A Typical Week?

It’s been a quiet week in the suburbs of Atlanta…

On Tuesday evening I began attending a monthly book group that meets at the monastery where I work. In the past this group has read such gems as The Cloud of Unknowing or Passion for Creation (Matthew Fox’s translation of the sermons of Meister Eckhart);  I’m joining them as they began reading Teilhard de Chardin’s The Divine Milieu. Discussion was lively and the monk who leads the group is a veritable fountain of theological and contemplative insight.

Then on Wednesday my family and I drove to Macon, where we participated in the ordination service of a dear friend of ours who was being ordained as an Episcopal Priest. At the reception afterwards we kept busy hugging old friends (the Episcopal Church is sufficiently small enough that, even after being away for almost a decade, I still feel like I know tons of people whenever I go to a service). Spent a while clucking nervously with one woman about the politics of the Episcopal Church’s recent convention, where among other things the church elected its first woman presiding bishop (yeay!) but also wrote a very tepid response to the worldwide Anglican Church’s objections to its consecration of a gay bishop.

And then last night we had dinner with two friends from the Pagan community: she’s a Canaanite reconstructionist with a particular devotion to Lilith; he’s a druid with a bit of an Irish twinkle in his eyes. It was a lively conversation that ranged from the challenges of deconstructing male privilege when raising a son to lamenting Atlanta’s paucity of decent reconstructionist Pagan groups to dishing up our actually-quite-similar reasons for being uncomfortable with Mythic Journeys (which I have taken to calling the "Yuppie Wicca" convention).

And also during this week, I submitted a mini-proposal to an editor who’s looking for an angels project (something I started and then aborted for a different editor last year), and at long last finished my mysticism proposal which I submitted to my agent, who is in turn shopping it around to eight publishers. Fingers crossed.

Heaven is Everywhere

It occurs to me that the Christian faith encourages its practitioners to pray to God “who is in heaven” (Matthew 6:9). Meanwhile, the tradition asserts that God is omnipresent (Proverbs 15:3) and even that God is present in the very pit of hell itself (Psalm 139:8). Thus, a wonderful syllogism emerges:

1. Heaven can be defined as “the place where God is”
2. God is everywhere; therefore, every place is a place where God is.
3. Therefore, heaven is everywhere

Ironically, this suggests that anyone who goes to hell actually is in heaven and hell simultaneously (perhaps that’s the true meaning of purgatory). At any rate, my dear reader, whether you are a Christian or not, whether  you are a person of faith or not, here is my belief: that as you read these words, you sit dazzled in the splendor of heaven and the presence of God. Welcome to heaven; welcome to eternity.

And if you don’t realize it/feel it/experience it yet — well, all the better to explore the path of mysticism. For mysticism is the path of entering into the mysteries, of which this is most certainly one.

The Well-Read Druid

The following question just arrived in my email inbox:

Carl, what would you say are the top ten books in Druidism?

Just the kind of question I love!

First of all, I would advise anyone wishing to study up on Druidry to remember that there’s more to mastering Celtic spirituality than just reading a few books with the word “Druid” in the title. This is because, sad to say, a lot of malarkey has been published on the topic of Druidism over the years. (Don’t believe me? Check out a book called The 21 Lessons of Merlyn, which is filled with such bad scholarship and sexist assumptions that anyone with even a passing knowledge of Celtic history can see through it. Alas, we live in such a culturally illiterate society that many people don’t have the learning necessary to discern that such a book is worthless, and so it keeps selling, to the naive romantics who desperately want to believe that “the ancient secrets of the druids” really can be obtained in a 20-dollar paperback at the local new age shop). So, my list includes not only books on Druidism, but also books on Celtic mythology and folklore, on the Irish Holy Well tradition (which has been Christianized but began as a pagan practice), and on the archaeology of ancient British paganism. Read all of these, and I think you’ll have a nice overview of Druidism, both in history and in its many “rebirths” over the years. You asked for ten books, but in true druidical fashion I’m offering you 13: in addition to the ten books that make the list, I’m throwing in two others that I haven’t read yet (one newly published, one due in August) that look very promising, and then I round out the baker’s dozen with (of course) one of my own books.

