Gift of Celtic Sight, The

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 1998 by Phillips, Jennifer M

Torture did rack them, disembowelling rend,

Ere the sight where a ladder was given their souls to ascend

To the broad next morning of Golgotha, their blest Lord's world without end.ls

Even the Devil has a place in the unfolding of the sacred story, and so brings inadvertent blessing, as in this sixth-century Irish legend:

The shipwright who made the Ark left empty a place for a nail in it, because he was sure that he himself would not be taken into it. When Noah went into the Ark with his children, as the angel told him, Noah shut the windows of the Ark and raised his hand to bless it. Now the devil had come into the Ark along with him as he went into it, and when Noah blessed the Ark the Devil found no other way but the empty hole which the shipwright had left unclosed, and he went into it in the form of a snake; and because of the tightness of the hole he could not go out nor come back in, and remained like this stuck until the Flood ebbed; and that is the best and worst nail that was in the Ark.l7

The interwoven nature of the universe gives rise to a profound and ultimate optimism. Sin is transitory though deep, mercy eternal. The Devil is coopted by grace to contribute to redemption. Above all, the cross of Jesus is seen as the emblem of victory as well as the principal sign of the coinherence of paradoxically cooperative material and spiritual dimensions, thus becoming polysemous. In the poem Cymru, addressed to his homeland and people, contemporary poet David Gwenallt Jones writes:

The angels would be walking here

Their footprints on your roadways,

And the Holy Spirit nested

Dovelike in your branches.

Poets heard on wind and breeze

His cry of sacrifice, His gasp of pain,

And in the middle of your forests

The tree of the Cross was seen.ls

The connection to Christian theology of the East is more than incidental. The Celtic Church adopted the works of many of the Eastern fathers and mothers, had a particular fondness for the desert saints of Egypt, and the tradition of the mendicant holy fool. This cross-fertilization was fueled not only by journeys of missionaries to the Holy Land, but by a lively fifth- and sixth-century sea trade between the eastern Mediterranean region and Wales, Cornwall, and Ireland.

5. Spiral

If there is a shape to Celtic Christianity, it is, like the Celtic knot, spiral and mobius-like. Present and past fold back upon one another in a unity. The organic and inorganic worlds are continuous. The domestic and cosmic flow back and forth. Inner and outer worlds are not opposite but conjoined, and the whole is moving toward its consummation in the Paradise of God. This is not historical positivism so much as a sense that the unfolding purpose of redemption is, since Christ, latent in the world as yeast in the flour or the fire of energy in the nucleus of the cell. There is glory commonly apparent in daily life for those with eyes to see, and beyond what is apparent, there is more, inexhaustibly more. This is an economy of abundance, in the face of which we are properly celebratory and wildly hospitable, as in this song from the tenth/eleventh century: