pat loughery

Earlier this week I wrote an entry recommending “Urban Iona: Celtic Hospitality in the City” (Kurt Neilson) . I did lots of highlightiing and notetaking in this book, which looks dog-eared already even though it’s only been through one read with me. I’m hard on books I guess :-).

In this post, I want to share some quotes from the book with a bit of commentary alongside. Away we go.

Beginning with a juicy nugget from Chapter 3:

It was the wild desert that gave the early Celtic Church its heart and soul.

The desert came to Celtic lands at the fringe of the Empire by way of old Gaul, modern France. John Cassian brought the desert style of monasticism there […]. So the kind of Christianity [in Celtic lands] was a Christianity which honored the passionate seeker and the pilgrim, with a taste for the desert and a gut-level sense that since God was not tame then the people of God had no need of being tame either. the church in Ireland in particular was a monastic church [….] This church flourished while the Empire died and the form of church allied with Empire either faltered or slowly became the new Empire. […] Today the “alternative narrative” of the Celtic way of faith is being re-read and re-told, re-imagined and re-tried, as yet another form of the Empire withers and declines all around us. As we seek an authentic way of faith that is vital and communal, flexible yet passionate, that reaches out to the broken and makes whole our own lives, that loves the world and does not spend energy in condemning those who do not fit by way of race or gender or sexual orientation or language or culture or by any other rigid standard, I think it is time to seek and bring forth something new by unearthing something old.

One of the features of Celtic Christianity is its being unrelated to the Empire the way that Orthodoxy and Catholicism were and sometimes still are. To describe Celtic Christianity as ragtag, unorganized and decentralized is something of an understatement. But it was never politically entangled or even politically astute by any means. I think a large part of the mistrust of Celtic spirituality, and specifically of Pelagius, is that these folks just didn’t know how to play the political games that the Roman church did. The Synod at Whitby, which really marked the beginning of Celtic Christianity’s decline, exhibited the Celtic church’s inability to organize or play by the same rules as the Roman church. I’m not saying that this is a bad thing, but it’s worth thinking about.

If we’re in a moment of Empire now – which I definitely think the American position in the globe reeks mightily of – then it stands to reason that Christianity will develop both within and without Empire. This is part of the reason that I’m so intrigued by Celtic Christianity, and also by monasticism (which also grew at historical moments to counterbalance the moments in which Empire was also growing).

To be continued with Urban Iona…