Celtic Blessings E-Book

Laurence Wareing

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 47

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Writing well over a thousand years ago, the Celtic saints and their followers who penned them reflected not just the cares and concerns of their own times, but also gave voice to the universal human experience – the hopes, fears, joys and anxieties that are as much part of modern existence as they were in the Dark Ages. Meditations on birth, death and everything else that comes in between, as well as comments on the rhythms of everyday life, are mixed with musings on the natural world, the divine and, of course, the eternal questions that everyone asks.

Leseprobe

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by

Birlinn Ltd

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

ISBN: 978 1 78027 569 7

Introductory material copyright © Laurence Wareing 2020

Illustrations copyright © Abigail Salvesen, 2020

The right of Laurence Wareing be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

Designed and typeset by Mark Blackadder

Printed and bound by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow

For Helen,companion on the wayand the best of partners

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Facing the day

2. For every task a blessing

3. Prayers on the way

4. Ever-present dangers

5. Hope in the darkness

Sources

Acknowledgements

‘Let us adore the Lord’; ‘God be with me against all trouble’; ‘Christ’s cross over this face’ from Gerard Murphy, Early Irish Lyrics: eighth to twelfth century (1998: Dublin, Four Courts Press), reproduced with permission.

‘O helper of workers’ from Thomas Owen Clancy and Gilbert Márkus, Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery (1995: Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press), reproduced with permission of Edinburgh University Press through PLSclear.

‘From this shield this day I call’, trans. Fr Noel O’Donoghue, from James P. Mackey (ed.), An Introduction to Celtic Christianity (1989: Edinburgh, T&T Clark Ltd), reproduced by permission of T&T Clark Ltd, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

It was a pleasure to be able to draw upon Roy Pinkerton’s expertise for the translation of the‘Blessing of the three boys’, and a reminder that Latin can be good fun over a coffee.

I’ve been increasingly grateful to be asked to produce this companion volume to Celtic Saints: Lives of the Holy Exiles. For all the shadowy complexity of their provenance, these blessings do seem to express something of ancient lives now largely hidden by the mists of time. More importantly, reading them over repeatedly has turned me from a sceptic into an advocate of their enduring value and strength. Ann Crawford and Andrew Simmons have again been patient and helpful supporters through the compilation process. As always, Helen helped me get my thoughts into shape, as only she knows how.

Introduction

Running through the lives of the Celtic saints is a sense of connection with the natural world. It is what makes their stories, and writings associated with them, at once ancient and remote and yet also insistently relevant to our present-day lives.

The very few writings we have from the Celtic saints, together with the oral and written traditions that echo their priorities, are marked with vivid pictures of the world they inhabited. Sometimes just a single phrase evokes those aspects of nature they enjoyed but with which they also contended as they travelled, preached and took shelter. To our eyes and ears, these writings seem ancient partly because they focus on the basics of life that we nowadays summon with a flick of a switch or grab in haste in a local supermarket. At the same time, in their evocations of the world, they remind us of the very environments and natural events to which we are, again, turning our attention with ever-growing urgency.

By repeatedly evoking the presence of the sun or the unpredictable power of the sea and by naming the important things in their lives (fire, cattle, four walls for shelter), the inhabitants of Celtic traditions offer memorable symbols for the world around us and of the fundamentals of life that we mostly take for granted. Their words help us reconnect with the earth from which we came and to which we will return. Within a single prayer, if we pause to breathe its meaning, we may experience simultaneously the mundane and the miraculous.

It is significant that these recurring symbols are so often wrapped in a blessing. Ian Bradley, a historian of Celtic Christianity, wonders whether this marked characteristic of the tradition ‘reflects a pre-Christian Celtic sense of the power of the spoken word to heal and to harm’.

The summoning of such a power is not at all remote from our modern experience. A single tweet may arouse widespread anger and even spark violent responses. What the blessings included in this small volume remind us, though, is that the opposite may also be true: that a benediction or a word of grace contains the potential to establish the context or the frame of mind in which good and beneficial actions may take place. A blessing, in other words, is not just a perfunctory sentence or two at the close of a worship service or a bland greeting (‘Good morning to you’). It embodies both the offering of hope and a call to action – to ourselves and to others. A blessing is transformative.

This collection is an abundant resource for everyone but, for those who have also read its companion volume, Celtic Saints: Lives of the Holy Exiles, it also endeavours to reflect themes and priorities that feature in those lives. In a few instances, this book draws on words attributed to the saints. Like many others, I have returned to Alexander Carmichael’s influential collection of songs, prayers and poems from the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, Carmina Gadelica. I have also sought out other, older sources – the models for countless modern echoes and adaptations of the Celtic Blessing tradition. And the inclusion of ‘The blessing of the three boys’ from the seventh-century