Celtic Christianity:
For the Feast of the All Saints of Ireland here is an essay on Celtic Christianity!
I was invited to write this by Sr. Stan Kennedy for inclusion in her 2015 Book: To Live from the Heart.
Celtic Christianity
The interplay of culture and faith has always produced
unique ways of being Christian,
(or Buddhist, or Hindu, or Muslim), When a faith encounters a
new culture there are two possibilities – domination, which leads to
resistance, fear or even violence; or fusion, which leads to a comfortable inter-being
in which the best of what was is nourished by the best of what is. In the
Christian tradition, this second way of being has over the centuries led to the
beauty of the various Rites of the Church. Each is distinct in language, history and ritual yet all are one
Church in confessing one Lord, one faith, one baptism. Unity in diversity is
the very mark of the Church in its
catholicity, in its universality.
In the faith communities that grew up in Europe
at its westernmost edge between the fourth and tenth centuries this
accommodation to native culture, and yet illumination and completion of it by
the Christian message, was undertaken in a way never seen before in the history
of the Church. A faith community emerged, which though seeing itself as part of
the larger Christian Church nevertheless had a unique way of being and a
distinctive vision of itself, of the world and of God; a vision that is
characterized today as ‘Celtic’. Much of this has been lost in successive waves
of invasion and ideology but the traces that remain whisper to the sacred
places in many people’s hearts and offer a glimpse of a way of relating to
faith and to the Church that seems to ground them in this world and the next in
a way both fully human and fully in communion with creation.
The ‘Celtic Christians’ in essence inherited an older form
of Christianity from the deserts of Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and perhaps even as
far away as Ethiopia. Theirs was a monastic Church, founded by monk
missionaries who carried the disciplines and teachings of a contemplative form of life that both completed
and transformed beautifully the ‘pagan’ understandings of the pre-Christian
Celts. Perhaps it was this origin in a monastic and contemplative way of being that
led to the ready fusion of old and new, for the Christianization of the Celtic
tribes and lands, particularly Ireland,
happened quickly, and largely without violence or persecution.
To a people who worshipped a pantheon of deities and saw the
presence of the divine in every aspect of nature, the revelation of Christ and
the Trinity offered a Hero and a High King as well as a God who was, at one and
the same time, utterly transcendent of and gloriously immanent in his creation,
so it took little to bring the pantheistic pre-Christian Celts to a more subtle
understanding of a pan-en-theistic faith, especially when the transition nourished their longing and hope for an
afterlife that could be gained without the sacrifice of lives in war, one open
to all genders and classes of people regardless of their rank or tribe.
Awareness of the presence of the divine in and through the beauty of nature is
a mark of this particular expression of Christianity: to such adegree that
whilst it is present, and always has been, in the Judaeo-Christian tradition,
it had never been so poetically and beautifully expressed before, and would not
be again until the Franciscan School in the 1200's.
So what were these ways of being Christian that were
manifested in such a unique way in the Celtic forms of Christianity? The early Celtic Church
often built on the foundations of monastic communities, each led by an elder
known for their holiness and wisdom. The parallel of this structure to the
tribal/clan system of the indigenous peoples under a chief meant that there was
an immediate understanding, as the two systems seemed to share a common way of life despite their
different origins. Loyalty to Clan and to Chief and through him to the High
King beautifully paralleled the monks’ obedience to the Elder and above all to
Christ, the High King of High Kings. A people raised on the sagas of the Fianna
and the Red Branch Knights saw the sacrifice of one’s life to an ideal, and
especially to the service of a king, as noble and to be admired. Leaving home and family to serve the
Gospel became attractive, even to those of royal and noble blood. This can be
seen in the stories of
Colm Cille (Columba) and Brigid. The so-called ‘green
martyrdom’ of trusting in the providence of God called forth great missionaries
like Brendan and Columbanus, who brought the Celtic expression of the
Christian faith to parts of northern Europe and
perhaps, in the case of Brendan, a good deal further! Rowing out from land into
the ocean currents, they simply went wherever wind and wave, fellow servants of
the High King of Heaven, brought them and there lived their life of prayer and
praise.
