Celtic Advent December 21st
The 21st has literally no true Celtic saints feasts. There are a couple of Anglo-saxon saints, but they have no Celtic connections like St. Hilda. But...it is Winter Soltice. That got me to thinking about Celtic Holidays in general and the idea of Christian/Non-Christian synthesis. I will finish up with some tribute to saints, so if you are reading this because you are a saint-a-holic, despair not.
Today is the shortest day of the year, the least amount of light. The ancient pre-Christian Celts divided up the year into a season of light and a season of dark. We know from the megalithic monuments that they were certainly aware of the equinoxes and soltices (like today). Yet they marked their year primarily by the midpoints between these solar events. Their festivals were November 1st Samhain, February 1st Imbolc, May 1st Beltane, and August 1st Lughnasa. Once the Celts converted to Christianity, these feasts didn't go away. Two of them were fairly succesfully converted to Christian feasts; November 1st became All-Saints day and February 1st became the feast of St. Brigid--which is followed on February 2nd by Candlemas, the presentation of Christ in the Temple. May 1st was "sort of" a Christian holiday at times: the later medieval designation of the feast of Mary, Queen of Heaven, or the Central European feast of St. Walpurgis. Lughnasa or Lammas was for a while the Feast of St. Peter in Chains, but this largely disappeared. Yet we, as humans, seem to have a persistance connection to these times of the year. Lughnasa is still celebrated in some parts of Ireland, and we Americans celebrate May Day, Ground Hog's day, and have made the eve of All Saints (Hallowed even: Halloween) the 2nd most celebrated Holiday in the US.
The early Christian Celts had a kind of mixed response to the pre-Christian traditions of the areas. The megalithic monuments and burial mounds were felt to be areas of demonic influence and were either avoided or approached with a sense of "spiritual battle" in mind.
Yet the Celts loved the stories of the ancient pre-Christian heroes and "gods." It was the Celtic Christian monastics who wrote down the stories of the Tuatha de Danaan, the early Celtic Warriors whose invasion of Ireland is documented in the Book of Conquests. There group included Lugh, a god-warrior after whom Lughnasa is named. The also wrote down the great Ulster cycle which included tales of the hero Cuchulain, who later morphed in medieval legend to the Christian knight Gawain. Cuchulain's main opponent was the queen of Connacht, Medb or Maeve, who has been held up as an example of early gender equality. There are even a tales which include encounters between the Irish gods and the Christian saints, as the former faded into either a less heroic and more humorous, mischief-making group: leprachauns.
Is it OK for me as a Christian to celebrate any of these non-Christian holidays? Could I, tonight, go to a solstice celebration? Or on August 1st, could my family have a Lughnasa party (which my son Bryan and I keep planning)? My very right wing Christian friends would say "no," this is paganism and should be avoided. Yet tonite, I will be singing in a Christmas concert in a church where one of the pieces includes the words "Welcome Yule." Yule has nothing to do with Christ, but is the ancient Germanic mid-winter celebration that included the myth of the great Wild Hunt. In another few months I will celebrate Easter, named after the German fertility goddess Oestre, whose cult involved symbols of fertility (eggs and rabbits). My own personal opinion: the influence of the solar cycle on human consciousness is not going to go away; it is a gift from God as a foreknowledge that light is still coming, it will overcome the darkness. Life will be reborn in the spring. As long as I celebrate with God and Christ in mind and heart, the peripherals of that celebration, like a pine tree with lights, or an Easter egg hunt, are just fun reminders of the joy of that time of year and an opportunity for family love and connection. If their origins are in pagan myths, so what.
I will end, as promised with a tribute to "saints" which was written by William John Fitzgerald, a Catholic priest who has authored several wonderful books, including A Contemporary Celtic Prayer Book, which this is from. It includes some non-saints in the prayer, note the pre-Christian Maeve is among them:
Prayer to the Vibrant Women of Celtic Lore
At eighty-three by the side of the sea,
She served us tea at Dun Laoghaire.
To an old tin shack,
Her friends would come back,
From one generation to three.
Her face was wrinkled and folded
But her eyes were a light,
And her smile was so bright
For all who passed by at Dun Laoghaire.
So this day, a toast and prayers
To the vibrant women of Celtic lore.
Ancient tea brewer of Dun Laoghaire,
Give me the vigor for life's daily jousts.
Countess Contance, holstered rebel,
Give me courage to make my stand.
Grace O'Malley, swachbuckler,
Guide my ship through stormy seas.
Brigit of Kildare, "Bride" of the Gaels,
May your shepherd's staff lead o'er high hills.
Maeve, mythic queen of ardor,
May her memory energize us for every challenge.
Hilda of Whitby, abbess of men and women,
Join the sexes together--our world to mend.
Ita of Limerick, foster mother of Brendan,
Help us to seek the Promised Land.
Amen.
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