It feels like a time of endings right now. Everything. The leaves on the trees, our gardens, the temperatures that make life outside and all the windows open bearable. And all the other endings in our governments and shared community life that I don’t have the energy to list right now. I don’t have to. You already know all the endings of everything that you are experiencing as well as I do.
It is a time of endings, especially in the old Celtic yearly cycle. Come Oct 21 – November 2, the Celtic year ends with the end of the harvest. The crops are now mostly gathered in from the fields, the wood for winter fire, the seeds to be ground for February bread. When we go out into the world looking for what the natural world is doing we see it mostly retreating back out of sight. The leaves, no longer useful to the trees, drop to the earth. Some plants pull the sugars back to the roots and other send out seeds before collapsing in frost’s great cellular disruption.
If the end of October marks the end of Harvest and the end of the year, then the beginning of November must also mark the beginning of the next round of growth, and harvest. The beginning of November marks the beginning of the new year. It is interesting to note that in this ancient way of measuring time, the seasons of growth and harvest do not begin with energy and action but instead with dormancy, retreat, and rest. It begins with the next thing hidden from our sight. It begins with nothing. Like the Celtic day that ends with nightfall, the year begins with darkness and unseen things.
We are deep and getting deeper into the hidden time.
I didn’t know that the yard where I live had a Rowan tree till the gardening crew started pulling branches, leaves, and perhaps a small trunk out of the back yard and up onto their truck. It was sick and needed to be cut down. I was busy picking up the freshly trimmed Ivy for future fabric dying projects but I took a look for the Rowan tree in my dye book and then added the leaves and branches to my pile of harvested dye stuffs. A few days later I picked up a small mass of horse chestnuts and their shells and the next day a friend helped me gather acorns, oak leaves and small twigs and branches.
It surprises me that the yard I live within had a Rowan tree. The Rowan tree has some serious punching weight in European mythologies and folklores but most interesting is its role in protecting people, homes, and cows from witches. The red color of its fruit was apparently an anti-witch color and the tree was often planted at transitional places – a door way or a gate or a cross of rowen wood just hanging somewhere on the cow. Apparently you can still find the rowen tree growing next to long abandoned crofts in the highlands of Scotland. Rowen branches also served as a small cross bound with red thread and carried in a pocket. I am starting towonder if I shouldn’t maybe stick a small bit of rowen bark in my face mask.
This virus is a breath rider. Our deepest, most profound gateway into and out of our body is our mouth, our nose, our breath’s pathways which this unseeable, untouchable virus rides. Our masks are our primary defense against this threat to our well being. Our mouths are the last chance stand in the transition between the inside and the outside of our bodies. We need safety on our face. So we wear masks. Most of us at any rate.
Maybe I’ll take some of the unspun wool I currently have soaking in the rowan dye bath and stuff it into my mask. Maybe I should dye some machine woven fabric (better screening for the virus) in the rowan solution, stitch it all over with red embroidery thread and then make it up into a mask. Maybe some Rowen dye around our masks will carry necessary protection against these abstract concepts we call aerosols and particulates. A virus we could almost as easily call a witch’s curse for all we can tangibly sense it. I find myself sympathetic to my long ago elders who planted trees with bright, red fruit next to gates for lack of a better idea on how to secure their home from unseen threat.
It feels like everything is out of control and in spite of our collective best efforts, it seems like it is only getting worse, not better. At this point I think my High School English Teacher would like me to give you three to five examples in this paragraph but my soul counsels that maybe we already know all the threat’s names too well. Maybe what we need is the name of hope or at least presence.
All four gospels in the Christian Scripture tell stories about chaos and also hope. People are hungry and they get fed. People are ill and they get healed. People are impoverished and they learn that their poverty is not God’s plan or desire for them. People’s own humanity is restored when they encounter the Divine Love embodied in a man who’s life could have appeared as being way out of control but was in fact in Love’s own control. I think it was intensely destabilizing to encounter Jesus on a mission tour. I think it turned the world upside down to become a disciple. I think it must have shattered the community when Jesus was killed and then what was left to count as true about this world when Jesus returns to table and lake shore and the tomb is found empty? The Gospel of Matthew ends with Jesus apparently leaving this world and the people he knew and loved for good. Yet – and this is important – his last words to this community still in existence today was, “And remember, I am with you always to the end of the age.”
I wonder if that is what people wanted to claim with the rowan tree at the gate. That while we may appear to be defenseless, we are not abandoned. The rowan tree might be the last thing of home you saw when you walked out toward the fields or village or to war or when you left your childhood home for marriage and another house. The rowan tree, with its bright red berries still visible in the deepest of twilights became the first sign that home has waited for your return, safely guarded against seen and unseen invaders.
The world is turning dormant and the days are turning short. The seasonal transition is a reminder that if I have not yet gathered what I need for the coming months, I will have to wait and go without. Meanwhile the chaos of fire, flood, wind, and even governance itself is still deeply aswirl. I’m on my way home looking for the rowen tree’s promise that safe space starts where it grows. If it is a tree or a rock or something else, this month I’m keeping my eyes out for signs of God’s promise that none of us are ever left alone.
Look out the window, go for long walks in as green a space as you can find. Notice everything around you, even if you don’t know their names. You’ll be taught the names of what you need to know. Pick up an acorn, a future oak tree, and carry it in your pocket or purse this coming winter. Or a small rock. Or nothing. Maybe you already know that we are never left alone.
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.
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 Ripeningat 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.
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.
My spiritual director asked me how I have been experiencing the Covid-19 social isolation of the last four weeks. (She asked this by video conference of course.) I told her I had stoped writing. She mis-heard me and exclaimed, “Oh what good news!”
I told her I was listening. I was watching and observing. I told her I was waiting with my face turned toward the windows of my apartment. I said I had nothing to say yet. She nodded her head.
It isn’t that I have not been busy. Paying attention requires, well, attention. Paying attention means observing, noting what is different and what is the same. Paying attention means not taking anything for granted including the pigeon couple that lives in the shared yard behind our house. Sometimes the fly up to the roof that extends over our back windows and sometimes they perch on the balcony railing that juts out a scarce half foot from the corder of the neighboring building. Recently, one of them slammed into our window and fell back. He quickly flew back up to the roof peak of the house on the left and his companion landed next to him. She stayed close while he paused to do whatever it is that pigeons do when they have received a shock. I think they have a nest or will have a nest nearby. I’m really not read up on the family lives of pigeons but I watch this pair. And I watch how they watch for the raven that also claims this space. I think he likes eggs for breakfast.
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.
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.
Today is the seasonal threshold of Fall Equinox. It is the midway point between the longest day and the shortest day of the year. Today the hours of light and dark stand in balance with each other. Today is a good day to notice and attend to. Celtic Spirituality honors transitions as holy spaces, thin spaces. Today is the transition between
Summer and Fall Harvest’s inbringing and restful fallow season Leaf shade and Leaf fall Lightweight shirts and shorts and heavy sweaters and coats Summer fruits and winter roots Salads and stews Summer lazy and the return of school and cultural events
