Celtic Spirituality - speaks directly to many of today’s concerns.

Celtic Spirituality draws its inspiration from the earliest manifestation of Christianity – an offering which was also inspired by the wisdom of pre-Christian Ireland.

In the prayers of the early church of these islands, in their passion and their practice of the faith there is a clarity, simplicity and wisdom that speak directly to many of today’s concerns. Here are some aspects of Celtic Spirituality

Love of the natural world

The prayers of the Celtic Saints are filled with experiences of God’s presence in creation, simplicity of living in harmony with creation, and awareness of the sacredness of all things. As it says in the first chapter of Genesis, all things originate in the Divine Source, and so all things are sacred. That Presence permeates all of nature, and speaks to us of the ‘Original/Essential Goodness’ of everything. To enter into this Presence is a sacramental experience so that when we walk in nature, everything is a visible reminder of the Invisible Presence. The Sacred Presence is there at all times and in all places and Celtic Christianity reminds us that all is sacred.

What is different about a Celtic Prayer Service that would make me want to attend?

This is a great question and one without a simple answer.

On Sunday mornings, Episcopalians gather in Church and participate in the Liturgy. We either utilize traditional language Rite 1 or contemporary language Rite 2. Liturgy is the church's public worship of God; the term derived from Greek words for "people" and "work.” The Rite includes both what is to be said and what is to be done in the religious observance and expresses the church's relationship with God through words, actions, and symbols. It orders the church's common worship and enables us to share its faith and experience God's presence in a particular liturgical and pastoral context. Divine transcendence is to be known through participation in the specific and finite realities of the rite.  In other words, through  this act of worship, one can  connect with God.

So in a way we experience spirituality through the Liturgical lens using the words, symbols, and actions of the Rite.

The Legalese

As Episcopalians, we follow Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. We believe in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We believe God is active in our everyday lives through the power of the Holy Spirit.

The mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and with each other in Christ. The Church pursues its mission as it prays and worships, proclaims the gospel, and promotes justice, peace, and love. The Church carries out its mission through the ministry of all its members.

We uphold the Bible and worship with the Book of Common Prayer. We believe the Holy Scriptures are the revealed Word of God. In worship, we unite ourselves with one another to acknowledge the holiness of God, to hear God's Word, to offer prayer and praise, and to celebrate the Sacraments. The Celebration of Holy Eucharist is the central act of worship in accordance with Jesus' command to His disciples. Holy Communion may be received by all baptized Christians, not only members of the Episcopal Church.

We strive to love our neighbors as ourselves and respect the dignity of every person. We welcome all to find a spiritual home in the Episcopal Church.

OK. That is the “official” Church definition but … what is your relationship with God and how does that relationship help determine what you believe and how you live your daily life?

A Different Way To See.

According to J. Philip Newell in his book, Listening For The Heartbeat Of God; “Celtic Spirituality has come to mean different things to different people. For some, it refers to the spirituality of the ancient Celtic church. To others, it is identified as a New Age type of spirituality that, in seeking simplicity and freedom from institutional religion, has borrowed aspects of the old Celtic tradition. But it is neither just a thing of the past nor a twentieth-century phenomenon.   ”

The feature of Celtic spirituality that is probably most widely recognized is its creation emphasis and the divinity in it.

In the first chapter of Genesis you’ll recall that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, the day and the night, the land and the water, the trees, the flowers, the grass and all the plants, the birds and the fish and all the animals, and last of all, humankind. And, after each of these things God pronounces that it is good. Some Christians mistakenly believe that after God created humans, he pronounced them alone to be “very good” but that’s not the case: After God creates humans, Genesis 1:31 says that he “saw every thing that he had made, and it was very good.”

Therefore all creation is inherently good … trees, animals, humans … all equally good. This is an important aspect of Celtic Christianity. Later Christian theology (right up to the present time) tends to emphasize the “fall from grace” or humankind’s brokenness, sinfulness and “total depravity.” But while Celtic Christians were aware of these doctrines, their primary emphasis remained rooted in the goodness of creation. Even when Adam and Eve leave the garden, God never pronounces them (or the garden, or anything in creation) to be bad. And so they, and we, remain inherently good.

There is also an inherent equality in this belief … the rivers and the trees are just as important as the cows and the birds, and the humans. Why? Because God pronounced all of these things to be Good, none more so than any others.

 Ancient Greek and Roman culture viewed nature as something to struggle against, something to conquer and subdue. And so the Roman and Greek version of Christianity emphasized using nature for one’s own benefit. Celtic Christianity, on the other hand, emphasizes the role of humans as partners with and protectors of nature for the benefit of all God’s creation.

Here’s Where It Gets Interesting

Pelagius, the first prominent Celtic theologian, a seriously misunderstood and misrepresented figure was accused by the church in Rome of “dangerous heresy” due to his controversial conviction that every child is conceived and born in the image of God. He believed that the newborn freshly comes forth from God, contains the original unsullied goodness of creation and humanity’s essential blessedness. This was in stark contrast to Augustinian thinking in the Roman church which accentuated the evil in humanity. That the human child is born depraved and humanity’s sinful nature has been transmitted from one generation to the next, stretching from Adam to the present and that we lack the image of God until it is restored in the sacrament of baptism. 

A second yet related feature is the perspective on the sacredness in everyday life. The focus is on God’s immanence, where the divine is seen to be manifested in or encompassing the material world. Prayers and blessings handed down through the oral tradition show the Celts’ reverence for the simplest acts in daily life—smooring the fire at night, weaving, or rising in the morning. Creativity including poetic imagination, song, and artistry was an expression of the soul. Further, the early Celtic Christians believed in the essential goodness of humanity and saw “penance” as an act of healing rather than punishment. This was fundamentally opposed to the Augustinian  view of original sin.

For Celtic Christians, God was not a far-off deity, removed from the world and the affairs of human beings. On the contrary, God was all around them – in the landscape of sea and mountain, bog, and  forest, in the rising and setting of the sun, in the comings and goings of the days and seasons, in the rising and sitting, moving and working of the people. Everything was and is sacred. Celtic spirituality is alive with this sense of the presence of God. The boundary between the sacred and the earthly is paper thin if it is there at all. The ordinary and mundane in life is as filled with the presence of God as the awe-inspiring and majestic.

Celtic spirituality celebrates the little things in life and marks them with prayers and rituals. Getting up, washing, dressing, lighting the fire, going out to work – all these and many more carried out in the presence and to the glory of God and in partnership with Him. Life was not just lived, it was prayed.

As Douglas Hyde wrote, the Irish people “see the hand of God in every place, in every time and in every thing. They have this sense of life being embraced on all sides by God.”

What's Different?

In a very concrete way, the mystical sense, the sense that makes us aware and alive to the presence of God in and around us is essential to Celtic spirituality. For us today too, it is important to see with this mystical eye, to let God be in our seeing, in our hearing, in our speaking. When we see in this way, we become aware that nothing and no-one is apart from God.

The CelticPrayer Service,  therefore,  places emphasis on silence and meditation, the Trinity, and creation/nature themes … different than the structured worship of Sunday morning … providing us with a greater opportunity to speak and listen to God.