Celtic Hospitality in Community

Celtic Spirituality: Celtic sacred life of hospitality in Community

         “I sought my God;

    My God I could not see.

    I sought my soul

    My soul eluded me.

    I sought my brother

    And I found all three.”

In the Celtic hospitality tradition, God is present not only in Nature, but also in our neighbor, ourselves, and especially in the stranger. This is a sacredness in relationships. I am told there is no word in the Irish language for private property. Faith is lived in a community with a combination of periodic seclusion and community and mission.

Anamchara or soul friends or spiritual friends or spiritual directors are essential relationships. Women are regarded as equals, and communities are not hierarchical. Monasteries rather than parishes are the basis of the church. The Celts value education, art, and music.

We traveled to Iona off the western coast of Scotland twice and would return in a heartbeat. You don’t simply stumble on Iona, however. You have to want to go there by ferry, down a one-lane winding road, and finally walking over on a ferry onto the small, three-mile-long island in the Inner Hebrides where Columba brought Celtic Christianity to England in 563. Here, the breathtakingly illuminated manuscripts of The Book of Kells is believed to have begun to be written at the end of the 8th century.

Iona is considered an exceptionally “thin” space where the membrane between the spiritual and the secular is extremely thin. This was our experience as well. You walk a lot, eat good food, worship outdoors in the ancient abbey and a decaying nunnery, listen to the wind and waves, study high crosses, wear warm clothing, and watch the sea change the color of the abundant million-year-old rocks by the shoreline.

I often meet with spiritual friends who describe Celtic Spirituality when they have no name for it. This seems a sign of the universality of this type of spirituality. The sacred presence of God in each of us is a start.

Again, further reading might include Philip Newell’s Celtic Benediction, John Miriam Jones’s With an Eagle’s Eye, Esther de Waal’s Celtic Way of Prayer, and John O’Donohue’s Anam Cara.

Joanna    https://www.joannaseibert.com/

Forgetting the Sacred in Each Other

Forgetting the Sacred within each other

 “Do not be shy about claiming the visions you have seen. In our time and culture, it is not as common for people to speak of their spiritual visions, but that does not mean they have ceased appearing.

The Spirit still sends messages to each of us, images unique to our experience, flashes of meaning for us to interpret and understand. Some we seek, some come unbidden, but all are authentic parts of a spiritual life. The sacred is a visual realm. Wisdom is in what we see.”—Bishop Steven Charleston Daily Facebook Page, June 27, 2018.

Salish Chief

We pass the town of St. Ignatius in the Flathead Indian Reservation on the way to Glacier National Park. The name of Ignatius is sacred to many for what this saint taught us so many years ago.

 I previously visited the church there at the foot of the Mission Mountains, known for its original biblical paintings on the ceiling and walls painted by one of the brothers, believed to be the cook!

My daughter tells me there was a boarding school there where young Salish Indian children were taken from their homes to become “civilized.” The student were punished if they ever spoke in their native Salish language. The Jesuits were certain they were doing the right thing, changing the Native Americans into Europeans.

This story is a constant reminder that we, as well, may be so assured about the God of our understanding that we forget to honor the part of God in our neighbor. We hope to remember to honor the God of our spiritual friends’ understanding. We may tell them about the God of love we know and share our experience. We may listen to the God of love of their understanding, but we do not insist that ours is the only way to encounter God.

Each of us has a part of the divine within. Our job is to realize that part of God within ourselves, help those we meet to find the God within themselves, and look for similarities in our relationship with God. We also learn so much from others about the divine presence in their lives, honor it, and care for it. It is sacred.

Today, we are beginning to realize the power of Native American spirituality, which for hundreds of years we falsely were certain was not God.

Joanna https://www.joannaseibert.com/

Spiritual Gifts

 Buechner: Spiritual Gifts

“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”—Frederick Buechner.

Our Sunday lectionary readings often are about a call, the call of the disciples, Jonah, Moses, and Paul’s call.
 In today’s world, Frederick Buechner gives us the best advice about how to find our ministry in perhaps his most quoted phrase about the meeting of “our deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger.”

The Spirit gives us gifts for our ministry for doing God’s work. “The varieties of our gifts” are mentioned in 1 Corinthians 12, but we are unaware of many other spiritual gifts.

The Rev. Dr. Kate Alexander reminded us recently that we must not limit our spiritual gifts to those described in biblical times. Many spiritual gifts may initially not seem “spiritual.” She gives the example of proofing the Sunday bulletin to further God’s work as a vital ministry performed by people with a very detailed, unique ministry.

We must remember that the gifts are to further the work of God, not necessarily our work, our agenda, or our goals.

Besides giving us several inventories, material from the Stephen Ministry by Stephen Haugk leads us through other clues to our spiritual gifts. For example, the skills we see in our most admired person may be ours. The gift we use to bring about our most fulfilling life events may be our gift. The action of Jesus we most appreciate may be our gift.

 I also learned from Lloyd Edwards’s book Discerning Your Spiritual Gifts that significant gifts may come from our woundedness. For example, those in recovery stay by helping others recover from addiction. Likewise, those who have experienced the death of a significant person are often the ones who can later best help heal others who are grieving.

Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak is another classic book about where and how God leads us into the servant ministry God has created us to participate in.

My experience is that I am using my gift when the ministry in which I am involved energizes me. I put energy in, and more comes out. The tried and true biblical fruit of the Spirit can also indicate when we are using our spiritual gifts. Galatians 5 reveals that when we are connected to and guided by the Spirit, we will feel and know “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.”

God seeks each of us out and calls us by name. We are each so needed today and tomorrow in our troubled world, healing that only each one of us uniquely can do, where “our deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger.”
Joanna    https://www.joannaseibert.com/