Saturday, September 12, 2009

Some reflections on Celtic Christianity



One of the reasons of interest in celtic christianity for me was to explore how a country, (Ireland and Scotland) which weren't conquered by Rome, saw their faith and belief in God expand. I mean would their priorities and preferences be different? Would some of their theologies be different? And how would they be different. Well, they are different.

I wrote;

I've always thought of my soul in terms of dungeons and basement rooms. Full of cobwebs and damp, uninhabitable rooms. A space where, with God's help, you carve out room to live and grow.
But one morning during prayer, I had a picture of my soul, and it was more like a huge open expanse. A place of hills and valleys, streams and forests. A place where God moves into, if we let him. And his presence in the space begins to turn it green and makes it come alive, producing all kinds of fruit.
He might be over in this area creating a shady green valley with a brook running through it. Or he might be over there creating a building structure in which we will house memories of close intimate times. He may be at work rooting out some nasty weeds or some underbrush that has taken over an area that He wants to turn into a lovely park.

I've limited the description I've included here for space considerations, but the picture is still so clear in my mind, and it's an image I've come to see as a very Celtic way of understanding God and myself.
There have been two profound shifts in my thinking as a result of the study on Celtic Spirituality, and though I am not yet settled in one camp or another, I have come to love the different expressions
that the Celts have brought us.

The first is how they have come to decide what is at our core as human beings. For me and my training and personal experience, what's deepest within in me is my sinful nature, -original sin. I have been living with a deep sense that at the heart of my being is a nature that is broken and sinful, a dungeon if you will that is vile and dirty, and well, just sinful. As I read the books and prayed the Celtic Office day after day I began to notice that their approach to what was the core was different than mine. Celtic Spirituality is marked by a belief that the deepest part of us isn't sinfulness, it's the image of God. That deep in there, deeper still than original sin, is this sense that we were created in the Image of the Holy One, God Himself. They refuse to define themselves by the ugliness of their failings, and choose rather to define themselves by the beauty of their origins.

It doesn't necessarily disagree with scripture, but it is a different way of thinking of oneself. I like that it sets God back at the core of things, not my evil nature. I like how it doesn't allow me to blame my evil nature when I fail and sin, and without wanting to shift responsibility, I like how it shifts the story from my absolute weakness, to God's absolute love. There is something to that, and as I've allowed myself to explore the effects this understanding may have on my belief system, I find a greater appreciation for Gods love, growing in me. It's like, He didn't create me evil, he created me after his own heart, his own image. That subtle shift is profound and it works itself out in hope filled ways.

The second shift in my thinking has come about as I've read of the Celtic tradition of the belief in the essential goodness of creation. Not only is creation viewed as a blessing from God, but an expression
of God. It's like a communication to us from God, and often in Celtic literature it's referred to as the book of creation. What this does in effect is to merge the sense of that which is spirit and that which is matter. For the Celts it was all one anyway.

Whether I realized it or not, my training helped to establish within me an understanding that physical things, fleshly, earthly matter has a brokenness about it. At it's heart its evil and groaning under the
weight of existence. While things of the spirit are holy and of God.

In our desire to separate spirit and matter we have distanced the mystery of God from the matter of creation. Again it goes back to the fall of humankind. Something God created is now not to be trusted, because mankind sinned. The Celtic understanding does away with the notion that the things that are Spirit are good and the things that are physical and made of matter are evil. This allows humanity to celebrate and be thankful for the gift of creation, and how beautifully it was created.
Again this subtle shift has far reaching effects.

It makes me concerned with how this world is cared for, and how we treat it. It removes the sense that it's evil and broken so who cares how it's treated. It causes me to look closely at the delicate beauty of nature and the language of love God communicates to me through it, and I respond with praise and gratitude for His great love for me. Even the fact that he allows tremendous beauty to exist where no one can see it just confirms to me again the greatness of God.

I confess this approach is a much more wholesome one than I've seen in many western churches and Christians who consume without thought, feeling that the earth is damaged goods anyway. I don't like how easy it is to say "This thing that God created was good, and this thing that God created isn't good because we messed it up!"

These two small shifts are effecting how I and God relate, and how I care for his creation. From the guy across the street to the lawn I get to mow, I'm seeing with different eyes. It's also begun to shift how I picture my own soul. The picture I shared earlier is for me an image infused with the sense of Celtic faith. That new image of my Soul gives me a lot of hope. It will effect how I care for others in foundational ways.

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