THE upsurge of interest in Celtic spirituality is a sign of hope today. Our ascetic forebears saw the world through "rinsed eyes - or, as Blake put it, with the doors of perception cleansed.
Esther de Waal introduced her new book at a conference on Celtic spirituality in Glendalough last month. Entitled The Celtic Way of Prayer: The Recovery of the Religious Imagination (Hodder & Sloughton), this attractively produced book will help to reclaim a heritage that can enlarge our vision. Celtic prayer touched not only - the mind, but also the heart and the imagination.
The reader is introduced to early Irish litanies, medieval Welsh praise poems, and to the oral tradition collected in Scotland and Ireland at the end of the 19th century.
Two organisers of the conference, the Rev Marcus Losack and Father Michael Rodgers, are the authors of Glendalough: A Celtic Pilgrimage. A delightfully illustrated volume which has already enriched the visit of many tourists, it will be published in the US next spring.
This tradition is celebrated by John J. O Riordain in his book, The Music of What Happens: Celtic Spirituality A View from the Inside (Columba Press) Father O Riordain's chapter on Peig Sayers goes altogether deeper than the level of appreciation reached by generations of Leaving Cert students.
This leads to an investigation of the Celtic world. He emphasises the communal dimension of both Christian and pre Christian Celtic spirituality. Quoting the legendary Fionn, this Redemptorist missioner asserts that living reflectively makes music of everything that happens.
Mary Low's Celtic Christianity and Nature: Early Irish and Hebridean Traditions was published by Blackstaff earlier this year.
Prophetic exploration
Esther de Waal considers this exploration prophetic as we struggle towards a more holistic world view: "For I have found in Celtic understanding nothing of the highly individualistic competitive, inward looking approach common in today's society."
She reflects on the paradox that finding our roots enables us to move forward; "to embark on a life of continual and neverending conversion, transformation." She is grateful to find in St Patrick's breastplate no easy optimism which would deny the dark forces of a fallen world.
Mrs de Waal is the author of Seeking God, a classic work on Benedictine spirituality. The Celtic Way of Prayer offers a treasury of material to the interested reader. It is also, writes Bishop Rowan Williams of Monmouth, "a personal testimony to how the resources of the Celtic tradition inform an acute and unsentimental 20th century mind.
For once, we have something of the challenge and the toughness of the Celtic Christian world, not just a romantic glow; and the connections made with our own age and society give this book exceptional value."
The author finds a "spirituality without tears' patronising. Reflecting on what Dennis Potter said a few months before his death from cancer - "Thank God religion to me has always been the wound, not the bandage" - she writes: "My life has been rich but it has also had many times of desolation and depression when I have not been able to believe that there was any light at the end of the tunnel, when it was merely mockery to be told by well intentioned friends that all would be well.
"I know that I have to face, and to live with, not only the dark forces in today's world, the suffering and injustice that is brought daily to me by the media, but also the dark forces that reign and have power wit bin my own self. None of us can evade the darkness."
She quotes the Irish saying: "Prayer should be cast wide." The prayers collected by Douglas Hyde - and in Scotland by Alexander Carmichael - are never self engrossed. They open up circle after circle, always moving outwards. Prayer was not limited to church attendance, but part of daily living. These simple prayers, reflecting a profound faith, have something of the breadth and depth of the psalms.
Hyde saw a people for whom God was "a thing assured, true, intelligible. They feel invisible powers before them, and by their side, and at their throughout the day and throughout the night."
While life was hard, it had an ordered rhythm - yearly, seasonal, daily - unlike today's frenzied world. Prayer resonated with poetry and song. This lay spirituality was essentially contemplative; God was addressed with familiarity, gratitude and trust.
Survivors
Esther de Waal says the Irish, Scots and Welsh faced a common threat of extinction and survived. When asked to speak in South Africa during the apartheid era, she realised "it was to the Celtic tradition that I could point them.
"For while it brings no easy assurance there is yet the promise of hope. Out of their long experience of living under threat, the Celtic nations remind us to `expect the morning light'. Light in darkness, hope in despair, life in death, is their constant theme."
Tears, as she learns from the Celtic tradition, "are never what so often my own tears become tears of rage or of self pity, tears of frustration, tears because I have put my own self at the centre of the picture and feel that I have not received the treatment that I deserve - the tears of the child, in fact, for whom `life isn't fair' . . .
"But true tears are those of real, deep personal sorrow, of repentance, which lead to the determination to change (which are of course what metanoia and `conversion' meaning the monastic tradition)."
Celtic Christianity is not gloomy, however: "Here is the repentance that makes for joyous living. This is what true repentance brings it sets me free to live fully, liberating me from the strangling cords of guilt. The intensity of the joyous sense of being alive is the other half of the ruthless acceptance of the recognition of sin."
Esther de Waal concludes that "if we are to appreciate the Celtic way of prayer we must turn to the psalms ... The psalter was the prayerbook which shaped their lives." She quotes Thomas Merton, who called the psalms "the simplest and the greatest of all religious poems". I wrote elsewhere that they contain the silence of high mountains and the silence of heaven.