Waymarkers: Categories of Inspiration

As I have more opportunities to teach and accompany others on their soul-formation path, I am often asked what are the areas that have most influenced my work and Waymarkers’ offerings. As I was clearing out my office recently, I came upon a writing project and drawing that aimed to get at three primary categories of inspiration and influence. I created this in October 2015 and it is amazing to see how these categories continue to shape and form my thinking and my work! I am also incredibly happy to see that my thinking, theologies, and theories (in short, my praxis) continue to emerge and evolve!

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I am using the concept of a Venn Diagram as represented by a Celtic Trinity Knot to describe my three primary passions (and ways of seeing the Divine at work in the world), their intersections, and ultimately, what they reveal about myself in relationship to the Sacred. Following are my core thoughts related to each trisection.

Placemaking/Theology of Land

Theologian Walter Brueggeman states that “…land be handled always as a gift not to be presumed upon and land be managed as an arena for justice and freedom.” And, it is true that those historically denied justice and freedom, power, place and voice, could see the arena of a wooded landscape as an absolute threat. Walter Brueggeman’s hermeneutic of Israel, provides understanding that, “Israel experienced the bitterness of landlessness, being totally exposed and helpless, victimized by anything that happened to be threatening. However, also as Israel, we take up a new identity vis-a-vis the land. It is important to be very clear about what the land is, how it addresses us, what it expects of us, and how we shall shape our faith and admit our identity in relation to it.

How do communities work on creating meaningful places that invert political and capitalistic powers on behalf of the other and the future?

Our neighborhoods are never singular communities, but are actually a mesh of myriad overlapping networks. We all belong to many different communities, from the diffuse (i.e. a professional association, or an online message board), to the intimate (i.e. a family, or a group of friends). In consideration of the paramount impact of how a landscape informs an individual and how they connect to the other in their community, there is an emerging theory called “Placemaking” that aims to create a balance of uses in public spaces that serve the many communities at once; in this way a landscape can serve as a therapeutic response to the needs of a neighborhood. A single place can’t do everything at once, so “Placemaking” prompts us to look for convenient and clever ways to make limited space serve multiple functions. De Botton and Armstrong (2013) have suggested that by balancing ones need with those of the people by which one lives, one finds their place, literally and figuratively, within a community of neighbors. By inviting the presence of a place to participate in the lives of communities for a common good, there is an acknowledgment of something profound and beyond human-limitations that is unleashed: God is revealed as intimately involved and present within the neighborhood and neighborwood!

Celtic Christianity

The great Celtic teacher John Scotus Eriugena taught that God speaks to us through two sacred texts, two books if you will. One is the book of scripture…the other is the book of creation, vast as the cosmos. Just as the Sacred speaks to us through the written words of scripture, so to does Spirit speak to us through the wild elements of creation. The natural world—the creatures within it and the elements that form it—then are a living sacred text we can learn to read and interpret.

Just as we prayerfully ponder the words of the Bible in Christian practice and as other traditions study their sacred texts, and even as we engage our sacred imagination in the practice of Midrash, so we are invited to listen to the life of creation as an ongoing, living utterance of God. This way of "reading" requires seeing the soil as a sacred story, and realizing that many of the narratives that have been told within the reverential spheres are ones that separate us from the reality of the biosphere.

Influenced by the wisdom tradition of the Old Testament and the mysticsm of John’s Gospel, Celtic spirituality sees creation not simply as a gift, but as a self-giving of God whose image is to be found deep within all living things. Sin may obscure God’s living presence, but never erases it. The divine voice can be heard speaking through all created things.

