The Soil of the Soul

What an amazingly beautiful Sabbath today is! I've been outside since early morning, first just to sit on the patio to simply be. The breeze was cooling, the sun not yet warm, and the sky an incredible clear blue. After finishing a second cup of coffee, I decided to do a little straightening up to make my patio into the outside living area it is supposed to be. The construction is now finished, the  new roof is on, and so items can be placed as I want them.

The madevilla is very showy in its spacious green pots at each corner of the patio. And the color of the blossoms accentuates so well the new red door going into the house. I spent some time reading about it on the Clemson Extension website only to find out it needs a lot of care in transitional times, and I will have to bring it inside in the colder months along with the philodendron and the palm plant on the front porch. I think my daughter may be right when she says that her dad and I live in a jungle. I do love having green and flowery plants around me.

In my new garden out back, I have planted a lot of purple items. First, there's an azalea, but I actually don't know what color those blossoms will be. Then, there are the irises that I transplanted. I know they are purple, but they haven't bloomed in a few years because they weren't getting enough sunlight. They won't have that excuse now! Then, there's the butterfly bush that I placed in the center of the bed. It's definitely purple and is already attracting butterflies. Today, I put another little shrub out there that I had in a pot. It was root bound, and I thought it might like to try life in a garden instead. The trees got a new dose of mulch and everything is getting water as I write this entry.

The garden of our souls needs just as much love and care as the gardens in our back yard. I have a vision for my garden, and I'm slowly but surely achieving that vision. Our souls need a vision as well. They need pruning, weeding, watering, and good fertilizer. They are the delight of God with whom we share the light of Creation and the light of life. To me, the key ingredient of a healthy soul is expressed in the tension between Sabbath and community. We need time to be alone with God, and we need a community of believers who can support us with prayer and fellowship.

On September 24, Michael and I are going to try an experiment. We're going to begin a house church. We don't really have much of a clue about how to do this, but we've invited our friends to join us, and we'll see where it goes. We know we want to follow a Celtic spirituality format, to include silence and study, and we want people to be able to worship God in a safe, non-institutional setting. I'm looking forward to the experience. If you have an interest in joining us, please feel free to contact me about particulars.

For now, I continue to weed and water, prune and enjoy the bounty of God's love. May you, too, have that abundance of love from the Creator God who sustains us from within and without.

What Happened to the Bull?

Just what kind of God do you believe in?

I'm afraid for most people, God has become an amalgamation of an angry Zeus hurling lightening bolts, an IRS agent knocking at the door, and an abusive parent. On the way to meet a friend for dinner tonight, I saw a sign that read, "God WILL settle all accounts." Such an attitude toward God makes me sad and just a little queasy.

The God who comforts me and gives me inner strength to meet each new day is not a God to fear. There is no doubt that evil is part of our universe. We confront evil, both personal and cosmological all the time, but it is not our natural state. I do not believe that a God who loves me as part of Creation requires sacrifice to make me acceptable. Although animal sacrifice has shown up in almost all cultures and religions, we do not know that such a practice was any more than a way to make people feel better about their choice to do wrong—which ironically comes from humankind’s own freedom to choose. In fact, I would like to suggest that repentance is the most important prerequisite of any ritual whether it is sacrificial in nature or not. Hosea 14:3 reads, "Take with you words, and turn to the Lord. Say to Him, forgive all iniquity and receive us graciously, so we will offer the words of our lips instead of calves."

In the Psalms, God asks, “Do I require the blood of bulls and of goats?” The answer is a rather definite NO! Rather, God says through the Psalmist, “Sacrifice thank offerings to God, fulfill your vows to the Most High, and call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you will honor me." (Psalm 50:14-15).

Celtic spirituality celebrates the goodness of Creation. Humans are part of that Creation, and God is very pleased with that Creation. God does not need to settle accounts, nor does God need to judge our every motive and behavior because ‘sin, death, and unhappiness are not from God’. (1) We are created free.

