A Year of Spiritual Thinking 1.4 (Month 1, Week 4)

Celtic spirituality and Creation

Sunrise with an epiphany….

Hello Friends! Welcome to Practicing Terraphilia in my Year of Spiritual Thinking, a journey of searching for stories that explain our innate affiliation for this living earth and those with whom we share the planet, from bacteria to blue whales, and sagebrush to snow fleas. This week I’ll talk about what I’ve learned from some reading on Celtic Spirituality and an epiphany I had on my pre-dawn walk.

Celtic Spirituality

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reading The Book of Creation: An Introduction to Celtic Spirituality by J. Philip Newell. When I say “reading,” by the way, I should confess I’m slow at reading anything abstract: I read a bit, take notes, and digest what I learned for a few days before reading more. I need plenty of time to let new ideas and concepts sit in my mind until I can feel them internally, in order to integrate them into my understanding intellectually, emotionally and spiritually.

Reading Newell’s survey of how the Celt’s pre-Christian “nature mysticism”—Newell’s phrase—shaped the Christianity they adopted after Roman conquest, I kept noting passages that spoke to me. For instance, where Newell describes the teachings of Pelagius, an early Celtic monk. (Pelagius is his Latin or Roman name, in Welsh he is Morgan or Morien—re-naming is a classic tactic of conquest.)

[I]n the Celtic tradition both grace and nature are celebrated as gifts of God. The gift of grace is given to restore us to the essential well-being of the gift of nature.

Yes! That speaks to my condition, as Quakers say. “The essential well-being of the gift of nature.” For me, nature IS the sacred, and belonging to that community of interwoven species and lives is absolutely essential to my well-being at all levels, spiritual, intellectual, emotional and physical.

I am fascinated to think that the spiritual beliefs I have instinctively gravitated to and am only now examining may be rooted in Celtic beliefs. As if somehow those traditions lived unspoken in my familial heritage, passed on in the way generations of my ancestors lived their lives. A felt inheritance, if not an oral or intellectual one.

That affiliation for Celtic spirituality suggests a direction to my reading and learning in this Year of Spiritual Thinking. I am going to search for resources on Celtic spirituality pre-Roman conquest.

A Epiphany from Walking Meditation

As I’ve said in earlier newsletters, part of my daily practice is to walk in the nearby wild each morning, taking a trail that runs down a draw right below my house and walking a two-and-a-half mile circuit in the stillness before dawn. As I walk, I greet my plant-kin, saying good morning to the one-seed juniper trees that dot this high prairie, blue grama grass winter-bleached to pale straw, saltbush with its papery seeds, spiny tree cholla cactus, the globe mallow and all the others. I thank them for weaving this landscape, and for breathing with us.

Plants and other photosynthesizing lives are our “breathing buddies” in the words of poet Clifford Burke. They exhale the oxygen we cannot live without; we exhale the carbon dioxide they require to make their food using the sun’s energy.

Walking in community with the land is my medicine, my way of releasing the stresses that accumulate in my body and spirit from moving through the human world each day. … Walking unknits the knots of every day, and reconnects me to light and joy and life. I walk to nurture that quiet light John O’Donohue wrote about, the light in my heart that reminds me that loving this world is the only true path, the only way for me to live as me. … I walk to shed the noise and busyness and pain and hopelessness. To immerse myself in gratitude for this living earth and all it offers us: Beauty, breath, life. Love. (From my post on Walking Meditation)

A twisted old one-seed juniper with lichen I greet every morning.

Creation

As I walked through the frosty grassland and silently greeted my plant kin, speaking their names and thinking them for weaving these landscapes and breathing with us, I “heard” a flash of insight: what some call “Creation” is simply the sacred force of life creating itself. Continually, experimenting, being born, evolving, growing in relationship with all of the other lives, dying, recycling into new forms.

Creating itself (or themselves, perhaps?), that is, not created by some divine being, a god in human form. Like the Big Bang, the theory of how the universe began as an unimaginably small, unimaginably hot mass that reached some threshold which caused that mass to suddenly push outward, loosing all that we know today, atoms, molecules, particles, planets, stars, suns, interstellar dust—the universe itself, still expanding, still creating itself.

Unlike the Big Bang theory, which is a scientific story that can be rigorously tested and modified by new data as they come in, my insight about creation is a personal story. An insight in my search for ways to explain the mystery.

As a Quaker, I come from a tradition of individual revelation, a tradition that honors the idea that each of us has access to the “small, still voice of the divine” and thus to our own understanding of spiritual truths. The story that resonates with me may be different from the one that resonates with you, and that is how it should be, because each of us comes from a unique perspective. We don’t have to believe in the same stories, as long as we all cleave to the same core truths about treating each other and this living world with respect and lovingkindness.

In The Book of Creation, J. Philip Newell talks about ninth-century Celtic teacher John Scotus Eriugena, who taught that the Biblical book of Genesis is not a chronological history of the creation of the earth, rather “a meditation on the ever-present mystery of creation.”

Eriugena, Newell writes,

also saw, in a way that anticipated the modern scientific understanding of life in its inter-relatedness, that all creation was made together. ... In other words, the light of the first day is the source of our life and all of life.

The Sacred Flowering of Life

I’m sure someone else has said this before, but to me, it was a revelation: Creation is the Big Bang of the living world. When the first organic molecules found each other and sparked life, first on the micro scale and then eventually aggregating into larger cooperative forms, whether sea lettuce algae or grizzly bears or cholla cactus, creation began. It came to existence in those organic molecules forming relationships and creating life.

That’s the sacred part, life bursting forth. Into billions of forms and kinds and many more times than billions of individuals. The sacred continually creating or co-creating itself in a a flowering of life.

And a flowering too, of the relationships that interweave species, communities and of course, individuals. The relationships that form the fabric of life and its flourishing. We are all in relationship, no matter how solitary we may be.

Where do humans fit? As I see it, our job is to love and participate, to honor and cherish the sacred gift of life bursting forth and continuing to create itself.

I’m no expert on spirituality, much less any religion. I am simply a seeker looking for a way to understand the mystery. As a friend who has a degree in Theology likes to say, spirituality and religion are the stories we tell ourselves to explain the big questions: Why are we here? What does life mean? How did all of this life come to be? Where do I fit?

In this Year of Spiritual Thinking, I seek a story or stories that resonate with my own inner truths, my own relationship with the sacred in this world. I don’t presume to speak for anyone else, because we each find our own understanding, our own truths.

Next week, I’ll dip into more of what I’m learning about Nature spirituality, plus offer a new call—a challenge, if you will—about prayer and what it means to us individually.

Blessings to you all!