Celtic Spirituality of Pilgrimage
Earthed Spirituality Retreat: June 13, 2008
The Spiritual Practice of Pilgramage – traveling for a spiritual experience – to the Holy Land, Rome or other historic sites. People go on pilgrimages for many different reasons – healing, penance, connection with God, to ask God to do it again…
Pilgrimage is not only Christian as a spiritual practice. Most Worldwide religions have pilgrimage as part of their religious practice. Even communists make a pilgrimage to Lenin’s grave!
Intro Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
Songlines p 229
That man is a migratory species is, in my opinion, born out by an experiment made at the Tavistock Clinic in London and described by Dr John Bowiby in his Attachment and Loss.
Every normal baby will scream if left alone; and the best way of silencing these screams is for the mother to take it in her arms and rock or ‘walk’ it back to contentment. Bowiby rigged up a machine which imitated, exactly, the pace and action of a mother’s walk; and found that, providing the baby was healthy, warm and well-fed, it stopped crying at once. ‘The ideal movement,’ he wrote, ‘is a vertical one with a traverse of three inches.’ Rocking at slow speeds, such as thirty cycles a minute, had no effect: but once you raised the pace to fifty and above, every baby ceased to cry and almost always stayed quiet.
Day in, day out, a baby cannot have enough walking. And if babies instinctively demand to be walked, the mother, on the African savannah, must have been walking too: from camp to camp on her daily foraging round, to the waterhole and on visits to the neighbours.
Apes have flat feet, we have sprung arches. According to Professor Napier, the human gait is a long, lilting stride — 1…2 ... 1 ... 2 — with a fourfold rhythm built into the action of the feet as they come into contact with the ground — I, 2, 3, 4 . . . 1, 2, 3, 4. .. : heel strike; weight along the outside of the foot; weight transferred to the ball of the foot; push-off with big toe.
Chatwin reminds us that the Jews are originally a nomadic people, and puts forward that their God (and thus our God) is a Nomadic God.
Songlines P 194
‘Alone and amid the nations’, masters of the raid, avid for increase yet disgusted by possessions, driven by the fantasy of all travellers to pine for a stable home — no people but the Jews have ever felt more keenly the moral ambiguities of settlement. Their God is a projection of their perplexity. Their Book — the Old Testament and the New — may be read, on one level at least, as a monumental dialogue between Him and His People in the rights and wrongs of living in the Land.
Was it to be a land for fields and houses? A land of corn and wine? Of cities which they had not built and vineyards which they did not plant? Or was it to be a country of black tent and goat path? A nomad’s country of milk and wild honey? A Kingdom where the people ‘may dwell in a place of their own, and move no more?’ (It Samuel 7:10) Or was it, as Heine surmised, ‘a portable kingdom’ which could only exist in men’s hearts?
Jahweh, in origin, is a God of the Way. His sanctuary is the Mobile Ark, His House a tent, His Altar a cairn of rough stones. And though He may promise His Children a well-watered land — as blue and green are a bedouin’s favourite colours — He secretly desires for them the Desert.
He leads them out of Egypt, away from the fleshpots and the overseer’s lash, a journey of three days into the harsh clean air of Sinai. There He gives them their Solemn Feast, the Passover: a feast of roasted lamb and bitter herbs, of bread baked not in an oven but on a hot stone. And He commands them to eat it ‘in haste’, with shodden feet and sticks in hand, to remind them, forever, that their vitality lies in movement.
He gives them their ‘ring dance’, the hag: a dance that mimes the antics of goats on their spring migration ‘as when one goeth with a pipe into the mountains of the Lord’. He appears in the Burning Bush and in the Pillar of Fire. He is everything that Egypt is not. Yet He will allow himself the doubtful honour of a Temple — and regret it: ‘They have set their abominations in the house which is called by my name, to pollute it.’ (Jeremiah 7:30)
You can see how Chatwin postulates that walking is a “soul movement” connected deeply to our origins and our faith. This may be why so many faithful people make pilgrimages.
The Celtic Pilgrimage is different than that of what you might think of pilgrimage today, or in the middle ages where you would make a pilgrimage to a specific city or relic. They used the word Peregrinatio to describe their pilgrimage.
