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Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the path that leads to life, and only a … Continue reading
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A cold north wind blows across Chanctonbury Ring. Her breath driving banks of white clouds across the crystal clear vista of the South Downs. Their shadows chasing the edges of light across the chalk landscape. Chanctonbury, an ancient iron and bronze age site, encircled now by banks of beech tree, is our host for our fourth Celtic Easter celebration. Thirty of us gather from across the country to meet on the date that the early British Church had celebrated Easter and to encounter Christ in the Cathedral of Creation.
Chanctonbury Ring
I am struck by God’s ability to communicate beyond the use of language. In fact my journey with the rediscovery of the British Easter celebration has become a journey of discovering theology and spirituality as drama and narrative, rather than the dominant view as history and orthodoxy. Much of our life in Christ is channeled through predetermined pathways, set out for us by the experts of cultural orthodoxy. Yet what captures most devotees of Jesus is not his orthodoxy, but his unorthodoxy. His desire to haunt the margins of society, the wild places of the mountains and valleys and to respond to the cries of the poor and the yearnings of creation.
The drama of Christ and the power of his resurrection is a story to be told and reenacted throughout life, not just a story to be confined to the pages of a book and a place in history. To my mind, confining resurrection to a ritual and to history is to deny its very veracity. If Christ is resurrected, then history has been framed as a daily encounter with the eternal. It moves from ritual to encounter, from history to future opportunity.
Therefore, celebrating Easter on the Celtic dating is not a reactionary political two-fingered gesture to the established religious institutions that benefited from the Easter Controversy and in recent times have presided over the demise of the message of Christ in these Islands, it is a vital symbolic enactment of the drama of God in our lives and an invitation to all of creation to take part in this drama. I call this a prayer-scape as it is more than just a meeting in the open air, it is the prayerful encounter of all of Creation with its Creator.
At Chanctonbury we weaved a prayer-scape of pilgrimage, ascending to the top of the highest peak in the area, the land meeting the coastland to the south, the Sussex plain the recipient of our prayers, the warmth of fire in the brazier, the procession through the points of the compass, voices intoning “be Thou My Vision” to the nation as we sung to the north, the mournful north wind chilling our bones as we listened to Uilleann pipes playing behind a recitation of the Psalms and watching Buzzards display in the open sky. In the breaking of bread and wine, Christ was in our midst, was in creation and our prayers for one another affirmed our desire to be transformed into the Likeness of Christ.
I am constantly challenged in my faith to find external ways of dramatising the internal journey of contemplative encounter. The resurrection of celebrating Easter on the calendar of the original British church is just one of those symbolic ways of doing so.
Glastonbury Tor
An evocative sight greeted me when I reached the top of the winding path that led up the hillside with its tall trees and winding thick roots. As I looked to the right I saw Chanctonbury Ring and about thirty people gathered there. Standing in front of them was my beautiful friend, Juliet, who had wrapped herself in a white blanket and was carrying a large stick on which she had attached a big white flag with a gold cross on it.
Take not food until you are hungry
The Rule of Columba
Elitism is a destructive force and I am mindful of it as I write on fasting. The early British monk and historian St Gildas writing in the early 6th century was openly critical of what he saw as elitist monks who spent more time fasting than working and in doing so had made fasting and aestheticism an idol, rather than a practice through which to draw close to God.
Yet fasting has never been optional extra for those that follow Christ, it is clearly an expectation,
‘When you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites do, for they disfigure their faces to show others they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full‘ (Matthew vi, 15).
As my exploration of Columban spirituality has developed, I have been mindful and challenged by the simply put ‘take not food until you are hungry‘. Although not an explicit reference to fasting, it is pertinent challenge to the overweight consumption of our fast food culture. A direct addressing of our relationship with food of which every living creature naturally has a vested interest in. For many in the monastic churches of Britain and Ireland, food was taken only as required.
“When the stomach is full, it is easy to talk of fasting” St Jerome (340?-420)
Equally it has begun to sensitize me to the issue of appetite and the role food plays in suppressing and controlling the development of personality and culture. If I agree with the basic supposition that my life is dysfunctional, my character out of alignment with Gods, then I, like others am faced with stark choices as to how to respond. Food has become, I would suggest, more than meal, a shared table of hospitality, a means by which we are able to demonstrate Gods compassion for the hungry, or our daily link to the health and inherent goodness and provision of creation. The cult of food and the fulfilling of immediate appetites has become a curse to great to bear for the west, as the obesity epidemic gripping our societies indicates, as the food miles of the supermarkets cripples the environment and impoverishes poor farmers through unfair terms of trade on supply contracts and commodity exchanges. The unequal distribution of food and the millions globally malnourished as a result, is the disgrace of our scandalous selfishness that we seemingly wear with pride as we tuck into a 99 cent plastic burger in the name of ‘good value’. Are the golden arches the gateway to spiritual oblivion? These external manifestations of greed linked to appetite only exist because the internal world of the souls goodness, mingled with the grace of God has become polluted and the self substitutes this with an idol; in our case a wrong relationship with food.
As I prepare for what has become for me an annual fast leading up to the celebration of the Celtic Easter date of 15 April, one of my aims this year will be to explore fasting in a more proactive intentional way of calling out the ‘Monastic Churches of Britain and Ireland’ (as I will blog separately on this over the next few weeks of Lent I won’t explore this further in this post) This may sound counter-intuitive given that fasting is an intentional activity by definition, but I do believe for many fasting, especially in the protestant tradition has become something we do, a bit like a sanctified diet, if at all, and to a minimal impact. I hear of television fasts, chocolate fasts, my favorite computer game, Indian take away (one my wife consistently encourages). My fasting becomes the removal of a small part of the edge of my lifestyle, which may act as a reminder of Christ, but will not radically alter that trajectory of my lifestyle that may in turn move the very ground on which my relationship with God is built.
