Celtic Spirituality

What is unique about Celtic Spirituality?			How can we join in the Celtic way of prayer?
What does the Rule of St. Benedict have to say to lay people in the 21st century?	Why should we care about the Rule of St. Benedict?		How did Esther de Waal, the daughter of an Anglican vicar, get involved with the Rule of St. Benedict?

Celtic Christianity developed outside the boundries of the Roman Empire, away from the influence of Greek and Roman thought. It escaped Gnosticism. It was unaffected by the intellectually-contrived rift between body and spirit, between sacred and common. Today it offers us wholeness in two ways: by mending our internal schisms and by taking us back to a time when there was no schism in the church of Jesus Christ. As whole people in a unbroken church, we can receive the Holy Spirit into every part of our whole life.

Two views: Esther de Waal, Colleen Grace

"Celtic Spirituality was a practice in which ordinary people in their daily lives took the tasks that lay to hand but treated them sacramentally, as pointing to a greater reality which lay beyond them.

What Celtic understanding brings us, is the chance to break down the barrier between the active and the contemplative life; and instead, to make the busy, boring, relentless daily life tasks into the basis for continuous praying and for finding the presence of God.

Essentially this is a spirituality which asks of us a return to greater awareness ...

... It is tempting to put the blame for our own lack of everyday piety on a society in which time has been conquered and technology determines the way we run our lives. But the loss ultimately lies within ourselves. Ironically, when travel and the media have blown all horizons wide open, our own inner horizons seem to have become narrower and our vision contracted.

How can we find again the seeing eye and the feeling touch?

Perhaps the first step is that we really should want to unearth God in our midst...

If we can rediscover this vision, then we too will be able to transform what lies to hand. Let the mundane become the edge of glory, and find the extraordinary in the ordinary."

- Esther de Waal

MS. COLLEEN GRACE: I think what it's all about is bringing God into the everyday ordinariness of life and really, you know, appreciating the special moments that you have here. In the Celtic way of life, there were prayers for everything; there were prayers for waking up in the morning; there were prayers for preparing breakfast; prayers for preparing the fire; prayers for putting the fire out at night, and, you know, redoing it the next morning. So just the idea that there could actually be prayerful moments in every small detail of what you do made me, I think, look at things a little bit differently. It's a very joyous way of looking at the world, and I don't think you have to be Catholic or Irish at all to appreciate the joy of living.

Colleen Grace is a lawyer, married with two small children. A parishioner at Old St. Patrick's Church, she lives in the heart of Chicago.

How can we join in the Celtic way of prayer?

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For a look at some of the prayers to which Colleen Grace referred (see above), see CARMINA GADELICA, edited by Alexander Carmichael. This is a an organized grouping of prayers collected from the rural Irish in the late 1800s. This foundational work shatters the artificial barrier between sacred and secular and is well worth returning to again and again. It will make a electrify your personal prayer life. This classic work, long out-of-print, is also available in book form.

How did Esther de Waal, the daughter of an Anglican vicar and the wife of an Anglican dean, get involved with the Rule of St. Benedict?

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Esther de Waal, daughter of an Anglican country vicar, grew up in a traditional Christian family on the Welsh borders. Her father's antiquarian interest give her an interest in landscapes and buildings, visual as well as written history. At Cambridge she studied history and then did research at the Department of Local History at Leicester. In her twenties she got married and had four sons in five years. Her husband ministered successively as Chaplain to Nottingham University, in Lincoln Cathedral, and for 10 years as Dean of Canterbury. In all three places she did as much teaching as family responsibility allowed. Canterbury was a special moment of Providence for her. Was it also an experience of God's sense of humour?

Because my husband was Dean of the Cathedral, we lived in a house - the Deanery - that had been the Prior's lodging, in the middle ages, of the Benedictine monastic community. So here I was, wife, mother of four then teenage sons, living in a house that had once been inhabited by Benedictine monks. Being a historian, I felt I had to get o the bottom of this story. I think it was the consciousness of buildings that made me so interested, not only in our own house, but in all the ruins that lay around. The monastic presence was inescapable. There was the brew house and the bake house and the monks at the bottom of the garden; there was the infirmary garden on one side of the house. To post a letter I would take a short cut through the cloisters.

So I picked up the Rule of St. Benedict and said to myself that I'd better come to grips with what all this was about. And then I was overwhelmed because that short text, only 9,000 words, so improbable, written by a man in sixth century Italy, for a group of men living together, spoke to me not as a historian, but really as if it were addressed to me in the depths of my own humanity.

It spoke to me of things I was struggling with in my own life: how to hold a family together because a family and a community have got so much in common; how to handle the ordinary things in life and make these a way to God; how to keep the open door of hospitality and a warm welcome to everyone who comes, without allowing oneself to be exhausted by the constant pressure of people. And in all of this how to find time and space for prayer while living a very ordinary, practical, day-to-day life.

It was by sheer chance that I came to write a little book - Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict. Every year, if you are Anglican, there is a Lent Book which people are supposed to take as their Lenten reading. It is usually written by someone of ecclesiastical distinction and commissioned well in advance. But for 1984 things went wrong. They had no script and they asked me to write a book in six months. I did so simply because it was a challenge. I had never written or expected to write on a religious subject.

