In the Celtic hospitality tradition, God is present not only in Nature, but also in our neighbor, ourselves, and especially in the stranger. This is a sacredness in relationships. I am told there is no word in the Irish language for private property. Faith is lived in a community with a combination of periodic seclusion and community and mission.
Anamchara or soul friends or spiritual friends or spiritual directors are essential relationships. Women are regarded as equals, and communities are not hierarchical. Monasteries rather than parishes are the basis of the church. The Celts value education, art, and music.
We traveled to Iona off the western coast of Scotland twice and would return in a heartbeat. You don’t simply stumble on Iona, however. You have to want to go there by ferry, down a one-lane winding road, and finally walking over on a ferry onto the small, three-mile-long island in the Inner Hebrides where Columba brought Celtic Christianity to England in 563. Here, the breathtakingly illuminated manuscripts of The Book of Kells is believed to have begun to be written at the end of the 8th century.
Iona is considered an exceptionally “thin” space where the membrane between the spiritual and the secular is extremely thin. This was our experience as well. You walk a lot, eat good food, worship outdoors in the ancient abbey and a decaying nunnery, listen to the wind and waves, study high crosses, wear warm clothing, and watch the sea change the color of the abundant million-year-old rocks by the shoreline.
I often meet with spiritual friends who describe Celtic Spirituality when they have no name for it. This seems a sign of the universality of this type of spirituality. The sacred presence of God in each of us is a start.
Again, further reading might include Philip Newell’s Celtic Benediction, John Miriam Jones’s With an Eagle’s Eye, Esther de Waal’s Celtic Way of Prayer, and John O’Donohue’s Anam Cara.
