As further adventure into the Celtic wisdom tradition, and as someone who writes poetry, this post attempts to describe another point of diversion from the religion I inherited.

Western Christianity has built itself on an altar of propositional truth. In order for this to be replicatable, this truth required sources and proofs which were all taken from readings of scripture. We can debate whether these readings were correct, but we can do something even more fundamental and question the approach entirely. What if the truth we seek is as much obscured by these readings as revealed?

Surely we can agree that the Bible alone is not sufficient, that we need so much more in order to form an idea of who and what god is and how to live well in the context we find ourselves in?

If this were not true, how are we in the mess we are in?

In his book Sacred earth sacred soul, John Philip Newell says this;

In the Celtic world, the imagination is a faculty of knowing. It is a way of remembering what we have forgotten, that spirit and matter are interwoven and that time and eternity are intermingled. The imagination is also a bridge into the future, forever opening us to ways of seeing and living that we have not experienced. To be made of God is to be made of sacred imagination. It is to have the capacity to dream our way to new beginnings, in our lives and in our world

(Ch 5 Pg123)

This is a hard pill for most of us to swallow. After all, most Christians from my protestant background have developed an epistemology – perhaps unwittingly – that replaces the trinity with a quadranity, with father, son and spirit subordinated to a fourth and most important part of the ‘trinity’ called the Bible (or ‘The Word of God’, or ‘Holy Scripture’.) There are countless examples accross Christian history of how this has gone wrong, how we have used readings of scripture to justify oppression, slavery, greed, conquest, antisemitism, racism, sexism, persecution of people of difference – particularly LGBTQ people. Recently I listened to someone describing how their Christian faith taught them how man, having been given dominion of the world, had a duty to make full use of the world resources – to tame the forest, to suck out all the oil, to mine gold and coal. To do so, it would seem, was ‘biblical’.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that we have sometimes, if not often, confused the medium with the message. We have elevated our own intellectual ego-centric readings above any sense of the wider principles contained within the swoop of scripture. We have obsessed over individualistic moral right/wrongs but ignored society-wide injustices.

This is not to say that injustices were absent from the Celtic world – the romanticism of Celtic hindsight is certainly worth resisting. But good water might yet come from old wells, so please let me make an argument (arising from Celtic wisdom) for poetry.

Perhaps we should start with the Hebrew scriptures, remembering that one third of the Bible- every third page – is poetry. What does this mean and how should we read this material? Is it ‘different’ is it less true, or true in a different kind of way?

I don’t want ot get too bogged down in the technical side of how poetry is thought to work in the Bible, but if you are interested, there is a good series from The Bible Project here. This is the first vid;

Does this mean that we can treat the ‘truth’ of those passages written as poetry differently? Not necessarilly. Most (if not all) of the poetry is in the Old Testament, although it is quoted in the New. We can be pretty sure that those who read the original knew that they were supposed to engage with those passages with their poetic antenae fully raised though – to let it fire their imagination, their passions. To let it do the work that poetry does through multi-layered ambiguity as much as through any propositional certainty.

There are some who believe that our Biblical ‘poetry blindness’ has resulted in multiple problems for Western Christianity.

And indeed this is just what Michael Edwards says in The Bible and Poetry, a short but hugely ambitious book whose aim is essentially to correct the course of Christianity. (Edwards, the only Englishman ever elected to the Académie Francaise, is a winningly candid Christian and interprets Scripture in that context.) Poetic illiteracy, according to Edwards, is not simply an individual problem but an institutional one. Christianity has developed as a religion of precepts and articles of faith. It has been defined and determined by systematic theology, an enterprise that Edwards believes—from Aquinas to Calvin and right through the present day—is simply an “error.” There is, he thinks, a reason that God chooses poetry to speak to us. Understanding this reason might not only lead to spiritual consolation and clarity for the individual believer but might even begin to heal some of our deep divisions.

From here.

There is another way to understand the role of the poetic as a tool for wisdom and spiritual engagement however, and this takes us beyond those who seek to ‘do the Bible better’, towards a kind of seeing that was perhaps more common within the Celtic world.

