Hello and welcome to Loving the Imperfect. Today's show is dedicated to all of you missing your homeland. Happy St. Patrick's Day to all of you who celebrate. I'm Brianne Turczynski. My family came over from Ireland at the beginning of the 20th century. So, we like to say that we're Irish, from County Cork. We are going to celebrate St. Patrick's Day today with some readings of John O'Donohue and we're going to end with a Celtic blessing.
We'll be doing a reading from Psalm 24 it's a Psalm from David again, but this one fits in with our theme of Celtic spirituality. So here we go: a reading from Psalm 24.
“The earth is the Lord's and everything in it. The world and all who live in it, for he founded it on the seas, and established it on the waters.
Who may ascend the mountain of the Lord? Who may stand in his holy place? The one who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not trust in an idol or swear by a false god. They will receive blessing from the Lord and vindication from God their Savior. Such is the generation of those who seek him, who seek your face, God of Jacob.
Lift up your hands, you gate. Be lifted up, you ancient doors, That the King of Glory may come in. Who is the King of Glory? The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle. Lift up your heads, you gates, Lift them up, you ancient doors, that the King of Glory may come in. Who is He, this King of Glory?
The Lord Almighty, He is the King of Glory.”
So, when I first read this, I was wondering, okay, why are they talking to gates and ancient doors? So, this is why it's good to have a study Bible, because I can go down to the notes and I can see that it says this psalm was often set to music and was probably used in corporate worship.
It may have been reenacted many times at the temple. People outside would gather, would call to the temple gates to open. And let the King of Glory in. And from inside, the priests or another group would ask, who is this King of Glory? And then outside, the people would respond in unison, The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle.
And the exchange would be repeated, and the temple gates would then swing open. And this symbolized people's desire to have God's presence among them. And this would have been important for any children who were watching this ceremony go on. Probably a memorable experience. It's to have all the adults sort of orchestrate this show for the community.
I wanted to focus on the first two verses. The earth is the Lord's and everything in it, the world and all who live in it. For he founded it on the seas and established it. One of my favorite verses from the whole Bible. Which I think is one of the most mystical verses is actually from Genesis. The very first and second verse it says,
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty. Darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”
So that is what came to mind when I read those first two verses in Psalm 24. We have a word for formless and empty. Tohubohu (or sometimes spelled Tohuvohu). It basically means chaos and disorder and confusion. I thought just starting with that, this formless and empty void, gives you a visual right away. It gives you this visual of this quiet silence over a great mass of water.
And water, to me, is very holy. Water gives life. It also gives off a lot of good energy. I think that's why a lot of people find oceans and rivers very healing for them when they're passing through illness. And I love the idea of us being the surface of the deep.
We have a deepness in us that God is hovering over. And when I say God, I don't mean like a man in the sky with a big beard. I mean all creation and all love, this overwhelming energy of love. And so that energy of love is sort of hovering over the surface of our deep, hoping to be welcomed in. Hoping to make a form of some sort, to make sense of the chaos within us. So, it is like Psalm 24 when we have the people having this dialogue back and forth from people inside the temple and the people on the other side of the doors saying, lift up your heads. You gates be lifted up, you ancient doors that the king of glory may come in. So it's as if this energy of love is knocking on the door of our hearts, knocking on the door of our deep, wanting to come in.
It reminds me of Revelations chapter 3, verse 20,
“Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person and they with me.”
John O'Donoghue died in 2008. But he was a poet, a philosopher, and a scholar. And he was a native Gaelic speaker from Ireland. And he was a priest at one time. So, he left us with all this beautiful work. There's a book of his called To Bless the Space Between Us. It's filled with prayers and blessings. He has one for waking, he has one for people. Going through grief, on your birthday, he has a blessing for every occasion.
He also wrote a book called Anam Cara, and it's a book of Celtic wisdom. Anam Cara means soul friend. All the books that John O'Donohue wrote, he stays very close to the ground, very close to the earth because at its root, Celtic spirituality stays with the earth.