EcoPsych/EcoTheology

Author and psychologist Bill Plotkin believes that the way towards a collective societal shift towards wholeness and sustainability will be to progress from our current “egocentric societies (materialistic, anthropocentric, competition based, class stratified, violence prone, and unsustainable) to soulcentric ones (imaginative, ecocentric, cooperation based, just, compassionate and sustainable).” Plotkin draws from the collective academy of cultural thought provocateurs ranging from Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, to Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell to imagine how to cultivate more mature human individuals to inform an evolution into a more mature human society. He believes that nature has always provided and still provides the best template for human maturation. Plotkin unpacks this further:

“…every human being has a unique and mystical relationship to the wild world, and that the conscious discovery and cultivation of that relationship is at the core of true adulthood. In contemporary society, we think of maturity simply in terms of hard work and practical responsibilities. I believe, in contrast, that true adulthood is rooted in transpersonal experience—in a mystic affiliation with nature, experienced as sacred calling—that is then embodied in soul-infused work and mature responsibilities. This mystical affiliation is the very core of maturity, and it is precisely what mainstream Western society has overlooked—or actively suppressed and expelled.”

Western civilization has buried most traces of the mystical roots of maturity, yet this knowledge has been at the heart of every indigenous tradition known. In this light, we see that our self-imposed exile from an honoring relationship with creation has stunted God’s design for human development, and even a proper revelation of God. Creation is imbued with the wisdom and presence of the Sacred, and to stifle and ignore the inherent value of the created order, stifles the very voice of Wisdom in our lives. Our way into the future requires new cultural forms of the old ways of being in relationship with the earth. As urban-dense living becomes the increasing norm for countries around the world, re-imagining how urban greenspaces provides the opportunity for a relationship with the wild world becomes critical. The health of our psyche, and the planet, depends on it.

Center

The challenge of loving and caring for one another well in the 21st century requires one to recover a primordial sense of the vast mystery of God and apply that energy to paying attention to the earth. Our love of neighbor needs to be extended to the greater community of things on this planet and our neighborhood needs to considerably broaden to include our universe as well. Historically anthropocentric views have concerned Christians with the redemption of this world alone, and have disconnected the very nature of a connected, covenantal God with the diversity of his inherently good creation. Nobel Peace Prize two-time nominee Ervin Lazlo (2011) attests that “seeing ourselves as separate from the world fuels selfish and irresponsible tendencies: we are only responsible for ourselves, and not for ‘foreigners,’ ‘competitors,’ and ‘others’” (p. 117). In bringing the care of the earth into the folds of reconciliation, there is acknowledgement that human-centric modern history has caused great harm to marginal people groups, and environmental injustice to a host of living beings on this planet, as well as a severe disconnect from the goodness with which the earth was designed. By engaging in restorative acts of reconciliation with the planet, there is an openness to the endowed goodness of creation and the intention that it was created to participate in the whole person and health of a community.

In returning to a grand sense of awe before the God of the Universe, God’s relationship is placed with humanity into the context of billions and billions of galaxies. This profound placement of the Great Mystery has immediate effects on how we engage and encounter the other and all living things. “The experience of our connection with each other and the universe would inspire solidarity among people and empathy with all life on earth” (Lazlo, 2011, p. 124). Leonardo Boff would call this the “socio-cosmic,” where mountains, plants, rivers, animals, and the atmosphere become the new citizens who share in the human banquet, while humans share in the cosmic banquet. Only then will there be ecological justice and peace on planet earth. In embracing the world. we shall be embracing God.

A Remembered Celtic Consciousness

One of the greatest teachers in the Celtic world, John Scotus Eriugena in ninth-century Ireland, taught that Christ is our memory. In Christ we remember how we are designed to be in relationship with the cosmos, humanity and the more than human world. However, we suffer from the “soul’s forgetfulness,” he says as our anthropocentric religions hierarchical structure push to the side our communion with creation. 

Christ then comes to reawaken us to our true nature, how we are meant to be, a meant-for-ness that is interconnected with the more-than-human world.

This deep remembering brings us back into an integral relationship with the whole assembly of the natural world. 