I wrote very much in the middle of my own family life, quite often writing at the kitchen table at the same time as I was cooking. In these snatched odd moments I wrote of this extraordinary man who had such a grasp of the human psyche and of practical living that he helped me to find God in my day-to-day life, who helped me above all in my relationships, in loving people as they need to be loved.

Then an extraordinary thing happened. The book written with lay people in mind was read by monks, the real professionals, so to speak. They read it aloud in their refectories, they read it with their guests and novices. I think they found it quite refreshing that a lay woman had turned to the source of their own life and found it so invigorating and so energizing for herself. So out of this book came something I could never had envisaged happening, again something mysterious: God's sense of timing.

Because those sons were just about to leave home, there was going to be a huge vacuum in my life when they all left. Just then I began to be asked to take retreats, to give lectures. But, because one can so often talk about spirituality and not always experience it, I also began to organize weeks when a group of people, ideally about 25, would come together and live the Benedictine rhythm, that holistic balance of body, mind and spirit. We would pray together so that the day was organized according to the framework of the Offices. We would study together all the insights of the Rule. Then we would share manual work: whatever there was to be done where we happened to be.

In this way, not only did we enter into the holistic and healing rhythm of recognizing that we are all made up of body, mind and spirit, and that we should pay attention to these three God-given elements in ourselves, but we found that Benedict was also helping us to listen to one another, to accept one another and to love one another. So at the end of a week, this disparate group of people - I always tried to make sure they were people from differing backgrounds, different denominations - left with a sense of how the Rule of St. Benedict gives you practical tools and equipment, not only to deepen your own spiritual life, but also to learn how to live more fully and deeply with other people.

We had forgotten our labels, Anglican, Catholic, Quaker, Methodist, etc. We had formed a community. And I am glad to say that this simple formula has been followed in many other places where such weeks are held regularly every year. I am happy to know that people are finding the Rule of St. Benedict as relevant and creative today as it was when it was originally written 1,500 years ago.

For me one of the significant things about the Rule is that, written in the fifth or sixth century, it takes me back to something very early in the Church, beyond all the wretched party labels of the churches, beyond and behind the tragic spills of the Reformation, behind the schism of East and West. It takes me back to some deep, shared, common ground in our Christian tradition, and, also, I come to feel, to some deep and early point within my own self.

What does the Rule of St. Benedict have to say to lay people in the 21st century? Why should we care about the Rule of St. Benedict?

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I was still a victim of a religious upbringing which told me that what God really wanted from me was that I should say a lot of prayers. I had the idea that the more uncomfortable they were and the more I suffered the more God was pleased. At one point, I determined to pray longer and in greater discomfort than my younger sister. Going to church, reading religious literature, giving up sugar during Lent, giving my savings to the mission field-- that's what God was looking for.

There was no idea in my upbringing that God would be pleased if I helped my mother in the kitchen handling ordinary things like the dishes. I had no idea that matter mattered to God and that included my own body. There was no idea that the earth, the ground on which I walked, was an essential part of God's world. There was no sense that creation was important, that God was part of the ordinary and the day-to-day. Without noticing it, I was part of the great dualistic system of the Western world that splits the world between the holy and the profane, the sacred and the ordinary.

While I was growing up, I was very conscious of splits and parties within the church. I knew precisely where I stood. I was an evangelical Anglican Christian. Baptists and Presbyterians were pretty dreadful; Anglo-Catholics were highly suspect; Roman Catholics were beyond the pale. These labels and banners made things simple for me.

In my education, I was shaped by the split that shaped western Europe from the 12th century onward. With the coming of the universities, the rediscovery of the Greek philosophers and the growth of rational analysis, an approach to education developed which was totally cerebral and left-brained to the neglect of the emotions and the imagination. I dealt in words, not in the visual, not in images. There was no sense of the right-hand side of the brain. I was also shaped by the split of 1098, the schism which severed the West from the great Eastern theological traditions.

Although I didn't realize its implications at the time, (by studying the Rule of St. Benedict) I also had begun to follow that simple movement of illumination that begins to mend these splits and divides, that heals the tragic divisions in my self, my thinking and my whole approach to the church and the world.

The Rule of St. Benedict, like the Celtic tradition which has enriched what Benedict gives me, takes me behind and beyond the divisions that shaped me. It takes me to the fifth and sixth centuries during which the Benedictine way of life and the Celtic tradition were forged. The Rule takes me back to something early, primal and universal. I choose these words carefully. I don't want to say "primitive." That would sound prejudicial and critical. So I say primal, universal, fundamental, existing not only in the church but in each of us.

Recovering this as the core from which we operate, the ground from which we reach out to others, is urgent. It is prophetic for our time and for what the next millennium is going to give us.

I think this language resonates with many people who are on the edge of the church, who are questioning and seeking. They find many things in the institutional church difficult, but they still find a deep longing within themselves. I think this language comes close to the new consciousness Bede Griffiths OSB has stood for during the many years of his monastic life. I think it is very close to the terms in which the "New Science" also speaks. Certainly, traditional peoples, Celtic peoples, African peoples and Native American peoples have always seen beyond historic Western dualities to unity and integration.

Follow this link to the rest of this article, Benedictine Charism Today, Esther de Waal's 1995 lecture at Illinois Benedictine College.

Find your roots. Find yourself.