Peregrinatio – p. 2 way – not aimless wandering
The word itself is almost untranslatable, but its essence is caught in the ninth-century story of three Irishmen drifting over the sea from Ireland for seven days, in coracles without oars, coming ashore in Cornwall and then being brought to the court of King Alfred. When he asked them where they had come from and where they were going they answered that they “stole away because we wanted for the love of God to be on pilgrimage, we cared not where.” This wonderful response and this amazing undertaking comes out of the inspirational character of early Irish spirituality. It shows at once how misleading is the word “pilgrimage” as we use it and how very different indeed is the Celtic peregrinatio from the pilgrimages of the Middle Ages or the present day. There is no specific end or goal such as that of reaching a shrine or a holy place that allows the pilgrim at the end of the journey to return home with a sense of a mission accomplished. Peregrinatio is not undertaken at the suggestion of some monastic abbot or superior but because of an inner prompting in those who set out, a passionate conviction that they must undertake what was essentially an inner journey. Ready to go wherever the Spirit might take them, seeing themselves as hospites mundi, “guests of the world,” what they are seeking is the place of their resurrection, the resurrected self, the true self in Christy, which is for all of us our true home.
So peregrinatio presents us with the ideal of the interior, inward journey that is undertaken for the love of God, or for the love of Christ, pro amore Christi. The impulse is love. And is the journey is undertaken for the love of Christ, then it argues that Christ must already hold a place in our lives.
-- Esther de Waal, The Celtic Way of Prayer, pp.2-3.
To go to Rome
Is much of trouble, little of profit;
The King whom thou seekest there,
Unless thou bring Him with thee, thou wilt not find.
…I shall not find Christ at the end of my journey unless he accompanies me along the way.
- Esther De Waal, The Celtic Way of Prayer, p. 3
The ambivalence toward travel – Columba begins the practice of peregrinatio by being banished. It is a hard banishment.
St. Columba, of course, in leaving Ireland for Scotland, knew exile only too well. He felt so deeply the pain of parting from his native country that he could say "the great of the people of Doire has broken my heart in four.” And sitting on the headland of lona, looking across the straits at the land from which he is now exiled, a poem that is ascribed to him speaks of what that parting has cost him. He writes with a depth of sadness of what he is leaving behind, for it is not only his earthly kin, family and friends, and the warmth and security of the small, close-knit community that bonded them, it is also the nonhuman, the land itself, nature, each leaf of the oaks he has known and loved, and not least the angels, of which Derry is full. So he says farewell to his native monastic home and makes his way toward the isles of Alba, the early Scotland:
Great is the speed of my coracle,
And its stern turned upon Derry;
Grievous is my errand over the main,
Traveling to Alba of the beetling brows
Were all Alba mine
From its centre to its border,
I would rather have the site of a house
In the middle of fair Deny.
It is for this I love Derry,
For its smoothness, for its purity;
All full of angels
Is every leaf on the oaks of Derry
My Derry, my little oak-grove
My dwelling and my little cell,
O living God that art in Heaven above
Woe to him who violates it!
Columba seemed to make the most of his exile/pilgrimage: this is an exerpt from a sermon of his…
God counseled Abraham to leave his own country and go in pilgrimage into the land which God had shown him, to wit the "Land of Promise"-Now the good counsel which God enjoined here on the father of the faithful is incumbent on all the faithful; that is to leave their country and their land, their wealth and their worldly delight for the sake of the Lord of the Elements, and go in perfect pilgrimage in imitation of Him.
Many teary prayers for those traveling, and many prayers of protection by those travelling
The connection between pilgrimage and mission – Columba was instructed to save at least as many souls as were lost in battle
Coricals – first to N.A.?
Columbanus – the first missionary back to Europe – many Monestaries in Gaul, and Italy, the most prominent being Bobbio, Italy
Map 194 Cahill
St. Patrick’s Breastplate is a traveler’s prayer
Aplication
Pilgramage/Journey as a lifestyle
Columbanus Quote Every Earthly Blessing p. 54
We are exiles in the far end of Solitude, living as listeners,
With hearts attending to the skies we cannot understand:
Waiting upon the first far drums of Christ the Conqueror,
Planted as sentinels upon the world’s frontier
By thinking nothing of the place of his birth, by forsaking his own land, he sought to find it; by living in exile he hoped to reach home. – Thomas Merton - Way p. 7
1 Peter 2:11 Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul. 12 Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.
11-12Friends, this world is not your home, so don’t make yourselves cozy in it. Don’t indulge your ego at the expense of your soul. Live an exemplary life among the natives so that your actions will refute their prejudices. Then they’ll be won over to God’s side and be there to join in the celebration when he arrives.
Simplicity movement – traveling light
Short-term mission as Pilgrimage
Take a walk with Jesus
