Southwell Deanery Lent Lecture 4 March 1998

SOUTHWELL DEANERY LENT LECTURE 4 MARCH 1998

Southwell Minster

‘Interpreting Celtic Spirituality in relationship to Developing Ministry through life themes’

‘A WORLD OF SACRAMENT’

Ray Simpson

The vision of God is vanishing from the earth. Carl Jung, who so clearly saw the value of archetypes for the collective unconscious warned us of this earlier this century. In the 1960’s Thomas Merton warned that ‘the degradation of the sense of symbolism in the modern world is one of its many alarming symptoms of spiritual decay’ (Love and Living p.55). This is the view of thinkers today as diverse as John Paul 11 and Leanne Payne, the Episcopalian who ministers healing to those with a broken self image. The person in the street no longer makes a connection between the thing they see and God, who is its Source and Destiny. Our Western societies have, in this sense, become Wastelands.

This absence of the vision of God is the end result of an Enlightenment mind-set. The Enlightenment chicken has now come home to roost. It began, as Graham Cray likes to point out, with Descartes’ idea that only reason is real - Cogito ergo sum. It ended with the idea that only what’s in a shopping trolley is real - Tesco ergo sum.

In a materialist society disintegration grows; deep questions are kept at arms length by dependence on tobacco, alcohol, medically prescribed or illegal drugs and the motor car.

Now a new culture is replacing the Enlightenment and mixing in with the materialist culture.. In this emerging post modern culture we are moving from the cerebral to the visual, from linear thinking to blob thinking, from the hierarchical to the relational, and from the analytical to the intuitive.

Unfortunately OldChurch (EnlightenmentChurch) has tended to be prisoner, not liberator, of this mind-set. Its worship has tended to be wordy and wooden, reflecting the cerebral more than the visual. Its structures have reflected the bureaucratic more than the intuitive. Its education has reflected the analytical more than the the imaginative.

OldChurch is therefore very unsuited to the new post modern society that is tired of unalloyed materialism and wants to experiment with a hundred spiritualities and ways of seeing. Yet this very Church is charged with the divine responsibility to cradle a new way of seeing and a new way of being to take us into the new millenium.

As the Christian Church in Britain learns how to to relate creatively to spiritual dimensions ignored by materialist rationalist theologians and scientists to their impoverishment and ours it will need to draw upon its Celtic birthright.

We now have a New Labour, New Britain Prime Minister who arranges his entire Government around significant symbolic acts. He knows that these can say more than words alone. He wants to lead us into the new millenium with a Dome that brings to life new ways of perceiving.That is why Peter Mandelson turned to young children for inspiration, because they have a sense of wonder.

A little child shall lead them.

The imagination loves symbols because it recognises that inner divinity can only find expression in symbolic form.

John O’Donohue

Fortunately, although OldChurch became unchild-like, bureaucratic and stiff, the church’s founder, and the early church in Britain continue to invite us to recover our child-like birthright. Jesus, of course, based his ministry on acted out signs, as John portrays in his Gospel. To Celtic Christians the whole world was a sacrament, which pointed beyond itself to its Creator. John Smith, the Australian biker priest who wins many young drug addicts to Christ and dialogues with politicians, has embraced Celtic spirituality. He says ‘The church offers sacrament to the world.’ Tonight I hope we may learn from our Celtic forbears four ways which will help us, too, to restore the vision of God on earth.

1. AN IMAGINAL WAY OF THINKING

Ron Ferguson of the Iona Community says of Celtic spirituality: ‘The material is shot through with the spiritual... The whole earth is sacramental: everything is truly every blessed thing.’ My Vicar (David Adam) reminds us that the CelticChurch ‘saw a universe ablaze with His glory, suffused with a presence that calls, nods and beckons.’ Every one in the land needs a Vicar like mine.

The Irish mystic and theologian Noel O'Donoghue explores the Celtic way of seeing in his book The Mountain Behind the Mountain..The Celts saw natural things pointing beyond themselves to an eternal reality. Thus the physical sun was a reflection of eternal light. O'Donoghue calls this way of seeing imaginal. It is not projecting inner fantasies onto the world, it is perceiving what is really there, though this is not obvious to people who lack this faculty. (The renowned French Ismaeli scholar Henry Corbin, a co-founder with Jung of the Eranos Circle, coined the workd ‘Imaginal’ to designate that inner world of the psyche which uses symbols to clothe the unkverse of the soul.)

O'Donoghue concludes: "There is a sense in which Europe is the creation of the monks who journeyed into the darkness with this Celtic way of seeing, for the light that troubled their dreams had to shine into the darkness; it was a Christian light, incarnate, sacrificial. It was a light and a vision that had been tested and purified and deepened in the darkness of Gethsemane and Calvary, a light breaking forth from the Cross, an Easter light, a vision of the Risen Lord who was 'the Son of the gentle Mary.'

