From Volume 4, Number 2, Autumn 1997

Beyond Fashionable Spirituality?

The annual deluge of catalogs is well under way. Along with the turning of the aspen and the elk coming down from the high country, the daily arrival of catalogs mark the turn of the season. The  offerings from the mail order companies vary little from year to year, save to reflect the changing fashions of clothing and gifts in our society. However, there is one fashion that permeates this year's selections  that is cause both for some delight and some concern.

It is a delight to see pages of beautiful Celtic artwork in stone, fabric and jewelry. It is a delight to see more and more books of substance dealing with the culture of Celtic spirituality. Of  course, there are also a number of rather silly looking leprechauns and T-shirts. One day we fully expect to receive a home catalog offering Celtic toilet brushes!

It is also a concern to find things Celtic in such vogue. The current popularity of Celtic spirituality needs to be taken with more than just a grain of salt. The permanency of commitment is not a  part of contemporary society. Fashion is by its nature a transient beastie. Celtic spirituality by itself, is not rooted in any element of our contemporary world, indeed it is at odds with many of the world's  values. While this might make it seem like an attractive prophetic stance, even a prophet needs some ground on which to stand. Celtic Christian spirituality holds a more solid ground. From a purely rationalistic  point of view such spirituality at least has a base of an international, cross cultural religion on which to stand. Further, as the elements of Celtic Christian spirituality are rooted in the Scriptures and are  reflections of the Scriptures, the base on which the Celtic “prophet” may stand is at least consistent with the message.

However, if that is all that Celtic Christian spirituality has to offer the world, then it becomes just another of the confusing array of sub-Christian types from which an already confused world is  asked to choose. The world can hardly be blamed for its disinterested yawn. And if the Christianness of Celtic spirituality is all that it has to offer the church, then it must elbow its way into place among other  equally Christian spiritualities, i.e. Franciscan, evangelical, Pentecostal, Anglican and so on and on. If that is all we offer then it seems best that we leave Celtic Christian spirituality to be yet just another  fashion, soon to fade into well-earned obscurity.
But the Celtic Christians did not represent themselves as one of a number of options for spirituality. They did not see themselves as a "corrective" for an  unbalanced church, nor as one element among many in a diverse church. Indeed they were too caught up in the wonder of the Living God to think in such fragmented ways about God's covenant community.

What Celtic Christianity has to offer is not its prophetic stance against the twisted values of our world, nor is it in its status as part of a worldwide religious system. Rather the value inherent  in this way of life is in its rootedness in the supernatural reality of God in Jesus Christ. What may be accomplished in a ministry whose mission is for the healing of the land will not be accomplished by an  individualistic application of personal discipline in the elements of Celtic Christianity. What may be done can only be done by our becoming channels of the supernatural grace, love and power of God. In other words,  it is God who is the healer of the land. Our role is to be that of yielded vessels.

But is that not also true of all Christians everywhere? So again, why Celtic Christian spirituality? Why the Aidan Way? We look to the Celtic saints because their lives are the lives of women and men  who gave over all elements of their culture as a whole to receive the life of God as a whole. If God is to use us as channels for healing and restoration then we not dare limit God's access to us by rejecting any of  the ways through which God chooses to work.

Were it only that simple! The problem that contemporary Christians face is that we are all children of our time. The "time" of the western world is a deeply fragmented time, capable, by  itself, of producing only fragmented people. We do not share a natural sense of the wholeness creation and the intimacy with the Creator of an tribal and agricultural people such as the Celts. Try as we might, not  even an approach to the remnants of the Native American spiritual culture will make us other than what our times have made us. And the Native Americans, being human like the Celtic peoples before them, have their  own share of the fragmentation of sin to deal with.

In our circumstances, to become a people yielded in wholeness means to undertake an intentional reordering of our lives and our priorities. Hence the Aidan Way of Life and the work of the Trust. Our  impact may seem no more than a snowflake on a great branch of a tree, there are so few of us. Yet as our occasional September snows remind us, even snowflakes have their power.
The work of the St. Aidan Celtic  Christian Trust is to create a people whose expression of supernatural wholeness works outward as a little leaven in a great lump of dough. The tools of our work are not the elements of our Way of Life, nor of the  general tenor of Celtic Christianity but the tools of the Wild Goose, the Holy Spirit of God. Having experienced the wholeness of God we seek to spread that wholeness outward for the restoration of wholeness to the  Body of Christ and through that Body to all of creation.
The work of the healing of the land then proceeds from this supernatural base. It is not the restoring of the creation we are about, but the restoring of  God's creation. It is not the reconciliation of people groups for which we work and pray but the reuniting of a human race created in the image and likeness of God. To attempt the work of God with the tools of  humankind leads to fragmentation, contention, persecution and destruction. Of that, our world has already seen enough.

The current fashion for things Celtic will fade quickly as fashions do. But a pattern of life, modeled by the Celtic saints, originating in heaven and rooted in creation, is a pattern that will last.