My Gran and the Christmas Invitation

My Gran and the Christmas Invitation:

Today, St. Stephen’s day is a very sacred one in our family… not just because of the first Martyr’s witness and passing to the Lord, but because it is also my Gran’s anniversary.

My Mother’s mother, she was, (and is), one of the greatest influences in my life growing up.

I have always regarded Gran as one of my first and best teachers, not only in the ways of faith but even on the contemplative path within it. 

Many, many hours were spent with her, listening to her stories and imbibing her teaching (though she would never have called it that… she simply taught by her very being, as all good elders do). Faith for her was as natural as breathing, and indeed, if you listened as closely as I often did to her whistled breathing as she went about her day, a short prayer to the Sacred Heart or to Our Lady was often just beneath the surface of her breath.

Like her own Mother and Grandmother before her she was a “sharp woman”, as they used to say in Dublin, meaning a wise person and one with a direct line to the Spiritual world. 
Her mother was sought out amongst the Dublin flats as she had “the way” of helping difficult births and deaths and was often asked for advice about a “match” between couples as she had a “good eye” for these things.

Gran was no different and there were many times I would go over to her house to find her sitting beside the phone waiting for the call that would tell her so and so had died. She, of course, already knew as she had “the dream” the previous night… the phone call always came to confirm it and I soon learned to be used to it. 
On other occasions I would arrive to hear her chatting aloud with someone only to discover her alone by the fire when I entered the room.

I never asked.

She never said.

We didn’t need to.

She taught me those ways too. 
“Look into the fire and tell me what you see” she would say, and then smile when, to my surprise, I saw. 

She taught me to look at people’s eyes when they spoke and at the way they stood and moved. 
She had tremendous devotion to the Blessed Virgin who had “been through it all” and her prayers to her were not so much novenas or devotions as a constant conversation born of a life long trust. She had great respect for the friars and religious orders much preferring their churches in town where she could attend anonymously, not liking the front seat parish people as she called them. 
She reminded me often never to judge anyone and taught me to give to the poor, especially beggars in the street. 
“There’s always a story there,” she would say, 
“No one is on the street because they want to be.” 
Women were on the street or poor because, 
“Men put them there.” 
Men were on the street or poor because, 
“Most men are fools for the bottle or for a story.” 
No matter the reason they were to be listened to and helped.

She had been sharp in other ways too. A hard life and losing her husband early on had made her hard in her mid-life and it was only as a Gran that she softened again. In her later years she would often tell me that she was glad she got to be a Gran after everything she had been through.

She often worried about her death. She was not afraid to die. 
"No one dies alone", she would say. 
She had seen enough deaths to know that, 
“They come to collect you.” 

She was, however, afraid that she would die in the house and that I or another grandchild would find her. So for the last few years of her life she prayed everyday the “Thirty day’s prayer” to Our Lady for a happy death and listed the way she wanted to go:

She wanted to die in her sleep so she could “wake up in Heaven”.

She wanted to die alone but having said her goodbyes and surrounded by love.

She wanted to be ready to go.

She talked about it often, not in a morbid way, but in the way you recite your shopping list.

Going and coming were natural in their very essence and death she had long taught and lived was nothing to be afraid of for a Christian soul.

That Christmas she had been very unwell.

Pneumonia had followed a chest and kidney infection and a stay in hospital was called for. She did not want to go but acquiesced at my Mum’s request. Feeling a little better after a few days of antibiotics she was to be released for Christmas by the Docs even though Mum was not happy that she was ready. She came home to us. She was weak and a slim figure of her former self though I still wondered at the muscled arms of her small frame, a result of countless years of housework when that still meant a physical ordeal. She spent most of the next couple of day’s in bed sleeping. She smiled a lot and we got to visit with her and hold her hand and chat. 
Christmas Eve came and her children and grandchildren all visited with presents and smiles and the occasional worried whispered conversation with my Mum and Dad as to how she was doing. Christmas Day she was very quiet and slept a lot. As the house was beginning to settle down she called my Mum into the room and very deliberately and unusually for a woman of her time thanked her for all she had done and told her she loved her. My Mum was somewhat taken aback but at that moment Gran asked her who it was that was standing behind her. 
There was no one there that Mum could see. 
Gran’s eyes focused on the spot behind her and she relaxed.

“It’s alright,” Gran said, “I know them.”

Mum said her smile was a beautiful thing at that moment.

She told Mum, “You can go down to the family now, I’m fine”.

Mum did, though to the end of her own days she often wondered why she did. 

As she went downstairs she could hear Gran talking quietly in the room.

Later Mum checked in on her to find her sleeping deeply and gently.

That night a Blackbird sang outside the house all night.

I remember looking out to try and see it.

I could not.

I should have known.

Gran had often taught me to watch out for Blackbirds.

“They are special to our family,” she would say, 
“Your Grandfather loved them and they come to warn us of things.”

“Whenever you see one, say a prayer to your Grandad.”

I still do.

The following morning, very early, Mum woke suddenly and went straight to check on her.

Gran had passed away.

She was still warm and she was smiling gently.

Mum called for the Priest and the Doctor and then carefully woke us all. I still remember that there were no tears in the house that morning. It all felt very peaceful and quiet. The Priest administered the Last Rites as he felt that she had only just gone before Mum found her. 
A little later myself and Mum stood in the room with Gran looking out the window. 

On the lawn a hen Blackbird was hopping around.

We smiled at that.

“Well”, I said, “She certainly got the death she had wanted!”

Mum told me then about the things that had happened the previous night and about Gran seeing someone in her room.

Someone who had made her smile.

“Do you think it was Grandad?” I asked.

At that moment, right in front of us, a Cock Blackbird, all shiny and bright yellow beaked flew down beside the Hen on the lawn outside. They greeted each other and flew off  together.

After that there was nothing else to say.

Gran had gotten the death she had asked for and we had received the little signs of her going.

In Ireland there has always been the custom of the “Cuireadh na Nollaig” the so called “Christmas Invitation” the feeling that a death at this time of the year is especially blessed and that the signs around it are powerful. Today, almost thirty years later I write this so that this story of my Gran’s passing may be remembered and may bring peace and hope to all who read it…

And perhaps the next time you see a Blackbird you might say a prayer for all your loved ones gone before you…

(Photo unattributed found on google)

Celtic Christianity: a brief essay

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.