Alexander Carmichael was a 19th century Scottish revenuer. While traipsing through the highlands, shutting down illicit stills,he collected Gaelic songs and poems for posterity. Alexander's anthology of the Gaelic oral tradition, the Carmina Gadelica, is, in the words of Ian Bradley, at least partly responsible for the notion that Celtic Christianity is "a gentle, 'green,' poetic and pagan-friendly inculturation of the gospel with a particular emphasis on notions of presence, immanence and closeness to the next world."
Now whether there is or was such a thing as Celtic Christianity, and whether it fits the above description, and whether 19th century Scottish poems can tell us something about the Celtic Christianity of the 5th-7th centuries, are topics that will have to wait for later. For now I just want to talk about the poems and songs. We are using Esther de Waal's reduced and simplified version of the Carmina Gadelica in our Celtic Christianity class, The Celtic Vision.
There are prayers for building a fire, for churning butter, for herding cattle, and for setting a loom. There are blessings of mothers for their sons who are departing on a journey. There are prayers for newborns and prayers for the dying. There are, to be frank, charms and incantations to ward off disease and evil spirits.
I like this one:
Bless, O God, my desire;
Bless thou my partnership
And the milking of my hands, O God.
Bless, O God, each teat,
Bless, O God each finger,
Bless thou each drop
That goes into my pitcher, Lord!
I wonder if these mostly Catholic Scottish highlanders didn't have a leg up on both their Protestant neighbors and on their cloistered co-religionists. These folks didn't have to drop everything to say the Divine Office. For them, ora and labora were a single movement, thanks to these prayers, poems and songs. And praying while working may have made "the sanctity of the common life" a lived reality and not a rote theological affirmation.
A classmate who is a minister said that this is what people these days want, a sense of God's presence in the minutiae of life, and not just on Sunday morning. The problem is, we Protestants haven't had anything to give them. We have sermons and free prayers. But where's the poetry? The catechism has fallen out of favor because we don't want to raise kids who have a parrot's faith, but without memorizing catechisms, psalms, hymns or poems, then the secular world's commercial jingles become the soundtrack of one's life. A deficit in my spiritual life right now is that I'm not singing in a choir. Thus I go to bed and wake up with the crappy pop music they play at That Casual Dining Chain You've Eaten In Before where I wait tables in my head instead of the anthem for Sunday.
And not nearly as many people milk cows by hand these days. So there's a danger in consigning a lived spirituality to the misty, dewy recesses of nostalgic by-gone days. But our professor, with the help of Norman Shanks, showed us how easy it is to re-enchant your disenchanted life.
Here's the format; it's easier than Haiku!
Bless, O Lord,
May
That
And this is what I came up with:
May I set it out and clear it away with a gracious spirit.
May it be wielded by those who tip generously,
who feast with thankful, not gluttonous hearts,
That both server and served may serve and be served by the Son of Man,
who gave his life a ransom for many.
And,
May it be a home to a labor of love, and not mere idle curiosity,
That I may glorify you with my mind,
and build up your people, the Church.
I think that in this washed out age, we need to teach people how to pray along with what to believe and how to live. We need to teach them to sing and to compose. We need to teach beauty, not just truth and goodness.
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