The Celtic Way of Prayer

By Esther De Waal

Esther de Waal's classic guide to Celtic spirituality shows how its rich literary traditions and earthy realism can speak to the toughness and challenges of our own world. Avoiding sentimentality , she presents a spirituality that can be lived with honesty, commitment and truthfulness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Canterbury Press
• Release date: Apr 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781848256873

Esther De Waal

Esther de Waal is a noted scholar and spiritual writer. She was propelled to fame by her book Seeking God, which was published in numerous languages. She now lives in Oxford.

Book preview

The Celtic Way of Prayer

The Celtic Way of Prayer

Esther de Waal’s rich and thorough presentation of The Celtic Way of Prayer is itself a rich tapestry of learning, personal experience of prayer, empathy with monastic endeavour and a real understanding of what inspiration is needed by so many of the laity also in their journey of Christian prayer today. I suspect that readers may be surprised to find that a learned work that evokes a far-off world of the past constantly touches and enlivens the living nerves of today’s Christian world. Perhaps they should not be surprised because the subject of this book lies close to the origins of Christianity in these islands and it is always good to come to terms with our roots.

Patrick Barry OSB, Former Abbot of Ampleforth

This is not only a treasury of material that we should all be grateful for; it is also a personal testimony to how the resources of the Celtic tradition inform an acute and unsentimental twentieth-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.

Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury

The Celtic Way of Prayer

The Recovery of the Religious Imagination

Esther de Waal

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© Esther de Waal 2010

First published in Great Britain in 1996.

This edition first published in Great Britain in 2003.

Published in 2010 by Canterbury Press

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, Canterbury Press.

The Author has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this Work

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

978 1-84825-051-2

Printed and bound by CPI Bookmarque, Croydon

For Hannah Gabrielle

the granddaughter born at Beltaine

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1. Journeying

2. Image and Song

3. The Trinity

4. Time

5. The Presence of God

6. The Solitary

7. Dark Forces

8. The Cross

9. The Saints

10. Praise

11. Healing for the World

Preface

I am grateful to be given the opportunity to write a short preface to the new edition of a book originally published six years ago. Since then the enthusiasm for all things Celtic has continued to grow – at what seems an alarming rate to some of us. The Celtic presence has become inescapable, as any visitors to heritage centres or gift shops immediately discover when they find themselves surrounded by an amazing profusion of Celtic spirals and swirls. I think that we all approach this Celtic world in our own terms, with our own demands and questions. This is above all what a living tradition can do. It is like a source or spring to which we come back time and again, at different stages of our life, looking for support, inspiration and challenge.

In the years since I wrote the original text much has changed in my own life, and out of recent experience has come a different and deeper recognition of the rich resource that the Celtic tradition can be. These years have witnessed much valuable new scholarship, particularly in the translations that have made early texts available to us, and I hope that the notes to the final chapter will be helpful to readers who are interested in these developments. But it is the quality of the Celtic tradition’s timeless wisdom for which I have become particularly grateful. As I spend time with my growing number of grandchildren, I come more and more to realise the importance of ritual and the power of story-telling, and how poetry and song come naturally to us as human beings. As I spend more and more time alone in a small, remote cottage deep in the countryside, I have found that I have come quite naturally to live the year of the changing seasons according to the Celtic pattern. This has meant that l cross each threshold with a strong sense of awareness of what is ending and what is beginning: I now feel that I appreciate much more vividly the cycles of creation and re-creation, darkness and light, as they succeed one another.

I now think of the year beginning on 1 November with the feast of Samhaine, and then plunging towards the darkness of winter. The first light of spring comes with lmbolc, St Bridget’s day on 1 February, and then the fullness of light occurs as the year swings on its axis at Beltaine on 1 May. With Lammas, 1 August, we reach the time of abundance, the gathering in of crops and fruits and wild berries. (I wrote on this theme of times and seasons, borders and thresholds in a small book inspired by living on the Welsh Border and by finding there an image which speaks to me very immediately.¹) As I watch the news and keep in touch with places I have visited where I see an ever-growing intensity of suffering and injustice, I am more than ever grateful for a spirituality which never denies darkness and pain. As I grow older many friends and family begin to have to come to terms with illnesses or the limitations of their faculties, issues which they would not have thought about earlier in life, and some are finding themselves living with fear and uncertainty – it is this that has encouraged me to go more deeply into the subject of the final chapter of this book.

