Celtic Spirituality of Art
God at the Pub – Earthed Spirituality
Grace – How the Irish Saved Civilization, p 174
Take up homework
1) book of prayers – choose one & use it
2) write a Celtic prayer that fits your life/work.
Art Show and tell
The Celts & Art
I think that if you would ask an ancient Celtic Christian about the relationship between Spirituality and art, they would look at you like you were talking Klingon!
Many of us made our first connection with Celtic faith through the arts.
The Celt’s whole life was integrated with art. Even the pre-Christian Celts were great artisans, they added ornamentation to almost everything – from tools to weapons, to their homes to their bodies. When they became Christian, they brought their art with them into the Kingdom. They added Celtic design to crosses, icons and church architecture.
The Celts had a love for beauty as can be seen in this story about St. Columba. Saint Columba was the founder of the Iona Community in Scotland, and he is a patron Saint of Ireland.
“An intense man, Columba loved beautiful things, the heritage no doubt of his privileged childhood, and was especially sensitive to his hometown of Derry—”angel-haunted Derry,” he called it—where he founded his first monastery and of which he sang in sensuous poetry that can stand beside any in the early Irish canon. But if Columba loved anything more than his native place, he loved books, especially beautifully designed manuscripts. As a student, he had fallen in love with his master’s psalter, a uniquely decorated I book of great price He resolved to make his own copy by stealth, and so we find him sitting in Finian’s church at Moville, hunched over the coveted psalter, copying it in the dark. According to legend, he had no candle, but the five fingers of his left hand shone like so many lights while his right hand assiduously copied. The legend is embellished with many such details; but the sum and substance of it is that Columba was found out and brought before King Diarmait, who issued his famous decision: “To every cow her calf- to every book its copy.” It was history’s first copyright case.”
- Tomas Cahill,“How the Irish Saved Civilization” pp 169, 170
What the king means is that Columba had to give his copy back to the Church. I saw on the web that someone wanted to make Saint Columba the patron saint of file-sharers!
What Tomas Cahill teaches us in the book “How the Irish Saved Civilization” is that with Christianity came literacy, and the Irish monks took great joy in making copies of the scriptures as well as other classical literature. In fact, what Cahill says is that while the rest of Europe was in the dark ages, Ireland was keeping the classic libraries alive by copying everything they could get there hands on!
One of the most famous Irish manuscripts is the Book of Kells. It is a copy of the Gospels illuminated in Irish motif and written in Celtic script.
c. 800
It is from the book of Kells that everything that we know of as Celtic art springs – the motifs, the swirls, the knot work, the mazes… as well as what we call the Celtic font or script
The Book of Kells is so intricate, and so beautiful, that one ancient writer believed that it was written by Angels.
The Chi-Rho page – the mice – the thin line between what is “spiritual” and what is not
The divide between the arts and faith – sola scriptura Luther 1483-1546 – the radical reformation, 16th century - Baptist church
the Enlightenment – compartmentalizing
Even in the Catholic and sacramental church, there is no longer a church monopoly on art, and in many ways art has left the church. So in 2008, the question of Art’s` relationship to spirituality makes sense.
Rejection of icons etc – brought us to “Precious moments?”
Connecting with the Creator through creativity
“At the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and the earth,
when the earth was wild and waste
darkness over the face of Ocean
rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters –
God said: Let there be light! And there was light.
God saw the light: that it was good
God separated the light from the darkness.
God called the light: Day! And the darkness he called: Night!”
Genesis 1:1-5 translated by Everett Fox
Creation Dream
Centred on silence
Counting on nothing
I saw you standing on the sea
And everything was
Dark except for
Sparks the wind struck from your hair
Sparks that turned to
Wings around you
Angel voices mixed with seabird cries
Fields of motion
Surging outward
Questions that contain their own replies...
You were dancing
I saw you dancing
Throwing your arms toward the sky
Fingers opening
Like flares
Stars were shooting everywhere
Lines of power
Bursting outward
Along the channels of your song
Mercury waves flashed
Under your feet
Shots of silver in the shell-pink dawn...
– Bruce Cockburn, Dancing in the Dragons Jaws 1979
Patrick’s answer to “Who is God?”
Our God, God of all men,
God of heaven and earth, seas and rivers,
God of sun and moon, of all the stars,
God of high mountain and lowly valleys,
God over heaven, and in heaven, and under heaven.
He has a dwelling in heaven and earth and sea
and in all things that are in them.
He inspires all things, he quickens all things.
He is over all things, he supports all things.
He makes the light of the sun to shine,
He surrounds the moon and the stars,
He has made wells in the arid earth,
Placed dry islands in the sea.
He has a Son co-eternal with himself …
And the Holy Spirit breathes in them;
Not separate are the Father and the Son and Holy Spirit.
