This month’s chapter from The Soul’s Slow Ripening: 12 Celtic Practices for Seeking the Sacred (Christine Valters Paintner) is called “The Practice of Landscape as Theophany.” Theophany is a religious word more commonly used in theological debate and teaching than in day to day life. Basically it means an encounter with the Divine, in a way that human beings can sense with one or all five of our senses.
Celtic spiritual practices involve being ready to experience the Holy in all of our day-to-day lives. Every moment can be an encounter with God. One of the spiritual practices is to pray all day long. To pray a blessing on a new activity such as setting a loom, banking the fire, or doing the laundry and to pray a thanksgiving when it is completed.One of the spiritual practices is to be mindful of transitions such as passing into our out of our homes, paying attention to sunrise and sunset, and all the passages of the seasons. Ancient Celtic monks were not the first to withdraw into wilderness space in order to experience the Holy through the land and its inhabitants itself. The first in the Christian monastic tradition, the Desert Seekers in Egypt, pulled out of urban areas in the third century A.D. because Christianity was already getting too corrupted for their tastes. They wanted the ultimate in ecstatic experience and they were inspirational to the deeply religious men and women of Celtic Christianity.
There are dozens of stories about how Celtic monastic seekers withdrew to lonely, abandoned places trying to shed all their ego needs in order to be ready to encounter the Holy. These stories also explain how the retreating monastics were cared for by the land they retreated toward. Birds, fish, and other creatures, would bring food to the monks least they starve. Following this path involves stripping off all ego and heading into deep denial of having a body with needs. Yet God created all of us with a body and our physical selves are worthy of being taken care of. We can claim a Celtic Christian spirituality that incorporates a practice of near constant prayer which affirms our material and tangible world.
Celtic spirituality specifically looks to the created world for testimony about God’s loving intentions. All bird song was thought to praise God. All the greens and yellows of summer trees and all colors of flowers point to God’s bountiful glory. The wind and the rain carry God’s strong force. The land itself speaks of God. This is no small thing given how fierce it was to live off the land in such challenging conditions of the Northern Atlantic waters.
Not all of creation is good. I am personally waiting for an explanation of what good mosquitos bring any of us but there they are, still hovering over the wetlands and sometimes my bed at night. The wild woods are filled with dangers and suffering alongside the beauty. The Celtic Christians, like the rest of us, have always known that the ocean would just as soon kill you as feed you and not care about either outcome. How then does the unnoticing world around us testify to the nature of God?
Those of us who enjoy the comfort of a warm shelter, especially one with running water and electricity, tend to point toward the wild abundance of beauty in creation. Flowers take a thousand shapes when really, they only have to be one. Trees form a million shadows and grow a hundred fruits when there only has to be one. That the world is expressed in such a wide range of colors and shapes is one of the signs of God’s own abundant and creative love toward God’s beloved creation. Those of us who live closer to the edge of homelessness or hand-to-mouth existence may not be so deeply in love with the abundance of ways to grow ill and die that also exists in creation. What does the existence of mosquitos reveal about the nature of God? Or the diseases of Ebola, Typhoid, measles just to name a few corruptions of our lives lived in God’s beloved creation?
What does it mean when fire takes the land that sings to God’s glory? I grew up in the Pacific Northwest and the forests of the Cascades are rich in Douglas Firs and wildlife. I’ve camped in its trees and slept in grassy fields. It is home itself to me and much of my home forest has fallen, is falling in hot, destructive fire. At the same time, another hurricane drives into the Gulf Coast that has already seen so many. Ice sheets are melting off of everything. It should not surprise me that landscape changes for I have seen, many of us has seen half a mountain jump up into the air and fly out to cover half a continent. Nature changes and it isn’t always pretty.
Which is one of the reasons we want to be careful about not confusing God with the forest. The landscape points toward God, sings of God’s glory and can be a vehicle of Theophany, of encountering God through the Holy Spirit and the organic peace of a healthy wild space but wilderness does not contain God. God still creates, heals and transcends this world. God is not limited to landscape.
So what gift for us is there this spiritual practice of Landscape as Theophany, of Landscape as scared encounter?
Hope. If we watch the land enough we can see where the burnt places, the scared and broken places start to heal over and reshape new landscapes. Most plants need nitrogen in order to grow, which was in short supply on the slopes of Mt. St. Helens after the eruption in 1980. As it turns out, there is one particular flower, the Prairie Lupine, that grabs nitrogen from the air and brings it back into the soil, and it was one of the first plants to come back into the now healing devastated land. God’s abundant creation has a way to heal itself.
Interconnection. All of creation is interconnected. No plant or animal or insect or cell level being, stands alone. Everything is passing some critical life supporting gift back and forth. Tree roots intermingle beneath the soil. Some forests are actually a single root system of many trees and the roots of fungi form networks between plants that can transfer nutrients and information. We speak of ecosystems rather than this tree and that corn stalk. Plants take the sun’s energy and transform it into energy that creatures can consume as we go about our busines. We tend plants so they can grow and thrive.
Chaos is also Creation. Even fire, normal ecosystem fire, clears the clutter of understory plants and makes room to new beginnings. Saying this does not devalue the grief of losing one’s home, loved ones, health, or purpose in life. Endings and beginnings are not easy. One thing we can look for is how the fallen tree becomes a nurse log for the next generation of green growing forest. We can keep an eye out for how we can care for each other in great times of change.
So here is the Spiritual Practice suggested by Christine Valters Paintner:
“Make a commitment in the coming days to spend time in nature and be present to it as a place of revelation. Bring the prayers of your heart and ask God for signs and symbols to guide you on the way. Consider making a pilgrimage to a landscape that feels especially sacred to you, whether desert, mountain, sea, river, or plains. “ (https://uscatholic.org/articles/201905/12-celtic-spiritual-practices-that-celebrate-god-in-our-world/)
Seems simple, right? Tell me what you find.