Making Peace with the Ancestors

Making Peace with the Ancestors

"Dear ones in the house of the dead,
Can you forgive
An old woman who was your proud
Daughter, who now too late
Returns your love?"
   ___ Kathleen Raine, The Oracle in the Heart


  We often do not understand those who closest to us until it is too late. This is especially true of our parents, upon whom we heap the faults of our upbringing. Parents struggle to do the best thing for their children, but these efforts are seldom appreciated until the children themselves become parents and enter into the war of attrition that we call growing up. When we are adults, our activities take us far from our parents' domain. The death of parents is perhaps the last part of growing up, usually happening when we are raising our own children, so that we stand midway between youth and age. Those who now find themselves in the eldest generation of a family discover new responsibilities: as they become grandparents: they look to the new generation to solve old, long-standing problems. This ancestral bequest tends to gather weight and momentum as it rolls from generation to generation, sometimes becoming too heavy for any one person to carry.
   Making peace between ourselves and our ancestors requires two things: the ability to speak the truth lovingly, and the ability to forgive and let go of issues that have muddied the way between us and the dead. We need to offer a word of love, a sign of admiration or praise, a visit, a gift or even a phone call - some direct communication while there is opportunity, before the time for regret is all that is left.

"Make a soul-flight to a place where you and a relative who is now dead used to meet together. Speak the words that you would have liked to say before death intervened. Listen to the words that your relative speaks to you. Thank and bless your relative."
[From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]

Samhain

Samhain

"Samhain night with its ancient lore
was occasion for new and merry custom;
it was learned in the wildness, in oak-woods,
from spirits and fairies."
   ____ The Metrical Dindshenchas (trans. CM)


    The festival of Samhain (SOW'en) marked the start of Winter when beasts were brought in from the hills to the nearby fields for winter slaughter or for overwintering in barns. Samhain was a liminal time in which the world of the living and
the ancestral realms overlapped. This was a time for the remembrance of the dead: candles were set in the window to welcome the loved ancestors and to shine upon the path of the unquiet dead to bless them on their way.
    There was always an element of fear and trepidation about this night - the eve before Samhain - and also one of expectancy. When the dead were abroad, certain kinds of divination could be practiced, which asked questions of the ancestors. This night was one when young people disguised themselves and played pranks on the community. The modern custom of trick-or-treating is based upon the old tradition of 'mischief night,' where the guisers begged for food and drink from door to door. At inhospitable houses, the gate might be removed from its hinges, or other petty misdemeanors might be performed.
    The great fear that many still have about this night is not aided by the commercialism of modern Hallowe'en, which emphasizes ghoulish fascination with ghosts rather than communal reverence for the beloved ancestors. As enter the darkness of winter this evening, let us remember our own ancestors with love, with a prayer that all unquiet souls be led to blessedness and peace, with a hope that this sacred festival may be restored to its former respect as a time of communal honoring.

"Light a candle for the ancestors this evening and breathe your blessing upon all who no longer walk in this world."
[From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]

Ancestral Dependence

Ancestral Dependence

"The one whose solitary boast is his lineage, has no descendant of any virtue."
   ___ Welsh proverb (trans. CM )


    The Celtic peoples honored the keeping of remembrance, and repetition of genealogies and family lists. Such genealogies were 'memory resident'  in bards and poets, one of whose chief tasks was to recite these ancient lineages on  important occasions. In our society, we generally leave such matters to the professional genealogist or herald, and so our own memory dwindles. As a result of this neglect, strange obsessions sometimes develop. People with no knowledge of their lineage sometimes invent family trees or make outrageously unsubstantiated claims regarding their descent. Such acts have a terrible pathos about them. At the other extreme, we find those who dine out on their ancestral achievements without any attempt to make their own mark. Both they and the people who invent their lineage fall into the trap of ancestral dependence. Whether actual or invented, our lineage is a path that moves through us to our own descendants. Our physical bloodline may have many great and good ancestors among its number, but their deeds do not flow through our veins or belong to us unless we make them our by similar doing.
    Dependence upon the ancestors is often just a manifestation of laziness, a way of absolving ours4elves from total engagement in life; it is also a form of theft that robs our hard-working ancestors of their credit. We cannot live in the reflected glory of ancestral honors without absconding from our own lives and missing the very real opportunities to become worthy ancestors in our turn.

