This week I offer the third of four issues [today’s column discusses pp 61-92] on John Philip Newell’s 2008 book “Christ of the Celts: The Healing of Creation”, in preparation for our after-church book study on Sunday April 7th, which itself is preparation for Newell’s visit to St John’s on May 10th through 12th. You are encouraged to purchase this fine book and read along with me over the next four weeks. Copies of many of Newell’s books will be for sale (and signing!) when he is with us.
Like me and like many others John Philip Newell is drawn to the wisdom and writings of Julian of Norwich, the 14th century English mystic. Although not much is known about Julian’s life, Newell does manage to trace her roots to ancient Celtic territory, to the northeastern knob of England that juts into the North Sea. He finds the themes of Celtic Christianity throughout her work. In Newell’s words:
“God ‘is in everything,’ writes Julian. God is ‘nature’s substance,’ the very essence of life. So she speaks of ‘smelling’ God, of ‘swallowing’ God in the waters and juices of the earth, of ‘feeling’ God in the human body and the body of creation. And she insists, as the Celtic tradition has done since its inception, that nature and grace are one. They move in harmony. ‘Grace is God as Nature is God,’ she says. ‘Neither of them works without the other.’ Grace is given to save our nature, not to save us from our nature. It is given to free us from the unnaturalness of what we have become and done to one another and the earth.”
Because our soul is “made of God” it is “grounded in the desires of God” and our soul’s deepest and most true longing is for God. In fact, it is a longing so deep that without attention or fulfillment, says Newell (citing Julian), it becomes a wound—irritated and inflamed. I’m currently reading (well, skimming) Henri Nouwen’s book on the Parable of the Prodigal Son [1] and in it he explains that younger son’s departure from home is a spiritual leave-taking from the “home” or grounding of his own soul, the place in him (and us) where God whispers, “You are my beloved one.” If we leave the soul’s home we wander in search of love in all the wrong places—you remember the story: squandering our inheritance on dissolute living—and our longing becomes a woundedness, irritated and inflamed, because what we are really hungering for is God.
Newell moves next to Julian’s visions or “showings” in which she saw the image of Christ hungering for us, saturated and overflowing with blood. Newell notes, “…the blood of Christ she sees is not about payment to God for sin. It is about the very nature of love. It is a revelation or showing of what it means to long for love and to live for love.” Suffering and love, he continues, are inextricably bound together.
Newell points to the birthing process and the pain that attends it, and the fact that one must journey through that pain to the new life and new love that await. Once a child is born, the love and the suffering because of that love only intensify. Newell cites Revelation chapter 12, in which John has a vision of a woman clothed with the sun and crowned with stars who suffers to give birth to a child. No sooner is the child born than John sees a multi-headed and horned red dragon waiting to devour it. Love is always attended by the possibility of loss.
A third image is shown John—that of the archangel Michael, set to battle the dragon with all the angelic hosts of light. Suffering and loss, though real and unavoidable, are not the end of our story. This informs perhaps Julian’s observation that “all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.” The humility borne of suffering and loss is, writes Newell, the truest mark of one’s spirituality.
It’s impossible to write about love and suffering and humility without mentioning the cross of Christ, and Newell explores the meaning of the cross in the sixth chapter of his book. He claims that our widespread use of the cross—as jewelry or home ornament—is not evidence of our “acceptance of religious orthodoxy but an intuition that the cross somehow relates to love.”
Just as Celtic Christianity rejects the doctrine of original sin it also rejects the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. In Western Christianity, Newell finds the latter dependent on the former: “There are two assumptions…First, that God requires payment, like a piper that can be paid to change his tune, from judgment to forgiveness. And second, we are so sinful that we cannot make a worthy payment [without Christ serving as our stand-in].” If we truly believe that forgiveness is free, reasons Newell, then how can we accept that God needs payment in order to forgive us?
Forgiveness is free, Newell continues, but it is not cheap. It is “the most costly of gifts because it involves the sacrifice of the heart…We participate in it only to the extent we open [risk] ourselves.”
Newell rejects the doctrine of substitutionary atonement because “it perpetuates the notion that what is at the heart of God…is judgment, not love. And judgment must be satisfied, paid for, before love can be offered.” If such a transaction were necessary, then love would not be love.
Newell doesn’t offer an alternative doctrine because he explains that Celtic spirituality is short on hierarchy and orthodoxy, favoring instead to point to truths rather than to define and codify them. So he stops short of saying, “The cross of Christ means X or Y” preferring instead to say, “in the Celtic tradition, the cross is the greatest showing of God.” It reveals God’s self-giving nature, God’s sharing of the divine life blood, the pouring out of divine love, and the divine willingness to share in such a costly way. The cross further reveals, writes Newell, “that we come closest to our true self when we pour ourselves out in love for one another.”
Newell cites Aelred of Rievaulx (12th c) who taught that God is Lover and not Judge. Judgement instills in us fear, inhibition, and perhaps compliance, but never transformation. Only love can do that, and God is in the transformation business. Aelred looked to the relationship between Jesus and John the Evangelist as a depiction of the way in which Christ is the companion of our souls rather than a ransom payment for them. John and Jesus were so close that they each listened for and to the heartbeat of the other.
Newell finds the intertwining of life and love and suffering in an early pre-Christian symbol in the Celtic world: the salmon. In ancient art the salmon symbolized wisdom and knowledge. When Christianity took root in the Mediterranean, it adopted a fish as one of its symbols. When Christianity spread to the Celtic countries, the melding of fish and salmon was natural. Newell reminds us of the costliness of the salmon’s love and yearning for life: at the culmination of that life—its free and magnificent journey upstream and its spawning—death follows closely after. “In the Celtic world,” writes Newell, “Christ is this bright, blessed, beautiful Salmon. Love comes freely from the heart of life, with costly longing.” In the Lenten story, as we follow Jesus upstream to Jerusalem and the cross, may we be grounded in this revelation.
[1] The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming, Henri Nouwen, New York: Image/Doubleday, 1994, 37-43.