‘A deep look at the deep past’ is how someone recently described what most enabled her to keep her own spiritual path vibrant and energising. In the Celtic tradition we have a past which is also the present – as the phenomenal success of John O’Donoghue’s book Anamchara made quite clear, for it was a distillation of a spiritual tradition that came to him in living form from the Ireland which had shaped him. Here, since he in no way sets out to be a scholar, he can transcend any context of time and place, juxtaposing successively something from the eighth century together with something from the oral tradition or his own folk memory.

What really matters is that we should approach the Celtic tradition with reverence, listening humbly and with receptivity to what it is telling us, and letting it reach us in ways that will make a difference to how we see the world and how we pray. The journey in life must be one of continuing growth and transformation. Writing this on the Feast of the Transfiguration – which is also the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima – seems a symbolic day on which to express gratitude for the riches of this spiritual tradition. The refrain of the intercessions given for the Roman Catholic office of Morning Prayer on this feast is ‘Lord, that we may see …’ Perhaps nothing better sums up what the Celtic tradition can bring us – when we open our hands and our hearts wide enough to receive it in its fullness – than these two images, for they show us both the depths of suffering and the transformation into light and life.

Esther de Waal

6 August 2002

Note

1 Living on the Border: Connecting the Inner and Outer Worlds, Canterbury Press, 2001.

Introduction

The rediscovery of the Celtic world has been an extraordinary revelation for many Christians in recent years, an opening up of the depths and riches within our own tradition which many of us had not before suspected.

As I reflect on what it has meant to me I think that above all it has enriched my understanding of prayer. It has taught me, and encouraged me into, a deeper, fuller way of prayer. I have come to see that the Celtic way of prayer is prayer with the whole of myself, a totality of praying which embraces the fullness of my own personhood, and which allows me not only to pray with words but also, more importantly, with the heart, the feelings, using image and symbol, touching the springs of my imagination.

I like to think of it as a journey into prayer. The Celtic understanding of journeying is in itself so rich and so significant. It is peregrinatio, seeking, quest, adventure, wandering, exile – it is ultimately a journey, as I try to show in the first chapter, to find the place of my resurrection, the resurrected self, the self that I might hope to be, to become, the true self in Christ. This journey is only possible because I am finding my roots – that familiar paradox, which is known in all monastic life and is a reflection of basic human experience, that only if one is rooted, at home in one’s own self, in the place in which one finds oneself is one able to move forward, to open up new boundaries, both exterior and interior, in other words, to embark on a life of continual and never-ending conversion, transformation. To find my roots takes me back to the part of my self that is more ancient than I am, and this is of course the power of the Celtic heritage. In my own case there are both my family roots, which are Scottish, and the place where I was born, and where I now once again live, which is the border country of Wales. But for any of us the Celtic tradition is ancient or elemental – a return to the elements, the earth, stone, fire, water, the ebb and flow of tides and seasons, the pattern of the year as it swings on its axis from Samhaine, 1 November when all grows dark, to Beltaine, 1 May the coming of light and spring. To pray the Celtic way means above all to be aware of this rhythm of dark and light. The dark and the light are themselves symbols of the Celtic refusal to deny darkness, pain, suffering and yet to exult in rejoicing, celebration, in the fullness and goodness of life. This is in itself a recognition of the fullness of my own humanity.

Coming from the furthest fringes of the Western world Celtic Christianity (an expression which I prefer to use rather than speaking of the Celtic Church)² keeps alive what is ancient Christian usage, usage which like that of the East comes from a deep central point before the Papacy began to tidy up and to rationalise. This was more difficult in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, the Isle of Man, Cornwall and Brittany the main Celtic areas, simply because of geographical distance and the lack of towns. This point is of more than antiquarian interest: it also speaks to me symbolically, taking me back to the ancient, the early, both in my own self, and in the experience of Christendom, where I encounter something basic, primal, fundamental, universal. I am taken back beyond the party labels and the denominational divisions of the Church today, beyond the divides of the Reformation or the schism of East and West. I am also taken beyond the split of intellect and feeling, of mind and heart, that came with the growth of the rational and analytical approach which the development of the universities brought to the European mind in the twelfth century. Here is something very profound. This deep point within the Christian tradition touches also some deep point in my own consciousness, my own deepest inner self.