It comes from the Celtic tribes that were worshiping earth forces. So, fire was very sacred, water was sacred, there were legends tied to water. Wells were said to have fairies and spirits with them, seasons were sacred, storms. The earth's elements were special and the Celtic tribes, these people from years ago, really paid attention to everything that happened. In nature. If a bird was chirping, if the wind picked up suddenly, if a branch fell from a tree. These things meant something. And they saw that the element of the great god or several gods was in all of these little movements of the trees and the water and the fire and the storm. And Celtic spirituality today takes an element of that with it.
It is Christian. But Celtic spirituality goes deeper than what you would see in most churches, it stays with the earth. It stays with its roots. It incorporates more mysticism where you see God in everything. You have this deep understanding that God is with every life force on the planet. Sometimes when I find feathers on the ground, I pick them up because as Celtic traditions say, the angels are telling you that you've done something well, or that they're trying to give you some sort of answer or communicate with you in some way. And so, they leave a feather in your path. So, to acknowledge that Celtic tradition, I pick up the feathers when I find them. I have now this massive collection of feathers blue feathers, red feathers, yellow feathers,
There was one time when I found a bird. It had just fell asleep on the sidewalk and died and it was sitting so perfectly beautiful, just poised, sitting there, almost like it was sleeping. Its eyes were closed. It was nestled down in the sidewalk just perfectly.
It was cold and collecting dew on its back. So, I picked it up thinking maybe it was just sleeping, like it needed to be warmed up.
I took it home and I put it in a box hoping it would wake up in the middle of the night and it never did. So, I buried it in my garden, and I used a couple sprigs from my lavender bush, and I made a little cross over its grave, and I put some stones there to remember this bird that had come and blessed me with its last moments.
I felt like that experience was sort of sacred. It's rare to find a bird like that. I know a lot of the birds in this area, and I had never seen it before, which made the experience stranger and more symbolic to me. It was a Virginia rail and when I looked it up online, my husband and I were trying to figure out what it was, and we found that it was a Virginia Rail. They say that they look for water. They fly around and look for water and sometimes they think the sidewalk is water and they'll rush to the sidewalk. And it probably was in a state of coming into death and sort of just sat down and died. And so anyways, that bird is now in my garden resting. The birds, they speak to me, they’re all so beautiful.
So, since we are celebrating St. Patrick's Day this week, I thought I would read a passage from John O'Donohue's book, Walking in Wonder. He talks a little bit about immigration from your home and about absence. How absence is energy. He said,
“The other aspect of absence that I'd like to mention in the Irish context. is the absence of Irish people from their own country. I remember working in America when I was about 19 or 20, meeting an old man from our village at home.
He was about 85 years of age and had left when he was 18 and had never gone back. Even though he was physically in America. In his mind, he was still in North Clare. He could remember the names of fields, pathways, stones, trees, in camera precise detail. It must have been a wrenching thing to be absent from your own place in a totally different kind of world.”
He also ends with what he calls a fascinating question. He says,
“While we are here in the world, where is it that we are absent from?”
In other words, what place are we absent from that we have no knowledge of that we've left? And maybe somebody in some other place is missing us and we don't even know it. So that's a reading from John O'Donohue. The book is called Walking in Wonder. They are different reflections from him. He has this very rich, earthy spirituality.
As we're on the subject of absence from our homelands, I wanted to talk a little bit about, St. Patrick. St. Patrick was born between A.D. 385 and 415, his father was a deacon, and his grandfather was a priest, and they did practice Christianity.
And they lived near Kirkpatrick. At this time, Scotland was frequently invaded by Irish chieftains and on one such occasion, St. Patrick was taken along with his sisters to Ireland and consigned to slavery. His job ended up being attending to the herds and the flocks of his master. In his confession, he describes how he wandered over the bleak mountains, often drenched with rains and he was enslaved for six years this way.
During that time, he got to know the language very well. And after six years, he escaped and regained his father's house. He was then taken a second time, but escaped almost immediately, and returned home.
