Grace Before Food

Grace Before Food

"Be with me, O Goddess, at the breaking of bread,
Be with m, O Goddess, at the end of my meal.
May no morsel of my body's partaking
Add to my soul's freight!"
   ____ Scots Gaelic grace (trans CM)


   The blessing of food or the saying of 'grace' before eating is regarded as old-fashioned behavior in most households these days,
except perhaps on Thanksgiving, when it plays a traditional role.
   The blessing upon our food is itself a thanksgiving to all who have participated in the preparation of our meal: the grains, the earth, the elements, the animals, the ones who have processed our food and sold it to us - everyone is involved. If we contemplate only one item of food on our table and trace it back through the steps that brought it there, the scale of our thanksgiving becomes very real - a network of cooperation that is one strand of our life.
    The Gaelic blessing above seems very relevant today. With the addition of chemicals and pesticides and the genetic manipulation of the cellular structure of our food, many people are very worried about swallowing anything these days. The need to return to organic food-production methods where only the usual growing agents - air, sunlight, water and root nurture -
are allowed to influence the food we eat is now widely recognized.
    Very few people wish to harm their bodies or souls by participating in immoral and disrespectful food-production methods. The same goes for foodstuffs whose gathering and production endanger other species of animals or plants or further exploit already exploited people. Our choice of food is determined by the staple items of our region and our culture, many of which are in short supply. Can we change our eating habits in order to be able to breathe a true blessing upon our table?

"Write your own grace or meditate upon silently before you eat."
[From: "The Celtic Spirit" by Caitlin Matthews]

Integrity of Action

Integrity of Action

"We of the Fianna never told a lie. Falsehood was never attributed to them. But by truth and the strength of our hands, we came safe out of every combat."
   ___ "Ladoidh Chunaic an Air,"  anon. Irish poem


      The Fianna (FEE'enn-a) was the prestigious war band of the hero Fionn mac Cumhail, whose honor was bound up in their maintenance of truth, as their motto says: "Truth in our hearts, strength in our hands, consistency upon our tongues."

    If we divert the truth in pursuit of our ambitions, however marginal the lie, we also divert the course of our honor; we weaken our soul's thread. It is often easier to lie than to admit the truth. To state our honest objections, to cut across the dishonesty of those with whom we associate, to challenge falsehood in the workplace or in high places may seem a kind of foolhardiness today.

     The practice of honesty is a daily exercise that hones our integrity in both trivial and important actions, the experienced truth-bearer is like a hero who has practiced her sword strokes so many times that she can cleave through thistledown with accuracy and perception.

   The integrity of truth offers a clean way of dealing in our lives - a way of dealing that sets down better and more honorable patterns upon which our society can be reformed.

"Try to tell the truth for twenty-four hours. Feel in your body how living honestly changes your life's experience. If your life is wholly or partially built on lies, begin to examine the scaffolding on which it is based: ask help of your spiritual allies to discover how the scaffolding can be dismantled, and how you can become true to your soul's thread."
[From: "The Celtic Spirit" by Caitlin Matthews]

The Initiations of Youth

The Initiations of Youth

"Youth's native sadness
dramatizes itself ever against time
in experimental mime
against the immensities."
  ___ Ross Nichols, "The Cosmic Shape"


    There are no formal rites of passage in our society to help children become adults: young people graduate, take their driving test, become sexually active, try intoxicants, get tattooed or pierced.  Forever testing the limits of their powers, they seem to know no restraint. This applies to girls just as it does to boys. In societies where rites of passage are customary, physical ordeals push participants to their limits of endurance, courage, and dedication, sometimes failure means actual death. While we may view such rites of passage as barbarous and unnecessary, we should note that our own children create their initiatory rites in the same daring spirit: running across the freeway, climbing up tall buildings, and driving at top speed down winding coastal roads are just a few of these initiation. Yes, youth dramatizes itself all right.
   We have made our choice not to initiate our children into adulthood with formal ceremonies that bring them to the edge of their powers. Having done so, we cannot blame them for making their own rites. Young people need to claim a name for themselves. In Celtic society, adolescence was often a time when a nickname became attached to the childhood name, or when the original name was changed to one that reflected a more adult commitment - a name 'discovered' in someone's chance remark, perhaps. How can our children make their own name in our society unless they are given the initiations that bring them to opportunity?

"Make your own initiatory blessing for adolescents about to launch themselves into the world." 
[From: "The Celtic Spirit" by Caitlin Matthews]

  

The Kindling of Love

The Kindling of Love

"There are three sparks that kindle love:
the face, the demeanor, and the way of
speaking."   ___ ancient Irish triad


    These sparks are like three lights that shine from the beloved, beacons that shine upon our dark and lonely landscape and illumine it in a way that no other person can achieve. The first light strikes us from the eyes: there is a liquid light within the eyes of the beloved that illuminates her face. Because the soul can be seen in the eyes, the glance of the beloved warms and welcomes us, while the glance of the enemy chills, repels, or withers us like a laser beam.
    The whole nature of the soul is seen in the demeanor of the beloved: the way the person moves, his body language, his way of guarding and shielding his soul with respect. The demeanor of the beloved is like an aurora of dawning that permeates the surrounding area with a gentle light and picks out features that are important and noteworthy in our own soul.
    Most wonderful is the light shed by the voice of the beloved. It is tuned to our own cadence, becoming a pathway of welcome, a resonant and gently penetrating music. Of all the sparks that we value about our beloved, the voice is probably the one we remember longest. Even those lovers whose beloved is dead and who can now scarcely remember every loved feature, who become impatient with the false memory of a photograph, say that the voice of the beloved is the most beautiful thing they still remember. The beloved speaks of things beneath the spoken words, like a ray of light that carries the shape and the shadow in its wake. To that shape we cleave while others linger in the shadow.

