Carl Mccolman - An Invitation to Celtic Wisdom: A Little Guide to Mystery, Spirit, and Compassion

PRAISE FOR

An Invitation to Celtic Wisdom

This book inspires us to say yes to life by giving us tastes of Celtic spiritual treasures. Carl McColman is a true shanachiehe loves telling stories that make our hearts sing.

Ray Simpson, founding guardian of the
International Community of Aidan and Hilda,
www.aidanandhilda.org and author of
Daily Light from the Celtic Saints,
Celtic Christianity, and Celtic Blessings

Franciscans recognize the headwaters of our own spiritual tradition in much of Celtic spirituality: nature based, optimistic, experiential, and much more mystical than moralistic. Carl McColmans stunning synthesis here is a great way to dive back into these wonder-filled and genuinely refreshing headwaters.

Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM, founder of the
Center for Action and Contemplation

With warm hospitality and the voice of a savvy storyteller, Carl McColman invites the reader to the feast of Celtic wisdom and prayer. In these pages, you will find a company of Celtic saints to walk with through our sacred landscapes, insights and good humor to guide you, and the clear voice of an author who knows the truth and depth of this tradition. Highly recommended.

Mary C. Earle, author of
Celtic Christian Spirituality and
Holy Companions: Spiritual Practices
from the Celtic Saints

Copyright 2018
by Carl McColman

First Broadleaf Books Edition 2021.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email or write to Permissions, Broadleaf Books, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209.

Cover design by Jim Warner

Cover photograph by Shutterstock

Interior by Timm Bryson, em em design, LLC

Typeset in Minion Pro

Print ISBN: 978-1-5064-8524-9

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-8579-9

Printed in the USA

For Phil Foster and Darrell Grizzle,
anamchairde

who walked with me between the worlds.

PART ONE
The Celtic Mystery

PART TWO
The Celtic Saints

PART THREE
Walking the Celtic Path

From the Carmina Gadelica,
an anthology of Gaelic prayers from the
Scottish Hebrides, collected and translated by
Alexander Carmichael (18321912)

Carmina Gadelica

The Celts are the people of the end of the world.

Visit the tip of the Cornwall peninsula and you will find a rocky placed called Lands End, where the thundering surf of the Atlantic pounds mercilessly against the ancient rocks. But once upon a time, it was Irelandat least in the imagination of mainland Europeanswhere you made your last stop before the vast, boundless ocean. The end of the world. All that lay beyond formed the stuff of myths and legends. A few hardy voyagerswell meet some of them in the pages to comeventured out into the deep and came back with tales of lands like Tr na ng, the island of eternal youth, or the Land of Promise of the Saints, the closest place to heaven that could be found in all the earth. Aside from those heroic wanderers, for most people the west coast of Ireland, where the vast ocean continually pounded the shore, represented the edge of mystery, the gateway into an unknown and unseeable world.

Today we have lost that sense of the wondrous mystery awaiting us just beyond the edge of the ocean. A traveler leaving the British Isles heading west arrives not at Tr na ng or the Land of Promise, but rather comes to Boston or New York. So it may be difficult for us to appreciate that sense of openness to ever-present mystery that informed the poetry and stories and spirituality of the Celts long ago. We may know better than our ancestors, thanks to the round earth and the gift of flight, than to face the ocean fog with a sense of awe and wonderlet alone a wee bit of foreboding. But we make a mistake if we insist on approaching Celtic wisdom with a purely materialistic sense of things.

Perhaps the end of the worldthe edge of mysteryis not so much a place on the map as it is a place in the heart.

Perhaps, even today, in our time hedged in by materialistic thinking and a culture besotted with entertainment and noise, we mortals are being invited into a spiritual otherworld as foreign and fearsome to us as the beach must have been to the first prehistoric creature who dared to crawl out of the ocean some half a billion years ago.