pat loughery

Wednesday – Day 5

On Wednesday we took our bus from Oban to Dunblane, which would act as our home base for trips to Edinburgh and Lindisfarne.

During the trip, Jock gave us an orientation to the evening’s speaker, Peter Niellson. Jock gave us four themes of Peter’s concept of mission: First, finding ways to create spaces for people in the urban environment; second, acting as chaplain to a culture, trying to understand what to change and what not to change in the methods of evangelism; third, wrestling with how to use church buildings in a more multi functional nature; and fourth, how to invest in the ordinary lives of ordinary people.

Peter appears to be on the forefront of the missional church movement among Scottish Presbyterians. His work in urban Glasgow is connecting with people where they live, and not expecting people to come into the church’s space and culture before being recognized.

After our orientation, I was handed a copy of one of Ray Simpson’s books. Ray leads the Community of Aidan and Hilda on Lindisfarne, which would end up being my most important connection on the trip. The appendix of the book I was handed included the community’s Rule of Life, the common spirituality that members of the community lived by. I appreciated its flavor, its call to simplicity, chastity (not just in sexual terms) and obedience.

It is at this place in my notes that I see my major a-ha moment. I have a sparse page, and I know that it was in or around Callender that I felt clarity about my doctoral studies. I’ve been on the journey of this work not really knowing what I wanted to focus my studies toward. I had felt a vague sense that I would focus on some form or experience or prayer, and I’ve also felt a deep interest in monasticism. I knew that my favorite project so far was from last spring for Christian History, for which I wrote about the ways that Benedictine spirituality was helpful for me as the pastor of a suburban, missional church.

I wrote that I wanted to explore how spiritual formation occurs in various historical streams: Celtic, Benedictine, Jesuit, Orthodox, perhaps from Taize – and understand how these historical foundations are useful for our everyday, workaday world – especially for those of us who are not in monasteries.

Two months later, I still feel a sense that this is generally the right focus for me, though I’m sure the details will change somewhat.

We stopped in the city of Callender to meet with Stan Brooke, who discussed St. Kessock. Stan’s brief conversation with us described implications for urban mission, and I found Stan to be the most consciously Celtic in his discussion with us. I was surprised that so many others that we heard from had vague impressions of the unique flavor of Celtic spirituality, but Stan had clearly considered its historical inheritance deeply.

When we asked Stan to tell us how Celtic spirituality influences him most deeply, he described the theology of place that is inherent in the form. In Celtic spirituality, there is a palpable sense that the membrane between this place and heaven is thin, and that approaching the holy is easy. Stan compared this sense to the Hebrew sense of place, reminding us of places like Bethel in the Old Testament, where God’s people memorialized their experience of his presence at wells, rivers, trees and other natural locations.

Stan described the Celtic sense of God being everywhere – not animists, thinking that God was the cat or the tree, but that creation speaks the presence of God. As a result of this sense of God’s imminence, we can now discover and find within everyday life ways of simply following the way of Jesus.

Stan described part of his pastoral theology here. He said that we can see the interaction between Scripture and culture several ways. One way is to be directive: to tell people to do what the Bible says. Another is to be correlative: to see what questions society is asking, and see the Bible as the answer. A third way is shared commonality: To see the Bible as a guide, along with the engagement of the Holy Sprint, in understanding the needs of an area and the stories of the people in the area. This sense allows the Bible to be a story rather than a set of rules.

In describing the implications of this approach, Stan talked about the church being a community, a living organism that lets the transcendent be expressed through thin spaces and through commonality between the stories of people and the story of God. He said that he “stopped dressing like Batman and speaking Middle English”, and instead became more involved in breakfast clubs, in starting clothes cupboards and lunch clubs for the poor. And he trained his people to work in teams, coming alongside the needy to be advocates, listeners, and counselors.

Understanding the possibility of being overwhelmed, he matter-of-factly said that he encouraged prioritization and letting people serve with their head, heart and spirit – and simply understanding that “you try to do what you can”, and you don’t get frustrated with what you can’t do.