First, he studied in France, and then he ventured back to Ireland, to the land of his captors, to raise up churches and baptize everyone he could. So, he spent the remainder of his life in Ireland and erected many churches, but no other church was as special to him as Saul of Ireland.
This is located just miles away from where Patrick first landed. It is the first building dedicated to St. Patrick's Mission. It was first erected as a barn by the first Irish chieftain that St. Patrick baptized. The Gaelic name for barn is Sabhal, which translates to Saul. So that's why they call it Saul Church. It is where he chose to return at the end of his days. It's still there. It's been rebuilt a couple times because it kept getting burnt down by Vikings and other various people. The current building was built in 1932. It's in North Ireland. So, besides visiting the Cathedral of St. Patrick in Dublin, which was built in the 10th or 11th century, you might want to take a visit to Saul Church.
In all of his icons, St. Patrick is always holding a three-leaf clover, because he used it to educate people about the Trinity: the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. So that's why the three-leaf clover is so special. Not only that, but it grows all over Ireland. He used it because those people were so close to the earth, and they paid attention to what grew out of the ground. St. Patrick used that to teach them it's a symbol of how well he understood the people he was teaching.
He was so dedicated to his mission that he never went home again. So, Maewyn Sucat was his original name. And it is said that he died on March 17th, and that's why we celebrate St. Patrick's Day on March 17th.
If the church seems sterile to you, but you still want to practice Christianity. Celtic spirituality is something you should look into, because it speaks to a lot of people who are looking for something deeper than just going to church and saying the prayers. There's also a Celtic daily prayer book that you can pick up. I like the Celtic prayers because you can tell right away that the language has changed. I'm Episcopalian and you can tell when an Anglican prayer or the Anglican liturgy in church is changed a little bit to acknowledge Celtic prayers or Celtic spiritual liturgy. The language becomes green and that's the only way I can describe it. I forget which saint used to use that as a description, maybe Hildegard. The words become so much richer with life. So the Celtic Daily Prayer book gives you a prayer for every day of the year and gives you some evening prayers, and it uses a lot of the Psalms. A lot of the language from the Psalms is tied into these very earthy, earth-bound prayers.
There's many mystics out there that need something like this to bring them back to themselves, to their own hearts, and to open them up to a deeper spirituality, a deeper life.
Because we all deserve to find ourselves: God hovering over the surface of the deep, or hovering over the waters, that is like that dialogue with the gates, talking to the gates. Will the gates open? We can only let God in fully, that energy of love fully, when we are in touch with nature.
We're a part of the earth. We are made of clay, the same thing that trees and stones are made of. We have an element of that in us. We have rushing water through us all day long. It rushes through us like a mighty river. So, we live and breathe nature. And we've come so far away from that. We're so detached from nature. If we told ourselves we were going to take a walk every day outside, not in just your neighborhood, maybe you start there, but hopefully you can get to a deeper place.
In the wilderness some trail or some woods, as long as it's safe, go out in there when it's quiet and you're not around a lot of people and just feel yourself connecting back to nature. Because that is really our home. And I think once we get there again, everything will start to sing to us. The trees will start to sing. The birds. The wind. The river. Everything will come alive, and everything will seem to have its own language, and it's all communicating to you.
So, we'll get back to our Celtic roots this way. By getting in touch with nature. That's the introduction of Celtic spirituality within you. It's already in you because it's the mystical. And the mystical is in us. We just need to get in touch with it and penetrate through our, sometimes feeling ungrounded by the chaos when we haven't recognized that sort of love hovering over us. Anyways, that is Celtic spirituality, just a touch of it. I'll put the titles of these books down below in my summary of this episode for you.
I'll send you off now with a Celtic blessing dedicated to all of you missing your homeland:
May the peace of the Lord Christ go with you wherever he may send you. May he guide you through the wilderness, protect you through the storm. May he bring you home rejoicing at the wonders he has shown you. May he bring you home rejoicing once again into our doors. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
So that's your little Celtic blessing from the Celtic prayer book. I hope you all have a great St. Patrick's Day. Next week is Psalm 31. I hope you all can join me then. Thank you again, bye-bye.
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