Saturday, December 12, 1998

Interest grows in Celtic spirituality

By Todd Hegert

The Gazette

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- When Colorado Springs author Steve Rabey was traveling through Ireland, he was struck by the ancient beauty of the Celtic cross.

Scattered across Ireland, Scotland and Wales -- an area Rabey refers to as the Celtic fringe -- these stone monuments blend the central symbols of paganism and Christianity: intricately carved circles of stone embracing the quadrants of a cross.

To Rabey, these stone crosses, built more than 12 centuries ago, carry a powerfully relevant message for a harried, spiritually hungry modern world on the verge of a new millennium. They remind us of a people who found a God of heaven in the beauty of the earth, a sense of holiness in the human capacity for love, and the potential for sacredness in almost every aspect of their daily lives.

Rabey's trips to Ireland in 1995 and '97 with his wife Lois, also a writer, inspired his latest book on spirituality, "In the House of Memory: Ancient Celtic Wisdom for Everyday Life."

"The Celts show us many ways to open the door to God in our lives," said Rabey, a former religion editor at The Gazette and now an author and free-lance writer. "It's kind of like starting eternity now. Instead of waiting until heaven to enjoy perfect communion with God, the Celts did everything they could to enjoy that intimacy with God in the here and now. That's the real theme of Celtic spirituality."

"In the House of Memory" is written to help people understand and apply certain aspects of Celtic spirituality, said Rabey.

The book is part of a larger Celtic revival reflected in the popularity of the music of Van Morrison, U2 and the Chieftains, in such movies as "Michael Collins" and "Braveheart," and in the rich literary traditions of Ireland that've brought the 20th century the great works of William Butler Yeats, James Joyce and Oscar Wilde, along with such recent best-sellers as "Angela's Ashes," by Frank McCourt, and "How the Irish Saved Civilization," by Thomas Cahill.

That synthesis of the earthy and the ethereal is found at the core of Celtic spirituality, said Rabey.

In fact, the outpouring of creativity that has flowed down through the misty centuries of Irish history springs in large part from the ancient Celtic belief that the imagination is a manifestation of the divine.

"Nearness to the divine brought forth a spiritually enhanced urge to create, from the pagan Celts, who gave us some of the wildest and woolliest legends of ancient times, to the Celtic Christians who believed they had been made in the image of an all-powerful God," Rabey wrote.

The story of the Celts is a creative one indeed, as he tells it, a mix of historical scholarship, ripping good yarns and spiritually uplifting lessons.

Though they once held an area that rivaled in size the later empires of Greece and Rome, little is known about the ancestral Celts.

Emerging from what is now Russia and Asia long before the Christian era, the Celts overran most of Europe, from the Mediterranean to Scandinavia and Asia to Ireland. They were fierce warriors who, according to the writings of Aristotle, fought naked and feared nothing. But unlike the Romans, who eventually overtook most of the Celtic holdings in Europe and Britain, the Celts were far more adept as warriors than administrators. When not fighting, the Celts were a simple agrarian people, and they were easily absorbed or pushed aside by the bureaucratically efficient growth of the Roman Empire.

The Celts, however, clung fiercely to their outposts in what is now Ireland, Wales and Scotland, areas Rome considered too remote and godforsaken to be worth a fight.

To the pagan Celts, these wild, beautiful lands were anything but godforsaken; they sensed divine presences in every misty woodland and green hilltop.

Even today, said Rabey, the traveler in Ireland can easily understand the sense of awe and wonder that the land inspired in the ancient Celts.

"It's a gorgeous, beautiful country. A woman I know recently visited Ireland with a friend, and as they were driving across the countryside, her friend turned to her and said, 'This must be where God lives,' " said Rabey. "The country still conveys that sense of divine presence."

Unlike Christian theology, Celtic paganism saw almost no barrier between the physical and spiritual worlds.

To the Celts, writes Rabey, "the world and everything in it, including themselves, was sacred. Or as author Margot Adler puts it, 'The world is holy. Nature is holy. The body is holy. Sexuality is holy. The mind is holy. The imagination is holy. You are holy.' "

That sense of spirituality is immensely appealing in today's world, especially among "spiritual seekers" who have not found a comfortable fit in mainstream faiths, said Rabey, a devoted Christian.

"Basically, we are living in a very pagan culture today. I mean, if you ask people where they feel the greatest spiritual power, hiking in the woods or sitting in a church, I think most would answer 'hiking in the woods.' "

Rabey sees some aspects of Celtic paganism as good stepping stones for people seeking a more spiritual path. But he and other Celtic scholars point out that some of the practices of the pagan Celts were deeply troubling.

"There was a very definite pagan dark side," said Ed Sellner, a professor of theology at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, Minn., and author of four books on Celtic history and spirituality. "They believed in a divination that used human sacrifice to try to influence the future. They were a violent, war-like, tribal society."

Though the bonds of love were unbreakable within Celtic clans, the conflicts among clans have left a legacy of tribal violence that haunts Irish life to this day, said Rabey.

And then there is the matter of sex. The Celts embraced a bawdy sexuality that, while highly entertaining, would raise eyebrows even today.

"They had a very positive affirmation of physical love, of relationships between men and women. But there was a great deal of just loving sex too much," said Sellner.