This past January, I went to Healdsburg, California to the sun-soaked, grape-growing soils of Bishop's Ranch to learn from theologian, author, and Celtic scholar John Philip Newell in the context of his newly forming School of Celtic Consciousness. While I have studied and practiced in the Celtic way for over twenty years, learning directly from this prophetic voice caused even deeper parts of my soul to awaken to the profound truth this tradition carries. 

The vision of the Celtic School of Consciousness is three-part and interrelated. There is an intentional direction to seek the sacred wisdom that comes through the Celtic spirituality stream. The hope is to provide relational access to this stream through collective spiritual practices that remind us of our interconnectedness through interfaith relationship and dialogue. Lastly, the vision of the school meets its mission in how its working to translate the rediscovered wisdom and spiritual practice within this Celtic tradition into compassionate and meaningful action. The vision and mission for this school makes it extremely exciting and relevant for our current times. 

I talk often about an eco-centered spirituality, and our need to move away from Western informed theologies and doctrines that are ego-centric, ways that maintain a separate and self-focused understanding of the divine presence. My experience of John Philip's teachings, and the Celtic spiritual tradition as a whole, is the inherent understanding of our interrelated being. There is sacredness within all of nature, including human nature; and to perpetuate mindsets that affirm otherwise will continue the degradation that we are seeing globally on this planet. In his book, The Sacred Universe, theologian and cosmologist, Thomas Berry writes that we must aim at

“overcoming our human and religious alienation from the larger, more comprehensive sacred community of the natural world...Our challenge is to move from a purely human-oriented or personal-salvation focus in our religious concerns to one that embraces the universe in all its forms.  This will require an immense shift in orientation.”

The gift of the Celtic Christian spiritual stream is that of its broad and inclusive embrace of the whole and its ability to shift one's orientation to include that of the integral and sacred subjectivity of everything in creation. 

By understanding an inspirited natural world, we move into the categories of resistance. The wisdom within this way of seeing demands a way of presencing ourselves on this planet that is in solidarity with the other. When we move into a role of solidarity with the other, we move in opposition to those that would power-over, in a word, we move in resistance against Empire. It was very interesting to be reminded of how the Celtic Mission was born on the wild-edges of Empire and grew its distinctive characteristics in response to the Roman Empire's power-overing posture. The Celtic way still invites this contrary opposition today in that the more we identify with the more-than-human world, the more we understand that Divine Presence is here, surrounding us and within us, the more likely we will resist political policies that see the wild as a resource to dominate.

The Celtic way emerged on the edges of the 5th century; however, its value doesn't stay in the past. A modern Celtic prophet whose life had profound impact on the body politic as well as shifting awareness to our need for the more than human world was John Muir (1838-1914), the Scottish-born, American naturalist whose writings and advocacy led to the preservation of Yosemite and other national parks, and, through his founding of the Sierra Club, helped ignite the modern environmental movement. Muir understood that when we are solely engaged in human relationships without emersion in the natural world, we lose the right relationship with nature. This understanding expanded beyond a proper accord with the outside world, but understood that this affair was needed to properly understand God. Muir's Celtic consciousness inherently understood this interrelationship that was articulated by Eriugena, 

"Christ wears "two shoes" in the world: Scripture and nature. Both are necessary to understand the Lord, and at no stage can creation be seen as a separation of things from God."

I love Muir's iteration of this truth, "The universe is a Bible that will one day be read by all." The whole of the natural world is a sacred script that we must remember to read and listen to again. This "Wildness is a necessity," stated Muir, for a deeper kind of knowing.

This was the kind of truth that I had been personally engaged with for years. I have been involved in a decades-long forest restoration project that fundamentally believed in making the urban wild more accessible to increase the potential of exposure and experience with wonder and awe. However; in spite of this stewardship work, and recent encounters and engagements with Native indigenous elders, a question began to gnaw at the edges of my work. Could I, one who has benefited from the supremacy of her settler heritage, truly read the text of my natural surroundings; could I hear the Spirit of Place? Through the wisdom of the Celtic tradition, could I gain access to the sacred presence that was imminent in the lands where I made my home?

