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
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