Stan left us with one more thought. In describing some of the differences between Scottish and American approaches, he described a great gift of Americans: We’re not afraid to try something and fail. This gave me encouragement to keep trying, to keep finding a way forward.

We enjoyed a brief lunch in Dunblane at a fantastic bakery, and I found a kilted skirt for my daughter and a kilt for my son.

The bus took us to Dunblane, where we stayed at the Scottish Churches House. I was able to walk through the city and explore it, and to take a few pictures as well.

After a fine dinner, we heard fro Peter Nielson, who is involved in “creating new patterns of church for a new generation”. I found Peter’s talk the most substantive of the trip, and was very happy to see that he brought books with him which fleshed out his topics more fully.

Peter described missional theology and strategy in Celtic couplets that may appear to be in tension but aren’t.

The first couplet described Celtic spirituality as both journey and monastery.

Celtic explorers made their way at least as far as Iceland to the west and throughout northern Europe to the south and east. Currently in Scotland, the church sees ministry in territorial and parish models. But Peter walked through the streets of Glasgow during all times of day and night, weekdays and weekends, and found a different group of people there. “On the streets, my training made no sense”. He realized that in the commuter and club culture in his city, “these are God’s people, though maybe they don’t know it yet.”

He reminded us that Celtic monks made their journey to what they saw as “their place of resurrection”, the place that they would die and be reborn in God. They would often establish monasteries in these places of resurrection. Those monasteries were places of heart (nurturing a heart for God), home (to friend and stranger) and hub (from which more missionary journeys would take place). Monasteries weren’t places to bring people in, but places to equip people to GO from. Celtic monasteries were models of flexibility and mobility. They were not part of Latin Christendom. They established liturgies in the common vernacular for non-literate people. The Celtic saint Columbanus was a great monastery builder, and through the monasteries of Columbines, the Benedictine rule spread through Europe. It is possible that the Benedictine rule of stability, wherein a monk was firmly rooted in one monastery for life, was a reaction to Columbanus and the Celtic urge to journey.

The second couplet is wells and monsters. In the Celtic culture, people met at wells, and wells were places of local spirituality. (I was reminded of the image of wells in Frost & Hirsch’s book, The Shaping of Things to Come). Peter described today’s missionary challenge to find places of belonging in local culture in order to connect people. This means becoming part of the everyday pattern and routine of our lives and that we should NOT in the church try to create another subculture separate from peoples’ everyday patterns.

Regarding monsters, Peter related the historically late myth about Columbanus seeing the Loch Ness monster, and having some of his followers attacked by it, but fighting miraculously against it. His point was that we should challenge the powers that challenge the community. Peter told us thee story of the monks at the monastery in Aberdeen, near a slave trading port, who would take the money given to them for upkeep of the monastery and either purchase slaves’ freedom with it, or offer to take a slave’s place to grant his freedom at the cost of their own slavery.

The third couplet is caim and coracle.

The caim is an encircling prayer, taking a form similar to, “Encircle us, God; keep fear without and strength within”. It is a physical prayer with a strong sense of place. When discussing Caim, Peter said this item, which I circled and starred on my page: “Go deep with the few and God will go deep with the many”. It reminded me of somebody who mentioned that Jesus’ core plan was to take twelve people and shape them, and they would change the world. This encourages me also; the shape of the church that I pastored was never large, and my interests don’t lie in huge organizations. I am much more attracted to relationship with a few deeply committed followers of Jesus and people with difficult questions about God.

The coracle was the Celtic transportation system – a wood-and-hide boat, sometimes with oars and sometimes with sails. Coracles were used to disperse Celtic travelers for centuries, and between the coracle and the sense of God in creation, Celtic monks often repeated that “the winds of God have brought us here”. They allowed themselves to not be in control. Peter described the Celtic love of the Gospel of John as being due to John’s “theology and spirituality of insecurity”, and reminded us that “being saved does not equal being safe”. Peter told us stories of Brendan the Navigator, who is said to have reached Newfoundland in a coracle, and encouraged us to be on “a journey of not knowing”.

