Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul
The Celtic spiritual tradition is one that has recognized and honored the sacred and the rhythms of nature rooted in place and community. Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening To What Our Souls Know And Healing The World by John Philip Newell (HarperCollins, 2021) is “about reawakening to what we know in the depths of our being; that the earth is sacred and that this sacredness is at the heart of every human being and life-form” (p. 1).
The Celts “formed a loose federation of tribes sharing a common culture and language base” (p. 7) across middle Europe. They worshiped without temples, experiencing the patterns and rhythms of the natural world and the union of the feminine and masculine as sacred.
What makes the Celtic tradition unique, according to Newell, is that “compared to most other Western traditions…it cannot be reduced to a set of doctrines or beliefs; instead, at its core is the conviction that we essential need to keep listening to what our soul already knows, either in the particular circumstances of our lives or in matters more universal” (p. 3). In other words, faith, trust and connection are not about surrendering the self to doctrine, but deepening the capacity to listen to an embedded self.
In service to reawakening to our own deep knowing, Newell shares the stories of nine Celts, most of whom posed “a challenge and even a threat, to the way more prominent forms of Western Christianity views the scared as separate from the ordinary rather than at the heart of it (p. 8). Each offer a particular stream of listening and remembering that we can look to as a support in our own reawakening. Flow, imagination and compassion are a few of the themes highlighted throughout the book, each sharing historical context for a particular Celtic icon and their spiritual work, and ending with a short reflection to invite further integration.
Newell comes to the subject as former co-leader of the abbey community on Iona, a small island in the Inner Hebrides. Associated with St. Columba since the 6th century and recognized as the birthplace of Scottish Christianity, it has been a place of pilgrimage tracing back to the early Druids. Readers not familiar with Celtic Christianity will find the profiles in each chapter open a new window on how the Celtic wisdom tradition became subsumed by imperialist Christianity and how it has endured and stayed connected to its roots through time.
One of the most known and beloved of Celtic saints is Brigid of Kildare (ca. 451-523). If she was a real person is of some debate, and stories of her origin and life evoke similarities to the earlier Celtic goddess Brigid. This overlap itself reflects the long and complex relationship between Christianity and earlier Celtic faith traditions. In this, and other ways, Brigid of Kildare represents a liminal space. As Newell writes, “She stands at the doorway or meeting place between the so-called opposite dimensions of life, which have been torn apart from each other”(p. 46). Divine and human, human and earth. From the Sanskrit word brihati (brightness), Brigid of Kildare embodied the goddess Brigid, shining one. In Kildare, Ireland, like the Druidic communities that came before, according to Newell, a fire continually burned for over a thousand years, a material expression of the light that shines in all things. Though this fire was extinguished by Protestant Reformers in the 16th century, houses across the region began keeping continual fire in the family hearth, known in the Hebrides as “the mother fire” representing “the feminine and the Light of the divine that is deep in matter” (p. 52).
St. Brigid’s feast day, also known as Imbolic, occurs at the threshold between winter solstice and spring equinox, between dark and light, between the dormancy of winter and the new life of spring. Newell offers an account of Brigid’s life and the rituals surrounding her place in both Christian and pre-Christian Celtic culture as inspiration for meeting our own time of liminality, where differences threaten mass destruction and monoculture renders us blind and deaf to the startling diversity of life on our planet.
Taking the reader chapter by chapter through time and history, Newell lands in the present, with a profile of the Scottish poet Kenneth White. Born in Glasgow in 1936, White has lived most of his adult life in France. Like other Celts before him, White’s writing and philosophy of life express a deep reverence for the natural world. As a writer, he’s especially interested in how we “redword” the world, how it is that we allow our relationship with the earth to “reshape how we speak and act” (p. 224), allowing a new way of being to emerge.
White’s poems express the ways in which he experiences the earth as sacred text, the rewording a “‘geo-poetics,’ which is how he describes a poetry that is rooted in the earth…” (p. 252). So much was his ear tuned towards the earth and “the power of truth spoken from the heart” (p. 252) that he was fired from his teaching post in Bordeaux for his involvement with student protests in the late 60’s. “By learning this language, he says, maybe we can move beyond the fixed categories of opposites that have dominated our Western world, of seen and unseen, spirit and matter” (p. 257). What’s beyond White imagines in his evocation of scotus vagans, the wandering Celtic teacher. The archetype of the wanderer, the journeyer, appears frequently in White’s work, guiding his readers to trust in the unknown unfolding, a subtle feeling and listening to a new way of experience and being.
Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul is full engaging stories that invite us, as we reflect on histories both shared and unshared, to image a present and future of radical and unconditioned care for ourselves, the earth and each other. Newell writes, “In the Celtic tradition it was said that we suffer from soul-forgetfulness. We have forgotten who we are and have fallen out of true relationship with the earth and with one another” (p. 3). Let’s now remember.