This October we brought a taste of Celtic spirituality to our Prairiewoods calendar. Angie Pierce Jennings and I invited anyone who wished to join us in delving into the spirit of two writers: John Philip Newell and John O’Donohue, both magical with words and both steeped in the inheritance received from their Celtic ancestors.
In this journey, the group that gathered together to unwrap this heritage sensed that in exploring the spirituality of the ancient Celts, we were touching something ancient within us, into longings we all share.
We loved how the early Celtic peoples found God at the very heart of life in ordinary daily events. Everything is sacred, all occasions worthy of blessings: the daily work of lighting the fire or milking the cow. John O’Donohue provided us with a taste of this in his book To Bless the Space Between Us, in which he offers a storehouse of blessings. Among these we found a blessing for the air around us, another for our longings, one for love in times of conflict and one for new beginnings. Each of us wrote our own blessings, aware that our own relationship to the Divine is alive in the most mundane aspects of our lives.
In this spiritual world, Christ himself serves as a shield of protection from all ills. Together we listened to the song The Deer Cry, which speaks of Christ being before us, behind us, above and below, on every side, always. We are held safely.
We spoke of another aspect of Celtic spirituality, of how close the invisible world is to us. We are connected to a world of the spirit. There are thin places where a veil seems to lift and we have a direct experience of God. Nature itself, especially wilderness areas, may offer thin places where the sacred is revealed, where we meet a God who is present and vibrant.
We read from Sounds of the Eternal, a Celtic Psalter by John Philip Newell, a book that contains this beautiful prayer:
In the temple of my inner being,
in the temple of my body,
in the temple of earth, sea and sky,
in the great temple of the universe
I look for the light that was in the beginning,
the mighty fire that blazes still from the heart of life,
glowing in the whiteness of the moon,
glistening in night stars,
hidden in the black earth,
concealed in unknown depths of my soul.
In the darkness of the night, in the shadows of my being,
O God, let me glimpse the eternal,
in both the light and the shadows of my being
let me glimpse the glow of the eternal.
There was so much more to explore about these ancient ancestors: the goodness of creation, the significance of the landscape where we grew up, a love of learning and the importance of pilgrimage. Our look at Celtic spirituality was brief—only three sessions—but it was, in itself, a tremendous blessing.
The Media Center at Prairiewoods houses a special Celtic section. Stop in and take a book home for reading on a wintry day. Learn to relish the refreshing spirit of the Celtic peoples.
—Betty Daugherty, FSPA, Prairiewoods foundress and spiritual director