Community of St. Ita and St. Fillan: A Celtic Eucharist

Why A Celtic Eucharist?

"Coming from the furthest fringes of the Western World Celtic Christianity (an expression which I prefer to use rather than speaking of the Celtic Church) keeps alive what is ancient Christian usage, usage which like that of the East comes from a deep central point before the Papacy began to tidy up and to rationalise... This point is of more than antiquarian interest: it also speaks to me symbolically, taking me back to the ancient, the early, both in my own self, and in the experience of Christendom, where I encounter something basic, primal, fundamental, universal. I am taken back beyond the party labels and the denominational divisions of the Chruch today, beyond the divides of the Reformation or the schism of East and West. I am also taken beyond the split of intellect and feeling, of mind and heart, that came with the growth of the rational and analytical approach which the development of the universities brought to the European mind in the twelfth century...

The Celtic way of prayer was learnt from the monasteries; it was from its religious communities that the people learnt to pray. As a result they learnt that there was no separation of praying and living; praying and working flow into one another, so that life is to be punctuated by prayer, become prayer. If ordinary people took their ideas on prayer from this ideal of continual prayer it should not really surprise us that, when we uncover something of the way of praying that was handed down in the oral tradition and was collected in Scotland and Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century what we find is lay spirituality, a household religion in which praying is inseparable from an ordinary, daily working life." - Esther de Waal 'The Celtic Way Of Prayer'

Perhaps the greatest single calamity to overtake Western Christianity in recent centuries is the divorce of the head from the heart and the exaltation of the former over the latter. In large part, this is a product of the Renaissance, translated into religious terms by the cataclysmic upheavals of the reformation.

During this period, in reaction against superstition - real and supposed - reason was exalted and intuition was discounted, even feared and denied. In this climate, religion became to a very large degree head-centred rather than heart-centred, and Sunday religion began, slowly and inexorably, to part company with the religion of the hearth (home). We, in our generation, are the inheritors of the fruits of this troubled period.

Celtic spirituality, as we are now rediscovering it, is the religion of the hearth. It is also the religion of what, in terms more familiar to our Orthodox brethren, we might describe as 'the mind in heart'.

There is no flight from reason in Celtic spirituality; very far from it. Nor is there any flight from intuition either. The celt is above all a realist. Poet he may be but there is none of the 'Celtic Twilight' about the Celt! His feet are very firmly on the ground and very firmly set.

Celtic spirituality is deeply Trinitarian. In addition, it presupposes a wholeness within which there is no possibility of separation between the farmer, his cow, the saints in heaven, the holy angels, the mother of God and the ever-loving Triune Creator.

The beauty of nature is always a reflection - even an icon - of its Creator. There is no conceivable distinction made between 'religion' and 'life'. Life is lived in the unselfconcious and utterly natural relationship of beloved creature and beloved Creator, and in company with all other beloved creatures in Heaven and upon Earth.

The voice and tone of Welsh spirituality is subtly different from that of gaelic-speaking Scotland and Ireland, but it is the same vision, the same deeply biblical, profoundly Christian understanding and tradition. it might be said to owe less - perhaps a great deal less - to the churches and chapels of recent centuries than to the monasteries of Derry and Iona, and to the spirituality of a Wales which resisted acceptance of Canterbury until the very last years of the twelfth century.

Most of all, perhaps it was the embattled and ever endangered Celtic languages themselves that enshrined this ancient and blessed tradition. Impenetrable to the Anglo-Saxon, and all too often proscribed, the ancient languages articulated the Celtic Christian vision to perfection. In our own day they have yielded to translation; this remarkable heritage of wholeness is now made available to others who have lost too much of their innocence, their imagination, their vision and even, sometimes, their faith.

Why a Celtic Eucharist? Because it speaks simultaneously to the heart and mind rather than solely to the mind.