1. Miranda J. Green. The World of the Druids. This is a lavishly illustrated “coffee table” book, but the text is solid and it’s a nice and brief look at the entire sweep of Druid history, from the priest/philosopers of the ancient world to the granola-crunching ecowarriors of our time. Pretty much anything by Professor Green is worth reading.
2. Alwyn Rees and Brinley Rees. Celtic Heritage. The single most important book on pre-Christian Celtic wisdom. Read it, and read it again. Not only is it scholarly, but it was published in 1961, blissfully before so much of the nonsense of recent years began to appear. The authors are comparative mythologists who do a superb job at exploring the links between Celtic and other Indo-European worldviews, particularly Vedic cosmology.
3. Philip Carr-Gomm, ed. The Rebirth of Druidry: Ancient Wisdom for Today. Carr-Gomm is the Chief Druid of one of the UK’s largest Druid orders; he’s an unabashed romantic but is humble and honest about his sources. This book is a worthy collection of essays by and about the contemporary Druid movement, including works by several of the authors listed here. It’s ten years old and a wee bit dated, but still essential reading for anyone who wants to grasp the soul of the Druidry movement.
4. Ronald Hutton. The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy. The perfect antidote to the scourge of Druidism (and Neopaganism in general): UPG, or “unverifiable personal gnosis.” So many practitioners of Druidism and other Neopagan religions eschew hard scholarship in favor of whatever their spirit guides happen to tell them. Yeah, right. To save the day, here is British historian Ronald Hutton with a no-nonsense survey of just what we know (and don’t know) about the Pagans of old. Along the way, he skewers more than a few Neopagan sacred cows.
5. W.Y. Evans-Wentz. The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries. Although it’s a hundred years old, this remains the essential work on fairy lore, which of course represents vestigial paganism as it survived in the Celtic lands for centuries after the arrival of Christianity. Incidentally, the link takes you to the New Page edition, which features an introduction by yours truly — but you might want to buy more than one edition of this book; I’m afraid the edition that features my introduction was poorly copyedited and contains rather many errors.
6. Lady Gregory. Complete Irish Mythology. If you want to grok Druidry, you need to be grounded in the myths of Ireland and Wales, which unfortunately do not have the kind of cultural ubiquity that Greek myth enjoys in our society. Lady Gregory’s retelling of the Irish tales is hardly perfect by any means, but is a fine enough introduction to the magical world of Irish deities and heroes. Here you’ll meet the Dagda, the Morrigan, Lugh, Brigit (the goddess, not the saint), Manannan, Macha, Cuchulain, Emer, Finn McCool, and many other classic figures of Gaelic myth.
7. Patrick Ford. The Mabinogi and Other Medieval Welsh Tales. The best translation of the greatest collection of Welsh myth. Ford’s introductory material offers insight into how we can unpack the myths to learn about the spirituality of the ancients. Rhiannon, Taliesin, Pwyll, Branwen, Arianhrod, and Lleu are among the many key Welsh gods and heroes you’ll discover in these pages.
8. Alexei Kondratiev. The Apple Branch: A Path to Celtic Ritual. A key text in the “Celtic reconstructionist” movement, which attempts to revive Celtic paganism through relying on scholarship about the ancient pagans rather than the silly psychic onanism that has marred many modern writers on “druidism.” Kondratiev gets extra points for being non-hostile to Celtic Christianity.
9. Walter L. Brenneman and Mary G. Brenneman. Crossing the Circle at the Holy Wells of Ireland. It’s out of print, but seek it out: this book looks at the competing spiritual worldviews of pagan and Christian Ireland as encoded in popular devotionalism centered on holy wells, and it reveals how the Christianisation of Ireland, far from being an event that was completed 1500 years ago, is a transition that is still very much in process.
10. Patricia Monaghan. The Red-Haired Girl From the Bog: The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit. Sort of a spiritual travelogue of late-twentieth century Ireland, this book celebrates the goddess traditions encoded in the land and honors how storytelling is so central to the Irish soul. It’s a poetic and lovely book, about as authentic a book on the Celtic soul as you’ll get from an American author. Not about Druidry per se, but essential to unpacking the mind of the Celtic wisdomkeeper.
11. Brendan Cathbad Myers. The Mysteries of Druidry. This is brand new and I haven’t received my copy yet, but I hope to review it once I do. Myers has long been known on the online world for his wonderful website on Druidism; this book has been endorsed by a number of movers and shakers in the Druid community and so I suspect it will be pretty good. But you never know with Druid books, so until I have a chance to read it for myself, this is only a qualified recommendation.
12. Isaac Bonewits. Essential Guide to Druidism. Due out in August, and will probably be a “not to be missed title.” Isaac was for many years the Archdruid of the largest Neopagan Druid order in the USA, and is well known as a brilliant but cranky author who takes no prisoners but who also really knows his stuff. This book will probably be as entertaining as it is informative. If it is anything like other writings of his, in this book Isaac is likely to praise the really cool elements in contemporary Druidry even as he eviscerates the b.s. elements with barely-contained glee.
13. Carl McColman and Kathryn Hinds. Magic of the Celtic Gods and Goddesses. I am a Scotsman, so of course I could not draw together a list like this without at least one plug for my own work! Even though Magic of the Celtic Gods and Goddesses was written at a time when I myself was moving away from Druidry and back toward Christianity as my own spiritual path, I think the book still provides a useful and user-friendly look at how the stories and traditions of various ancient deities can be inspirational to today’s Druids and other Neopagans.