To be imaginal, a person must heed Jesus' statement that it is the pure who shall see God (Matthew 5.8.) The Celtic saints were able to see creation in its God-intended glory only because their eyes had first been washed by continuous spiritual exercise. It was because of this, as Robin Flower observes ‘that they, first in Europe, had that strange vision of natural things in an almost unnatural purity.’

The Celtic Church saw the elements, in particular, as signs of God’s Presence. I come now to examples of how their use of two elements turned the hearts of the people to God.

i) Patrick and the Celtic Fire

For many people in Ireland Christianity began with the lighting of a fire. Once a year at the Spring solstice the King of Tara, High King of all Ireland, gathered together the regional kings, and his druids and people to the high Hill of Tara. There, at a giant celebration, they lit a bonfire with the aim of invoking the sun, after winter’s death, to shine beneficently upon them and their crops in the coming season. On that day, it was forbidden for any one else to light a fire. Patrick, in a stroke of inspired genius, went with his team of Christians to the hill of Slane which was in full view of Tara, and there lit a fire to celebrate the resurrection of Christ. The future of Ireland was at stake. For what hundreds saw, would soon be talked of the length and breadth of the land. ‘If that fire is not extinguished today’, the Shamans told the High King with such accurate intuition, ‘it will burn for ever, and it will overcome all the fires of our religion’. So it proved to be. And the Christian communities that proliferated kept a fire burning night and day as a sign of the Risen Christ, whom they proclaimed as the Sun of Suns. That is why, in the Easter Sunrise Service of the Community of Aidan and Hilda, these words are proclaimed:

The sun rises daily only because you command it;

Its splendour will not last, created things all perish.

Christ the true Sun nothing can destroy;

The Splendour of God, He shall reign for ever!

The phrase ‘The Celtic Fire’ has burned itself into British consciousness. This fire was the heart of every church community. Celtic fire has three aspects. There is the keeping alight of the eternal flame - we ‘d do well to up the percentage of churches who do that. There is the fire of faith in the hearts of each Christian. But more than these, which are but reflections of a greater fire, is the fire in the heart of God. This we call the Trinity.

For Celtic Christians the Trinity was not a dogma to be mouthed, it was an experience to catch. At the heart of the doctrine of God is the conviction that God is a communion of loving selves, each self drawing its life from the other, each self giving itself to the others - totally, freely, always. The 4th. century Greek theologians known as the Cappadocian Fathers spoke of this as perichoresis -a divine circle dance of mutually indwelling love. Another way of putting this, as does the Italian theologian Bruno Forte in his book Trinity for Atheists is ‘a communion of flowing relationships’.

The communion of love is the clue to our deepest identity. As we discover the Celtic Fire, the Sacred Three, we learn how we live from each other and how we are to live for each other. We reflect the Fire of Love which draws all lesser loves to itself.

The Celtic churches have an intense awareness of the presence of the Sacred Three pervading and shaping all of life.

ii) David and Water

David and the Christians he enlisted as monks were known as the Watermen. It has been said of them:

As fish live in water so these folk live in God

As waters flow so clearly so these folk flow with God

Celtic Christians often went to the source of water, a spring, well or river, to be baptised there. They often immersed themselves in river or sea, both as a penance and to remind them that baptism is a way of life, a way of being immersed in God.

Brendan O’Malley, in his St. David’s Pilgrim’s Manual expands on the understanding that Jesus’s baptism had a cosmic significance: The sinless Saviour enters the streams of the Jordan, thereby cleansing the waters and imparting divine redemption to the entire material creation....The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

Like Jesus, David and Celtic Christians go with the flow. That is relevant, not least because I heard Christopher Frayling say on radio, after the opening, I think, of a Royal Society of Arts Exhibition:The future will belong to waves.

Icons and fluid people

It is relevant because so many unchurched seekers can only relate to Christians who go with the flow. Kim Erickson Haire worked as a waitress in various American cities. She became aware of a large group of people who were quite different from the people she met in churches. She calls these ‘the fluid people’. Fluid people, she observes, congregate at the vegetarian restaurant during Sunday lunch, while ‘the Christians are institutionalised, singing words which originate on the surface of a page, skim the surface of their hearts, and echo off the surface of church walls.’

Fluid people, in contrast, ‘are liquid; they are poured into life and moving with the tide of the cosmos’ Fluid people ‘pour their spirits into art. Their souls feel somehow connected to the movement of the earth, and they search for meaning through colour, movement and harmony.’

