All of Life As Sacramental

Listening for the Heartbeat of God: A Celtic Christian Spirituality, Part Two

During college and for several years after, I was part of an organization that talked a lot about “living for eternity.” We were exhorted to develop an “eternal perspective,” which referred to the idea that the only things that will last for eternity are God, people's souls, and the Bible. So, if we really wanted our lives to count, then we better give ourselves to those three things. This aspiration became a fire in my belly, profoundly influencing the decisions I made and the trajectory of my life during those years.

Eternal perspective was a compelling message. It neatly categorized what was worthy of my time and energy and what wasn’t. If I was doing something “spiritual,” like leading a Bible study or sharing my faith, I was spending my life well. If I was doing something material, like getting the car washed or vacuuming the carpet, then that time spent was just a fleeting vapor. It counted for nothing—other than a clean car and carpet!

All this made a lot of sense to me until I became a mother. Here I was, age 27, babe in arms, spending all my time nursing, swaddling, changing diapers, and cuddling my newborn daughter—and none of these activities checked the box labeled “spiritual’ or “eternal.” The problem only compounded when we added a second, a third, and a fourth child. Now I was in deep trouble! The time I spent living for eternity was utterly taken over by the practical needs of our four small children, six and under! What was a mother to do?!

That’s when the idea of eternal perspective began to unravel for me. In the quiet of my own heart and home, and often in the twilight hours, as I held and nursed my baby, I peered into her sweet, angel face and knew in my soul that what I was doing was deeply spiritual. Deeply sacred. Deeply eternal!

At the time, I had no idea that the message of “living for eternity” was one of the implications of the fateful decision made at the Synod of Whitby to grant the Roman mission sole authority over the beliefs and practices of the Christian Church in Britain. The Roman mission argued that the created world was utterly temporal and that God was entirely separate from it. It presented the Church, her teachings, and her sacraments as the spiritual center of life, while rejecting Celtic sensibilities that recognized all of life as sacramental. To these Christians, everything was a means of grace.

Part Two: The SPIRITUAL/MATERIAL Duality

(If you haven’t read Part One, I recommend you do so here.)

One of the tragic ways the spiritual/material duality has damaged Western Christianity is in our relationship to and with the matter of creation and, consequently, ordinary daily life. Consider these words from Listening for the Heartbeat of God: A Celtic Christian Spirituality, by J. Philip Newell:   

“How many of us were taught actually to look for God within creation and to recognize the world as the place of revelation and the whole of life as sacramental? Were we not, for the most part, led to think that spirituality is about looking away from life so that the Church is distanced from the world and spirit is almost entirely divorced from the matter of our bodies, our lives, and the world?” (P. 3)

The implication of this paradigm is that the main stuff of our lives—our time, activities, work, relationships—are evaluated as either spiritual or material, eternal or temporal, rather than both. It judges the bulk of our daily life as dross because it isn’t explicitly “spiritual.” (I.e. like going to church, studying the Bible, sharing our faith.) It shrinks the viewfinder through which we look for God’s Life intersecting ours; through which we might envision the nimble hand of God at the loom, weaving all of life into a tapestry of rich color and texture!

In contrast, Celtic Christians wove the sacrament of life together in their habits of prayer. Prayers were audible—either spoken, crooned, or keened—stitching all aspects of life into a single garment. For instance, when Celts arose in the morning, they would greet the sun with a bow, thanking God for a new day. They prayed a special prayer when stoking the fire. A special prayer for making tea and making beds. A special prayer for welcoming visitors and bidding farewell. Children grew up constantly hearing the hum of prayer in the background. No matter what was happening, everything was entwined with prayer as they acknowledged God’s good and kindly presence. All of life was sacred.  

More than twenty years ago I was exposed to this kind of prayer through Newell’s psalter, Celtic Benediction: Morning and Night Prayers. It was during a particularly painful season of loss and spiritual disillusionment. The only spiritual practice I could engage that felt authentic was to read the daily prayers in this lovely little book. The same line appeared on the first page of each day. *“Pay attention to the God who is both within and all around you.”  I remember, with a heart full of sorrow, sitting with that line, feeling it in my body, and imagining it to be real.  

Over time, it was this line that began to heal and re-pair me to my life. It was an enlarging gift to consider all of life—the messy and the mundane—as sacred material through which to encounter the Holy One. To say that my faith was salvaged by this line of Celtic prayer is not an exaggeration.

*This line was so meaningful to me that when David and I wrote Prayers at Twilight: Daily Liturgies for the In-between Times, we included a variation of it in each day's prayers. You can purchase a copy here and will certainly notice the influence of Celtic Christian spirituality throughout!