Listening with the Imagination
Bible Text: Job 38: 1-11 and Mark 4:35-41 | Preacher: Rev. Bruce W. Kemp | Series: Celtic Spirituality
As we discovered last week, the Celtic spirituality had gone into hiding. It had been suppressed for a number of centuries and yet had survived. Its survival was given hope by the work of Alexander Carmichael. Yet in spite of this, it continued to be discouraged. In reflecting on what took place, it is interesting to note that those who first brought the Christian faith to the Celts did so in such a way as to incorporate and enliven the faith already present in the people. Their methods were enlightened and led the people to a deep and lasting relationship with God.
Around the same time as Carmichael was collecting the prayers of an increasingly dispersed tradition in the Western Isles, another Scot, George MacDonald (1824-1905), was finding a new channel of expression for this ancient stream of spirituality and communicating it in the form of short stories and novels. MacDonald had been reared on the old Celtic stories and legends of the Western Isles and these shaped the spirituality that he expressed through his fictional works. His writing was meant for those who could see with the eyes of a child and his works of the imagination strove to recover the inner faculty of sight whereby God may be seen within us, among us and in all the things of creation.
MacDonald owed much of his spirituality of the imagination to a so-called ‘heretic’ named Alexander John Scott (1805-66). Scott was guided in his theology by John Scotus whom we learned of in an earlier message. Scott’s belief that God’s love is in and for all people was in sharp contrast to the prevailing Calvinist doctrine which saw God as separate from the creation and God’s redemptive love as exclusively for those elected by God to receive the grace of light. Scott saw God as immediately present in the whole of life. He maintained that “everywhere we can find the ladder that connects heaven and earth, God and humanity, with the angels of the eternal light ascending and descending upon it.” (Newell, p. 62) This image is picked up by MacDonald in his stories and also by C. S. Lewis in the Narnian wardrobe.
Scott, who grew up in the Western Isles, discovered that the people looked for God in the whole of life. He described them as listening for God in all things. “In their inmost being,” he said, “they knew a type of communion with the uncreated at the heart of creation.” (Newell, p. 63) They perceived the interweaving of the spiritual and the material, of heaven and earth, time and eternity. “Always,” said Scott, “there is the greatness that lies within and beneath the common. Everywhere…we can glimpse signs of the presence of God’s life in and among us, for God is the Being on which all being rests.” (Newell, p. 63)
Scott ran afoul of the established Church and was stripped of his ordination because he maintained that the love of God was not limited to the Church and the elect but that the love of God was for all for Christ is the Life of the world. Scott also took issue with the perception that ordained ministers had a greater presence of God’s Spirit within them than the rest of humanity. He also criticized the Church’s Sabbatarianism. He didn’t disagree that there should be a day of rest but he firmly believed that the Sabbath was not the only holy day – but rather that the whole of life is sacred, every day, every hour, every moment.
God’s life is like the heartbeat at the centre of life, pulsating within, sustaining all that is. God is forever communicating his life and love in and through the outward forms of creation. For Scott, the emphasis of Christ that we become like children is evidence to him that we are to recover the inner faculties we were born with and use them to glimpse the presence of the Spirit of God in the creation. He believed that we need to regain our innate childlike way of seeing that becomes increasingly obscured by neglect throughout our lives. The gift of the imagination – which in a child is still uninhibited – allows creation to be a lens through which we may fleetingly bring into focus aspects of the eternal. In a real sense, this way of looking at things forces us to re-examine the materialism that has increasingly gripped our Western society and caused a growing spiritual insensitivity whereby life has come to be seen more and more in limited material terms. Value and meaning has shifted from the internal to the external.
But lest we believe that the Celtic spirituality is a romantic perspective on creation – one that sees the world in an idyllic way – we need to remember that while maintaining the goodness of creation, the Celts knew that there were forces of evil present in the world. They knew that they needed to discern with inner sight what the essence of God in creation is and therefore what is truest and most unshakeable in life. They knew that as we listen to hear God’s living Word to us in the Scriptures, we will also hear words of human failure and violence. When we explore creation, we will perceive suffering and cruelty at one level, but deeper still we will perceive that grace and boundless creativity of God. Evil was described as a snake coiled up in the grass of our lives, ready to spring up and tempt us to violence of heart and action. Any spirituality must take account of the evil in and around us and provide ways of growing in spite of it.
But their recognition of evil and its attempts to stop us from finding that light of God gave the Celts hope for they firmly believed that the darkness cannot overcome God’s essential light. It was even believed that Satan would one day repent and be restored to his original role of angel of light. The spirituality of the old Celtic church had begun to find new life and expression. It led to much social reform in Scotland and is probably to be found behind much of the ecological awareness in the world today.
Another theme that continued to bubble up from the old Celtic church was the belief that at the heart of all things there is a unity of the person in God. Distinctions of male and female, race and colour disappear. With it came a freedom to use either male or female images to describe God. A mother’s heart could be imagined at the heart of God – God’s love perceived as that of a father. In fact, the feminine became a rich symbol of the One who gives birth to life, and who nurtures and watches over creation like a mother her child.
The end of the 19th century began a major revival of the old Celtic spirituality in the Scottish church. It began to free itself from much of its enclosed Calvinism and opened itself up again to life and to the world. Next time – on July 5 – we will explore the next phase of the revival and the re-emergence of the community of Iona.