Monday, January 14, 2019

LISTENING for the HEARTBEAT of GOD

LISTENING for the HEARTBEAT of GOD:
A Celtic Spirituality
by J. Philip Newell

      I have always been interested in Celtic Spirituality but never had such a clear book interpreting the essence of why. Luke gave me this book for Christmas in 2018 and it immediately began to put words, history, and theology to my innermost feelings. I have come to see that at heart, I am more a Celtic Christian than ‘Augustine’ for I believe in man’s innate goodness that is lost when we are separated from the God that dwells within us. (That statement would have excommunicated me from the church or perhaps sent me to the stake a thousand years ago!)

      I am using Celtic knotwork for my prayers, with a ‘heartbeat’ image superimposed on each. The background will be from my photographs of nature. (OK....some of them are off the internet!)  Some of the knotwork designs I have drawn myself!

     I am going to try a "Celtic Chapter Cinquain" at the end of each chapter - a brief 5 line poem that summarizes the essence of the chapter (if it is possible to do in just 5 lines!)

CHAPTER 1:  LISTENING FOR THE GOODNESS  (Pelagius)
January 7, 2019
  • The most typical mark of the spirituality of the Celtic tradition apparent in Pelagius’ writings is his strong sense of the goodness of creation, in which the life of God can be glimpsed. Everywhere, he says, ‘narrow shafts of divine light pierce the veil that separates heaven from earth’ (10)


January 8, 2019
  • Much of Pelagius’ teaching can be seen to stem from the Wisdom tradition of the Old Testament. He saw Christ as the fulfilment of that tradition, as the perfect exemplar of wisdom and humility. (11)

January 9, 2019
  • It is not believing in Christ that matters; it is in becoming like Christ. (12)


January 10, 2019
  • Deeper than any wrong within us is the light of God, the light that no darkness has been able to overcome. (14)


January 11, 2019
  • The ministry of the Church is to liberate and free the goodness of God that is already at the very heart of all life… (18)


January 12, 2019
  • Jesus does not invite people to become his disciples for his own benefit, but to teach and guide them in the ways of goodness.(18)


January 13, 2019
  • Wisdom consists in listening to the commandments of God and obeying them. (22)


Goodness.
God-Light, God-Given.
Liberating, Revealing, Serving
Part of us from birth
Heart.


CHAPTER 2: LISTENING WITHIN CREATION (Eriugena)
January 14, 2019
  • A distinguishing feature of Celtic spirituality includes an awareness of the goodness of creation and a sense of the company of heaven’s presence among us on earth.(24)

January 15, 2019

  • All created things carry within them the grace and goodness of God. (24)

January 16, 2019
  • Within creation there is something of the presence of the uncreated, that is, God. (25)

January 17, 2019

  • Christ moves among us wearing two shoes – the shoe of Creation and the shoe of Scripture. (34)

January 18, 2019

  • There is not in the Celtic way of seeing a great gap between heaven and earth. Rather the two are seen as inseparably intertwined. (26)


January 19, 2019

  • God has not created everything out of nothing, but out of his own essence, out of his very life. (35) Eriugena

January 20, 2019
  • Listen for the living Word of God in nature as well as in Scripture. (34)
(Ginger Photo of Red Columbine)

January 21, 2019

  • All that is visible comes forth from that which is invisible; all that is seen issues from what is unseen. (35) Eriugena
(Ginger Photo: Lily Pad Lake, Elkhorn Mts. Oregon)

January 22, 2019
  • God’s divine goodness is the essence of the whole universe and its substance. (36) Eriugena
(Ginger Photo: Powder River, Baker City, OR)

January 23, 2019
  • Goodness is not an attribute of being; rather being is an attribute of goodness. (36) Eriugena
(Ginger Photo: Trillium, Portland OR area)

January 24, 2019
  • Grace is not opposed to nature, but cooperates with it, restores it, or releases it’s essential goodness. (37) Eriugena


Creation.
Divine, Seen-yet-unseen.
Praising, Revealing, Connecting
Heaven and Earth intertwined.
God Visible. 


