2018 St Patrick's column and Celtic Spirituality

Last week, I touched on my maternal side. My father was killed in a seafaring accident before I was three, so I carry his name but not that much about his Irish background. I do know that my grandfather was a relatively late immigrant to the country, in the 1880s. It has been said that to be Irish is to know that the world will break your heart. With that sense of doom, it helps to have a sense of humor, as a tool against the gloom.

It makes some twisted sort of sense for a patron saint of Ireland to have his feast day become an excuse for all sorts of celebration that is often centered on drinking. It is sort of a continuing wake, as March 17 is said to be the date of his death. Given the Irish love of story and legend, a number have touched on Patrick. One that tells a cute story is that Patrick would visit his parents in Britain and preach when he could. He carried a walking stick of ash wood, the wood for some baseball bats. He would plunge his stick into the ground. Once he preached so long that the stick grew roots and turned into an ash tree, so the area became known as aspatria, the ash of Patrick.

While I don’t place much stock in the legends surrounding St Patrick, I do find myself drawn to the movement of what is called Celtic spirituality. It includes a sense of the communion of saints both in the world beyond and this world. It speaks of the soul friend, the anam chara. The sense is that a companion, a guide, perhaps accompanies us in our journey and can often read us well without judgment but acceptance as a friend. John O’Donahue describes it as: “a person to whom you could reveal the hidden intimacies of your life.”

In a sacrament the ordinary becomes a vehicle for the extraordinary, the divine. The physical is the gateway to the spiritual. Celtic spirituality takes this principle and seeks to integrate everyday life with religious significance, so that the most basic of acts, say making coffee, is accompanied by a brief prayer. Esther De Waal puts it well; ‘The Celtic approach to God opens up a world in which nothing is too common to be exalted and nothing is so exalted that it cannot be made common.’ 

This then extends into seeing the natural world as providing insight in God’s creation and a gateway for contemplation.  It fits an ecologically minded age, as it is rooted in the natural world of god’s creation instead of the more airy and abstract world of other spiritual focus. Here’s a prayer attributed to Patrick: “At Tara today in this fateful hour I place all Heaven with its power, and the sun with its brightness, and the snow with its whiteness, and fire with all the strength it hath, and lightning with its rapid wrath, and the winds with their swiftness along their path, and the sea with its deepness, and the rocks with their steepness, and the earth with its starkness– all these I place, by God’s almighty help and grace, between myself and the powers of darkness.”

Finally, they honor time, not as the frenzied rush of filling every minute with activity or worship of the phone screen, but to be enjoyed as part of a natural rhythm. They know of special threshold moments. Basically, time is a crucible where we can offer hospitality to another and that includes making time for God. In the midst of St Patrick celebrations, I hope we can touch on some of these aspects of the faith to honor the legend.