Patrick

As we approach St. Patrick’s Day, it so happens that I am reading up on Celtic spirituality and have just come across a translation of St. Patrick’s Declaration on the Greatness of God’s Works. Time and space only allow me a sizeable excerpt. When I read this, it was as if I read scripture itself. Who do I hear in his voice but the Apostles? St. Patrick has touched me very, very much this year.

I am Patrick. I am a sinner: the most unsophsticated of people; the least among all the Christians, and, to many, the most contemptible. I am the son of the deacon Calpornius …, when aged about sixteen, I was taken captive. I was then ignorant of the true God and, along with thousands upon thousands of others, was taken into captivity in Ireland. This occurred according to our merits for we had pulled back from God …

And there the Lord opened my understanding to my unbelief, so that however late, I might become conscious of my failings. Then remembering my need, I might turn with all my heart to the Lord my God. For it was he who looked on my lowliness, and had mercy on the ignorance of my youth, and who looked after me before I knew him and before I had gained wisdom or could distinguish between good and evil. Indeed, as a father consoles his son, so he protected me. …

But even if I am imperfect in many things I want my brothers and relatives to know the sort of man I am, so that they may understand what it is to which I have committed my soul.

I am not forgetting the testimony of my Lord who testifies in the Psalms: You destroy those who speak lies” and who elsewhere says: “Thy lying mouth kills the soul.” Again, the same Lord says in the gospel: “I will tell you on the Day of Judgment men will render account for every careless word they utter.”

So with all my heart I dread, with fear and trembling, this sentence on that day, which no one can evade or hide from, when every single one of us shall render an account of even the least sins before the judgment seat of the Lord Christ.

For these reasons, I have thought of writing this account this long while, but held back until now as I was afraid of the attack of men’s tongues, and because I have not been a student like other men who in the very best manner have drunk equally in law and sacred letters. They have never had to change their speech since infancy; rather they were always adding to the command of language and bringing it to perfection. My words and speech, however, are translated into an alien language, and you can easily assess the quality of my instruction and learning from a taste of my writing. For as the wise man says: “For wisdom becomes known through speech, and education through the words of the tongue.”

But what use is even a true excuse, especially when there is an element of presumption in it, since now, as an old man, I desire to have what I did not acquire in my youth? Then my sins blocked me from gaining a firm grasp on what I had already read. But will anyone believe me if I repeat [the reason I came to proper learning so late in life]? I was young, indeed, almost a speechless boy, when I was taken captive, and at that time did not yet know what I ought to desire and what I ought to avoid. So today it is with shame and very great fear that I lay bare my lack of expertise and polish. The situation is this: To the learned I am unable to make my meaning clear with the brevity my spirit and mind desire and the disposition toward which my understanding points.

But if I had been given the same chance as the rest, then without a doubt, “for the sake of the reward,” I would not keep silent. …

…But I know one thing without any doubt and with the greatest of assurance: that “before I was punished” I was like a stone lying in the deepest mire; and then, “he who is mighty” came and, in his mercy, raised me up. He most truly raised me on high and set me on the rampart. So I ought to cry out with all my strength and render thanks to the Lord for his blessings are indeed great, here and in eternity, and beyond all that the human mind can imagine. …

And after a few years I was again with my parents in Britain who welcomed me as a son. They, in good faith, begged me – after all those great tribulations I had been through — that I should go nowhere, nor ever leave them. And it was there, I speak the truth, that “I saw a vision of the night”: a man named Victoricus — “like one” from Ireland — coming with innumerable letters. He gave me one of them and I began to read what was in it: “The voice of the Irish.” And at that very moment as I was reading out the letter’s opening, I thought I heard the voice of those around the wood of Foclut, which is close to the western sea. It was “as if they were shouting with one voice”: “O holy boy, we beg you to come again and walk among us.” And I was “broken hearted” and could not read anything more. And at that moment I woke up. Thank God, after many years the Lord granted them what they called out for.

And on another night, either in me or close to me — “I do not know, God knows” — I heard them using the most learned words. But I could not understand them, except what became clear toward the end of the speech, “He who gave his life for you, he it is who speaks in you.” And at that point I woke up and was full of joy.

