THE CHURCH IN FLUX
Chapter 20
How the Irish did it again.
In 1995 Thomas Cahill wrote a book with the flattering title of How the Irish Saved Civilization: the untold story of Ireland’s heroic role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe. In it Thomas Cahill outlined how the Irish practiced human sacrifice, because their gods were capricious, entrapped people and would only bless them in response to flattery, liturgical manipulation and sacrifice. That religious worldview produced a precarious sense of life; no Irishman was unfamiliar with the experience of cosmic terror.
When Patrick came – now the patron saint of Ireland evident in Saint Patrick Day – he preached the good news of a different God, a God not hostile, not capricious or self-seeking, but a God who loves people and all other creatures, and wants them free from sin and terror, a God who desires no human sacrifice, but whose sacrifice of his only Son for all of creation, makes human sacrifice forever unnecessary. Saint Patrick proclaimed a God who calls them not to die for him, but to live for him and each other.
That was the beginning of Celtic Christianity.Why do I single out Celtic Christianity? I single them out because the Irish are different. Their mindset was not influenced by Greek logic or by the Roman sense of organization and obedience to authority. The Irish were more like the people of Israel, if the Psalms are any indication. The Hebrew psalms show a wide range of religious experience, from exultation and doubt, from pain and persecution, from passion and aspiration, to fortitude, bitterness, despair and complaint, but also abundant gratitude and heartfelt praise. The Psalms reflect a deep humanity, that’s why they have remained a mainstay of the Christian life until this day.
And these very same traits are evident in the Irish. Perhaps they are the Ten Lost tribes of Israel, because there are many similarities between the Jewish mentality and the Irish character: both have given birth to great thinkers and outstanding scientists. Here’s how Thomas Cahill sees them: “They understood, as few have understood before or since, how fleeting life is and how pointless to try to hold on to things and people. They pursued the wondrous deed, the heroic gesture: fighting….drinking.. art – poetry for intense emotion, the music that accompanied the heroic drinking with which each day ended…All these are worth pursuit, and the first, especially will bring the honor great souls seek.”
Patrick, the apostle of the Irish, having spent many years there as a prisoner, understood their psyche and therefore was able to connect his message to their deepest concerns. Patrick knew their religious backgrounds, how their gods were an indifferent lot, and he could convince them that the Triune God of Christianity was receptive to their emotions. Patrick knew their love for artistic expression and he was able to give them the necessary outlets for venting their feelings through story telling, poetry, music, dance, drama and their indigenous gift for oratory. Celtic Christianity was so effective because it provided an avenue to release their deepest felt sentiments.
Every branch of Christianity in the world is influenced by the prevailing opinions prior to it taking root there, even though Missionary work throughout the centuries has tried to impose a Western brand of Christianity on the native populations. We see the disastrous consequences of this especially among the indigenous population in Canada, where their native customs have, by force, been replaced with a Western brand of religion which has destroyed their own heritage and culture and left them empty and drifting.
That has been equally true in Asia, in China, in Africa, while Japan rejected this approach completely. Fortunately Ireland was spared this cultural holocaust because they have always believed that God uses all five senses to “speak” to people.
The Celtic cross is one example of Celtic expression. 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 ozone depletion, 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.”
That word is still speaking to us. 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. Celtic love for nature springs from three roots. First, love for God’s creation is Biblical. Genesis declares the goodness and preciousness of God’s creation, the Psalms are filled with a sense of creation’s wonder, and Jesus taught that the birds and animals, and even the plants, matter to God. Second, from the Druid mature mysticism that preceded Christianity’s introduction, the pagan Celts already respected and revered nature; the Christianity that Patrick brought affirmed and “Christianized” their closeness to nature. Third, Celtic Christians lived in natural settings, so their experience reinforced their love for nature. What Christianity did was converting them from Pantheism, seeing nature as gods, to Panentheism, seeing God in all things. Romans 1 :20 affirms this, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – has been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.”
That text is one of the most telling passages in Scripture: simply looking around us in nature, up in the air, where the sun and moon and stars tell of God’s infinity, the miraculous interconnectedness of everything, has led to the Four laws of Ecology, as defined by Barry Commoner. They are:
(1) Everything Is Connected to Everything Else. The system is stabilized by its self-compensating properties, which, when overstressed, can lead to a dramatic collapse. Jared Diamond in his book Collapse uses the Easter Islands as a grim example of such an event.
(2) Everything Must Go Somewhere. Global warming is a current example of this law: when we burn fossil fuels the inescapable result carbon overload causing Climate Change.
(3) Nature Knows Best. We are sinning against that law when we introduce organic compounds that are foreign to nature. The result is harmful substances that lead to illnesses and air pollution. Smoking tobacco is a well-known example.
(4) There is no such thing as a Free Lunch. We are now discovering that we must pay the price for polluting: the longer we delay the true cost of our riotous living habits, the steeper will be the penalty.
It would do well if preachers, rather than keep on telling Sunday School stories to an adult audience, bring home to them that God’s laws, including those of Ecology, are laws to live by, because they are valid for eternity.
More about this in the next chapter.