Celtic spirituality Piece for St Patrick's Day

With a last name like Crowley, i am obviously Irish on my father's side. He was killed in a ship accident when I was a toddler, so I did not identify with that side very much. As i have grown gray, a part of Irish culture has captured my soul, Celtic spirituality.

My first exposure to irish religiosity came with knowing Mrs. Kennedy's faithful daily Mass attendance. As a teen, I discovered that an Irish priest near the Catholic high school was kinder about underage drinking than our parish priest. Years later when I became, of all things, a minister in the old Orange Irish Presbyterian church, I noticed the famous breastplate prayer attributed to St Patrick in our book of Common Worship. We have precious little accurate information on Patrick, but I am Irish enough not to let legend  or absence of facts get in the way of good material.

Before that, i realized that I was introduced to the Celtic religious imagination by the singer/songwriter Van Morrison. (We use a number of his songs in our Saturday reflective worship at 6PM here at First Presbyterian, Alton In Dweller on the Threshold he writes: “I have seen without perceiving/I have been another man/Let me pierce the realm of glamour/So I know just what I am.” Into the Mystic begins: “We were born before the wind/also younger than the sun/ ere the bonnie boat was won/as we sailed into the mystic/ Hark now hear the sailors cry/ smell the sea and feel the sky/ let your soul and spirit fly into the mystic.” Morrison realizes that a thin veil is all that separates us from a deeper engagement with the depths of life.

Celtic spirituality has a few distinctive traits. it seemed to have a prayer for everyday act from milking cows to putting out a candle at night. It is most definitely a creation faith that sees the goodness of God in the manifold elements of creation itself.In that created order are so called thin places, where it seems the divine touches or penetrates our physical relammore easily or radiantly.

I am on Facebook with the Irish writer John Philip Newell. He was a member at the famed Iona community. It liturgy is contemporary, but beautifully written. In his Listening to the Heartbeat of God, he reminds us that Celtic approach does not conflate creation with God but does see God suffusing all of life. “Attention moves, like a shuttle of a loom between the physical and the spiritual “(45). So, it moves beyond the merely aesthetic sense of folks who “find God in a pretty sunset,” but find traces of the divine within creation as  a whole. The Celts are cognizant of the dangers of the world, that is why so many prayers are indeed asking for shield of protection from the realm of the valley of the shadow.

Celtic spirituality is earthy. On Ash Wednesday we are forcefully reminded that we are beings made of the elements of the earth. Adam, after all, is a play on the Hebrew word for arable soil. Celtic spirituality does not see the physical to be derided as a lower sort of plane of existence, but simply where we live. So, prayers are thankful for food and drink and plenty of it. After all, the fundamental christian assertion of Jesus Christ is that he embodied the human and the divine together, “without division, without confusion.” Jesus used natural examples in his teaching and transformed mud to be a healing salve for the blind. In that sense then, Celtic spirituality is sacramental as it sees the whole world as capable of shining with the presence of God. If only we have eyes to see, the everyday becomes a portal to the overflowing grace of god, the good gift of God.