pat loughery

I want to recommend a movie that I’ve just finished watching for the second time. It’s a documentary in a series called “Pillars of Faith”, and this edition is called “Celtic Saints”. I found it on Blockbuster Online at http://www.blockbuster.com/online/catalog/movieDetails?movieId=157885.

It’s a good documentary for insight into the Celtic Christian history, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that one of the experts interviewed was Ray Simpson, who we’ll get to meet at Lindisfarne according to the itinerary (woohoo!) J The movie is a bit under an hour long and has brief sketches of the Venerable Bede and Saints Patrick, Bridget, Columba, David of Wales, Aidan and Hilda along with some good background historical information. There is stock footage of the islands of Iona and Lindisfarne as well.

The following is a quick transcription of a quote from Ray which closes out the documentary:

Celtic spirituality is not top down form of church, but bottom up.

It allows spirituality to flow from the heart. It allows the five senses to be used; it’s creative, it’s a flowering of creative arts. It’s an expression of Christianity which believes to be Christian is to be fully human. It is restoring meditation as a way of life. It is unthreatening in its form of church.

And as people question whether the shelf life of the forms of church that we’ve had in the second millennium has come to the end, the imperial form you might call it, Celtic spirituality is coming into its own. It’s offering an alternative model from within the Christian tradition which may be far more relevant to the third millennium.