“Behold an Angel of the Lord came to him and a light shined in the prison.” Acts

“There was no such thing as a prison in the Celtic mind.” John O’Donahue

Recently I was sitting in a garage visiting with my good friend Greg.  Due to a very rare illness Greg is limited in his mobility, restricted mainly to a walker and a wheelchair.  We share a lot in common, not the least of which is a love for Scotland.  Greg told about watching a series about the Celts.  He the conveyed about the plans that had been made to travel there which never came to fruition due to Covid and his physical condition.  But then he said this, “It’s OK, because I go there frequently in my mind.”  What a powerfully freeing assertion!  Greg is a free man!  Though severely limited, one might say imprisoned, physically, he travels anywhere and everywhere he desires viewing unlimited vistas through the imagination of his mind.  How very Celtic!

“The Celts inhabited a rich imaginative landscape. At the heart of Celtic spirituality is the fire, the force, the tenderness of the Celtic imagination. The beauty of Celtic spirituality is the imagination behind it, which has no boundaries.”  O’Donahue.

As children we are gifted with such imagination.  Anything and everything is possible.  We live in the realm of make-believe.  We each have our personal Peter Pan who takes us by the hand and accompanies us to adventure land.  We live outside the walls of what is “real, true, logical or sensible”.  But then we become adults, and we begin to build.  Our minds are fed by an overly aggressive Western way of thinking in which facts and figures and functionalism rule the day.  And we build the walls which wither our souls and suffocate our spirits. 

“A mental prison can be as bad as a physical prison. When you are trapped in a mental prison the crippling idea or feeling robs you of all joy and freedom.  You can see and feel little else. Your mind becomes a room with little light. You turn the wild mystery of your own mind into a shabby, negative little room; the windows are blocked, and there is no door. The mental prison is devastatingly lonely.  It is a sorrowful place, because ultimately it is you who locks yourself in.  You come to believe that the shape of the prison is the shape of reality. It is so difficult to leave the mental prison precisely because you cannot see beyond your own pain. This punishment is mainly self punishment.  Inevitably you begin to blame others and hold them responsible for whatever hurt put you away.  It is only when you become aware of your own longing to be free that you realize how you let what happened to you take away your power and freedom.”  O’Donahue

I’m guessing we don’t think of this as a sin.  At least I don’t.  We don’t consider what a tragedy it is to take the freedom, in which we are created, and throw it away due to the restrictions of religiosity, the resentment resulting from the words or actions of others, or the compulsion of our culture to impose upon ourselves the sentence of scientific sanity, which is the sanitizing agent of our soulful imagination and liberty of our spirits flying in free formation with God’s Spirit.

What is it, dear friend, that has imprisoned you in your mind?  Take a lesson from Greg, and so many others who have broken free from the shackles and travel to that place where you long to be. Pray that your angel comes and shines a light, unlocks the door and leads you on the Way.