Imbolc Waxing Awakening Moon
St. Patrick’s Day. I’ve always felt that the Irish celebrating St. Patrick’s day is much like the Dodgers celebrating a Yankee World Series win or maybe more like Native Americans celebrating the coming of Christianity to the New World.
Why? The snakes St. Patrick drove out of Ireland represented the takeover of the ancient Celtic faith by the invading dogma of Roman Catholicism. Not only did the R.C.s finish off the auld faith, but they did in a native Celtic version of Christianity that had a close relationship to Mother Earth and who offered to the church, Pelagius, a theologian who believed we were born good. Augustine, yes, that Augustine, set out to crush Pelagianism and he succeeded. In fact, Augustine was so successful that Pelagius rarely comes in church history at all.
What I know of Celtic Christian spirituality would salute this poem by e.e. cummings that Scott Simpson quoted at our last Woolly meeting:
O sweet spontaneous
- O sweet spontaneous
- earth how often have
- the
- doting
- fingers of
- prurient philosophers pinched
- and
- poked
- thee
- ,has the naughty thumb
- of science prodded
- thy
- beauty how
- oftn have religions taken
- thee upon their scraggy knees
- squeezing and
- buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
- gods
- (but
- true
- to the incomparable
- couch of death thy
- rhythmic
- lover
- thou answerest
- them only with
- spring)