Another aspect of fasting, alongside the external political implications it can have on publicly standing against over consumption, is that it actively addresses the internal imbalance and our over reliance on sustenance that does not reflect the incarnation of God. It is only in Christ that the moral paradox of the incarnation of God as a poor man born into poverty and simplicity whom we are called to imitate, as opposed to what Julius Nyerere the first President of Tanzania once said in regards to the plight of his nation, ‘that God created humanity in his own image. I refuse to believe in a God who is poor, starving and illiterate’ can be reconciled. Fasting therefore catapults us towards being rooted in a symbolic re-imagining and imitation of the life of Christ. That life rooted in truth and the search for veracity in the earth and dust of my life.
I know Jesus fasted, and I am always drawn to the relationship between fasting and the desert. The desert a place of being alone with self, stripped of all props that crowd our life and distract us from our core being. The desert a silent place where only the cries of wildlife act as partners in our prayers. The desert a place were you are alone to battle the demons of your own self and the phantoms of your own perverted appetites. Fasting and the desert are Gods chosen partners in stripping us down to bare essentials and testing our resolve to put God before everything.
My personal practice, and one I have been developing since 2008, is to eat one meal a day after sundown. As I have repeated this each year I have built in new facets, like no alcohol, no take away food, or eating out. Each year growing in confidence that I can take another step in exploring the benefits of fasting. Last year I made the fatal mistake of externalising my fast to include greater levels of transparency and honesty in the gold trade. By the end of this fast the Christian company I was working with had defaulted on a project in Sierra Leone, been exposed as deceitful in intent, spiritually manipulative in saying because this was in the name of the Kingdom it was ok not to pay bills and left my household without an income for most of the year. This month I discover they have gone down for $2.8 million, leaving thousands without hope in the DRC and elsewhere in Africa. God honoured my fast last year, and I was totally unprepared for the consequences. A salient lesson in be careful what you ask for.
Fasting I have found creates the space both internally and externally for God to move more freely. It creates an environment of light in our lives that reveals the content of who we are and what surrounds us and hopefully will move us in such a way that as we emerge on the other side, we are more conscious of our need of grace so we may not only dream of truth, but may find the will to live with it.
Posted in Celtic Christianity, Celtic Easter, St Columba, The Rule of Columba
Tagged Celtic Easter, Columba, fasting, food culture, Rule of Columba, st gildas
I guess for many people who express a devotion to Jesus Christ and who identify with his message, the celebration of Easter will be the high point of the annual calendar. It is the time of year when followers of Christ focus on the core elements of their faith, belief and practice.
I’ve always been captivated by the message of Jesus, yet for me the drama of the entire story is the most compelling aspect. The longer I have tried to walk with Jesus, the less the abstract theological interpretations of his story have been relevant to me. What has motivated me to pursue the man was his willingness to demonstrate truth and freedom to all of us. A freedom that transcends death itself in the resurrection and a truth that liberates all the creation from the cruel subjugation of selfish motive and control.
An ancient icon
As a group of us stood in the circle of Stonehenge on Easter evening 2010, I was aware that I had very little to say to our small gathering. In recent years I have come to a place in my walk with God where I am aware that I have nothing to say. The Jesus story has already been told and enacted, any additions I may make to it through words are of little substance at best and the egocentric ramblings of an insecure preacher at worst. God I have discovered does not have a problem communicating with people. The wonder of creation, the uniqueness of every person, the emotion of a moment, the hunger for justice and freedom, the hatred of evil, the healing power of a tender touch, the intimacy of love making are some of the myriad of subtle and powerful ways the Creator speaks and is a testimony to the pure genius of The Trinity and my deafness to the vitality of life.
In truth celebrating Easter at Stonehenge was the culmination of a journey I have been on for a number of years. A walk of discovery with Christ, in which the internal journey and narrative has been played out and echoes in the physical world around me. An internal journey away from the noise of religious expression and expectation and towards the stillness and silence of discovery in Christ. A discovery that the Kingdom of God is not about talk, but about power. Its been a journey that I have found deeply disturbing as I have faced my own prejudices, religious addictions, disconnection from creation, lack of rootedness in the earth of my home and landscape, shallowness of my faith and my weakness in allowing my head to be turned by any minor distraction so I can avoid engaging with the Holy Trinity.
Yet it has been a wondrous journey of new possibilities and expression. For me that is what Easter at Stonehenge was all about. The living picture of breaking of bread and drinking of wine in remembrance of Jesus by a rag-tag broken, dysfunctional group of people of whom not all would have said they are followers of Christ. On an Easter date (4 April 2010) that was one of the few days when the western and eastern (I include Celtic church as eastern) celebrated on the same day. Within the iconic British stone circle of Salisbury plain that is one of the world’s most ancient ceremonial sites. A site more associated with druidic practices than with Christ centred ones. And yet it was a unique coming together of all the strands of life; the ancient, the modern, openness to creation, celebration of life, friendship, prayer and spirituality all gathered around the person of Jesus.
There is no where in the world that is off limits to the Holy Spirit and for me Easter at Stonehenge has been like walking through a doorway that leads to a world of endless possibilities in the Spirit.