John Scottus Eriugena’s seminal work was Periphyseon. In it he states, “God is the beginning, middle, and end of the created universe. God is that from which all things originate, that in which all things participate, and that to which all things eventually return. (Periphyseon III.621a-622a). Thus, Eriugena rejects any divine predestination to evil by an appeal to God's unity, transcendence and goodness. (2)

Eriugena’s mysticism “allows God to be truly God, utterly free of all limiting human notions of space-time, distinct entities, finite relationships and other constraints which have more to do with ignorant human conceptions than the actual Divine nature.” (3)

Human nature, however, wants to believe we are bad. I for one, want more of the God of Monty Python who unequivocally states, “Stop that groveling!” And remember that God really did say, “It’s good!”

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1http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scottus-eriugena/

2-3 http://www.enlightened-spirituality.org/John_Scottus_Eriugena.html

The Light of Christ is in the World

This time last week, I was experiencing Sabbath with a group of pilgrims on retreat at Roads End Retreat Center near Fleetwood, NC. We gathered there on Friday afternoon to learn more about Celtic spirituality. On Sunday morning, we found ourselves in the Chapel of the Ark for morning prayer and meditation, experiencing worship together, and beginning the day with time to enjoy God’s presence in our midst.


Celtic spirituality has a number of characteristics commonly identified with it. These include, but are not limited to a love of nature and a recognition of the untamed and wild places that are a part of God's gift to us, or a connection between the natural and supernatural. In fact, the belief in thin places or boundaries between sacred and secular is a Celtic idea. There is a distinction between thin places and holy sites because in most religious traditions the site is holy because something happened there—i.e. a prophet ascended to heaven, or a miracle happened at that site, or someone was martyred there. With Celtic spirituality, the place is thin because something is happening right now—God is present in a very powerful and visceral way when we find ourselves in a thin place.

The most important concept for me that I tried to help us all explore in this retreat is the difference between the Celtic belief in human goodness and the Augustinian belief in human depravity. Too often in our Western religious tradition, we have been taught that sin is at least as strong as God’s grace—that light must come into our being to drive out the darkness. Quite the opposite is true in the Celtic mindset. We are, in fact, filled with light that must be “liberated from the heart of creation and from the essence of who we are” (Newell, 12). This idea is fundamentally opposed to the one that says we are infected with original sin and that God had to come into the world to take away that sin so that we could receive the light of life. Yes, sin is real, but it is not our created state. “Rather the light is held in terrible bondage within us, waiting to be set free” (Newell, 12).

This idea originated with John Scottus Eriugena whose theology explored the idea of liberating the light from within. God is present within each of us, and that is where the focus on redemption takes a lovely turn. It’s not some outside force coming into us to make us righteous, but rather, a connection to what already lies within. The light of Creation, the light of life, and the light of Christ are all one and the same. Our very selves are thin places where God’s work is accomplished.

The question then arises as to why we want to believe that we are inherently bad. The answer harkens back to that idea of original sin postulated by Augustine of Hippo and others who were in the hierarchy of the Church of Rome. This idea says we are all born sinful and are in need of redemption. Because of this belief, the people who “won” the day at the Council of Nicaea and the church soon became inured of crusade and conquest.

When we change our attitude about our stance in God’s eyes, we come to realize that God said something very important in Genesis 1. And God said, “It’s good!” How can we be good at the same time we are impossibly flawed by sin? The light of creation is the light that is within us and as Newell says, it needs to be liberated so that we are walking in the fullness of our potential.

How does one do this? It is in the incarnation of Christ that we find the answer. Celtic spirituality is orthodox, especially when it comes to the Trinity. Christ is a part of the Trinity from the beginning, and it’s that Christ that we should pay attention to. I’ve heard more than one person quip that Christ was not Jesus’ last name. Christ is what we are to become. It’s our potential. It’s what Jesus of Nazareth did, and it’s in his life that we have our model for how to become Christ.

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John Philip Newell, The Story of Creation: An Introduction to Celtic Spirituality