From Volume 9, Number 2, Fall 2002

The Charateristics of Celtic Christianity

 If it’s not about Celtic culture or ethnic nostalgia, what is it about? The very first issue of the Wild Goose began with a justification for the startup of this ministry. It hadn’t been planned that way. When we announced the startup of the St. Aidan Trust at our local church we were full of enthusiasm and excitement. But within a couple of days an older leader in the church whose opinion I very much respected, called to share his concern. He felt that our denomination already had way too many competing and contentious groups tearing the church apart. Did we really need yet one more voice in the cacophony?

 He had a good point and it drove me to some deeper prayer. Had we jumped ahead of God in this? The prayer led us to two conclusions. First, we were indeed supposed to bring this new ministry to the US. Second, it was not to be a ministry within our denomination or any other. A third conclusion came much later on; we were not the only group had called into being in the US around Celtic Christianity and therefore we were to support and bless all others working in this area, even if it seemed we were duplicating efforts.

 The next challenge we faced was the very popularity of things “Celtic.” As word of this ministry began to spread a great number of the responses we received were from folks trying to reconnect with some element of a Celtic heritage. There was nothing wrong with this, but oftentimes, once they had received a copy of our resource list and way of life, we never heard from them again. Again we turned to prayer. This time the prayer led us far deeper than the question that had prompted it. It was not so much that we were not about Celtic nostalgia but that we were not even about restoring some golden age of the Celtic churches. Rather, our mission was to reintroduce to the contemporary church certain characteristics of Celtic Christianity that could be applied in the modern world as part of God’s movement to call His church back to wholeness.

 This conclusion led to a critical question: What are these characteristics for which we were called into being? While there are a large number of characteristics (10 of them contained in our Way of Life), there were six that define what we bring to the churches.

Creation: You might call it a “green Gospel” but in fact, the Bible is far more positive toward creation than the culture of western Christianity. The early Celtic Christians lived in a much closer relationship to the vagaries of the natural world than do we. They recognized their close dependency on the forces of nature. The technology of our age enables us to maintain an illusion of independence from those forces.

 What the Celts realized is what most non-technological cultures realize: we are intimately connected with creation. What we do to the natural world we do to some extent to ourselves. It is the issue of connectivity rather than of stewardship that is our concern. The term stewardship has a number of connotations from a manager of funds to a manager of creatures, or property or even people. However, when the steward recognizes an interdependency with the subject of the stewardship, it can profoundly change the manner in which stewardship is exercised.

 We therefore seek to reach beyond a doctrine of stewardship to an understanding of our kinship with all creation. There are as yet no contemporary patterns of living this life to draw on. Therefore we seek by means of worship and spiritual discipline to find new ways to aid Christians in reestablishing the connection with creation that we believe was God’s original intent.

Wholeness: As the church of Jesus Christ has been fragmented over the centuries, so also has the life of the Christian disciple. We have formalized these fragments by labels: charismatic, sacramental, contemplative, evangelical, and so on. Yet there is a growing sense that in dividing these elements of discipleship and identifying ourselves by these labels we have lost something crucial.

 These labels would have been nonsensical to the Celtic Christians. For them you were Christian or you were not. How could a Christian separate Word from Spirit, Spirit from Sacrament, Word from action, action from contemplation? Each was a part of the whole. Even today, in the fragmented institutions of Christianity, very few of these institutions hold positions that force such fragmentation. Rather it is a denominational culture, not doctrine that encourages this interior division.

 We therefore seek to enable Christians to find ways to live the wholeness of the discipled life within the context of their own communities.

Balance: The division in Christian life, which springs from the fragmentation of the church, is paralleled by an imbalance of life forced by a society that is sick at its core. That imbalance is represented by a work life that destroys human dignity and often the human family as well, a prayer life that is anemic and haphazard and a rest life that is ineffective or non-existent.

 The Celtic Christians generally followed a pattern of work and prayer in which work was considered to be an element of prayer. Though given to nightlong vigils they were not neglectful of rest, but found perhaps that because their work and prayer were in balance such rest as they got was more effective.

 Any attempt to change our unbalanced patterns is certain to put us at odds with our business and social culture and probably threaten our livelihoods. Yet the imbalance causes increasing harm to our physical, spiritual and emotional well-being. We seek to provide a forum that holds this issue before us and encourages us through our soul friends and other contacts to create an effective process of change.

Risk: Setting out on the great ocean in small coracles, leaving home and tribe to wander for the love of Christ, confronting kings and popes – the Celtic Christians were not afraid of risk. Unlike these Christians we live in a world where change, and rapid change at that, is the norm. In such a world many people like to reserve some part of their lives as havens of predictability and security. Our spirituality is often that area of choice because – to be frank – it is often the most irrelevant to our daily living.

 We encourage those on the Aidan Way to rethink the meaning of stability and security. There is indeed nothing certain in this life and investing our energy and passion in transient things is to take a risk whose reward is both predictable and tragic. Yet there are things that are stable and reliable and cannot be shaken by war or recession. The late missionary, Jim Elliot, said, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” The certainty of the High King of Glory, His victory over death, His promise of eternal life in the Blessed Otherworld gave the Celtic Christians enormous freedom to risk those things that cannot endure to obtain those that shall.

 We seek to live the life of freedom that comes from this recognition of what is truly eternal and valuable.

Commitment: The Celts took to Christianity with a passion and alacrity that mystifies our half-hearted world. New Age adherents and neo-pagans cannot accept that the druids were neither suppressed nor persecuted by the Christian movement in Celtic lands. Indeed their disappearance came with massive conversions so startling and complete that the Celtic tonsure was modeled on the druid one, because the druids were the first to fill the ranks of Celtic monasticism. The disciplines of the individual Celtic Christians and that of their communities seem bizarre and unthinkable to us, but to a warrior culture such commitment was a virtue. It was a virtue they saw in Jesus as the King who sacrifices himself for his people, and who therefore inspires similar commitment and sacrifice.

 We encourage those on this path to commit themselves without reservation to Jesus and to honor his call on their lives in whatever sphere of activity it may be.

Creativity: The Bible is a very dangerous book particularly for those who want to live tightly controlled lives and particularly for those who want to tightly control the lives of others. The stories of dancing to the praise of God, the passionate poetry of the psalms, the lack of circumspection in Jesus around issues of alcohol and disreputable company strike a very different chord than the culture of church that dominated Western Christianity for so long. While the Roman church allowed for some aesthetic element to worship in the plastic arts and in song, even this was severely restricted in scope. The later Reformers were even more restrictive in their approach until Christian worship was solely an approach to the mind with a solid distrust of engaging the body or the emotions in the worship of God.

 The Celtic Christians, in spite of their occasions of strict asceticism, were far more open to engaging our full humanity in worship. Restrictions in diet were implemented to create an interior discipline and not because of any intrinsic evil associated with food, drink or attire.

 We seek to restore the whole human person to worship and discipleship, receiving and using all things with thanksgiving.