Kim Haire concludes that most fluid people are consumed with the spiritual world, but few relate to Christ. She believes that the icon can be a powerful tool for discipling the fluid person. The icon, she writes ‘has an intrigue which arouses the imagination and stimulates the senses of a person... it reaches mysteriously from the cosmic realm into the human realm.’

Celtic Christianity spawned fluid people who reached fluid people.

2. AN INCARNATIONAL WAY OF LIVING

Patrick Thomas, Rector of Brecon, writes of another aspect of this Celtic imagination: "It is this ability to fuse together the unique time and place of Christ's birth at Bethlehem with our own specific present... which is part of the genius of Celtic spirituality; a realisation that the eternal moments of the Incarnation or the Crucifixion or the Resurrection can transcend time and space, enabling us to locate Bethlehem or Calvary or the Garden of the Third Day in our own back yard".

Celtic Christians believed that just as Christ incarnated God so they had to. That is why they went around blessing everything and making the sign of the cross over them, over things as mundane as a cow or a milking pail. When Hodders accepted my next book, Celtic Blessings for Everyday for publication, I was pleased that they wanted me to add prayers for significant modern life events such as mid-life crisis, infertility, redundancy, miscarriage, leaving home, exams.

Celtic spirituality starts where people are and draws out that which is of God within them. It recognises that all persons have a spirituality. C.f. Cambridge Research on Children’s Spirituality.

Here are ways they did this, which provide images which can sink into and change the consciousness of our time.

Four Images of Our Time

a) The Journey.

Brendan’s Voyage. Pilgrims for the love of God changed Europe.

Matthew D’Ancona, Deputy Editor of the Sunday Telegraph, wrote about a study on Swindon, which has no population stability or focus. Community is simply the people you deal with, on the fax, on the telephone.These and the Internet do more to bring people together and define loyalty than geographical location.

D’Ancona concludes: ‘In ways mundane and intriguing, the people of Swindon are learning to live with modernity which one of them described as “the vagabond way”. In their unhistoric acts are lessons for us all, gathered on this uncertain vagabond pilgrimage to the Britain of the future.’

b) The Cross-shaped arms.

Cuthbert and the Cross shaped arms

C.f. Celtic Orthodox Church and Francis’ connection.

c) The Caedmon ‘Karaoke’.

Whitby and Caedmon.

d) Aidan of the Streets

Aidan gave up a horse which would have distanced him, and walked everywhere.. So did Chad.

3. AN INSPIRATIONAL WAY

It was Irenaeus, who taught Celtic Christians that “the glory of God is seen through a fully human life”. They were at ease with themselves. Their confessions were heartfelt sharings with a dear fatherly friend, not a formal recital to an office bearer. They were in touch with their feelings, as their poetry, into which their feelings flowed, tells us so memorably; and they rejoiced in all the senses, which they called the five stringed harp.

Creative arts

The missionary company that accompanied Patrick included artists, according to the Book of Armagh. Patrick himself used to teach young people who were training for the ministry to write the alphabet in a graceful style. Before Patrick’s arrival, the people of Ireland were all but destitute of a literature. In the centuries following Patrick there was a great flowering of art and calligraphy. The flower of that flowering was The Book of Kells. Even today, Nicolete Gray in A History of Lettering can say that the three Greek letters that form the monogram of Christ on the Chi Rho page are ‘more presences than letters’. For shining through the brilliance of the artistic skills is the splendour of spiritual understanding.

The Irish sense of riotous complexity moving swiftly within a basic unity found its most extravagant expression in the monumental high crosses, in miraculous liturgical vessels such as the Ardagh Chalice, and, most delicately of all, in the art of the Irish codex.

New Church walks hand in hand with the creative arts, because human creativity is a reflection of the Creator’s Presence with each of us.

Poetry

Columba took an initiative to safeguard the role of the bards in society by proposing registration and schools for bards.

OldChurch’s neglect of this side of people created a vaccuum which other groups try to fill. ‘Everyone has a poet inside them struggling to get out’ says Peter Sanson, the poet hired by Marks and Spencer to bring out ‘the creative side’ of its 57,000 employees. (The Week 13 Dec 1997)

Columba was not only concerned with poetry. He is reputed to have written over 300 songs, a few of which have survived. ‘Give me the songs of a nation and I care not who makes the laws’ said John Wesley. It is interesting that a Methodist, Rob Frost, in his new book Which Way for the Church?, (Kingsway Publications) predicts that “Music will take greater prominence and will become integral to the prayer experience. Prayer through music will be commonplace, be it sung Evensong, jazz mass, folk celebration or classic meditation.

“The new churches will rediscover art, from the iconography of the East to the statues of Rome, and they will develop their own contemporary spirituality through it. Frequently changing displays, pictures, posters and banners will become a growing inspiration for prayer as the churches learn how to use the visual arts as a means and not an end ...