Despite the lush greenness of much of the Celtic territories
the spirituality of their monastics was influenced greatly by the fathers and
mothers of Christian monasticism who had flourished in the deserts of Egypt and the Lebanon; large monastic complexes –
often called ‘Disearts’ for the perceived extremity of the observance – often vied with each other in
their pride in the monks and nuns who fasted the most or kept the most vigils,
or whose elders worked the most miracles. This ‘boasting in God’ was not
meant as a source of vainglory or pride: it came from the bardic culture that
esteemed its heroes and heroines and commemorated their deeds to inspire the spiritual
practice of others. The bardic culture of long epic poems and sagas created an
educated class who,
along with the druids, were among the first Christian converts;
they aided in the exchange of ideas, links between cultures and cultivation of
wisdom that led to the Celtic monasteries’ reputation as bastions of learning
and contemplative practice when the rest of Europe
was falling into the chaos of the so-called “Dark Ages”. In Celtic monasticism the fusion of desert spirituality
with a holistic understanding of creation and humanity’s place in it saw
redemption as bringing
about such a healing of the person that a new and holy unity
with creation was the result. Through the ancient remedies of prayer,
meditation, fasting, vigils and charity, the monastic began to experience that
oneness with nature that Adamic humanity first knew. We have many stories
of the Celtic saints and their animal companions: Kevin and the otter, Colm Cille
and his horse, Gobnait and her bees, among so many others, show a marvellous
intimacy with our fellow creatures in which we all serve the Lord of Creation
according to our capacity and gifts.
The visible creation can be a door to the unseen world too.
For the Celts, a liminal and animistic people, the nearness of the
supernatural, the world of angels, demons and elemental powers carried over
from pre-Christian days, was actively completed by the sacramental view of
nature that is at the very heart of the Christian contemplative tradition in
which all that exists is a word from the Word of God, and creation itself the universal testament to all peoples of all times of Divine
Beauty and its nearness to us in every breath.
In the Celtic, domestic form of spirituality every household
act, no matter how small, could be performed mindfully in the presence of the
divine and
thus assume a cosmological and redemptive purpose and
meaning. The blessing prayers and poems that come down to us from places like
Donegal and Kerry
and especially from the Hebrides
hold an immense lexicon of benedictions for every activity and task of the day
and important moment in life. The making of bread, the laying of the fire, the
opening of the hall door, the kindling of the evening lights all had their
blessing prayer and ritual (usually performed by women in the home and by men
on the land), and each had its patron saint or angel. The domestic scene, an
expression of the Church in its own right, mirrored and deepened the life of
the larger Church, nurturing the sense of belonging and being part of the redemptive
mission of Christ through his Church.
With the turning of the year the old festivals found their
fulfilment in the liturgical calendar. For example, the honouring of the
ancestors at Samhain has its counterpart in the feasts of All Souls and All Saints
in which the ancestors were no longer to be feared or placated but to be assisted by the prayers of the
living. The old grave offerings became the blessed salt and bread left in the
hearth overnight and consumed the next day. The Fires of Lughnasa became the
bonfires of St John’s Eve and the dancing around them continued, as did
pilgrimages to holy wells and trees and mountains, places now sanctified by the
observances of the saints and the miracles they wrought. “Cuimhnionn an tir na
Manach,” the people would say ever after: “the land remembers the monks”. So
the people would gather to celebrate the goings in and goings out of life; the births, the marriages
and the deaths, sanctifying them by their association with the saints of old in
ruins and caves
soaked in centuries of prayer.
Today, this unique spirituality and way of being Christian
appeals to a generation that achingly feels its distance from the earth and her
seasons, that is stressed and distressed by the pace of life and by separation
from its inner rhythms. In the wave of mindfulness and meditation programmes and classes that has
swept across the Western world we can detect a hunger for the wisdom of the old
ways and old paths. Perhaps we need to return to the pace of the
ancestors who lived with a foot in both worlds, and in domestic familiar
intimacy with God; to return to a pace slow enough for us to discern the
language of praise and beauty that issues from every tree and rock and rivulet
of water, to realign humanity with its ancient purpose and meaning as the
Celtic Christian understood it.
It would be no small thing if this wisdom was recovered and
renewed for the next generation. A humble affinity with nature and a sense of
our place in the cosmic context of creation and redemption would allow us to
recover ourselves as pilgrims
passing reverently through this world with one eye always on
eternity and a heart and soul on fire for the High King of Heaven who blesses every
place, every moment and every breath.