If God is first the creator (as in St. Patrick’s creed), and we are made in his image as creators (not out of nothing, but out of HIS creation) Should not the act of creation, and creataivity give us an inherent conection with him?
This is what Luci Shaw says:
In our created universe pure functionality might have seemed to be enough to fulfill God’s creative purpose. We might ask, “How essential is beauty to the working of the universe?” Philosophers and metaphysicians may disagree about this, and, surprisingly, “elegance” is something that today’s scientists strive for in their theories and equations. For me it seems that the inclusion of the desire and appreciation for the beautiful is gratuitous—an infusion of pure Grace, a reflection of the generous heart of the Creator.
When we create something appealing, even in an act as pragmatic as the way we arrange our living rooms and choose the color of the wallpaper, or add a new typeface to our printer fonts, we show our integral relationship with the Creator. God, the first Quilter of prairies, the prime Painter (sunsets, thunderheads, forget-me-nots), the archetypal metal Sculptor (mountain ranges, crystalline structures), the Composer who heard bird songs, and the whales’ strange, sonorous clickings and croonings in his head long before there were birds or whales to sing them, the Poet whose Word was “full of grace and truth”—translated his own divine image in our human flesh so that we too are participants in creative intelligence and originality. As Frederick Buechner says, “Beauty is to the spirit what food is to the flesh. It fills an emptiness in you which nothing else can fill.”
- Luci Shaw, Art and Christian Spirituality: Companions in the Way in Direction Journal Fall 1998, Vol 27 No.2, 109-22 www.directionjournal.org/article/?980
The Holy Spirit and Art
Then the Lord said to Moses, “Look, I have specifically chosen Bezalel son of Uri, grandson of Hur, of the tribe of Judah. I have filled him with the Spirit of God, giving him great wisdom, ability, and expertise in all kinds of crafts. He is a master craftsman, expert in working with gold, silver, and bronze. He is skilled in engraving and mounting gemstones and in carving wood. He is a master at every craft! - Exodus 31:1-5
Luci Shaw:
Are we astonished at the way the link between the visible and invisible worlds is made? Faith is not linear. It is, indeed, a widening of the imagination, a leap into the transcendent, a taste of the numinous, a vision of the extraordinary in the ordinary. And our coach for the leap, the glue in the link, is our Muse, the Spirit of God.
A phenomenal resource, the Spirit. As Christians and artists we are not just followers, plodding imitators, or self-propelled innovators. We are empowered from within our own God-given imaginations by the First Poet, the Primal Artist, the Original Composer. Our own creative spirits, made in the image of Another, are boosted and blessed and set on fire by our union with God in Christ.
There is a radical nature to both art and faith. Both are epiphanic—“manifestations.” Both are transformative; we are changed as we enter their gleaming realms. They are full of inexplicable transitions and showings, mysterious both in their origin and mechanism.
Does art impact our spirituality? Does spirituality affect our art? Yes. And yes. The two seem symbiotic, each feeding on and in turn nourishing the other. They work in tandem; it is hard to imagine an artist who is totally unspiritual in the sense of being out of touch with both created and unseen worlds. And it is hard to image a person full of the Spirit who is not in some way creative, innovative, world-disturbing.
- Luci Shaw, Art and Christian Spirituality: Companions in the Way in Direction Journal Fall 1998, Vol 27 No.2, 109-22 www.directionjournal.org/article/?980
My experience with Nouwen’s meditation on The Return of the Prodigal
Meditate – to gaze deeply into: scripture, art, creation… to find the face of God
In order to meditate, we need to let ourselves go into the scripture, the art, the story, the poem… and see what comes through the leading of the Spirit.
Luci Shaw
“…art allows us to oppose the false clarity of oversimplification, and disclose the truth in its diverse richness and complexity, and its subtle nuance, making it less manageable but no less true.
In the context of control and manageability, the word “surrender” comes to mind—a word with somewhat negative connotations for me. It speaks too loudly of the sawdust trail, the guilt-charged evangelistic meetings of my youth. My word of choice is “abandon,” a wild and crazy word whose noun form is as powerful to me as its verb form. In Walking on Water Madeleine L’Engle has said that “to be an artist means to approach the light, and that means to let go our control, to allow our whole selves to be placed with absolute faith in that which is greater than we are.”6 And when God created us with free wills, he let go his control, relinquishing the glory of heaven, giving his power away. But you know that story . . . .
Art as a form to speak the Gospel – N.T. Wright p 143
Conclusion
Questions:
Home work:
Visit a gallery, find one piece and meditate on it
Is God present in the piece? How?
Is He absent? How?
- Extra reading: Luci Shaw Art and Christian Spirituality: Companions in the Way in Direction Journal Fall 1998, Vol 27 No.2, 109-22 www.directionjournal.org/article/?980
