A New Perspective

On the way to now things changed.  Actually, the change started back some nine years ago when retirement moved me from the pulpit to the tractor.  As I began to meander around the farm doing its chores, things starting changing inside of me in a way I could never have imagined back in the working days.  I became aware of a new way of thinking theology.  Being out midst the creation day after day began to cause me to think about God and my relationship with Him in a way that was different from a theology based completely on the Word and the teachings of the Church.

 

While this process started back in those early days of being on the farm, it moved from a strange inner awareness to a more conscious practice as I started reading book after book on Celtic spirituality.  Certainly, this stream of spirituality has not replaced everything about my view of God, but it is has opened up new windows which have enabled me to experience His presence in the ordinary things around me.  The Celtic tradition holds that the Creation is a book which needs to be read as one reads the written Word.  As the year prepares to drop off the calendar, there is within me a greater understanding of what seems to be a word bordering on heresy.

 

But, of course, the Celtic tradition is not heresy.  It is simply a stream of spirituality which calls us to pay attention to everything and everyone around us.  It calls us to embrace the possibility that God chooses to reveal Himself through the creation around us in addition to the ministry and teachings of the church.  This tradition declares that the interior of church buildings are not the only holy places, but instead, the whole world is holy because it has been touched by the creative power of God.  So, I have come to see the creation that is so very much around me as a great cathedral in which God is constantly being worshiped.  It is a different view of the Holy.  It is one which is transforming my perspective of all that is around me.