I was able to have lunch with John Philip where I could ask him this question, truly hoping for a way to emerge through the rugged and murky soul-terrain this question had brought me. He said, 

"We each have access to the world soul, to the heartbeat of the sacred within the earth, to this subterranean stream of God. That doesn’t disregard the particular stream of how indigenous cultures have translated that voice in particular places. It does invite us to do the work of learning how to listen."

The Celtic way doesn't provide a way through; it provides a way to the spirit of a place. It provides the insight into understanding an inspirited natural world, and then it demands that in this remembered relationship of solidarity, we speak truth to the powers that would subdue and dominate it. This demands that we, that I, acknowledged my Whiteness, my complicity with Empire, and the ways that I turned a blind-eye to when an other was objectified into a resource serving solely Power's ends. 

The way into Celtic Consciousness is an invitation to a journey that will take one to high and sacred wild places, but also will require interfaith relationships, including those with the land, so that together we can work towards compassionate activism on behalf of the other and a flourishing future. 

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These are pictures I took of stained glass windows with the Chapel of St. George. Created by glass artist Irmi Steding, the windows follow the theme of the song-prayer of St. Francis, the Canticle of the Sun.

Pilgrimage Demands Your Presence

I facilitate pilgrimage journeys to Iona, Scotland and in the Pacific Northwest for individuals who respond to The Call to engage transformational travel as a means to recovering a sense of the sacred within themselves and the natural world.  Every retreat participant with whom I have worked has felt the deep uprooting that occurs when the call to go is upon them and are relieved and refreshed by this ancient practice and a profound place that demands action, questions and a quest for answers.

Iona provides all the trappings of a good pilgrimage: historical significance, a saintly presence, a continuous line of faithful heritage, and a requirement to travel there with intention.  Moreover, Iona is the historical birthplace of the Celtic Christian tradition and so by going here, I invite conversation and attentiveness to the numinous natural world that surrounds us, and of which we are fundamentally apart.  One of the key themes of this unique stream within the Christian faith is that nature is revelatory. 

The early Celtic church had a fundamental belief in the revelatory nature of the created world.  Every tree, blade of grass, and wild goose’s cry was imbued with the Spirit and spoke to the character of the Creator.  These “theophanies” –God showings—were expected and sought after as a way to understand the sacred mysteries.  The ninth century Irish teacher, John Scotus Eriugena believed that God was the ‘Life Force” within all things. 

“Therefore every visible and invisible creature can be called a theophany” ”

— John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon-The Division of Nature, 749D

The entire created world upholds something of the essence of the Creator.  Eriugena also taught that there are two primary ways in which the sacred is revealed–the Bible and creation: “Through the letters of Scripture and the species of creature…” mysteries of God are revealed.

The particularities of a place subsequently became both a sacred messenger and a storied record of divine encounters.  Many important religious sites in Celtic lands are notable because of the presence of standing crosses.  These great, free-standing, three-dimensional or ‘high’ crosses often stood in replacement of even more ancient pillar stones that stood to testify and link heaven to earth.  This was a primal way of place-making.  By naming a place through the placement of stone, or more notably, through tale-saturated titles, the Celtic people affirmed how important the natural world was to their experience with the numinous.  Sacred legends associated with landscapes abound in Celtic country, and are often the narratives that bring people back to and into nature.  

The island of Iona is storied land, tilled with tales immortalizing meetings with angels, prayer practices, and marking the journeys of those who have come before.  Annie Dilland points out in “Teaching a Stone to Talk” that holy places have been disappearing rapidly since the Enlightenment, and our contemporary dislocatedness affirms this. “God used to rage at the Israelites for frequently sacred groves.  I wish I could find one…. Now we are no longer primitive; now the whole world seems not-holy.”  However, Iona is sacred land and people make pilgrimage here to soak of these stories, hoping that something of this sacred soil will stick and have a profound impact on their personal lives.  And my hunch is that there are many more sacred sites all around us, even in our own urban neighborhoods, if only we would pay attention.  

