I used to host retreats on what is popularly known as “Celtic Spirituality.” I was good at it, largely because I found the whole concept a relief from a particularly patriarchal and oppressive church experience I was caught in. I focused on the seasons and poetry and art and the holiness of the ordinary. We wrote protective prayers and celebrated outdoor Eucharists and memorized Yeats. It was lovely and it felt good and there was a lot of truth and insight in it that I still cherish. But I began to notice a problem.
I included some recent writers in the movement for morning and evening prayer but I had a commitment to using as many of the ancient texts as I could. I had spent several years in graduate school trying to wrestle a dissertation out of Early Christian Irish art because I was fascinated by the intricate patterns and interlaces that I believed were a language and one that I wanted to learn. I had had to give it up because you can’t footnote an oral culture, but I still had a fierce loyalty to what that language was, rather than what later writers pronounced it to be. Remembering that commitment, I began to worry that I was simply picking and choosing the parts I liked.
When I delved into anthologies of the poetry and practices of the early Irish saints, I kept stumbling across things that were uncomfortable to me. I was looking for a spiritual system based on a reverence for the natural world, a joy in honoring the new moon, for example, and I kept running across asceticism and penitentials and, let’s be honest, some pretty odd behavior. There’s the story of Kevin, for instance.
Kevin was a 7th century saint who had retreated from the world, gone off into a wild place by the beautiful lake at Glendalough and become a hermit. The story goes that he was praying in his tiny chapel with his arms outstretched when a blackbird landed in his palm, built a nest, and laid some eggs. According to the story, so devoted was Kevin to the forces of nature, so courteous was he to the bird, that he stayed where he was, arms outstretched, until the eggs hatched and the chicks fledged. The story is iconic. Seamus Heaney wrote a poem about it. It is the perfect vignette to invoke Celtic Spirituality but …. I began to wonder …. I’m missing something.
I don’t know what motivated Kevin, of course, but whatever it was, it was not to provide nature-centered parables for modern seekers trying to fill a hole in their own spirituality and therein lies an ethical problem. If the elements these seekers find do fill a need, where’s the harm in taking them as inspiration? To which I respond that it’s fine so far as it goes, but it does Kevin and his compatriots a disservice. By seeing only the courtesy to a blackbird and not Kevin’s belief in self-discipline, it takes all the bite, the depth, the difficulty out of the practices of these early saints.
Whatever the real Celtic Christianity was—and we really don’t have the answer to that, only clues—it wasn’t about trying to live at one with nature. Those men (there were women, too, and their story is mostly different) were trying to live at one with God and they were doing it in ways that, frankly, I wished they hadn’t. To understand the universe this story lives in, though, one has to take it all in, even the uncomfortable bits. The penitentials, the asceticism, the shunning of society, all of which seem grim to me, are not, if I’m being honest with myself, optional. They aren’t the only thing, but they provide ballast, gravitas, to what might otherwise dissolve into romanticism and superficiality.
So on St. Patrick’s Day (don’t get me started on him, but that’s for another time), pay attention. Anyone who wants to throw around clichés about “the luck of the Irish” hasn’t read history. There are the famine roads, for instance, and the Vikings, and the British. There is the fact that the Irish faced widespread discrimination when they emigrated to this country. It isn’t all shamrocks and leprechauns.
So drink the green beer for goodness sake, but somewhere in the midst of the silliness, raise a glass to Kevin and his aching arms and his blackbird.