CHAPTER 3: LISTENING FOR GOD IN ALL THINGS - Carmina Gadelica
January 25, 2019

  • For generations, parents had been teaching their children prayers whose origins stretched back beyond living memory. (40)
(Ginger Photo: Peaks of the Dolomites, Italy)


January 26, 2019
  • Prayers were used in the most ordinary contexts of daily life and not within the four walls of a church on Sunday. (40)
(Ginger Photo: Tucson, AZ sunset from Shalom Mennonite parking lot)

January 27, 2019

  • The life of God was viewed as being deep within Creation as well as being distinct from it. (43)

January 28, 2019

  • This tradition also includes the practice, typical of many of the Psalms in the Scriptures, of seeing our voices as joining the voice of the whole universe in giving praise to God. (46)
(Ginger Photo: )


January 29, 2019
  • To look to God is not to look away from life but to look more deeply into it. (48) 


January 30, 2019

  • To look into the face of a newborn child is to see the image of God. (49)


January 31, 2019

  • God’s gift of grace is regarded not as planting something totally new in essentially bad soil, but as bringing out or releasing the goodness which is already present. (51)
(Ginger Photo: Matterhorn, Switzerland)


February 1, 2019
  • Death is a river that is hard to see or a place of black sorrow that is difficult to cross; the angels of God are guiding us over to a goodness of unimaginable glory. (57)



Celtic Prayers
Almost Forgotten
Morning. Evening. All day long.
Passed orally from generation to generation.
Carmina Gadelica

Chapter 4: LISTENING WITH IMAGINATION - George MacDonald

February 2, 2019


There is much in the Western tradition that has discouraged us from believing and hoping that, even in the midst of terrible wrong and evil, deeper still, buried maybe, at the core of every human being is the image of God. (60)

(Ginger Photo: Anthony Lake, Elkhorn Mts. Oregon)


February 3, 2019

Geo.MacDonald’s works of the imagination strove to recover the inner faculty of sight whereby God may be seen within us, among us and in all the things of creation. (61)

(Ginger Photo: Lake MacDonald, Glacier National Park, MT)

February 4, 2019

One of MacDonald’s best-known novels, The Princess and the Goblin (1872), a work that was later profoundly to affect the spirituality of men like GK Chesteron and CS Lewis, reflects the continuing themes of Celtic spirituality. (61)



February 5, 2019

MacDonald and Alexander John Scott saw God as immediately present in the whole of life in opposition to prevailing Calvanist doctrine. (62)


(Ginger Photo: Elephant Heads, Hoffer Lake, Elkhorn Mts., Oregon)

February 6, 2019

Everywhere, Scott maintained, can be found the ladder that connects heaven and earth, God and humanity, with angels of the eternal light ascending and descending upon it. (62)



February 7, 2019

The image of a staircase or ladder leading unexpectedly from the most ordinary of contexts into an opening into the eternal was a favorite of MacDonald’s, similar to CS Lewis’s Narnian wardrobe. (63)




February 8, 2019

The Spirit of God is impregnated throughout the whole of creation. (64) - Scott


Ginger Photo: Skogafoss, South Coast of Iceland

February 9, 2019

The gift of imagination, which in a child is still uninhibited, allows creation to be a lens through which we may fleetingly bring into focus aspects of the eternal. (65)


(Ginger Photo of Columbines from front yard garden)

February 10, 2019
Just as we join creation’s voice when we give praise to God, so the movement and color and sound of creation’s elements can be the voice to which we listen in prayer. (66)

(Ginger Photo: Mountains of Berner-Oberland, Switzerland)

February 11, 2019
Creation is a transparency through which the light of God can be seen. (66) - Scott


(Ginger Photo: Unknown waterfall)

February 12, 2019
Scott urged us to hold a Bible in one hand but also to study God in ‘that other volume’, namely the great and holy book of Creation. (67)

(Ginger Photos: Anthony Lake and Oregon Coast Trail forest)

February 13, 2019
As pervasive and fundamental as evil appears to be, the recurrent hope in Celtic spirituality is that the darkness cannot overcome God’s essential light. (68)


(Ginger Photo: Sunset at Bandon, Oregon)

February 14, 2019
As early as the 1840’s, Scott contended that God is not merely present beside the human, but IN the human. The Church in Scotland did not even accept that God loves all people, let alone that He is the life within all life. (70)


(Ginger Photo: Cascade Pass, Washington)

February 15, 2019
In Scott and MacDonald, the Celtic stream of spirituality was taken into the realms of literature, education and political concern, but for the most part it was still a spirituality without a church, without a clearly defined religious home. (72)


(Ginger Photo: Rural church on west side of Iceland)

February 16, 2019
It was MacDonald’s novels that had the greatest impact in both England and Scotland...and opened a side door for Celtic spirituality’s re-entry into the Church. (73)

(Ginger Photo: Mt. Shukskan, North Cascades, WA)


Imagination
MacDonald and Scott -
Challenging, Writing, Educating
Brought Celtic Spirituality back.
Church.