Okay, so there’s the list. Happy reading!

Kindle Our Hearts and Awaken Hope

Recently Fran and I have brought a little bit of Anglican energy into our daily practice. For some time now we have sat in meditation twice a day, morning and night, ideally (though not always) for thirty minutes per sitting. Up until recently we began each period of meditation with a prayer Fran learned from Ron Roth:

Come Holy Spirit, Living Flame of Love; Kindle in us the fire of your Divine Presence, that all may be One in joy.

We’d end the meditation with Julian of Norwich’s prayer as found in chapter five of her book, Revelation of Divine Love:

God, of your goodness give me Yourself, for You are enough for me. I can ask for nothing less that is completely to Your honor, and if I do ask anything less, I shall always be in want. Only in You I have all.

Both lovely prayers, but after a while it felt appropriate to bring a bit more depth to the prayer by which we began our meditation. And so recently we began using the morning and evening “Daily Devotions for Individuals and Families” as found in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer (pp. 137 and 139). Even just using these “cliff note” versions of the Daily Office bring back a flood of memories, of reciting the Office (silently of course) on the Marta while commuting back in the mid-90s.

For those of you who are not familiar with the BCP, it’s filled with lovely prayers, both traditional and contemporary. Here are two of my favorites, from the Daily Office:

Lord Jesus, stay with us, for evening is at hand and the day is past; be our companion in the way, kindle our hearts, and awaken hope, that we may know you as you are revealed in Scripture and the breaking of bread. Grant this for the sake of your love.

and

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ: give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous, and all for your love’s sake.

I know that many of my readers will struggle with this or that fine point of theology as found in liturgical texts like these. Honor your struggle, but for right now, I invite you to simply enjoy the simple literary beauty of these prayers. Roman Catholic liturgy has its own beauty too, of course; but I think I’ll always be fond of the poetry in the Prayer Book.

We still end our meditation time with Julian of Norwich’s prayer, however. That one never seems to get old. It’s a wonderful summation of Julian’s theology as well as her literary style. Wonderful stuff indeed.

Mythic Journeys: Initial Thoughts

It’s the morning after Mythic Journeys and I’m exhausted. And I only attended the main conference that ran from Friday through Sunday; so many of my friends were volunteers or participants in the entire event (which began last Wednesday) that I can only imagine how bone tired they must feel. It was an amazing, exciting, adrenaline-pumping event (at least, for those of us who geek out on sacred story, ritual performance, and mythic art) but it was also supremely frustrating. I was there with a press badge, covering the event for Beliefnet; over the next two weeks I’ll be writing a long feature story which hopefully they’ll run sometime before summer’s end. Over the weekend I interviewed some truly wonderful folks: David Abram, Derek Beres, Tom Blue Wolf, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Charles DeLint, Derreck Kayongo, Ellen Kushner, Michaela Foster Marsh, Gayle Ross, and Sobonfu Somé. I heard stories that covered the whole terrain of the human emotional palette, from Gayle Ross’ heartwrenching tale of the Trail of the Tears and how the Cherokee Rose got its name, to David Abram’s eloquent exhortation to the mysticism of surrendered love for the earth, to MytholoJazz’s tragicomic rendering of Orpheus and Eurydice — à la contemporary street poetry. Deepak Chopra and Coleman Barks traded poems of Tagore and Rumi. Fred Johnson and Michael Meade sang and drummed and got the entire convention fired up with brotherly (and sisterly) love. Young cerebral palsied poet Ekiwah Adler Belendez read his work, passionate yet restrained and probably some of the best wordsmithing I heard the entire weekend. A group of high school kids from Wisconsin danced and led games and inspired everyone with their commitment to conflict resolution and building community through fun and story. And then there were the musicians, and the artists with their contemplative installations, and the play-places called Imagination Stations, and the endless round of impromptu conversations that unpacked wonder at odd corners of the trade show floor… and on and on I could go.

