Do You Have a Celtic Soul?

People often ask me what I mean by Celtic Spirituality. There are many answers to this question. For some, it is a longing for home, a yearning to interact with our surroundings in a way that our ancestors would have, to ground ourselves in ancient ways of being that have meaning for us. Many people love Celtic music and culture, and the wild beauty of Ireland and Scotland awakens something that inside of a person that had been paved over from living too long in an overdeveloped world.


The ancient Celts themselves were not one united group, but many different tribes loosely related by their common Indo-Aryan origins. What the tribes did have in common were some similarities in dress, customs and perceptions of the Universe. Like most of Europe, the Celtic countries eventually converted to Christianity. The centers of early Celtic Christianity were monastic communities in rural Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales and the Isle of Man. Because the British Isles were largely independent of Rome between the fifth and twelfth centuries, much of the pre-Christian Celtic viewpoint was preserved in the Celtic Christian religion of that period. Celtic Christian theologian Edward Sellner identifies several elements common to Christian and pre-Christian Celts that he believes offer hope for healing in the modern Christian church:


Mystical Connection with Nature. Rather than viewing God as a remote being in a faraway place, the Celtic soul experienced the Divine everywhere in nature. A well or a stream carried the spirit of a local goddess; a god lived in an old oak. Even in modern Ireland, workers will refuse to participate in the construction of a building that interferes with a sacred spring or fairy mound.


Because the Divine infused the material world, there was no real separation between the physical and the spiritual, and a sense of sacredness and prayer could be found in even the most mundane task. The Celts had prayers for lighting and smooring the fire, preparing a meal, sowing, reaping and all the simple routines of day to day life. The Divine was all around, so one never knew where or when a direct encounter with the sacred might occur. The Otherworld was right next to the material world, and inhabitants of one could and did cross over to the other. The Celts celebrated this fluidity of reality in their affinity for “betweenness”—times, places and things that were neither wholly one thing nor another. Celtic stories are filled with shape-shifting druids and people who wander into a meadow or wood and wind up in the land of fairy. The most sacred times in the Celtic world are “between” or liminal times: dawn and twilight (when it is neither night nor day) and the four major festivals when one season surrenders to the next: Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasadh. At these sacred times, the Celts believed the veil between the worlds was thinnest.


Appreciation of Women’s Leadership and Gifts. While not perfectly egalitarian, Celtic tribes allowed women to own and inherit property, divorce their husbands, and hold positions of spiritual authority. The acknowledgement that the Divine expressed itself in female and male forms meant that in the early Celtic Christian church, women preached, performed miracles, heard confessions and also taught and governed both women and men. Naturally, the acknowledgement of the Divine presence in women as well as men led to scholarly and religious collaboration between the sexes, and perhaps not coincidentally, collaboration between lay and religious people.


The Celts also appreciated the marginalized in society and in the self. The Celtic tradition of hospitality extended especially to the poor and all those who were outcast, excluded or different. Similarly, the Celts understood that it was better to know and befriend the dark and misfit places within themselves.


Beauty, whether experienced in nature or people, music, poetry or art, was sacred to the Celts as an expression of the Divine. An extension of this appreciation for beauty could be found in the Celtic love of the spoken and written word. Storytelling was sacred as a way of connecting with the ancestors and the history of the people. A bard who had received the highest level of training was equal in rank to a King.


Eros was a form of spiritual power that connected people to each other. Sexual and non-sexual expressions of this connection each had value. Kinship and community were revered, and to have an anam cara or soul friend was considered essential to living a full life.


Underlying all of Celtic spirituality is an understanding that nothing exists without its opposite, and so there is little point in denigrating one form of experience or way of being as “bad” or “less than,” when one could never understand the “good” or desired” experiences or ways of being without relationship to its opposite. One of my favorite biblical texts is this famous passage from the book of Ecclesiastes:


To every thing there is a season,
A time for every purpose under heaven.

A time to be born and a time to die;
a time to reap and a time to sow;

a time to kill and a time to heal;
a time to destroy and a time to build;

a time to cry and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn and a time to dance;

a time to cast away stones and a time to
gather stones together;

a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to search and a time to lose;

a time to keep and a time to cast away;
a time to rend and a time to sew;

a time to keep silence and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;

a time for war, and a time for peace.



Author: Kimberly Schneider

---

Previous article: 21 March 2007 | Home

---