Have you ever had one of those moments where many seemingly unrelated experiences, inclinations, and convictions have crystallized into one coherent thread? Like puzzle pieces scattered across years of your life, which, without warning, come together into a picture you didn’t even know you were assembling? I had such an experience reading John Philip Newell’s Listening for the Heartbeat of God, A Celtic Spirituality. Parishioner John Wilson recently recommended it to me, and though the book had quietly gathered dust on my shelf for years, I picked it up—especially as it aligned beautifully with the pilgrimage Jacob and I were planning to southeast Scotland and the eastern coast of England.
Long before this recent journey, elements of Celtic spirituality had quietly permeated my life. Since college, I have prayed from a worn copy of Celtic Night Prayer from the Northumbria Community and resonated with its immediacy and poetry. During my sabbatical in 2022, I enjoyed a transformative solo retreat on the island of Iona, the ancient seat of Celtic Christianity. I was inspired by the work of George MacLeod, the founder of the modern Iona Community, whose passion for justice and nonviolence shaped a new spiritual movement in the 20th century. I have always held a special love for the Gospel of John, whose mysticism and profound beauty speak of a love that transcends and yet permeates the everyday. And I have long felt that God is just as present in and concerned with what goes on outside of the church building as in it.
In seminary, I had dutifully learned the story of the Synod of Whitby in 664, where King Oswiu of Northumbria decided in favor of aligning customs and teaching with the Roman church. That decision effectively marked the decline of the independent Celtic church. I also learned about the 4th-century figure Pelagius, often labeled a heretic for his supposed denial of the doctrine of original sin and the necessity of grace. Yet no one had ever told me that Pelagius was a Celtic monk—or that his “heresy” may have been a mischaracterized insistence on the original goodness of creation and the image of God in every human soul.
Reading Newell’s book was like following a golden thread through these fragments. He draws together a vision of Christianity rooted not in separation from the world, but in deep, loving attentiveness to it. Celtic spirituality sees the world as “shot through with holiness.” It affirms that human beings are not, first and foremost, sinful or broken. Instead, we bear within us the divine image— imago Dei—an image that, though often obscured by sin, remains intact at our core. Rather than seeking escape from the world in pursuit of holiness, Celtic Christianity listens for God’s heartbeat within it, in the ordinary and the sublime, in the sacred and the seemingly mundane.
Newell champions the early Celtic Christians’ belief that their approach was like that of St. John, the evangelist and “beloved disciple,” who at the last supper rested his head on Jesus’ chest, listening to the heartbeat of God. They continued listening for that heartbeat in all of creation and in the day-to-day of human life. The Roman church, following St. Peter, found God in a holiness that separated itself from the world, often in the walls of the church, and built up its defenses against sin and evil. Celtic spirituality, on the other hand, even after its suppression, continued to seek out God in the mundane as well as the transcendent, in church and in cow-pastures. As Newell puts it, “To look to God is to look not away from life but more deeply into it.”
When forced to go underground, Newell claims, Celtic spirituality continued in the prayers and lives of the people, particularly in Wales, Ireland, and the highlands and islands of Scotland. The 19th century scholar Alexander Carmichael compiled prayers and songs handed down orally for centuries in the Carmina Gadelica. These prayers, including a blessing on the “bed-companion of my love” and holy greetings for the sun and the moon, provided an earthy, integrative counterpart to the rigid Calvinism that became the line of the official Church of Scotland after the Reformation. Celtic spirituality showed up in theologians the official church continued to deem heretics like John Scotus Eriugena in the 9th century and Alexander Scott in the 19th. It shaped the Christian Socialist movement that emerged during the Industrial Revolution, when churches began advocating for the poor, creating schools, and securing livable housing. And it turned up in the literature of people like George MacDonald (a major influence on CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien), who found fairytales a perfect vehicle for spiritual teaching at once light-hearted and profound.
I had always cherished the idea that before Henry VIII declared himself head of the Church of England, officially founding the Anglican/Episcopal Church, before the Synod of Whitby ruled in favor of a more clerical, hierarchical, sin-focused form of Christianity in Britain, the Celtic church had existed. Based in monasteries and led by women as well as men, balancing contemplation and action, finding God in beautiful art, worship, and sacred spaces as well as in all of creation, I treasured the idea that this form of Christianity, which had developed in relative isolation in the British Isles for a couple hundred years before encountering its Roman cousin, was where the true roots of the Anglican Church were to be found. After reading Newell’s book, after walking in the footsteps of the Celtic saints and standing on the cliffs of Whitby, I have ceased to claim Celtic Christianity as part of Anglican identity and have simply come to accept that I am a Celtic Christian.
And I believe Celtic Christianity is a heritage we all share. As those who went before us heard the heartbeat of God echoing in scripture and tradition, in the world around them, and deeply in their own souls, so we too, each generation afresh, have the call to listen, to hear, and to live out of that Love that made us, redeems us, and continues to make us new.
If you are interested in a book study on Listening for the Heartbeat of God or in exploring elements of Celtic Christianity, please let me know! revamy@grace-episcopal.org
Recent Comments