Entangled Whispers: Celtic Poetry, Cosmic Christ, and the Rediscovery of Hope

I believe that Celtic poetry, entanglement, and the cosmic Christ all joined together form some kind of a hope for our times and for the failure of our spiritual view on the world.

Why poetry? Because I believe a good artist stands between God on one hand and humanity on the other, and tries to link humanity, nature, creation with God. The early Irish monks inherited a pagan ideology with some little gods that were the sea, the sky, the stars, the forests around them. When Christianity came, this altered under the force of St. Patrick and the early Christian teachers into God being one, the whole of creation being one, and Christ being the force that pushed, that developed this awareness.

So from nature being abstract, out there with a weird strange name of God to it, now it becomes somewhere humanity is actually vividly aware of, its beauty, its integrity, its entanglement with human living. Now the monks in their monasteries like Gendalough or Monasterboice or Mungert were copying the psalters, which are poems, and a lot of them. And in the margins of their books they wrote little poems of their own, perhaps taking a break from it. And these focus on nature, creation. The monks were in the forest, like I am here, and wrote about the nature that was around them.

One of the early ones, a poet called Amergin, early 5th century, wrote a poem that is almost Old Testament God, where he says:

I am the wisdom of the wood.

I am the hawk on the cliff ledge.

I am the breezes that fall down the rivers of life.

I am, I am, I am.

That poem was quickly followed by one called Patrick’s Breastplate, where Patrick is out in the wild with his companions. They are chased by hunters and they go into a forest and they plead to Christ to help them. And Christ turns them into deer and the hunters pass them by. After that, St. Patrick wrote the poem, The Deer’s Cry or St. Patrick’s Breastplate. And we all know the central focus of that, Christ:

Christ be beside me.

Christ before me.

Christ above me.

Christ within me.

Christ with everybody who thinks of me.

And so on and so on and so on.

And from there I like to follow the course of Celtic spirituality up into the invasion of the Normans and the whole focus changed to war and revolution. Then I would like to finish off my little idea with three contemporary writers of poetry, where I believe that the early Christian awareness of the unity of the universe, the entanglement of it all with Christ, is finding its way back through poetry. Now I know it’s a small little corner of creation, of creativity at the moment, but it exists. And I would like to quote from some of the poems I’m writing myself, some of the poems of a poet called Padraig J. Daly and another one called James Harper. These are just the Irish ones. And I would like to point out how Celtic Christianity’s wisdom is important and growing again.