And on another occasion I saw him praying in me, and it was as if I was inside my body, and I heard him over me, that is, over “the inner man,” and he was praying there powerfully with sighs. And in my excitement and astonishment I wondered who it could be that was praying in me. But toward the end of the prayer it became clear that it was the Spirit. Just then I awoke and remembered what was said through the Apostle: “Likewise the Spirit helps the weaknesses of our prayers; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with ineffable sighs which cannot be expressed in words.”

Continuing on with The Story of Christianity, vol. 1, by Justo Gonzalez (San Francisco: Harper, 1984), I open with a quote from a section on Eusebius, the early church historian, to explain the atmosphere of the church that has continued since Constantine down to the present day to impact the culture of worship.

Three examples should suffice to illustrate the manner in which theology was being accommodated to fit the new situation. First of all, it is clear that in the New Testament as well as in the early church, it was affirmed that the Gospel was first of all good news to the poor, and that the rich had particular difficulty in hearing it and receiving it. … But now, beginning with Constantine, riches and pomp came to be seen as signs of divine favor. … But Eusebius — and the thousands of others for whom he probably spoke — does not seem to have been aware of the radical change that was taking place as the persecuted church became the church of the powerful, nor of the dangers involved in that change.

Likewise, Eusebius described with great joy and pride the ornate churches that were being built. But the net result of those buildings, and of the liturgy that evolved to fit them, was the development of a clerical aristocracy, similar to the imperial aristocracy, and often as far from the common people as were the great officers of the Empire. …

Finally, the scheme of history that Eusebius developed led him to set aside a fundamental theme of early Christian preaching: the coming Kingdom of God. … Since the time of Constantine, and due in part to the work of Eusebius … , there was a tendency to set aside or to postpone the hope of the early church, that its Lord would return in the clouds to establish a Kingdom of peace and justice. At later times, many groups that rekindled that hope were branded as heretics and subversives, and condemned as such. [125]

It was during such times that the emissaries to the Western church are thought to have reached the Western Isles, but it was not the Constantinian representatives who arrived first but descendants of the Desert Monks of Egypt. (If truth be told, legends abound that the Apostles or their representatives reached the West in the first century, so it is quite possible that some sort of indigenous church already existed in part of the West by the time the later emissaries traveled from Egypt.) Gonzalez explains the thrust counter to Constantine at this time:

…When the church joins the powers of the world, when luxury and ostentation take hold of Christian altars, when the whole of society is intent on turning the narrow path into a wide avenue, how is one to resist the enormous temptations of the times? …

Many found an answer in the monastic life: to flee from human society, to leave everything behind,to dominate the body and its passions, which give way to temptations. Thus, at the very time when churches in large cities were flooded by thousands demanding baptism, there was a veritable exodus of other thousands who sought beatitude in solitude. [136-137]

Certainly monasticism and the church system traveled together across Europe and eventually met up with the far West, but prior to that were groups of monastics in the Western Isles completely untouched by the changes since Constantine, such that when they met up, they were quite different. Even today’s Coptic Orthodox Church which claims some parenthood to the far Celtic church, bears the stamp of contamination of the times. It surely is not the same as that from which sprang the original apostles to the Isles.

In truth, the approach chosen for converting the barbaric Celts was as ridiculously simple as in the first century. The New Testament indicates that the original disciples did not continue only in pairs just because Jesus sent the first group out in twos. Reading the accounts of the apostles where this and that one consulted each other before going out gives that impression. But other names are also mentioned as being part of an entourage. We know that later groups involving men and women also went all over. And where were the children? There must also have been children. This missionizing would have turned into a family affair at some point. The early British church was begun by monastics, but the monastic life also included children as well as married and celibates and also involved people with many kinds of skills.

Gonzalez says only a scant amount about the Irish church:

Ireland had never been part of the Roman Empire, but Christianity had spread to it before the downfall of the Empire. Although this probably took place through several channels, the spread of Christianity to Ireland is usually attributed to St. Patrick. … Since Ireland was bypassed by the wave of invasions that swept Europe, her monasteries became one of the main sources from which the territories within the ancient Roman Empire regained much of what had been lost during the invasions.