This tapestry of the riches of the Celtic way of prayer has about it something of the variety of shapes and colours that I find in a page of the Book of Kells, and so I find myself asking where and how we can begin to unravel one of these extraordinary spirals or threads so that it leads us on into our exploration. I think that the easiest starting point is the fact that Celtic Christianity was essentially monastic, as indeed the origins of Christianity in the whole of Britain were strictly monastic.³ The Celtic way of prayer was learnt from the monasteries; it was from its religious communities that the people learnt to pray. As a result they learnt that there was no separation of praying and living; praying and working flow into one another, so that life is to be punctuated by prayer, become prayer. If ordinary people took their ideas on prayer from this ideal of continual prayer it should not really surprise us that, when we uncover something of the way of praying that was handed down in the oral tradition and was collected in Scotland and Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century what we find is lay spirituality, a household religion in which praying is inseparable from an ordinary, daily working life.⁴

Those earliest years in Ireland and Wales forged a powerful mix between monastic Christianity and what existed already in the people to whom this Christian message was now brought. It was the way in which Christianity responded to what it found in these lands which gives it its unique character and emphasis. The Celtic countries lay on the edge of the known Western world, largely outside the Roman Empire, a people lacking the social moulds and mental framework and cultural infrastructure which the Roman Empire brought elsewhere. These were a rural people, living close to the earth, close to stone and water, and their religious worship was shaped by their awareness of these elemental forces. They were a rural people for whom the clan, the tribe and kinship were important, a close-knit people who thought of themselves in a corporate way as belonging to one another. They were a warrior people, a people whose myths and legends told them of heroes and heroic exploits. Above all, they were a people of the imagination, whose amazing artistic achievements in geometric design, filigree work and enamelling can be seen in La Tène art, and whose skill with words (spoken not written) flowered in poetry and story-telling. This was a society in which the poet held a highly respected place, played a professional role, and where story-telling was taken seriously and demanded many years of study and learning. All this was taken up by a Christianity which was not afraid of what it found but felt that it was natural to appropriate it into the fullness of Christian living and praying. So the Celtic way of prayer is a reflection of this: it is elemental, corporate, heroic, imaginative. This is its gift to us.

As I have gone deeper in my exploration of the Celtic heritage I have found that it has touched me profoundly at many levels which had not hitherto been a familiar part of my twentieth-century upbringing and education. I discovered that if I wanted to encounter Celtic Christianity I had to look at poetry, and so I found myself being taken into the world of poetry and song. My own religious upbringing had been so intellectual and cerebral, a matter of going to church, of reciting the Creed, of saying prayers, and instead here was a world which told me that books were not enough, that books could not express the wonder of the world that God had made:

The Father created the world by a miracle;

it is difficult to express its measure.

Letters cannot contain it, letters cannot comprehend it.⁵

The Celtic journey that I am describing in this book is unlike any other journey that I know. Its shape and its end are different, as are the songs I sing while I journey, the company that I keep along the road. I have been brought into contact with the visual and the non-verbal, confronted by the power of image and of symbol I have found myself thinking about God as a poet, an artist, drawing us all into his great work of art. I have been taken beyond the rational and intellectual and cerebral for this world touches the springs of my imagination. I am reminded of what Thomas Merton said, in Contemplation in a World of Action, about the role of the imagination as a discovering faculty, as a means of seeing new meanings, and above all as an essential element in prayer:

Imagination is the creative task of making symbols, joining things together in such a way that they throw new light on each other and on everything around them. The imagination is a discovering faculty, a faculty for seeing relationships, for seeing meanings that are special and even quite new. The imagination is something which enables us to discover unique present meaning in a given moment of our life. Without imagination the contemplative life can be extremely dull and fruitless.⁶

So I have been brought face to face with a world at once very familiar and very mysterious, for I have found in the Celtic a world-view which touches on much that is common, shared, perhaps archetypical, in all human experience. I have become aware of how this way of seeing the world is common to all early peoples, to the traditional and aboriginal peoples throughout the world. Although I do not develop it here I am sure that the exploration of this Celtic world will be prophetic for the future as we try to break down the barriers so that we may reach out to one another. This discovery of my own Celtic roots has meant that I have also become more aware of the riches of many other traditional peoples. I have found that much in the African or Native American experience speaks the same language as the Celtic, has a shared and common resonance. For I have found in Celtic understanding nothing of the highly individualistic, competitive, inward-looking approach common in today’s society. Here instead everyone sees themselves in relation to one another, and that extends beyond human beings to the wild creatures, the birds and the animals, the earth itself.⁷ This has brought a sense of us all as a part of the whole web of being. There is something here of ‘the breathing together of all things’ as Teilhard de Chardin put it, something of the mystery of coinherence of which Charles Williams writes in his novels. The new science speaks much the same language, of mutual inter-dependence. Here is the promise of a more