{"id":30792,"date":"2023-02-03T21:53:07","date_gmt":"2023-02-04T05:53:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=30792"},"modified":"2023-02-03T22:14:15","modified_gmt":"2023-02-04T06:14:15","slug":"fire-the-celts-and-the-gift-of-the","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/fire-the-celts-and-the-gift-of-the\/","title":{"rendered":"Fire, the Celts, and the gift of the Ampersand"},"content":{"rendered":"

This last Wednesday was Feast of Saint Brigid, both a Celtic pagan festival and a Saints Day for the Irish Catholic Church. \u00a0\u201cRites of initiation and installation, then, teach the lesson of the essential oneness of the individual and the group: seasonal festivals open a larger horizon;\u201d [1]. This feast day and festival is for St. Brigid of Kildare, one of my personal heroes and mentors in my faith journey. \u00a0And the celebration of her feast day reminds me of greater horizons. \u00a0She holds in her story what I believe Joseph Campbell describes as the Hero\u2019s journey in his Book the Hero with A Thousand Faces.\u00a0 <\/em>Let me explain a bit more about my studies into the Celtic Christian tradition.\u00a0 I studied at the Sacred Art of Living Center in Bend, OR.\u00a0 In these 3 years of study, I became an Anam Cara Apprentice which is a Gaelic phrase for \u201cSoul Friend\u201d and tapped deep into the well of traditional Celtic Wisdom.\u00a0 \u201cThe Celtic spiritual tradition is one that has long emphasized an awareness of the sacred essence of all things\u201d [2] The Celtic pagan tradition is all about legends and myths, and like Campbell writes, this deep understanding of story and myth served this tradition well when Christian missionaries arrived in Ireland and Scotland.\u00a0 The Celts sat by the fire listening to the story of Jesus and the Bible and instead of turning away from their deeply embedded culture and stories they found parallels to their own stories.\u00a0 Utilizing this story telling allowed them not only to accept this new understanding of Spirituality it also allowed them to live into the &; both were acceptable, they were able to hold the balance between traditions and culture & embrace the new.\u00a0 This study of Celtic tradition has helped me on my reconstruction of my faith journey.\u00a0 I can hold my childhood faith and not throw it out with the bathwater but keep it in the same container with a threshold knowing that my beliefs are tremendously different.\u00a0 It is not an either or, it\u2019s an &.<\/p>\n

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A little education on St. Brigid. St. Brigid is known as the Fiery Arrow.\u00a0 She was fierce, she was compassionate, she stood up against patriarchy and became an abbess over men and women studying the faith.\u00a0 She was said \u201cto have been born just before the sunrise, in the twilight of the early morning, in the time governed neither by the sun\u2019s light nor the moon\u2019s light, but by the two lights, the twi-lights.\u00a0 So, her birth signals that she is in the liminal space between two worlds.\u201d [3] She represents so much to both the pagan Celtic world as well as the Christian world.\u00a0 She has also been told to turn water into ale [4] (sound familiar) and was said to have been the midwife to Jesus\u2019 birth[5]\u00a0 The Celts didn\u2019t care she was centuries after Jesus, as true faith is not limited to time and space.\u00a0 In Edinburgh Art Museum there is a painting of 2 angels carrying St. Brigid from the Island of Iona to Jesus Birth.\u00a0 I was blessed to have gone on a Celtic Christian Pilgrimage to the Isle of Iona in Scotland last April and was able to take a picture of this painting.<\/p>\n

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\u201cSt. Bride\u201d<\/p>\n

By John Duncan (1866-1945)<\/p>\n

My spiritual journey into Celtic Christianity has been a tremendous grounding gift to me as I work through feminine theology and my place as a Leader in this world.\u00a0 I am a daughter of St. Brigid, and I sit in the warmth of her eternal fire that is still lit today.<\/p>\n

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Saint Brigids Well<\/p>\n

Isle of Iona, April 2022<\/p>\n

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As I looked deeper into all the other ways of understanding Campbell\u2019s Hero\u2019s Journey, I found that I connected to the need to also find The Heroine\u2019s journey<\/em>: Women\u2019s Quest for Wholeness<\/em> by Maureen Murdock especially enlightening.\u00a0 She too found that there was a need to start naming and expressing the feminine voice.\u00a0 She tells of all our \u201cneed to find the duality of the feminine and masculine, to find our balance, our Ying and Yang,\u201d as summarized by the website www.mythcreants.com<\/a>. I have mentioned my deep desire to elevate women in the world of leadership and on a personal level doing so within the Church walls in previous posts and I\u2019ve mentioned the struggles myself and other women have had.\u00a0 I find it refreshing that John Campbells work can be stretched and expanded into new ways of understanding and do so without diminishing his work, but to enhance it and hear it from other voices and global perspectives.\u00a0 As a female clergy in a man\u2019s world, as a mom, as a wife, as a whole and complete person, I find resonance in the & symbol.\u00a0 We don\u2019t have to choose between feminine and masculine, we don\u2019t have to choose our own traditions and new threshold horizons, we don\u2019t have to choose to leave our culture in order to embrace a new thought or way of being or belief, we don\u2019t have to leave our faith even if we\u2019ve left the church and we certainly can go back, and that is living in the &.<\/p>\n

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As a celebration of St. Brigid\u2019s Feast Day, I leave you a beautiful video gift for all of you.\u00a0 Happy St. Brigid\u2019s Day! [6]<\/p>\n

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A beautiful dance honoring St. Brigid and the Divine Feminine by Kirsten Newell, filmed in the Orkney Islands. The Gaelic song being sung by Mischa Macpherson is based on John Philip’s prayer from\u00a0Sacred Earth Sacred Soul<\/em>:<\/p>\n

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Awake, O my soul,<\/p>\n

to the beauty of the divine deep within you<\/p>\n

and awake to its fragrance in the body of the earth.<\/p>\n

Know its strength of attraction<\/p>\n

and its grace to heal what has been torn apart.<\/p>\n

Awake, O my soul,<\/p>\n

to the beauty of the divine deep within you.<\/p>\n

Awake, O my soul.<\/p>\n

Awake.<\/p>\n