Posted by: Jan on September 14, 2008
Categories: Mind/Body/Spirit // There are 2 comments already...
Fr. Dan wore a Celtic Knot badge on his brown Capuchin robe. Through out the evening on September 11th, he explained the essentials of Celtic spirituality as transformed by the missionary work of St. Patrick (around 433 AD).
Unlike missionaries to the Americas, St. Patrick first understood what the indigenous people believed, and then incorporated the best of their traditions and beliefs into an everyday spirituality.
Practices that did not value human life and the sanctity of all people such as human sacrifice and slavery were eradicated.
With his own links to the Irish and ready wit, Fr. Dan Crosby highlighted what’s not in the Celtic experience of the Divine.
There is not:
• the separation between the everyday activities and the spiritual exercises that many people today experience,
• the paradigm that something here and there done on a Sunday is all there is to growing our spiritual life,
• the angry, judgmental, punishing God that many of us grew up with,
• the slavery of human beings, trafficking in the poor and the weak, using other people for your own ends,
• the list of rules, regulations, requirements that some religious denominations put on their congregations as essential to a faith life.
That’s why the Celtic Knot is such a poignant reminder of the integration in Celtic spirituality. Just as there is no obvious beginning or end to the intertwining lines, there is no separation between the activities of daily life and the communing with the Divine.
The early Celtic people had prayers for washing their face, prayers for putting on their clothes, prayers over their meals. There was a prayer for every activity in the house, the barn, the field.
Their spiritual connection to the Divine was as intimate and essential to them as their breath was to their physical existence. In the Celtic Knot, the threads of the mundane and the eternal intertwine and are inseparable.
The Celtic everyday spirituality is a timeless gift to people of all cultures who are open to receive it.
Janice M. Puta
Author of Pathways: Tales for the Spiritual Seeker
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