“I Am with you always . . . “  Jesus

“The Celt was very much a God-intoxicated man whose life was embraced on all sides by the Divine Being.”  John Macquarrie

I’ve decided to devote the next series of blogs to the topic of Celtic Spirituality.  I have made reference to it throughout my past blogs, but I’d like to take a deeper dive.  The primary  source that I’m using this is the book entitled “The Celtic Way” by Ian Bradley.  I begin today with the topic of “Presence”.

What is your first recollection of God?  How did you imagine or envision God?  As a child growing up in the Northwoods of Wisconsin God was all around me.  I couldn’t have named it at the time, but God was quite immanent.  God was in the forest and the trees, in the animals, the birds and yes, the bees!  God was a wild God.  God was always close to me, sometimes it almost seemed that God was in me. 

As I grew up I was taught that God was transcendent.  That God was far away.  Heaven was “up there” in the sky somewhere.  Jesus, at His Ascension, had also gone away into the sky.  The goal of life seemed to be to somehow reach God, to get to where God is.  I realize now how inaccurate that is.  And also, how the Celtic Christians simply didn’t see God that way. 

Yes, for the Celts God was transcendent (we may address this in the future), but God was also quite close.  God was immanent!  There is a Welsh word “presen”, which is taken from the Latin “presentia”, and means exactly what it implies:  God IS present and God IS presence!  As Bradley notes, for Celtic Christians “The world is the place of God’s presence.  God’s presence makes the world at every moment.”

God was and is present in a number of ways, two of the most prominent being in nature and in others.

Some have accused the Celtic Christians of being pantheistic, meaning that God and nature are the same.  God IS nature and Nature IS God.  But that is not the case.  Not at all.  They recognized that God created nature, and continues to do so.  A more accurate description of what they believed has been called “Panentheism”.  This means that God is IN nature—and all things.  That God is responsible for creating all things, and continues to do so.  Our world would benefit with such a perspective on nature!  Perhaps, if we saw God present in it, we would treat it with more respect.

God was also present with other people.  This is a type of ongoing incarnation of Christ.  It is putting the “skin” on Christ in the here and now.  Long before the concept of “namaste” became popular, the Celts were recognizing the Spirit of the Living Christ in, with and under others. 

The following from St. Patrick perhaps sums up this recognition of God’s presence in all things.

Christ be with me, Christ within me,

Christ behind me, Christ before me,

Christ beside me, Christ to win me,

Christ to comfort and restore me.

Christ beneath me, Christ above me,

Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,

Christ in hearts of all that love me,

Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

Consider carefully what this recognition of the immanence of God in Christ means.  God is not far away, but is present here and now!  God is closer to you than you even are to yourself!  Therefore we don’t have to look far and wide to try and find a far away God, but simply look around us, and dare I say within us? In God we live and move and have our being, and God does the same for us!