Celtic Advent November 22nd, 2013
    33 days until Christmas

I have been writing about Celtic Saints and how something about their lives or location seem to affect me.  I am going to stretch the idea of formal saint a little for today as eventually I will want to talk about a significant spiritual leader (a modern day saint) who was born in Northern Ireland.
But first I need to talk about the 22nd of November.   I am sitting in Mr Spencer's Homeroom class at Huntington Junior High.  I can visualize the speaker system in the corner of the room up near the ceililng.  Mr. White, the principal, has a distinct voice and I hear him come, unexpectedly on the speaker to announce that President Kennedy has been shot.

I grew up in an ultra conservative town, but the idea that our nation's President could be gunned down was daunting and fear-provoking.  Jack Kennedy was from an Irish background and his religion was an obvious part of his persona as the nation's first Catholic president.  He was, however, far from being a spiritual leader.

In a strange twist of fate, another "Jack" had died that same day, but the papers had little room to eulogize him.  His full name was Clive Staples Lewis, known to the world as C.S. Lewis, and to his friends as Jack. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, which technically makes him a Celt, so I am going to spend a little while talking about how I have been affected by him.  I have not read all his works, nor have I been enthralled with all of his works that I have read.  I loved the first several books of the Narnia series and Mere Christianity.  His "sci-fi" novels about Mars, which starts with Out of the Silent Planet, were for me kind of a dud. But one of the things that Lewis impressed upon me, in several, if not most, of his works, was the reality of evil in the world.  That may seem like an odd thing to bring up, but as a 20 and 30 something I had struggled a lot with what evil was.  I had gone through a fairly heavy duty Plato phase, where evil was only the absence of good, kind of like a temperature drop being an absence of warmth.  That worked OK in some scenarios, but certainly not when thinking about things like the holocaust or the genocide in Cambodia under Pol Pot.  I didn't feel comfortable. with the idea of a red suited evil genius with horns--which, given my home church's vacuum in talking about evil--was what I got from the media.  Even in the tongue in cheek portrayal of the Screwtape Letters, Lewis gave me a strong sense a pervading, often subtle, force that was looking to trip us up.  As I became more biblically literate, something also lacking in my early church upbringing, I found Lewis' vision to be more true to the portrayals in the bible, such as Job, Paul's references to the forces of evil in Ephesions 6 ("Put on the whole armor of God..."), or the "prowling lion seeking whom he may devour" in  1 Peter 5. It was also, much more Celtic.  It is wonderful to focus on the early Celtic Christians as lovers of nature, a being more egalitarian with gender issues, of being less hierarchical.  Yet they were also very aware of the sense of evil in the world, hence the prayers often referred to as Breastplates, of which St. Patrick's Lorica is just one: "I rise today through God's strength to pilot me...God's host to save me from snares of devils..."   A significant number of the prayers in the Carmina Gadelica are related to the protection of St. Michael the archangel.  One of Michael's main roles is to help fight the forces of evil that may be arrayed against us.

I try to do some form, even if briefly, of contemplative prayer each day (key word here is "try").  I vary a little with what kind of prayer I use to lead me into contemplation.  One of the forms I have found a lot of comfort with involves invoking protection against evil.  Although not specifically Celtic, I think the early Celts would have approved of it.  I use Paul's list for the "armor of God" that I mentioned above from Ephesions 6, re-reading that text as a form of lectio divina. I change the order slightly so that  I can combine that with a chakra breathing exercise left over from my Buddhist phase (also when I was 20-30 something).  I realize that that kind of synthesis is abhorrent to some conservative Christians, yet again, given how the early Celts took many of the druidic practices into their prayer armentarium, I don't think they would have minded. I do this pretty slowly, but here it is:

Lord help me to put on your whole armor, that I may be able to withstand evil.
Help me to:
Put on my feet that which will allow me to spread the gospel of peace
  (Visualizing the breath going in and out from my feet up through the base of my spine)
Gird myself with the belt of truth
  (Breathing through the point just below my navel)
Put on the breastplate of righteousness
   (Breathing through my heart)
Taking on the shield of faith to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one
   (I imagine holding a shield and with the breath I take I connect it mentally to a point near my throat)
Take the helmut of salvation
   (Breathing through a point at my forehead)
And take the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God
    (I imagine holding a sword in a defensive position above my head, and breath through that point)

Let me rest for a time, Lord, surround by both your love and your protection....
(time for silent contemplation)
Amen