Month: August 2020

I invite you to join me in engaging in ancient Celtic Spirituality practices in the community and landscape where we live. Celtic spirituality looks to find the Sacred engaged with the Secular, the Holy at work in the world around us.​​

After  several years of incorporating Celtic traditions in my personal spiritual practice, I am committing to take this practice out of the silence of my home and into the world. For the next 12 months I will be following and adding onto the 12 chapters of Christine Valters Paintner’s book, The Soul’s Slow Ripening at a specific time and place at various public and outdoor locations in Munich. You are welcome to join me.

​While my theological context is Trinitarian, I intend to extend welcoming hospitality to anyone who wish to interrogate the Holy in our day to day world. Anyone for whom Mary Oliver’s poem, Wild Geese resonates. 

This first year’s of outdoor gatherings is based on the book, The Soul’s Slow Ripening: 12 Celtic Practices for Seeking the Sacred by Christine Valters Paintner. We have been meeting since September of 2019. While I have used the book’s organization as the starting place for our gatherings I have augmented the material as we went along. Here is the list of the chapters explored so far with some key points from each gathering. Reading the key points only cheats the book because I am leaving behind much of the text behind each point. 

Continue reading “2019-2020: the key points so far”

Wild Geese – August 2020
Chapter 9 – The Practice of Solitude and Silence

Almost every month, once a month, we have gathered on the third Thursday of the month since September, 2019. The big virus shut down claimed a few months in the early part of the year. Personally I found it necessary to fall silent in this project and just exist in each hour of the lock down and slow re-opening time. Last month, for the first time since February, we* walked clockwise around the hill in Luitpold park holding a piece of bread** and considering the season of Lughnasa (harvest)***. For ancient Celtic practices the new day begins with sunset, not sunrise. The new year begins with the end of harvest (Nov 1) not the middle of winter. The new begins with the end of the old. The pause of nightfall or winter’s dormancy is part of the preparation for the next thing. Lughnasa is the last seasonal marker in the Celtic calendar year.

Continue reading “Silence and Solitude”