"Consider your own beloved, whether alive or dead. Which of his or her qualities spark love within you? How are loving qualities present within yourself?"
[From: "The Celtic Spirit" by Caitlin Matthews]

Daring

Daring

"He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
That dares not put it to the touch,
To gain or lose it all."
   ___ James Graham, Marquis of Montrose,
   "My Dear and Only Love"


    When the young Setanta was being taught by the druid Cathbad, the students asked their teacher, "What deeds are favorable for this day of all days?" Cathbad replied, "This day is one on which any young stripling who claims the arms and armor of a man shall become the hero who surpasses all the youth of Ireland. His name will be glorious, but his life will be fleetingly short." On hearing that, Setanta - who would become the hero Cuchulainn - immediately decided that the day had come for him to take valor and claim his status as a man.

  When we are young, we are fearless, heedless of both hidden and obvious perils. We have the brash arrogance and ignorance of youth, a combination that is oddly endearing and chillingly frightening at the same time. Age and experience bring us to greater circumspection.

    Whence do we draw the daring to perform the deeds of adult life? There is no time to dither when we stand in danger of losing our livelihood or well-being. To take up the gage of daring is dangerous, but to have never dared is to have never won. It is good to spend our lives in risk-free circumstances, never challenged or stretched beyond our personal comfort factor? Sometimes we have to become vulnerable, and suffer risk to protect and defend that which we love beyond our personal lives. When our response is absolute, we seize our fate with urgent hands, fly out on the spiral loop of our soul's thread, without a parachute, only by the truth and integrity of our actions are we protected.

"What feels risky in your life? How are you endangered? Where are you being stretched to dare?"
[From: "The Celtic Spirit" by Caitlin Matthews]

The Voice of the Soul

The Voice of the Soul

"Who is this Singer that sends his voice through the dark forest and inhabits us with ageless and immortal music, and sets the long echoes rolling for evermore?"
   ___ Mary Webb, "Gone to Earth"


    In all people there is a potent voice sounding from the very depths of their being. When we stand at the timeless intersections of our lives, when danger threatens, when beauty awakens us to deeper levels of being, we hear its clear call. It speaks words of urgent survival, of potent arousal, of immediate and uncontrollable response. It may not speak with words that we hear with our physical ears, but its vibrations permeate our very body. Many people who have been aware of this voice fear it with an almost superstitious terror: they fear its strength, its persuasion, and especially its passion. They believe that this voice is from some dark malevolence, rather than from the very heart of love.
    It is the voice of the soul itself, which has its wavelength tuned exactly to our personal pitch. In our society, which validates only that which is seen, 'hearing voices' is associated with serious mental disturbance. Our society's inability to recognize the unseen as real in turn causes us to distrust our deepest beliefs and instinct. Instead of listening to the voice that surges passionately into every aspect of our understanding, we attempt to blot it out, expunge its presence, substituting our rational explanations as being more authoritative.
    Beginning to make sense of the soul's voice often requires us to 'tune out' the interference that our suspicions and conditioning have created. The voice of the soul speaks from the heart of love. True love does not injure; rather, it upholds the good of the beloved before itself. By the fruits of our experience, our trust in that voice will grow until we can progress to a stage wherein we will be borne up in love and trust.

"Listen to the deep voice of your own soul. Feel what it is saying. Do not be distracted by the voice of your mind."
[From: "The Celtic Spirit" by Caitlin Matthews]

Deferred Decisions

Deferred Decisions

"Do not go Monday, be still on Tuesday,
Wednesday's a bad day, Thursday is slow,
Friday's unlucky, Saturday's grudging,
So give up your troublesome travel tomorrow!"
   ____ Scots Gaelic song  (trans CM)

   This song is sung to beguile the welcome guest, to delay her departure and cause her to stay longer. Sometimes, though, we cannot be so self-indulgent; we need to make incisive action rather than defer it.
    Procrastination is subtle and invasive self-persuasion that second-guesses all avenues of possibility as they present themselves. It is always easier to leave a difficult decision to the next day, to put off reading and signing a complex document until a later date, to ignore a request until the time is more convenient and our mood more amenable. The prince of procrastination is Shakespeare's Hamlet, who virtually worries himself into mental illness. When deferred actions are deferred too long, the fear around their performance becomes horrifically amplified.
   When we are stuck in procrastination, we need 'a rabbit bolter' - something that flushes realizations out of their deep hiding places up to the surface of our attention. This bolter may involve taking a day off work and away from the family, going into nature or to a place of some peacefulness, without stimulus and interface from any outside source so that our minds can cease their squirrel-cage contortions and come to rest in focused attention upon how we must act. In our prayers and in the companionship of our spiritual allies, we can ask for help, clarity and strength to make the right decisions and to defer them no longer.

Choose one current predicament and mediate upon possible solutions."
[From: "The Celtic Spirit" by Caitlin Matthews]