That fits completely with my own understanding of my faith journey at this point: I have no idea what is next, but I’m comfortable not knowing.

The fourth couplet is cows and angels.

Cows are a reminder that there is no true sacred/secular divide. Everydayness is about spiritual life. The Celts “baptized” everything, purifying it before God. They baptized the Druid sacred spaces and used them as their own, and they baptized holidays and festivals. Celtic monks lived on a diet of the psalms, which Peter described as “bringing the whole of us before the whole of God”.

I’ve found for years that I’m most drawn to the Psalms of all the Scriptures. I love the poetry and the beauty of them, but I especially love the raw emotion in them. I love that the psalmist implores God to bash the children of his enemies against stones – not that God would do this, but that the psalmist’s raw emotion was received by God as okay. The images we heard of the saints praying the psalms while standing in the ocean were romantic and attractive to me.

Angels are a reminder that amidst our sense of everydayness, there IS a spiritual reality that is transcendent. There is one reality, visible and invisible, even though our enlightenment worldview only has room for the visible and tangible.

Peter takes teams into psychic fairs and offers healing prayer and listening prayer.

The fifth couplet is horse and rider.

Peter described a sculpture in Edinburgh titled Horse and Rider, which is a symbol of power and domination. He sees that symbol as similar to the church, where “Christendom put church at the center and Jesus at the edge”.

He told an alternate story, of Aidan at Lindisfarne. Aidan was given a horse by the king, but gave his horse away to the first beggar family that he met. This act was a symbol of kenosis, the same self-emptying that Jesus did and is described in the poem in Philippians 2.

Peter’s synopsis of his couplets was interesting to me. He asked the question, “what’s new in this understanding of the church?”, and answered it himself: “Nothing, really. There’s nothing new here.” But Peter’s thesis was the Celtic way fits the postmodern way, as the postmodern world responds to story, image, and mystery.

I asked Peter to talk about monastic models that he has seen and can recommend. Peter again referred to the community of Aidan and Hilda on Lindisfarne as a good model, and also described the 24×7 prayer movement’s Boiler rooms as having what appear to be monastic rules. He also discussed Northumbria Community’s experience as a dispersed community and trying to understand urban monasteries.

Peter discussed the Raven community he works with which is for the clubbers in Glasgow. He discussed some of the illustrations of ravens in culture: Elijah being fed by ravens; the raven as the unpredictable trickster in Native American cultures, and that a group of ravens is called an “unkindness of ravens”. He reminded us to never be romantic about Christian community, which reminded me of the same exhortation in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book Life Together. Peter also told us that the hospitality that we were about to experience on Lindisfarne with the Community of Aidan and Hilda “was paid for with blood, sweat and tears”, and to not take it lightly.

One of the students asked Peter to share his perspective on Pelagius, who had easily become the central theological figure in our reading and discussions. Peter responded that Pelagius did NOT minimize evil, but that he did disagree with Augustine’s distortion of the brokenness of humanity. He encouraged us to go farther back past Pelagius to Irenaus in our thoughts about a theology of evil. And Peter closed with this nugget, saying that the Celts though of evil more as external than as internal to humanity.

That evening, many of the students went to a warm little pub next door to where we were staying. At that pub, I had a fun conversation with the bartender about Dunblane. When I told her we were studying Celtic spirituality, she told me about Dunblane’s fame as a center for spirituality. Dunblane, she said, was one of the only places in the world where three lay lines met together, and if we were here for the new moon next week, we would see the fog along each lay line at night. I hadn’t heard about Dunblane and lay lines, but I had heard about Iona in a similar sense when reading about the island from new age perspectives. I asked the bartender whether there were still people who practiced as Druids in the area, and our conversation was abruptly over, with the bartender very uneasy and uncomfortable.