Matter Matters

A Celtic Curriculum, Week Six

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We’re back after a week of vacation. It was a staycation for me—some home/kid care tasks, followed by four days with extended family here in the DC area for sightseeing and hanging out. It was a very full week… not exactly restful, but full of recreation and re-creation. (The restful vacation is coming in a few weeks.)  

I envisioned this week’s curriculum as a bit of a follow-up from last time, when we lifted up the importance of time spent in nature. As I shared, Celtic spirituality seeks to break down the artificial wall between the spiritual and the physical—for the Celts, everything around us is infused with the very stuff of God and is therefore beloved and beautiful. Time spent in nature can be a means of communing with the Holy.

My plan for this week was to follow up the nature theme with a specific focus on how we CONNECT TO OUR BODIES in particular. And then… something unexpected happened to my own body along the way. More on that below.

About the Practice

You may recall that last time, we talked about how Celtic thinkers held that the universe was created out of the substance of God, and thus was to be treated with reverence and sacred delight. Sadly, this did not become the prevailing view of things. Instead we have the doctrine of creation ex nihilo: the idea that God created the universe out of nothing. As I said, this theology became official doctrine because it granted the Roman empire (and countless empires to follow) the license to exploit and subdue anything it desired for its own benefit. “Manifest destiny,” colonialism, enslavement, genocide: these are all outgrowths of this theology.

Something similar is going on when it comes to our human bodies.