O King of the Friday; an ancient Irish Rune Prayer

O King of the Friday; 

   an ancient Irish Rune Prayer 

for Friday evening:

O King of the Friday

whose limbs were stretched on the cross,

O Lord who did suffer the bruises,

the wounds, the loss,

we stretch ourselves

beneath the shield of thy might,

some fruit from the tree of thy passion

fall on us this night!

Donegal Dance

Donegal Dance

After what had seemed a very long day

of talking, and visiting, and listening

to the secret woes of, oh, so many,

we had arrived at the last,

to the old farm on an ancient hill,

above a half forgotten valley,

that seemed to dwell in its own time,

to travel its own long seasoned path.

A few thorn trees broke the wind

before the whitewashed walls.

A cow watched us deliberately

conferring with the few scraggly chickens

about these strange visitors; a welcome distraction,

perhaps.

They greeted us at the door then, the old couple.

Dressed in Sunday best, they stood as much to attention

as their work bent spines allowed.

Smiling with heavy, creased, but still bright eyes.

We knew then the far away neighbours had warned them

we were near; two friars travelling from house to house.

the annual days of the parish mission come again.

They beckoned us in to two soft chairs

drawn up beside the fire, there we settled into cushions

shaped by long quiet night’s sitting for them, not us,

as they sat on hard, straight, kitchen chairs

pulled from dark corners.

Then we talked, as you do, always

observing the ancient Irish liturgy of visiting:

The Weather?

“All right for now, but sure it will change.”

Health?

“Good days and bad days, neither of us as young as we were.”

The Children?

“Well, they are busy, they can’t make it here as often as they would like.”

The land?

“Enough for us, but we will be the last to farm it,

there’s no love for it in the young ones.

It’s a hard life, but a good one.”

We listened while scanning all the while this

place caught out of time, yet redolent of deeper, quieter life.

 “You’ll stay for the tea Fathers?”

The old farmer said suddenly

It was, on reflection,

more statement than question.

For his wife was already on her feet

and heading for the kitchen.

To this day I am glad we said yes

for the miracle that came of it then

and was ours alone to witness in the holiness of home.

Though at the time the glance between us brothers

told of a different mutual desire for return and rest.

“It was ever such”, the Brother reminded me, later when we left,

speaking only after we had passed a while of silent awe at what we had witnessed there,

“God’s revelations are never expected,

Moses was not looking for a burning bush that desert day.

The Shepherds did not expect Angels overhead that night.”

“He is the God of surprises after all.”

Perhaps the Farmer did not want or need to continue chatting then,

the old man rose and joined his wife in the small scrubbed kitchen,

while we stretched our sandaled feet before the fire

and stared across the hearth to where

the door half open let us watch the dance begin,

as these two souls, long made one,

in daily sacrament of living, prepared the liturgy of tea.

Without a word and each always aware of their partner’s presence

revolved around each other as stars and planets do

in orbits long settled since the foundation of being,

so they spun and weaved, the one always in right relation to the other,

passing by at just the right moment to receive from outstretched hand

the bread, the butter, the jam, the cheese,

each always, and without asking, just where the other needed them to be,

as their silent waltz produced a table set and ready for us all

to gather, seen and unseen, together.

We sat breathless and blessed just watching,

knowing we were witnesses of a secret communion

made all the more sacred for its being born of ordinary duty.

Danced daily for long years in that place,

Danced in a Spring surrounded by chattering Children

Danced in a Winter filled with worries and woes,

Danced in love and long and lazy Summer nights

Danced now in the Autumn of long burnished gold,

Danced under the stars of Heaven

Danced with the powers of Heaven

Danced with the Divine Dancer

who is the space and music both,

between all souls who dance the daily dance of love.

Once, at the end of a long day,

through a half open door, in an old cottage,

on a half-remembered hilltop in Donegal.

I sat in silence and witnessed the cosmic dance

of love incarnate take place

in an old but well scrubbed kitchen

where brown bread was broken

and we ate beneath

the glowing lamp

of the Sacred Heart.

(Pic not mine, found on Pinterest)

Meditation for St. John's Eve

Meditation for St. John's Eve:

Now, as Vespers sings itself
to dusk’s silent sitting,
the beacons begin to burn.
Men watching for the moment
of Moon’s waning,
in twilight midsummer sky lit
by a Sun too lazy to truly set,
so to kindle flame for the Forerunner;
John.
He whose element is fire.
Both lamps now hanging
in cloth of such deep blue
that the world seems enfolded
in the mantle of one
who midwifed his birth,
even as she joined her magnificat
to old Elizabeth’s pangs,
and doubting Zechariah’s silence,
beneath the shining stars of desert sky.

Now, as Matins touches midnight
of Monks long vigilling,
the herbs are gathered.
Women seeking
the helpers and the healers
in wood, and dell, and garden bed,
where, blessed by dew and moonlight
and the long warmth of Sun’s summer,
the Yarrow and the Bracken,
the Fennel and the Rue,
the Rosemary and the Foxglove,
always the Elder and
the great yellow flower of the Forerunner
willingly give up
their essence on the night
that marks the first whisper
of the Word’s healing breath,
breathed through the one
who is His herald Voice;
John.
Dried, and hung,
and laid upon the Lady Altar
to become more than they are
they will bestow divine healing.
Twice gifted and graced
by Summer’s picking
and Autumn’s
Assumption blessing,
they reveal the medicine
present always, beneath.

Now, as Lauds’ psalms sun skywards
the pots and pans
and ancient drums are beaten.
The children sing the old songs
and the rhymes long lost to meaning,
as young men and women, harelike,
leap heedless across the
dying flames together.
Recalling he who leapt with joy,
filled with fire, even in womb’s waters,
so near was the One who first kindled flame,
rendered the rivers holy and made the wells
vessels of new birth.

Now, as Mass bell tolls dawn’s daily resurrection
monks and men,
and women, and children all
hear the summons of the Sanctifier
and His herald
loud upon morning’s breeze
as embers die down, and herbs are hung up.
Beneath the vaulted stone they gather
to join their voices to praise
that vastness veiled
in simple bread and wine,
and hear again the word first spoken by
the herald,
the lamp,
the flame,
the leaper,
the prophet,
the angel,
the voice,
the Baptist,
whose birth they have
blessed anew,
cry across the ages
“Behold the Lamb of God!”

I wrote this in 2016 to illuminate so many of the customs we have lost that wove the wisdom of the wild and the faith together so beautifully. On St. John's Eve, (The Vigil of the Feast of the Birth of St. John the Baptist), the last official day of the solstice, bonfires were set burning to commemorate the fire of the Baptist's faith and the facing into the waning of natural light after the longest day.
Couples leaping across the fire was an old betrothal custom. This was also the traditional night for gathering the herbs that would be used as medicine for the year to come. Gathered tonight and dried until Assumption Day they would then be blessed in the Monasteries at the first Mass at Our Lady's Altar... The songs and noise making around the boundaries of the hills and the fields was to frighten away evil and stagnancy so as to refresh the fields and prepare for the Harvest... Our faith was and is both holy and holistic and we must return to such deep knowing again... May the Baptist pray for us on this the feast of fire!

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.