Gift of Celtic Sight, The

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 1998 by Phillips, Jennifer M

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They called those ages "dark"! Eight days before the first of March some fourteen hundred years ago while the brethren of the Welsh monastery of Cell Muine were singing Matins, it is said, an angel spoke clearly to abbot and bishop Dewi, saying, "The day you have long desired is at hand." Great mourning followed among the brothers and spread throughout the city and the region and finally the whole Island of Britain and even across to Ireland. Then "like bees making for their hives on the approach of a storm" they began to flock to the holy man: monks, mystics, the prayerful faithful, those itinerant, mendicant-belied preachers who roamed the countryside to the dismay of the Roman Church missionaries, even common men and women wailing as for a dying father.

For eight days, it is said, Dewi never left his church, praising God and presiding at the liturgy and preaching, and on Sunday immediately after feeding the congregation, he was stricken with pains and illness. He blessed the people, saying, "Be joyful, brothers and sisters. Keep your faith and do the little things that you have seen and heard from me." And properly, his hagiography records that, on the third day while the brothers again sang Matins, the place was filled with the fragrance of incense and blossom, and Jesus appeared to the old bishop who said, "Take me with you," and went with Christ as his companion into the company of the saints in light.l

Be joyful, brothers and sisters. Keep your faith and do the little things you have seen and heard from me.

My Godparents Owen lived in a big stone house on the lower slopes of the Carneddu hills of North Wales, overlooking the Menai straits and Ynys Mon, the island renamed by the English, Anglesey. Nearby runs a little river, more of a stream, plummeting down from the sheep-cropped mountains through a village built from its stones and a ravine of replanted oaks-once sacred to the deities of the place-and into the sea. There I holidayed as a child, helped with haymaking in the meadow through which ran the hummock of a Roman Road, and there, in the rafters of a twelfth-century barn which was the courthouse of Prince Llewlyn I hid from the steamy-flanked monstrous tide of cattle that rumbled in, purposeful, for their dinner. And there also, I had confirmed in me some instinct toward a certain sort of seeing which recreated the world in which I traveled into a place translucent to a sacred dimension and humming with a current of glory.

It has been the work of decades to trace my ancestry through generations in London and Cornwall, back to the Welsh border country, and to unfold the literature and language of that Celtic heritage which I've felt so keenly since the age of four. In an American high school, it was weird and nerdy to hole up in the library or under the playground trees and write poetry. But in Wales, ask any cattleman leaning on the gate, any publican pumping ale, any accountant dodging the downpour in a bus shelter, and the odds are good he or she might quote you a few stanzas of a poem in progress. . or recite a favorite stretch of Gwenallt or Euros Bowen. In a court of law, you might still hear a poet of the ninth century quoted as an authoritative voice. Strange, in a stony, poor, long-occupied country which took to a severe Calvinism from the Continent which matched its climate and economy, that Methodism erupted into a coexistent polyphonic hymnody that is still sternumshakingly glorious. Strange that the ancient music, bardic poetry, and language which were outlawed continued on and now have exploded into a great literary and language revival which is felt even among Celtophiles over here. Curious that the old rift between the Anglican Church in Wales-the church of the English occupation-a thin thread of Roman Catholicism, and the prevalent homegrown chapel traditions is mending now, in a common rediscovery of some of the riches of the Celtic Christian past. Almost beyond belief that in the 1990s Celts from Brittany, both parts of Ireland, Wales (Cymru), Scotland and Cornwall should be cherishing dreams of a Pan-Celtic alliance, or even nation! Odd but fitting that even in America Christians and new-ageists in equal measure are entranced by collections of runes, prayers and incantations from the Celtic highlands and islands and the vision they hold out for an environmental ethic which seems almost modern.

It would be a mistake to assume that the Celtic cultures were monolithic. Each region carries its distinctive threads, and generalizations across them must be tentative. Nor did the spread of Roman Christianity unfold in just the same way in each region. Since Celtic writings come to us from centuries after the Roman influence began, it is not possible to separate out with certainty the origins of particular thoughts and styles; again observations must be tentative. The Celtic influence spans centuries, and generalizing across time also is a delicate matter, yet there seem to be elements of Celtic style and thought discernible despite all these difficulties.