As part of my retreat on this beautiful island of peace, we visited a little museum set up by Fairisle inhabitants that can trace their stay on the Isle to the 1600s. It seems that their family, the Wilsons, began their time on the Isle when a man arrived here either through a shipwreck, or just because he was on the run, because he was a Covenanter.

(If you don’t know much about this stormy part of our religious and cultural history, here might be a place to start, as it concerns itself with a song about a shipwreck full of Covenanter convicts not far from these parts…)

No-one could accuse the Covenanters of lacking conviction, of deconstructing their old faith and standing unsure in the ruins. I have often wondered how they were so damned sure that they felt able to do difficult, even dreadful things out of that same conviction. They could face death, and they could kill. Even when their cause was defeated, they could stand tall, firm in the certain knowledge that God was on their side.

I think I used to envy this kind of conviction but now I despise it, even without the murder. I am reminded once again of that Nick Cave quote I used a few posts ago;

…the rigid and self righteous certainty of some religious people – and some atheists for that matter – is something I find dissagreeable. The hubris of it. The sanctimoniousness. It leaves me cold. The more unshakeable someone’s beliefs are, the more diminished they seem to become, because they have stopped questioning, and the not-questoining can be accompanied by a moral superiority… a bit of humility wouldn’t go astray.

So, please read the rest of this post with this firmly mind…

As part of exploring the Celtic Christian tradition, one of the most startling differences of view is the one I spoke about in the poem featured in my last post.

Let’s approach this from a different angle…

At the very centre of the deepest of us, we contain the divine – not in the sense of being ‘gods’, or because we are made-in-the-image, or even because we are built-from-the-substance-of, rather because this is true of all living, created things.

What implications does this have for spiritual practice, for how we seek truth, how we seek meaning, how we seek wisdom?

If we carry within us what is divine, then our search might no longer be external. It might be that wisdom is born within us, that it is part of the sacredness of our very being. Our job is to look for it within (and in others, but starting within ourselves).

To quote Meister Eckhart, the late 13th and early 14th century Christian mystic, “God is not found in the soul by adding anything, but by a process of subtraction.” By trying to get below or around all the stuff that gets in the way. If that sounds like therapeutic deism, then we need to get below or around that too.

Pelagius talked about three graces.

1. The grace of nature – the constancy of nature, the sunrise, the beauty we find in every moment
2. The grace of illumination, in which we awaken to a kind of seeing that we have forgotten, that invites us back into the great union of all things, back into relationship
3. The grace of forgiveness, when we feel that we can still live again out of our depths.

He thought that wisdom was born in all of us out of the sacredness of our being, that is is available to us by right… but he also felt that if the wisdom that we find is out of kilter with the example of Jesus, then we should look again, we should go deeper.

The implication here is that in the deepest part of who we are, we know.

We know.

When we encounter goodness, we feel it.

When we are faced with injustice, we are repelled by it.

There is a ‘yes’ inside me as I encounter this ancient wisdom tradition, and it takes me back to a list I made myself as a guide to deciding the ‘correctness’ or otherwise of a decision to steop towards the light;

1. I acknowledge those whose teaching/writing/leadership has inspired me, consciously holding on to those things I inherited that are ‘good’. These act like signposts or filters or channels through which I measure and encounter the new
2. What sings in my soul? I have decided to trust my own embodied reaction as a guide for accepting and adventuring. If I read something or encounter something and it lights me up emotionally/physically/spirituality (even intelluctually) then I will pay attention.
3. What is useful? By which I mean the degree to which ideas contribute towards my understanding of peace love and justice. If they do not seem immediately useful in this regard, I am not necessarily rejecting them as ‘wrong’, rather I am far less interested.

I think that this Celtic wisdom stuff ticks all three boxes.

But also I have to remember the Crown of London and all those Covenanters, then show a bit of humility…