One of the best books I've read this year is a small volume entitled, Listening for the Heartbeat of God. One day in January that beautiful brown
box with the curvy Amazon arrow showed up and
greeted me upon coming home from work. After dinner Lynn and I turned
off the television, curled up on the love-seat by the fire, and spent
the evening reading. I nearly finished the whole book
before bedtime. I couldn't put it down. In a way, it was almost as if
my soul had returned to a long forgotten place where authentic intimacy with and worship of Christ had not yet been swallowed up by institutional religion.
This book provides us with a glimpse into Celtic Christ-centered spirituality as contrasted with Roman Christendom. Let me share with you a bit of the journey I took through its pages.
The first thing you need to understand is that nearly all of our Christian experience in this country finds it's roots in the Roman Empire. Catholic and protestant expressions of faith all emerge out of the Roman branch of Christianity. What we don't often hear about are the branches of Christianity that emerged outside of Roman influence and managed to remain untainted by the abusive, oppressive, and often heretical Papal influence and the later hyper-Calvinist system of isolation and exclusion.
A purely British, non-Roman Christian stream began around the early fourth century primarily through the ministry of a man named Pelagius whom the Roman church later declared to be a heretic (yet a careful reading of his own writings may leave you convinced that perhaps he wasn't as much a heretic as he was a threat to Roman control and domination). This stream of Christianity flourished and managed to remain free of Roman infection until the Synod of Whitby in 664 finally pushed it to the margins where it eventually faded, though never entirely disappeared.
First, some contrasts between the Celtic stream of Christianity and the Roman stream of Christianity, in which most of us today remain:
Celtic Christian spirituality emphasizes the ability to listen to the voice of God and experience His presence in all of life. Roman Christian spirituality emphasizes that the voice of God and the experience of His redemptive presence is only to be found within the church, her doctrines, and sacraments performed by a "properly ordained" priesthood.
The Roman church's view on humanity and creation begins with the fall. Therefore, everything human and everything natural is viewed as evil, sinful, and entirely void of God's goodness. The Celtic view on humanity and creation begins with creation and the Creator's pronouncements of "It is good" and humanity being created in the "image of God." Where the Roman stream believes that humans are an entirely evil species which must be transformed into a new creation by God's grace, the Celtic believers believed that the goodness of God remains in creation and the human condition is that of God's image-bearers imprisoned by sin, yet longing to be freed by God's grace and restored to the righteous species we were created to be. Roman spirituality declares that the fall erased the image of God from our humanity. Celtic spirituality believes that the image of God remains, though it is imprisoned by sin.
The Roman church locates it's authority in the person of St. Peter as a symbol of faithful action and outward unity. The Celtic church honors all of the saints, but resonates most deeply with the person of St. John, the beloved disciple who leaned into the chest of the Savior at the Last Supper and listened to the heartbeat of God.
Next, I'll simply share with you a series of quotes from the book.
"Celtic Christian spirituality is one of deep and rich perspective, with origins in the mystical traditions of the Old and New Testaments."
"How many of us were taught actually to look for God within creation and to recognize the world as the place of revelation and the whole of life as sacramental? Were we not for the most part led to think that spirituality is about looking away from life, so that the Church is distanced from the world and spirit is almost entirely divorced from the matter of our bodies, our lives, and the world?"
"In the old Celtic prayers the lights of the skies, the sun and moon and stars, are referred to as graces, the spiritual coming through the physical, and God is seen as the Life within all life and not just the Creator who set life in motion from afar."
"Pelagius maintained that the image of God can be seen in every newborn child and that, although obscured by sin, it exists at the heart of every person, waiting to be released through the grace of God. He argued this despite increasing acceptance throughout the Western Church of Augustine's teaching that every child is born sinful. Augustine believed that the image of God can be restored to us only though the Church and it's sacraments. He thus developed a spirituality that accentuated a division between the church, which was seen as holy, on the one hand and the life of the world, perceived as godless, on the other."
If you're interested in looking at the book for yourself, click here.
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