Sexuality, explains Rabey, was an integral part of Celtic paganism, which worshipped above all else, the fertility of the land upon which the Celts depended for survival. This made for some wild religious festivals.

"Since it was believed that the earth and humans were spiritually linked, it made perfect sense for these regular fertility festivals to be marked by the liberal coupling of the communities' able and healthy members," Rabey writes. "It was also common, well into the 19th century, for couples to make love in the fields surrounding a house where a corpse lay. According to author Andrew Greeley, the custom was a way for pre-Christian Celts to say 'Screw you, death. Life is stronger than you!' "

Despite its excesses, the exuberant earthiness of Celtic paganism was to provide fertile soil for the seeds of Christianity -- seeds sown by St. Patrick and a handful of lesser-known Christian missionaries.

Patrick -- a Romanized Briton born in the year 390 -- came to Ireland first as a slave, after being captured during boyhood by an Irish war party raiding the British coast. The story of his religious experiences during his captivity, his eventual escape from Ireland and his return as an evangelist, forms one of the pivotal yarns of Rabey's book.

Armed only with a message of God's love, Patrick transformed Celtic Ireland into a fervently Christian land in a matter of decades. The Celts, in turn, reinterpreted and spread Christianity in ways that may well have saved the faith during the dark ages after the fall of Rome. While barbarians were gleefully sacking monasteries and burning libraries across the continent of Europe, Irish monks on the Celtic fringe were busily copying books that preserved the sacred and secular wisdom of Western civilization.

Christianity burned so brightly among the Celts for several reasons, said Rabey.

The natural mysticism of the Celts lacked a coherent theological framework. They worshipped a bewildering array of pantheistic gods who could be maddeningly unpredictable, bestowing bountiful harvests one year and famine the next.

Christianity gave the Celts a single God of all creation, one whose relationship with mankind was both benevolent and predictable.

"The pagan gods were rough and mercurial, and the Celts never knew if they would bless them or curse them. It made life a bit unstable. Even with a Christian God there is no guarantee that life will be rosy. But at least God's character is stable and He desires to bless humanity," said Rabey.

Patrick's brand of evangelism also had a great appeal. His was a faith so lovingly bestowed, so courageous and yet so tranquil, that the war-weary Celts found it irresistible.

The conversion of Ireland was a historical rarity -- a mass conversion that did not take place at the point of a sword or as a byproduct of empire building. Patrick had no ulterior motives, and with Roman Catholicism in disarray after the fall of the Roman Empire, he was free to take Christianity in a new direction in Ireland.

He could not have found a better audience, said Rabey.

If Christianity gave the Celts a more coherent conception of a God of heaven, the Celts helped Christianity bring God back to earth. Like the Celtic cross, early Celtic Christians showed that humanity could embrace God directly and fully in almost every aspect of daily life.

This was reflected in the rich prayer life of the Celts, said Rabey. They had prayers for sleeping and prayers for rising. Prayers for tidying the house and prayers for milking the cow. Prayers like the "Blessing of the Kindling."

I will kindle my fire this morning/In the presence of the holy angels of heaven/God kindle Thou in my heart within ...

"These prayers were clearly transformative. In them we see the Celts were concerned with the viewing of every single act -- no matter how minute or seemingly mundane -- as a sacred opportunity to experience God's radiant Grace," writes Rabey.

The Celts, affirmed and incorporated many valuable aspects of their pagan past into their new faith, and in so doing they enriched Christianity, said Sellner.

Or, as Rabey puts it:

"The Celts were a mirror in which some of the most beautiful aspects of Christianity could shine. The beauty of God's creation. The sacredness of family and relationships. The immanence of God as opposed to the remoteness of God."

That sense of the closeness of God has been one of the themes of Rabey's work since he left The Gazette to begin writing books. Another theme is the sense of spiritual hunger and dissatisfaction he sees in today's world.

His last book -- "The Lessons of St. Francis: How to Bring Simplicity and Spirituality into Your Daily Life" -- focused on the modern relevance of St. Francis of Assissi, who sparked a Christian revival in the 13th century that sounded many of the same themes as the Celtic Christian revival of the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries.

"Like the Celts, Francis also preached about the immanence of God. He believed God was in him and with him and present in all creation at all times," said Rabey.

His next book, "Revival in Brownsville: Pensacola, Pentacostalism, and the Power of American Revivalism," is due to be published in January.

The book is an account of a contemporary Christian revival movement. Since 1995, thousands of people claim to have been "slain in the spirit" at mass ceremonies at Brownsville Assembly of God in Pensacola, Fla., and other locations. Rabey first covered the Brownsville revival for Christianity Today, balancing the views of believers who say it has transformed their lives with critics who say it's about "emotionalism, money and Elmer Gantry-style excess."

Like his other books, "Revival in Brownsville" will combine historical analysis with suggestions for ways readers can pursue spiritual renewal in their own lives.

"Revival historically has been the church's answer to spiritual dryness. The movements sparked by the Celts and St. Francis are two earlier examples of powerful revivals," said Rabey.

"Maybe if there is a thread running through all three of these books, it is simply the thread of spiritual vitality."

(c) 1998, The Gazette (Colorado Springs, Colo.).

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