Poetry is embodied

Standing in a place like the one where the above photo was taken, it is possible to say lots about the scene. We can name the bird (Fulmar) the rocks that make the cliffs (Sandstone.) We can describe by which processes the sea has sculpted the cliffs into caves, wihch then become arches and eventually collapse to stacks. We can describe the grasses and lichens. We can see the marks left in the land by past habitation and farming practices.

None of this information will tell you what it was like to stand on the edge of that cliff, clothes plucked by the wind, with hundreds of feet full of whirling birds straight down to a crashing sea. Neither will it tell you much about the soul of the place, the sense of being that it has and gave to me.

One is descriptive, the other is experience. One allows me to know things in my head, the other allows me to know things in my whole being.

It might be compared to the difference between knowing about something, to knowing something.

Poetry is mystical

I grew up in a tradition that regarded Irish Catholicism as empty superstition at best and demonic evil at worse, because of all the saint stuff and the icons and the holy wells. The idea that any of this might carry symbolic meaning was beyond reason, let alone the possibility that people engage with shrines or relics for mystical experience. The closest we ever came to the mystical was through charismatic craziness. (I tried some of that.)

What do I mean by ‘mystical’? The dictionary definition is ‘inpiring sense of spiritual mystery, awe and fascination’ but this is not adequate. Mysticism is a different way of seeing, a different way of knowing, often related to contemplative practice, art or encounters with nature and the wild.

It has been said that mystics accross the different world religions (all of which have a mystical tradition) often have more in common with each other than they do with other parts of their own tradition.

If there is a language that best communicates the mystical, it is poetry. The Sufi poems of Attar, Rumi, Hafiz, Sanai might be the best place to start- they are so fresh, so vibrant. Words written before Shakespeare yet (albeit in translation) could have been written yesterday. They come to us laden with longing for the divine, for union with the Beloved.

The Celtic tradition was an oral tradition, in which ideas of the divine were handed down, shared and celebrated using poetry. Many of these poems, prayers, incantations, songs, spells were gathered and recorded in the late 19th C by Alexander Carmichael into what we now know as the Carmina Gadelica. Perhaps people used these words for practical reasons- to mark the changing seasons and other threshold experinces such as birth or death or even the dawn or the keeping of the fire. It connected them to ancestors. But the nature of some of the words suggests a further purpose, in that they draw us beyond ourselves into a kind of knowing that is hard to describe in any other way.

Poetry is ambiguous

This might be partly because mysicism also deals with mystery, with unknowning as much as knowing. The things of God, of the divine, are not certain, they are less-than-half-percieved, or as Paul (who seemed to be pretty certain in other ways) puts it ‘through a glass darkly’.

Poetry leaves the field open. It leaves questions for us to grapple with. It uses metaphor and similie, allowing us to approach meaning from different viewpoints. Even more, it allows one thing to potentially have multiple interpretations, and none of them are necessarily wrong.

There is a generosity to this approach to spirituality. One that treats us as worthy of our own understanding, able to engage with the divine that we carry within us.

I am not suggesting we replace the Bible with poems. I am advocating for a poetic engagement with spiritual experience, one in which our knowing is allowed to be more fluid, more open, more embracing of wider possibilties and allows more room for mysical ‘feeling’.

Newell call this ‘flow’.

Years ago, I wrote a song based around one of the more well-known Iona blessings which (I think) is very old. I share it here not because of its poetic merit, but because it connects me with much of what I am trying to describe. It goes something like this;

Deep peace of the running wave to you

Deep peace of the running wave, running rising till it breaks on you

Deep peace of the running wave to you

.

Deep peace of the quiet earth to you

Deep peace of the quiet earth, dark green place of fresh new birth for you

Deep peace of the quiet eart to you

.

Deep peace of the flowing air to you

Deep peace of the flowing air, fresh and clear blowing through your hair to you

Deep peace of the flowing air to you

Deep peace of the shining stars to you

Deep peace of the shining stars, ancient light sent from afar to you

Deep peace of the shinging stars to you

.

Deep peace of the son of peace to you

Deep peace of the son of peace to you

Deep peace of the son of peace to you