CHAPTER 5: LISTENING with ACTION - 
George MacLeod

February 17, 2019
The figure who most clearly reunited the two ways of seeing, torn apart for centuries, was George MacLeod, part of a ecclesiastic dynasty in the Scottish church. (75)
(Ginger Photo: Fall colors along Steven's Pass, Route 2, Washington)

February 18, 2019

We are in touch with God every moment that we live for the simple reason that God is life; not religious life, not Church life, but the whole of life...God is the Life of life. (76) (G MacLeod)


(Ginger Photo: Bandon, Oregon shoreline rocks)

February 19, 2019

MacLeod was both a Celtic mystic and a Presbyterian minister and proud of it! (77)


(Ginger Photo:  Sunset off the Kona Coast, Hawaii)

February 20, 2019

MacLeod constantly used laughter to show others a new way of seeing, particularly the perception that God is the Life of the world and not merely some religious aspect of it. (77) 


(Ginger Photo: Hoodoos at Kodachrome Basin State Park, Utah)

February 21, 2019

MacLeod, quoting George MacDonald, affirmed ‘Whatever wakes my heart and mind, thy presence is, my Lord.’ (78)


(Ginger Photo: Sunset from Bandon, Oregon)

February 22, 2019

The first major tenet of Celtic spirituality is the essential goodness of creation and of the image of God in humanity. (86)


(Rick Photo: Winter Wonderland atop Dooley Mountain, Oregon)

February 23, 2019

The second major tenet of Celtic spirituality is the belief that although creation is essentially good, the world and each one of us is also streaked with terrible darkness. (87)


(Ginger Photo: Elkhorn Peak, Baker County, OR....View from our soon-to-be-built new home!)

February 24, 2019

Salvation means being liberated from the evils that dominate us in order that our essential goodness, and the original blessing of the Earth, might be set free. (89)


(Ginger Photo: Field of poppies near Kalispell, Montana)

February 25, 2019


The third characteristic of MacLeod’s Celtic spirituality was his sense of the immediacy of the spiritual realm, of God’s presence in the whole of life. (89)


(Ginger Photo: Clark's Nutcracker near campsite at Craters of the Moon Natl. Monument, Idaho)

February 26, 2019

In G MacLeod the stream of Celtic spirituality found new expression; most significantly, it was an expression that came from the very heart of the established Church. (91)


(Ginger Photo: Sunrise over Swan Mts. of Montana. 
Flower drawing is Bitterroot, Montana State Flower)

CHAPTER 6: Two Ways of Listening - 
John and Peter

February 27, 2019

The tragic outcome of the Synod of Whitby was not that it chose the Roman mission of Augustine (and Peter) but that it neither made room within the Church for both ways of seeing or declared that both were firmly rooted in the Gospel tradition. (94)
(Ginger Photo: Hayden Lake valley in the NE corner of Idaho near Yellowstone Park)

February 28, 2019

Celtic Spirituality is a tradition that can stand free of the four walls of the Church, for the sanctuary of God is not separate from, but contained within, the whole of creation. (95)


(Ginger Photo: St. Mary Lake in Glacier National Park, Montana)

March 1, 2019

The two traditions have often been pulled apart, but they are much stronger together, as evidenced by the creative tension of the two crosses side by side on Iona of St. John and St. Martin. (98)


(Internet Photo: Iona Abbey and crosses of St. John and St. Martin)

March 2, 2019

In the area of man’s sinfulness, we must recover a balance in our spirituality, believing and hoping in our God-given goodness on the one hand and being wise and alert to sinful leanings on the other. (104)


(Ginger Photo:  On the trail to Ice Lake, Glacier National Park, MT)

March 3, 2019

To combine the two ways of seeing is to combine the LOVE of others with the law of righteousness. (105)
(Ginger Photo: Cabinet Mountains south of Libby, MT)

March 4, 2019

The Church was the poorer for forcing Celtic spirituality underground, so that for centuries it survived primarily on the Celtic fringes of Britain, among people unsupported in their spiritual life by clergy. (106)


(Ginger Photo:  Salt River Canyon, Arizona)

March 5, 2019

The Church cannot shut itself off behind four walls, but should become a side chapel for the cathedral of God in the whole of creation; we might then more fully rediscover that God’s heartbeat can be heard in the whole of life and at the heart of our own lives, if we will only listen. (107)

(Ginger Photo: Crypt Lake, Waterton National Park, Alberta, Canada)

Church
Side Chapel.
Releasing, Balancing, Loving.
Listen for God’s heartbeat in ALL.
Creation.



I am finished with the book!! 













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