"Honor your ancestors, known or unknown, by a worthy act of your own."
[From The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]

Ordinary Things

Ordinary Things

"There are three slender things that support the world: the slender stream of cow's milk into a pail; the slender blade of green corn in the ground; the slender thread running over the hands of a skilled woman."
  ____ ancient Irish triad


    The comfort and nurture we derive from dairy products is the gift of the cow, that supremely important animal to the Celtic world.  The cow, a unit of wealth, was so highly prized that it is remembered in the heavens among Celtic speakers who know the Milky Way as 'the Way of the White Cow.' The fertility of the fields was always considered a measure of how committed a ruler or chieftain was to his land and people: poor crops were an indication of poor rulership. Along with the milk of the cow, the bannock (loaf) of bread made up the staple diet of most people before the advent of the New World potato, so grain was another measure of prosperity and well-being.
     Before the coming of industrial looms, all clothing was made laboriously by hand. The woman of the house (with the help of her daughters) clothed her entire family; she would take the unwashed wool, comb and card it, and then timer-comsumingly spin it from the distaff until it could be labor-intensively woven on a hand-loom.  That wool kept the cold out, but the greatest skill went into weaving fine linen, garment for wear next to the skin. It is by the help of the ordinary thing that much of our own living is supported. In different countries, there are different staple grins and foodstuffs, different materials. From their slender existence our own is sustained.

"What three ordinary things are the supporters of your life? Make your own personal triad."
[From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]

The Language of Winter

The Language of Winter

"We have all of us eaten the pomegranate seed of language, and we are its Persephones in its ways of structuring our experiences of ourselves and the world."
  ____John Moriarty, Turtle Was Gone a Long Time

    John Moriarty refers here to the Greek myth of Persephone, who went into the Underworld with the god Hades. When sought by her mother, Demeter, she was licensed by the gods to return to the middle world again, as long as she had not eaten anything while in the Underworld.  But Persephone had partaken of six pomegranate seeds, and so it was judged that she could return to earth for only half of the year. During those six months that she remains in the Underworld, we have winter. Similarly the ways in which we think and speak, the concepts that we use to frame experience, give their own limited seasonal coloration to our culture. Meaning is submerged in the very words we speak about deeper mythic states, which is probably why we have such a correspondingly rich folk-story tradition, which speaks of nothing else.
    The revolt against the language of winter is everywhere around us as people attempt to explain their own subtle experiences. This revolt often expresses itself in extreme ways - as an unhealthy stretching out toward the bizarre, the unexplained  and the alien, when all the time the common has but subtle experiences of life are so ordinary. When we begin to use the wisdom of the pomegranate seeds of language with the insight of those who have experienced the deep riches of the Underworld, we will be liberated Persephones, able to bring beautiful spring to our bare acres of expression.

"Recall a subtle experience of your own. Write it down or speak it onto tape in a way that captures the mood and experience."
[From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]

The Mantle of the Universe

The Mantle of the Universe

"You never enjoy the world right, till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars."
    ___ Thomas Traherne, Centuries


   To re-experience the integration of ourselves with nature, we have to take ourselves out of our four walls and set our life-story in the context of nature's terms. This means becoming especially aware of one area of the natural world - an area that is our listening place, an area where we tune out the old broadcasts of our separateness and return to the original station of the universe belonging. In that place we enter into a new relationship with nature, conducting a dialogue of one with the other, in which both parties speak and both listen to the other.
    In this communion, a further state of belonging may be experienced - initially just in brief glimpses, then sometimes for longer and longer periods. It is the condition that poet and mystic Thomas Traherne speaks of above: the temporary loss of our sense of identity, a softening of the hard boundaries that separate us from the tree and the animal, from the earth and the sunset. In this condition, we experience ourselves as no different from nature or anything within it. We come into true relationship with nature in such moments, which strip away our hubris, our control, and our feelings of separation and bring us once more under the mantle of the universe.

"So sit in nature and just be with it, without judgment or mental comment. Let your attention be drawn to one feature around you. Be present to it as though it were another being: listen and speak;
speak and listen. Finally experience the feature and yourself occupying the same space, breathing the same air. Just be. Slowly reverse the steps above until you are fully restored to your own body and consciousness again. "
[From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]

Criticism

Criticism

"To correct is good, for the mind accepts correction; not so is reproach, against which the mind rebels."
    ____ Colman Mac Beognae, Apgitir Chabaid
    (trans. CM)


     Certain kinds of criticism stick in the mind like a thorn.  The words of the cleric Colman are specifically addressed to teachers within his monastery, but all who are in positions of authority and responsibility should guard their words carefully, lest reproach rather than correction comes to their lips. This is especially true for parents, teachers and all who deal with the young, who are especially susceptible to reproach. Continued criticism, offered in place of helpful suggestion, can overwhelm a child and leave her with little self-esteem. Correction shapes technique and eliminates errors over the course of time, until the student himself becomes expert, able to guide and correct in his turn. Reproach, on the other hand, is like lime: whatever it touches immediately shrinks away. Wherever reproach has spread its acid nothing further grows.
    Criticism springs from three desires: a desire to improve, a desire to detract, and a desire to hide the same fault in oneself. The last of these desire is the deadliest; by casting criticism on others, we throw a convenient smoke screen over our own faults, which often perfectly mirror the thing we have pointed at elsewhere. The only way to guard against unwarranted criticism in daily life is to think first, keep silent when possible, and speak only words that will be received without undue offence.

"Consider a recent situati8onh in which you were criticized or you criticized others. Was correction or reproach used?  What wisdom can you learn from the situation?"
[From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]