For a while now, I have been feeling the joy of spiritual adventure in what has been described as ‘The Celtic tradition’. I can feel some of you rolling your eyes already – I get why, because I once would have done the same.

I grew up in a Christian world in which ‘Celtic’ meant singing worship songs with tin whistles with everything else unchanged. It was about style, not substance ; a marketing ploy, not a serious spiritual path. It was the opposite of serious learning because it was concerned with myth and legend at best, or romantic projections from people who had no real idea what the Celtic Church (if such a thing ever existed!) really was within its own context.

We have also tended to simplify history in ways that suit the story we want to tell. The ‘Celtic’ church then is now seen as morally good and pure, supporter of women and woodlands, lover of wild geese and religious freedom. The Roman Church which overwhelmed it (booooooo!) is then rendered as the evil interloper, with its insistence on authority and adherence to doctrines invented by Empire. (It is perhaps worth noting that perhaps this simplification hides some truth too.)

This thing that we call the Celtic Christian tradition is just a modern creation – a slippery construct that lacks historical or theological seriousness. It is useful only in the broadest sense to describe something that mostly we can only infer. We can mostly use it to tell which ever story we want to tell. This is certainly the way I used to see things.

Perhaps this is a good time to introduce this interview, between our very own Ruth Harvey (Iona Community leader) and author/Celtic expert Professor Ian Bradley.

Professor Bradley is erudite, deeply immersed in his subject and despite his reluctance to even recognise the label of Celtic Christianity, he remains sympathetic to tradition. Why then do I find myself unfulfilled by his arguments? What right have I, with my extreme limited learning and perspective, to think that at some level he might be missing the point?

Am I going soft in my old age, finally succumbing to that half of me that is Irish, land of fairies, holy wells and bog saints? Perhaps I am.

So now we come to a second video. (I hope you have time to watch them both in full.)

Are JP Newell and Paul Bradley even talking about the same thing? Two late life middle aged white men, offering us different windows to look through.

Perhaps not. One approach is that of the Academy, of historical process and rational discourse based on what can be evidenced through documentation and record. Professor Bradley’s review of ‘Sacred Earth Sacred Soul’ suggests he has a dim view of some of the historical work in the Newell’s books – not least his chapter on Pelagius, as referenced in this video. Perhaps too that many of the criticisms I made above might be leveled at this book and many Newell’s wider views.

Meanwhile, the other approach is one of the poet, the guru, the spiritual seeker. Source material here is through inspiration, through deep listening to what feels true in the human soul, or what can be learned from the teaching of others who have explored what Newell believes to be the wider Celtic tradition. In his way of thinking, this tradition is a radical anti-empire strand that never went away, despite the best efforts of institution and academy. It is the truth of the small people, the women, those out on the fringes, those who still feel the ebb and flow ot tide and season. It is the religion that white upper class men have always rejected.

Perhaps what is being described here is NOT a theological block of learning, but rather a stream of folk consciousness, which has been carried through myth and traditions out on the celtic fringes, then rediscovered serially by throughout history. After all, Newell points out that we never needed the institution to tell us what was right, because we carry the divine within us, and when we encounter that which is good, we feel a soul-deep ‘YES’.

Is he right? Have you ever felt something similar?

I hope I am not being overly simplistic if I suggest that Bradley and Newell might embody a polarity that has always been present within the Christian tradition between the priest and the poet/prophet. One side is drawn to order, to the keeping of safe community within a long tradition. The other seeks the elusive other through the beautiful mess of what we are. One builds knowledge and belonging structure, the other sees their limitations and always wants to explore beyond them.

We can trace this polarity (or perhaps this dichotomy) through church history, but also through the words of the Bible,one third of which are… poertry.

I have to confess that I see both the world and my experience of the divine through the medium of poetry. I am longing for mystery and deep music, not for facts or evidence trails. I have spent too long in the shadows of the academy and institution and have seen the way they things inadvertantly and overtly become tools of power, used by the powerful.

Does this mean that I think that Newell is ‘right’ and Bradley ‘wrong’? Is one ‘true’ and one ‘untrue’? Of course not – it is not that simple. Perhaps the better questions are these;

• What do you feel singing in your soul when you encounter the ideas in these videos? Are there things to which you feel a deep ‘yes’?
• Which version is the most useful in terms of liberation, healing and renewal of relationship with the divine?

It is my answers to these questions that keep me interested in the Celtic tradtion. I think we need the myth and the poetry arising still in these western fringes. We need the wild islands and the ancient remnant rain forests. We need the ancient places of pilgrimmage. We need the old stories.

We need too the diversity that seemed to be part of this old tradition – the fact that some monastic gathering were just men, some women and some were mixed. We need local expressions and explorations that not motivated first by conformity.

Perhaps most of all we need new (old) ways to connect us to each other and to the wider earth community that we belong to – in much the way that I tried to talk about in this post here. (In fact this piece should be read as part 2 to that post.)

We have a resource here in both versions of the Celtic story- the history, but particularly the poetry. Let’s use both.