Yep. It was, in the Beatles’ simple words, "all too much." And therein lies a big piece of my frustration. As a weekend dedicated to the vision of Joseph Campbell and featuring not only more than 90 performers/speakers/presenters but also hundreds of similarly insightful and visionary participants, it was mythic overkill. Again and again I heard folks say "I’m full," "This is overwhelming — good, amazing, wonderful, but overwhelming" or "I think my brain is going to explode." By the end of the conference, the kaleidoscopic cornucopia of experience had been distilled into some basic (and quite worthy) messages: Let’s be nice to one another. Take care of one another. Respect diversity. Honor, cherish, defend and save our precious and threatened environment. And to do all this, we need to fill our lives with art and song and story and ritual. Well, yeah. Maybe part of my frustration is, after seven + years hanging out with the Pagans and even a longer track record with liturgical/mystical Christianity, this is all old news. Important news, to be sure, and well worth repeating again and again, for we human beings are so forgetful. But in the meantime, I can’t help but wonder about some of the unintended messages of Mythic Journeys: that cultural diversity is just one more thing to consume. That myth, like french fries, tastes better when you supersize it. That William Blake was right: all you have to do is take the road of excess to reach the palace of wisdom. Most telling of all: that for all our commitment to the democratization of spirituality and myth, at the end of the day everybody just wants a piece of their favorite celebrity, be it Michael Meade or Deepak Chopra or whomever — thereby subtly reinforcing all the tired old power dynamics. Which suggests that, for all our lip service to transforming the world through myth, at the end of the weekend all that’s really gonna change is everybody gets a hangover from their conference high…

Am I being curmudgeonly here? Perhaps. I attended two very disappointing workshops on Saturday, and went to bed that night wondering why I had given so much time to such a mediocre conference. But Sunday I attended two utterly magical event, and so Mythic Journeys was partially redeemed for me. Now, I can truthfully say I’m glad I went and I hope that the organization figures out a way to make money doing this (both the 2004 and 2006 Mythic Journeys Conferences were huge financial hemorrhages) so that future events like this will take place. I think we need events that are part ritual, part performance art, part fan convention, and part academic conference. I don’t know anybody else who’s doing this. But there are some walls herein that need to be scaled (or torn down). Mythic Journeys seems to be as good a place as any for this kind of deconstructing to take place.

But next time, I’m going to make sure I’m well rested before the conference begins.

Of Celts and Catholics

I continually wrestle with questions of spiritual integration. In other words, how do I integrate the various strands of my spirituality into one cohesive faith identity? Put another way, I have profound love and affection for western mysticism, Catholic spirituality, Celtic wisdom and lore, and the integral thought of visionary thinkers like Ken Wilber. How can all of these sometimes contradictory forms of spirituality/wisdom be woven together into one continuous strand that is my faith?

Obviously, there are several bullets to dodge here. It’s all too easy to get lost in the dogmatism of any one worldview. And yes, one can be dogmatically pagan just as easily as one is dogmatically Christian! I’ve seen it, I know where the bodies are buried, and I can name names. Fundamentalism is fundamentalism, and it stinks whether it’s wearing a cross, a pentacle, or even hangs out with the UUs ("I’m more truly tolerant than you are"). Fundamentalism is all about creating strict boundaries that separate the "saved" or "enlightened" or "initiated" from — well, from everybody else.

But that’s not the only bullet for me to dodge: there’s also the new agey pollyannishness of "all religions are really just the same way down deep inside, so just blend ‘em all together to make a nice mystical smoothie." The problem here is, they really aren’t the same, and just like when many colors are blended together often an unappetizing brown is what emerges, so too efforts to blend too many different expressions of spirituality into one unified whole can result is some sort of sugary sweet spiritual confection that in its zeal to offend nobody ends up being little more than religious junk food.

