Northumbria Community

 I love ‘The Antiques Roadshow’ where all manner of ordinary household items from the ‘there and then’ of years gone by are paraded in the ‘here and now’ of today, explained and valued. There are often huge surprises for people, making me wish I had kept more things handed down from my Grandparents. For younger people they were just things, novelties that they had not seen before but for older folk they were the stuff of memories, a nostalgic rediscovery of the past that had largely been lost. I recall handing down my prized Matchbox cars and Dinky Toys from my childhood to my son Jonny which of course although new to Jonny were evoking all sorts of memories for me.

 This is what has been happening these last 35 years or so with Celtic spirituality. There is an enormous interest still in all things Celtic, although it may well have peaked. Publishers were falling over themselves to get book after book published while the interest was there. Some are dry as dust academic works with hundreds of footnotes and others far worse, the ‘flavour of the month’ popular romantic twee stuff. The Celtic themepark ‘Be a celt for a day’ experience, like some sort of spiritual Disneyland.

 For the Northumbria Community there was never any design or intent to be this or that, including Celtic. It was and is a simple fact that as we struggled to obey the call of God on our lives, as we attempted to respond to the questions ‘Who is it that you seek?’ ‘How then shall we live?’ ‘How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’ as we researched an authentic Northumbrian spirituality, we discovered (in the history and teaching of the Celtic church in Northumbria) rays of light in the darkness, coherence in the confusion that made sense of the nonsense within us and around us and gave us an understanding of our own spiritual journey in God. The ‘here and now’ of our own journey began to make sense as the there and then’ of some aspects of Celtic spirituality became a treasure chest of wisdom that gave us a language to explain and express what God had laid on our hearts.

 The greatest discovery was that the heart of Celtic spirituality was simply living the life, following the Way, travelling the journey in the everyday ordinariness of life –the pain and the pleasure, the heartaches and the hopes, the disappointment and the dreams. This is of great importance because this is essentially what spirituality is.