Let's Talk About Celtic Spirituality

What I've discovered as I've dug into the Indigenous teachings of my Irish ancestors.

The labyrinth at Shrine Mont in Virginia.

I’m back in DC after my Celtic retreat in Virginia with John Phillip Newell.

The picture above is of the labyrinth where I spent a lot of time walking and meditating during downtime at the retreat. This is one of my favorite contemplative practices.

I wish I could do more often.

I gave a little background on what led me to search for teachers like Newell in last Tuesday’s post.

Like many people who have had bad experiences with Christianity, I went through an intense deconstruction phase many years ago. Thankfully, during this period, I attended a retreat with the Franciscan teacher Richard Rohr, at which he taught about “transcending and including.”

This means that rather than demonizing past stages in your life you, you move on without judgment. You take what was good from that season and leave behind what was not. You do not look down on the people still in that stage, because you are not better.

This is about as hard as it sounds.

It took me a while to adjust to this way of thinking, but now it is much more reflexive for me. It’s not that I never judge; it’s that I notice when it’s happening and self-correct. In the past, judging others was like breathing. It went on with no awareness on my part.

Every stage has high and low sides. Often, when people move out of a stage, they can caricature it as being only the less positive aspects or the low side. This is normal, as people sometimes are shocked out of a stage because they experienced harm from the lower side energies of the stage.

That was certainly the case for me.

Something that can happen during deconstruction is that people move from having an intense and meaningful spiritual life to having nothing. It’s hard to know where to go, especially since Western Christianity (even some of the more progressive flavors) can make everything that is not Christianity seem either bad or, at best, not true.

So, there is a lot of unlearning to do.

I think it’s important to deconstruct but not get stuck there. At some point, it’s time to reconstruct, which is where I’ve been for quite some time. This is the process of creating a healthy spirituality.

For me, this is a faith rooted in tradition, but not religion.

It can go by the labels “contemplative spirituality” or “mysticism.” It’s a spirituality that draws from many wisdom traditions and makes no exclusive faith claims. There is no dogma or doctrine.