The Celtic way of pilgrimage paid attention to place, understanding that God was revealed through the natural world and even through the hospitality of the stranger.  When we travel with a pilgrim’s pace, we embrace the perspective and values of the Divine.  Charles Foster holds that a journey will challenge you to engage critical aspects of the divine through:

“…life on the edges; indiscriminate and costly hospitality; solidarity with the marginalized (most of the nomad’s time is spent outside main centers and in the company of peripheral people); intimate relationships with humans and the environment; a new view at every step; and the loosest possible hold on possessions.”

This was a way of living, of moving, and of arriving to a place that required radical engagement.  It entreats the individual to live into communion with the seasons, the elements, the natural world and other humans.  The journey becomes the medium by which meaning is made and relationships are maintained. 

Pilgrimage demands we pay attention, sensing messages for our inner journey through the faces with whom we share the sidewalk, as well as the environment that surrounds us.  We awakening to the culture of a place when we pay attention to the potential of interactions with both the seen and unseen world.  And this is where I sense the profound gift Celtic spirituality and its propensity to journey have for our modern cities today.  This stream of spirituality both honors wandering and seeking out a new special place with the challenge to find renewal through an attachment to place.  This attachment to a place comes through knowing its stories and noticing its strangers as portals of profound meaning and connection.  However, this kind of noticing requires unplugging from our devices and engaging in our new places with our senses.  It means tapping into the collective memory of a place through our bodies.  The smells, sights and sounds of a place will reveal much about its stories—stories that induce knowledge and love of the land, the culture that co-habitates here, and the Creator who exists in and in between these places and its people.   

When one sees more of a place, (these are the bits and pieces: birds and benches, angles and alleys, weeds and woods) because of one’s experiential sense of it, it allows us to plunge into a posture of permanence because we are enabled to gauge the true significance of what we gaze upon. This kind of seeing is akin to what the early Christians meant when they spoke of theoria, that was a way of seeing into the heart of reality that sometimes revealed the very face of the divine. Or like what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins meant when he spoke of “inscape,” the luminous, utterly singular texture of a thing that emerges with blazing clarity when a person actually looks upon that thing with care and sensitivity. Pilgrimage requires all senses as it depends on our sensory selves to receive and transmit divine messages in the here and now. It is nigh impossible to have an I/Thou encounter based on particularity and receive its sacred import if podcasts and screens overwhelm our sensing selves. This capacity is often grown by practicing the pace and posture of pilgrimage so that when we return home we are able to “see into” all that is there and all that is yet missing.

Go. Deliberately.

“Since we are travelers and pilgrims in the world, let us ever ponder on the end of the road, that is our life, for the end of our roadway is our home.”

— St. Columba

There is a general unsettling that is upon people these days, an agitation that is exacerbated by the daily news of political and environmental climate change.  The traditional means and methods of creating and cultivating a spiritual practice that assuage this sense have gone stale. The weekly trek to church can be driven thoughtlessly as can the participation in the service’s rituals. It even seems, as the community that assembles for corporate worship are so compatible that carbon copies might seem a more appropriate categorization. 

Despite these long standing traditions, there is a need to go and seek wisdom beyond the pulpit and outside of the walls! Don’t vacillate as that will only result in inactivity and indecisiveness. Resolution and an intentional move to initiate the journey activates the sacred archetypes and commences the re-membering this pilgrimage is bound to produce. You do not need God’s presence when sitting on the couch undecided. 

Desperation for the divine ignites when you decide to go and commit to The Call.  This is when the enlivening veriditas energy begins to flow in and through you, and synchronicities start and happen all around you.