The Irish then began sending missionaries to other countries, most notably to Scotland. The most famous of these missionaries was Columba, who settled on the small island of Iona with twelve companions, probably in A.D. 563. …

For reasons that are not altogether clear, there were a number of differences between this Scotch-Irish [American term] Christianity and that which had evolved in the former territories of the Roman Empire. Instead of being ruled by bishops, the Scotch-Irish church was under the leadership of the heads of monastic communities. They also differed on the manner in which a number of rites should be performed, and on the date of Easter. [235-236]

Here I digress for a moment to say that there is much popular association with St. Patrick and all things nationally “Irish” when we speak of the Celtic church. However, I think it a little silly. I once researched my own Scott family surname and discovered that, although the clan is associated with Lowland Scots today, it was precisely the geographical area of Ireland they came from where St. Patrick operated. And it was they who first gave their clan name to Ireland as “Scotia” before moving across to Scotland and giving the same name to that part of Great Britain. So we may as easily say the early church was Scottish as Irish, if you measure by the people and not the land. However, when Columba went to Scotland, he met a different group of people than the ones he left in Ireland as the Scots (or Irish) hadn’t gone to Scotland yet! (Nor had some of the Irish yet become Irish.) The problem with merging ourselves back into history is that lands and peoples change in time, both on our end and on the original Desert Christian end.

Returning to topic again, many have tried in our day to get back to the simplicity of the gospel in various and sundry ways by starting up churches in homes. Most have not crossed over into all-out monastic living, though a few have developed closed communities. From my point of view, the closed communities have largely invited disaster, turning into (in many cases) oppressive cults. And in the cases of the house churches, they often wind up in another hierarchical system or wind up back in the big building because they just can’t leave it alone. The megashift of 325 A.D. is too much a part of them.

A few have gone the “Celtic church” route, but bigger than ever, practically every one has proven itself to be another flash-in-the-pan for the same reasons as above. They just can’t leave Constantine alone. All that is changed is the tone of the liturgy and one wonders why they bothered. Could a true Celtic-style church be revived and could all cultures re-develop indigenous churches? I think it possible, provided they stick to the most organic kinds of relationships and quit officializing and prescribing everything. But I also believe that as soon as we try to develop this or that kind of church, we kill it. It’s not about having a “Celtic” or any other kind of church. It’s about going back to the simplicity of the gospel and doing it in such a way that it feels natural to our culture, that we have a healthy narrative to pass on, and that we forget how we used to do it and get back to normal-sized groups of relationship — say 10-20 persons max.

I can easily envision separate groups of monastics with ties to one another operating as “the church” in an area. These contrived “teams” that are sent out by institutional churches today are probably a stab at this, though the relationships begin as ordered roles and not as organic realities. I’m quite curious to see a set of organic relationships develop into a team without benefit of top-down ordering. It is from this collegiality that the mature elders will be recognized and supported by the community as they watch for the souls in their charge.

After exploring the Ancient-Future Church I hit an rocky impasse that gave way much sooner than expected. It threatened everything I had just written. I then took to reading everything I could get on the earliest missionaries to Britain. As soon as I found new material that excited me, like a slap in the face, it would turn out to be written by some proponent of British-Israel (in case you wondered, the case cannot be made from DNA samples). I also had to figure out what to make of the fact that Patrick was not the first missionary to Ireland. The first monasteries were there before Patrick, and while it may be true that Patrick founded many monasteries after the Irish custom, it is also true that he left Ireland for Rome on one occasion and came back under orders to make Irish Christians more Roman Catholic.

I found it disheartening to learn that the main reason the Irish church died out later was that it celebrated Easter on the wrong date (they used the Eastern Orthodox calendar). This enraged a pope so violently that he sent delegates with orders to place the people under Roman Catholic protocols by force if necessary. I still can’t figure out the whole truth of the story; it has some difficult twists to be sure and depends on who tells it.

After that, I discovered there are several new versions of Celtic Churches, complete with bishops carrying Apostolic Succession papers, descending through both Orthodox and Roman Catholic ordination. I see the logic of there being one Church on earth, but something didn’t quite fit together. Why the big deal to be Celtic if Roman Catholic would work just as well? Was it a matter of race or nationalism or what? Maybe doctrines, who knows. It smacked of contrivance.

