Eyes of the World

In the circles in which I run, Celtic sprituality has become enormously popular in the last decade or so, and I can't even imagine how many books have been written.  In the denomination where I make my living as a professional Christian there are now Celtic liturgies, Celtic prayers, Celtic theology, Celtic art.  It is in fact, nearly all Celtic, all the time. I was well into becoming bored with all this until I went to Ireland recently, and discovered for the first time that in spite of our best efforts to make this spirituality complicated enough to sustain a market, it is fundamentally simple and very profound.   

As a result, I was reconverted to the Celtic way. Maybe it is simply that if you want want to really understand something you have to go back to its roots, back to the expression of it in its simplest form.  When I did that I realized that this spirituality is not intellectual at all.  It isn't about doctrines or formulations, it isn't about theological nuance.  Certainly it is not about hundreds of how-to books.  It can be summarized in a sentence:  "we are surrounded here folks; the divine is absolutely everywhere and in everything, and you can either notice that or not."  The little goat that runs to you every morning with teats full of milk bleating to be relieved, that little goat is also full of God.  That green, green grass you walk over every morning is suffused with that same divine presence.  The bus you ride on the way to work every day, that bus is a place where God dwells.  There is no place you can go, and nothing you can do that is not blessed by That Presence before you got there, while you do whatever you do, and after you leave.  

The same of course is true of all of us.  As part of creation, being neither better than, worse than, or other than, all that has been made, we too are full of that same Spirit.  I even saw this in the way in which the Irish identify important places.  In Ireland the shrines to the saints are not places where ordinary people did extraordinary things and so raised themselves above the common run.  In Ireland the shrines are places where extraordinary people did ordinary things, and thus exemplified the simple Celtic truth, that everything is hallowed, everything blessed.  I stood at the place where Brigid fetched her water, Kevin slept, and Patrick celebrated Easter.  Not a heroic moment in the whole thing.  But seeing the holiness in fetching water or sleeping over there opens one up to seeing that same holiness in doing laundry and taking a nap here. 

I never really thought of walking my dog (a welsh Corgi, by the way. See, all-Celtic-all-the-time) as a sacred enterprise, but after Ireland I can't see it as anything but that.  That deep and vital grief that Beth wrote about in another post, that life giving grief is borne with and in and by and through the divine.   By comparison I realized that here in America, and in much of Christianity at least, to the extent that we are spiritual at all, we live in kind of a dream world, a world of illusion.  We dream that we are separate from God, we live under the illusion that God is...well, I don't know, but just not here.  It is a wonderfully convenient illusion, because it creates room for people like me to become the brokers of God's presence, but an illusion it is, and one that we are better off without.  

My favorite poet, Robert Hunter (and I realize that is cheating just a bit because all of his poetry ends up in songs) called us all to "Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world.... Wake now, discover that you are the song that the morning sings."   I am still very sleepy, I still dream of a world in which all is separate, distinct and apart.  But slowly I am beginning to wake up.