Month: March 2020

I have trouble with a story often told about early Celtic Christian Monks. Apparently, they were inclined to jump into little boats without an oar or rudder and trust God to take them to some place God wanted them to be.

While these guys were clearly optimistic, they were not stupid. They knew about currents and windstorms. They surely understood that many of the tiny rock islands they were about to encounter were nearly uninhabitable but their faith in God’s presence with them gave them courage. I think the monks were trying to leave their egos on the shore alongside all other tools useful to marine navigation. They trusted God’s guidance to appear in the flow of the water itself and they wanted to remove any barriers to God that were born in fear or self-promotion.

I personally think all of them were nuts but I have a different idea of how God is at work in this world. I think God is comfortable with human free will. I think God baked the ability to make choices into this beloved creation. We have to be able to to make our own choices if our relationship with God and each other is to be anything other than robotic programming. I think that one of the reason God is comfortable with letting us creatures make our own decisions is that God is always working to bend our choices toward the good. Nothing we say or do is beyond God’s ability to reclaim and heal and make new. Including the bad choices. The really bad choices.

Continue reading “Small Boats, Big Sea – 25 March 2020”

Thresholds are seen as a significant space to transit through in Celtic Spirituality.

And thresholds have become extraordinarily significant in our world wide practice of social isolation. In so many places we are all under orders or if not orders then encouragement to stay home. To not pass through our front door except for the most urgent of reasons.

Thresholds are also edges, a place where one kind of space ends and another begins. In Permaculture, edges are seen as the most creative and dynamic spaces in green growing systems. A forest is a forest and a field is a field except for the edges of each as one makes room for the other. In permaculture, which is based on careful observation of a place before turning soil for a garden or a growing field, the transition zone between cultivated and uncultivated spaces holds important information for the health of the land as a whole.

Continue reading “Thresholds – 21 March 2020”