I have tried for a very long time to be open to Apostolic succession, as it’s very intriguing. But there are some things that just don’t add up to me. For example: 1) I can’t find a mandate for it in scripture or in The Didache and 2) I don’t feel brought closer to Jesus for it. I feel further distanced for its rigid, top-down approach. In the ancient church, the authority of my elders would have been familial and personal. They would have expected me to grow into a capable emissary of God. In the top-down approach, I am to remain a child forever, sit in a pew and be spoonfed. Where is my soul-friend who walks alongside me? Where is my teacher who says, “Come see where I live?”

But enough of this! It’s depressing and I want to get to the good that I finally found. I examined the travels of the Apostles, got the map out and, sure enough, what I’d heard looked right. Mark the Apostle went to Egypt. The Celtic people were said to have loosely based their monasteries on Egyptian models. Mark was, indeed, the Apostle whose work took root in conditions favoring later migrations in the direction of Ireland. Circumstantial evidence rules out the two other Apostles, John and James, whose missions initially took them closer.

For a moment I digress to something I was doing while this quest for answers was going on. I was pondering how to make better use of a holy table in my home. It had morphed into several different aesthetic designs over the months, and I had finally consigned it to the role of presenting my part of the narrative in the story of Christ to whoever comes to my home for intentional fellowship. I kept changing my mind about what items to place on it, according to the objective data I was gathering about my my faith fathers. Nothing felt right. Then I remembered that I am not actually in the British Isles. Much of that culture no longer works for me even though I appreciate it on several levels. What had I heard before? You cannot be what you are not.

There are many expressions I love, but they are not all my personal story. The larger faith migrations through many cultures have created one macro-story, but we also have a personal story unique to our calling. I do not feel comfortable worshipping and sharing God in ways foreign to me even if they are authentic according to the macro-story line. While pondering this, it hit me. What speaks to me? Nature. Of course, it was the way of the Celts — to abhor structure and to love nature. I still carry that “gene”. I find both structure and ornamentation distracting even though I appreciate them in certain places. But I am not overly comfortable worshiping or presenting my own story through elaborate structure and ornamentation.

I find my deepest contact with God in simplicity and turning inward, away from things. I considered the idea of sharing God while sitting on stones in a circle instead of by means of an altar, a pulpit or a holy table. I grew up in the Southwest and it feels more authentic to present my story while sitting on large rocks in an open field or praying with a friend while taking refuge in a downpour. I am used to the Christ I learned in the rocky places amidst the yucca, scrub and cacti. I toy momentarily with the thought of piling my holy table with a few stones. I have always loved rocks and dirt. They remind me of the memorials that Israel left in the wilderness.

My world is not the English rose pattern of my mother, my grandmother, and my great-grandmother. It is the pattern of semi-desert and loneliness, the taste of sandstorms and weather-twisted plants growing in rocky ground. It is the place where fatherless souls wander amidst strange creatures in search of God. My heart turns to the Apostle Mark and Anthony of the Desert more than to the strange “fathers” who stole the children of my people.

Psa 68:6a God setteth the solitary in families:

One organized church I know of that really comes close to what I think I see of the early church is the Orthodox Church. There are some other disqualifiers, which I won’t go into just now for the sake of brevity. I decided to visit the local OC one day and found out that the major difficulty for me was culture shock and the inability to keep track of who was doing what next. I met a few people who managed to overcome this. It does raise the question of how a small ethnic body can live so long in a new country and fail to reach out to the prevailing culture. On the other hand, it stands to reason that they will preserve the ways they know because it has been handed down to them since old. The beauty of being Greek and Orthodox is that there can be no question of who their spiritual fathers are. Their story is an unbroken line, unlike the story of much of Europe and other parts of the world. But it is significant, because the Lord says He sets the solitary in families – not church meeting halls.

Much is made in some places of Apostolic Succession, and though I believe these people when they say they have an unbroken line of bishops, I cannot find a biblical mandate for this as a litmus test of true church-worthiness. One would think the rest of us are all bastards, but I think it better to say that some of us do not know who our fathers in the faith were. Yet we cannot say we have no fathers going back to the beginning, for we would not be having these conversations if a line of people had not begotten us in the spirit. I will even go so far as to say that if we each knew our successive line of spiritual begottenness, we would find that we all trace back to one or more of the Apostles. I was hoping my years of genealogy research would not go to waste, and apparently they haven’t. Such a thought would not have crossed my mind had I not been keenly aware that all families in the earth are old, though a few smug individuals think they have the pre-eminence in old families.

