When you turn your natural longing for the Divine into a prison, then everything in you will continue to ache. The prison subverts your longing and makes it toxic. Watched by a negative God, you learn to watch your self with the same harshness. You look out on life and see only sin. Your language becomes over-finished and cold. Others sense behind your eyes the ache of forsakenness that does not even know where to begin searching for itself.
The Wildness of Celtic Spirituality
The world of Celtic spirituality never had such walls. It was not a world of clear boundaries; persons and things were never placed in bleak isolation from each other. Everything was connected and there was a lovely sense of the fluent flow of presences in and out of each other. The physical world was experienced as the shoreline of an invisible world which flowed underneath it and whose music reverberated upwards. In a certain sense, the Celts understood a parallel fluency in the inner world of the mind. The inner world was no prison. It was a moving theatre of thoughts, visions, and feelings. The Celtic universe was the homeland of the inspirational and the unexpected. This means that the interim region between one person and another, and between the person and Nature, was not empty. Post-modern culture is so lonely, partly because we see nothing in this interim region. Our way of thinking is addicted to what we can see and control. Perception creates the mental prison. The surrounding culture inevitably informs the perception. Part of the wisdom of the Celtic imagination was the tendency to keep realities free and fluent; the Celts avoided the clinical certainties which cause separation and isolation. Such loneliness would have been alien to the Celts. They saw themselves as guests in a living, breathing universe. They had great respect for the tenuous regions between the worlds and between the times. The in-between world was also the world of in-between times: between sowing and reaping, pregnancy and birth, intention and action, the end of one season and the beginning of another. The presences who watched over this world were known as the fairies.
The Lightness and Imagination of the Fairy World
To the contemporary mind any acknowledgment of the fairy world sounds naïve. Yet at a metaphoric level, recognition of the fairy world is recognition of the subtle presences that inhabit the interim places in experience, the edges of time and space impenetrable to the human eye. Our clear-cut vision imprisons us. The fairies were especially at home in the air element. There is nothing as free as the wind. In modern Ireland there is still a sense of their presence. Often at evening one sees a fog low in the fields. Usually fog is first on the mountains and then it comes down. In the gathering dusk, this other fog collects in white streamers and clouds over the fields. It is almost as if a vaporous white wood suddenly stands suspended over the grass. All outlines are blurred; the interim kingdom becomes visible in a presence that is neither object nor light nor darkness. The ancient name for this presence still lingers. It is called “an ceo draíochta,” the fairy fog. On a still, clear day a few years ago, a friend and I were visiting an old “cillín,” a children’s graveyard, between two mountains. Suddenly, out of nowhere a powerful gust of a breeze threw itself out all over the cillín, bent the bushes low, and just as abruptly vanished back into the seamless stillness of the day. It was as if all the sighs of the lost children had unravelled for a moment from the quiet ground and had come in a massive whoosh into our world. This is called the fairy breeze, “an Sí Gaoth.”
There are many stories in the Irish tradition of musicians who learned some of our most beautiful tunes from the fairies, for example, the tune “Port na bpúcái.” This music often has a haunting beauty that seems to be inspired from beyond the limits of the human. A famous old fiddle player in County Clare always played a special tune and claimed that the tune came in a visitation from the other world. The fairies might use a person’s home while the whole family were in bed asleep. Humans were often brought into the fairy world. The fairies were invisible, but if they allowed it, you could see them.
There is a lovely old story from the West of Ireland about a midwife who was called to tend a fairy woman who was giving birth. When the child was born, the fairies gave her some ointment to rub on the baby. By accident, the woman rubbed her own eye with the ointment. When her work was finished, the fairies took her home. Some time afterwards, the woman was at the market. Suddenly, she recognized one of the men at the market as one of the people from the fairy dwelling. When she spoke to him, he realized that she could see him because of the ointment that had touched her eye. He was very angry to be visible to her. It was said that he put his finger in her eye and blinded her. The invisible world is full of presences. They like to keep to themselves under the protection of invisibility. Through accident a mortal receives the unintended gift of seeing the invisible; it turns out to be an intrusion that has to be punished and the gift revoked.
There are many fantastic anecdotes about the fairies. Long ago, there was a man who lived near us who often went with the fairies. One night they went over to one of the islands with the intention of substituting a fairy child for a newborn there. The fairies and the man were up in the rafters of the house. Someone sneezed down below, and the man uttered a loud blessing. The fairies dropped him, and he fell onto the floor below among the people, who recognized at once that he had been there with the fairies. They chased him and he ran for the shore of the island. Catching an old plough, he uttered an invocation: “Molaim do léim a sheanbhéim céachta. Tabhair abhaile mé.” I.e., I praise your leap old beam of plough. Take me home. With that, he gave a mighty leap over the ocean and landed home.
The fairy world was not subservient to the normal laws of causality which regulate time and space. Their world had a lightness and playfulness. The fairy world was not merely adjacent to the mortal world, it seemed to suffuse it. Such a vital and fluent sense of the world never permitted the notion of the Divine to become a sinister, crippling prison. The Celtic world was not a world of stolid fixation. It was a wild, rhythmic world where the unexpected and the unknown were constantly flowing in on human presence and perception and enlarging them. When perception and culture are open to the possibility of surprise and visitation, it is more difficult for individuals to lock themselves away in mental prisons of forsaken thought and feeling. It is interesting to reflect that the Celts were not taken with the construction of great architecture. They loved the vitality and magic of open spaces. Celtic spirituality is an outdoor spirituality. Living outside must make for a very different rhythm of mind!
Your Vision Is Your Home
Thought is one of the most powerful forces in the universe. The way you see things makes them what they are. We never meet life innocently. We always take in life through the grid of thought we use. Our thoughts filter experience all the time. The beauty of philosophy is the way it shows us the nature of the layers of thought which always stand invisibly between us and everything we see. Even your meetings with yourself happen in and by means of thinking. The study of philosophy helps you to see how you think. Philosophy has no doctrines; it is an activity of disclosure and illumination. One of the great tasks in life is to find a way of thinking which is honest and original and yet right for your style of individuality. The shape of each soul is different. It takes a lifetime of slow work to find a rhythm of thinking which reflects and articulates the uniqueness of your soul.