The third bullet is the one I’ve really allowed myself to take, more often than not, over the years. That’s the tendency to church-hop (or more accurately, to faith-hop). Since the mid-1980s, when I first realized that Celtic and earth-positive spirituality had a claim on me just like mystical Christianity did (and vice versa), I’ve gone back and forth, first identifying as a Christian, then as a pagan, back to Christianity, back to paganism… and so the merry-go-round continues. As I said in Embracing Jesus and the Goddess, often I felt as if practicing Christianity brought out the pagan in me, while practicing a pagan faith brought out the Christian in me! The problem here is obvious to anyone who has known me for more than a year: the process of shifting gears, and going from one side of the meadow to the other, is wrenching — not only to me and my family, but also to my friends and especially to my students. 

So what I need is integration, without fundamentalism, without new agey blending, and without the instability of going back and forth from one spiritual form to another. For the last two years, I’ve tried to find my center by identifying as a "dissident Catholic" or a "Druid with a rosary." My family and I joined a very wonderful, multi-cultural Catholic church last year, and since November I’ve been working as a marketing consultant for the bookstore associated with a Catholic monastery not far from where I live. Last year the Grateful Bear and I started a "Christian Mysticism" meetup that has morphed into the Atlanta Julian Meeting, and we’re currently talking with several venues for teaching mysticism-related classes (the first one will be this July at the Phoenix & Dragon Bookstore). This has been wonderful for nurturing the Christian and mystical dimensions to my spirituality. Meanwhile, teaching a class on Ken Wilber at Evening at Emory earlier this spring (a class that will be reprised at the P & D this fall) has kept my integral light shining.

So what’s missing? The Celtic dimension.

On one hand, I’ve nurtured my Celtic spirituality through the Fiddlin’ Blarney storytelling project I have with fiddler Julia McPeek. And that’s lots of fun, and I hope to keep telling the stories and honing my storytelling craft.  As much as I loved Brigid’s Well, it was clear that it was time for me to leave that community (which I did in December), and seeing all the BW folks at the Atlanta Celtic Festival last month simply confirmed that move: I love the folks, but I don’t miss the group. No, retreating back into Neopagan, Wiccan or quasi-Wiccan spirituality is not the path I need to be taking.

What I need, simply put, is Celtic Christianity. Earth-friendly, Brigid-honoring, holy-well-venerating, Celtic Christianity. And it certainly exists within Catholicism: after all, it was the expression of Catholicism in Ireland that wooed me back into Christianity after seven years as a pagan. But in practice, my experience of Catholicism whether at my church or at the monastery stresses the mystical/universal dimensions of the faith, rather than its ethnic/Celtic dimension. And I’m beginning to notice a hunger within me. That hunger needs to be addressed, and now — before it grows into something that threatens to undermine my sense of satisfaction within Catholicism.

So, to nurture that hunger, I’ve begun hanging out online with a small community called the Celtic Catholic Church. It’s a small independent catholic communion with an apostolic bishop in California. I’ve been familiar with their website for several years now — back when I first felt like it was time to leave paganism and return to Christianity, I briefly thought about becoming a member of the CCC. I didn’t, mainly because I know from my experience with ADF that joining an internet-based faith group doesn’t really work for me — I want a community I can interact with in the real world. So I’m glad I’ve become a (Roman) Catholic — and yet, I keep feeling pulled back to the CCC. And recently I’ve realized it’s because I’ve wanted a more explicitly Celtic expression of my faith, to go along with the  universal/mystical expressions that being a Roman Catholic affords me. The CCC folks are explicitly Christian, but with a deep appreciation of the Celtic love for nature, and with a strong emphasis on the distinctive spirituality of the Celtic saints. Best of all — they celebrate the four Gaelic holidays: Imbolc, Beltaine, Lughnasa, and Samhain! Granted, they do so in a Christianized form, but hey, that’s what you get in Ireland. The most beautiful/powerful Imbolc ceremony I’ve ever attended was put on by the Catholic nuns in Kildare, Ireland.

In case anyone is wondering: no, I’m not going to stop attending mass or participating in the liturgical life of the monastery. But maybe I need to be more focussed on just being "Catholic" and not worrying about whether that word is modified by another (like "Roman" or "Celtic" or "Irish"). Meanwhile, the CCC folks have a wonderful study program that involves reading close to fifty books on a variety of Celtic and Christian topics. It’s their ordination process, but anyone is welcome to participate, even non-members with no interest in seeking ordination. So I’m thinking I’m going to do that (in addition to all the reading I’m currently doing, on mysticism, and theology, and so forth!).

Mysticism. Catholicism. Celtic Wisdom. Integral Spirituality. It’s tricky holding all of this in one body. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.