Only recently while learning more about the Northumbria Community did I give a lot of thought to the early church in Europe before most of it became Roman Catholic. Finding names for the European churches becomes tricky, as they were autonomous, stretching from Turkey to Ireland. Some refer to this broad collection as the “Celtic Church”, though not all were Celts. There is some basis for this name, given that the Irish churches evangelized huge parts of the world. I think of the term “Celtic Church” as a loose descriptor more than anything else. I’ve done a lot of research on the Web and my impression is that the name is up for grabs by a lot of people who make it what they want. I know of one Celtic site run by people who are essentially Calvinist Reformers — I don’t know why they weren’t satisfied being Baptists or Presbyterians. I found another with a fascination for knights and ladies (what has this to do with the Body of Christ?) and many other strange forms of church.

Nevertheless, I had to take the Northumbria Community’s research into their Celtic past seriously. They have done a lot of footwork, thus saving me the headache. They are located in the north of England, in the area connected with well-known saints like Patrick, Columba, and Aidan. Many confuse St. Patrick and the Celtic Church with a strictly Irish Church. This thinking is too limited, in my opinion. Since the topic I’m addressing can be very complicated, I will attempt to use my own heritage to illustrate the connection between culture and the narrative of our organic spiritual lives.

I bought the book, Celtic Daily Prayer: Prayers and Readings from the Northumbria Community, to see what these people had to offer. I found myself strangely unable to identify as completely with their founding saints as they did. I wondered why and then realized that part of the reason is that I’m not living in the actual land of these people as they are. My family has undergone the resulting culture shifts of living in the New World. Their story is partly my story but not entirely. I discussed these findings with a friend and will share here some of my notes (I said they might be a bit raw/rough and they are…) In fact, I was trying to discover God’s design in the way we come about our faith organically.

I first began by debating the possibility that our traditional church meeting styles, which so many simple churchers detest, might actually have been indigenous to part of Europe even though it was imposed on the whole by Constantine. Perhaps it naturally works better some places than others. The Romans had their meeting halls and the Vikings had their mead-halls. How could the idea of meeting in halls instead of houses be totally foreign to all? I wrote to a friend:

The truth is, we ARE descendants of much Greco-Roman culture. Those were the first Gentiles that Peter and Paul went to. As I was thinking of my own background, it’s Viking/Celtic/Germanic…what could I use from that culture? There was NO Viking church culture originally, as I know it. all my Viking ancestors (and believe me, I’ve traced them) were all pagan Odin worshipers until they became French and then English. I can, at best, only borrow the culture of my mother’s forbears in Scotland and Early England. That would loosely be the “Celtic” church which is much like Orthodoxy only in smaller groups. K– and I talked about the Celtic monastic communities that St. Patrick was a part of. Well, it’s something to think about.

What I discovered, to my great surprise, is that although I am not very Irish by most people’s estimation, I probably owe more to St. Patrick than many of the Irish. My father’s family name traces back to a tiny hamlet in York (lines have been redrawn to put it in Lancashire). It is fairly near Northumbria. Part of my mother’s family hails from the Scottish Lowlands — we are from Scott of Buccleuch. Although they were Scots, they were originally Irish who later pushed into southern Scotland long after Patrick evangelized the Emerald Isle. In fact, he set up operations in northeast Ireland, within what was probably their homeland. More emissaries left Ireland for Iona and the North of England. Later they turned to the the south of England. Clearly, some of my ancestors were Christianized before the coming of Roman Catholicism to the isles. My people were in the right places at just the right times to include these as spiritual fathers: Patrick, Aidan, Cuthbert, Columba.

DNA studies have revealed that English populations share nearly identical DNA as Ireland. It is essentially Celt; the Germanic has been far overblown. I see it now. My fathers are not the fathers of Roman Catholicism at that point in time. They were the saints of the Irish church whose spiritual roots derive from the Desert Fathers of Egypt. (Alexandria, here I come.) Even my father’s family from Germany was likely evangelized by Irish church emmissaries (some of whom weren’t actually Irish). I have obviously found my earliest European “fathers” of the faith. Easier than I thought. I told my friend:

We don’t all have exactly the same line of “fathers” in the faith, though they all tie back somewhere to the beginning. The Lord sets the solitary in families because it is families who share their experiences….musing here.

[Continued]