..The Native Mind yearns to envelop the totality of the world and brings a totality of mental capacities, beyond cool reason, to the task.” (Italics in the original). On page 13 there’s something I have also always advocated: ” Traditional Native knowledge about the natural world tends to view all of nature as inherently holy rather than profane, savage, wild, or wasteland.”
Sadly we have strayed far from this truth thanks to insidious Gnosticism evident everywhere. Can we still turn back? Is it even possible for a church or a denomination to take a different direction? Compare it to today’s economy. Can it again become non-capitalistic? I believe the economy will have to collapse first. Is that true for ecclesiastical structures as well?
Ecclesiastical Intolerance
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 some sort 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 tbe praised.
John, the apostle, had a fine ear for God’s creation, evident in the opening words of his gospel: 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: he visualized and it was there, he spoke and it came to be.
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.
Colossians 1: 15-20
The attitude of The Irish John and Celtic spirituality in general is diametrically opposed to the materialism we have in our world, shaped by Gnostic Christianity. 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, his first act was to duplicate himself in the body of Jesus Christ, in the form of the ultimate expression 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 God’s creation, but we originate from the lowest material, its basic ingredient: clay. The word ‘Adam’ means clay. God fashioned us, the human race, from a mixture of dry dust and water. He, as the Master Sculptor 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. That’s why we, fallen humanity, are still as creative as we are.
However, because we have strayed from the path of Christ, because we 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 we see a world depleted from 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 fulness 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 new way to bring the Gospel
About a decade 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 of use 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. Especially today, where the entire world is in agony, from financial institutions to labour markets to weather related events, communal prayer is needed more than ever.
(4) Practice open and full hospitality as our prime response to those who are seeking. Indeed, people are at a loss: they crave for answers, and none are given. 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.
We live in ‘final’ times. We see every day what the American Way of Christianity is bringing to the world: destruction and pollution. We must fight tooth and nail the accepted norm that God planned this earth explicitly for our benefit and that no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve our purposes. Christianity, in absolute contrast to native practices and such Asian religions as the Chinese Tao, not only established a dualism of humanity and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that we exploit nature for our own benefit.
We now know that this appraoch has been destructive for our planet. I sincerely believe that Celtic Christianity provides a better answer to today’s way of serving God than most denominational practices now in vogue. The Celtic cross illustrates this 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.
A Celtic Blessing
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.
In other words: We, creation and God-Jesus- are part the three parties to the Covenant with Creation.
More about this in Part Seven: the Five +Five bridesmaids. A look at a parable.