Each of us has a unique and particular soul, yet the Western world teaches us to feed and nurture this inner-life by the most conventional and traditional of means.  Pilgrimage, while as ancient as our bipedal designed bodies, is now seen as an unconventional expression in our culture. However, if we are going to give the soul the feeding it needs, we are going to need to go against the grain and go to where are souls are freed to search for, and re-discover the divine. This path of development and discovery ultimately is soul attunement, which integrates authentic expressions of our unique gifts and talents on behalf of a greater and common good as the result. 

The response to The Call, which requires a threshold crossing, a leaving of sorts, is an action that leads to transformation, most often fulfillment and freedom, an alignment of our individual soul with the Divine Soul and communion with all of creation. What might have started as a soft whispered call has now become a heart-throbbing desire to go and find the animus mundi--the Soul of the world! Pursue the wild place that makes your heart skip both with doubt and desire for here is where you will find your Answer covered in salty barnacles and cracked-leathered edges and God within the windswept moors and tangled trees.

Pilgrimage Awakens the Soul

“Isn’t it time that your drifting was consecrated into pilgrimage?  You have a mission.  You are needed.  The road that leads to nowhere has to be abandoned…. It is a road for joyful pilgrims intent on the recovery of passion. ”

— Alan Jones

Pilgrimage. What is it about this word that causes one’s emotions to stand on guard-both compelled and curiously cautious at the same time? Indeed, it is a loaded word, packed with ages of political and parochial themes. Even with the historical entrapping of this concept, there is a much more ancient restlessness that is deep within our collective consciousness to be on the move and to engage questions and the Answer in the rites of passage process. Movement and travel is fundamental to the human experience. A general arc from hunter/gatherer societies to today’s human populations underscores that there is an inherent desire to move. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Hebrew God is often portrayed as a traveler showing up to deliver divine guidance. The journey upon which the traveler embarks subsequently becomes sacred as well.  This holy hegira underlays the constant travels and wanderings of many ancient Celtic Christians.  Restlessness was in their blood as was the notion that it was better to travel hopefully than to arrive.  This lens of hope presented a perspective that the road was a rite; that the path provided prescient knowledge and insight to their journey towards divine revelation. 

This is the stuff of rites and rituals. This is about growing to the edge of life as we know it and discovering that there is a world beyond that wild hedgerow that is drawing us into its feathers, fronds, and fur. Getting up and moving to the parameters of our life, to the absolute edges, is where we re-engage our senses and re-awaken our souls to our sacred meant-for-ness. 

I believe that what agitates people when they first engage the concept of pilgrimage is that it literally unsettles them. The domesticity that ties us down to the perceptions of our lives begins to untie and unravel as this seeker-path begins its work of instigating a longing and a calling to go beyond, to move through, to expand and re-discover the divine in this asperous, ancient process that involves an epic, wild exchange with the natural world. When you first hear of pilgrimage, whether it is the perspective or a place, it is as if something gets lodged within the soul like an irksome stone or that sense of evasive knowing of a lost thing that you just can’t quite remember…that sense stays with a now restless-you, and will call to you your entire life until The Longing and The Call has been courageously met and engaged with a knapsack in hand and boots on the feet, knowing that the road is a rite, the thing that will bring us to an authentic center and sense of the sacred.

Rewilding & Journeying with Nature: A Conversation with Pilgrim Podcast

I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with friend and fellow-guide, Lacy Clark Ellman, host of Pilgrim Podcast about our shared appreciation for seeing life through a pilgrim's lens and how the natural world avails itself to us as a sacred guide as we make our journey. In our conversation I share my thoughts around rewilding as a spiritual practice and a process of remembering our meant for interconnectedness with all of creation. If you are curious about the Rewilding Retreats I facilitate, I invite you to take a seat! Pour yourself a cup of tea and listen in for an hour. There is a sacred voice on the ancient side of remembrance that awaits you and is calling you forward toward the wild edges of your life!

>>LISTEN HERE!<<