Celtic Spiritual Development in Liturgy
No one really knows just when Christianity came to the British Isles.
There are traditions that purport that Joseph of Arimathea, the man who contributed Jesus’ tomb, brought the Jesus story to Britain. Tin was mined in England even back in those days and was traded around the Mediterranean Sea, and although remote, the British Isles were visited by many traders and merchants in the time of Christ.
At any rate, a monastic form of Christianity took root in England, especially in the western counties among Celts, Picts, Cornishmen, and Welshmen. This British Christianity developed locally within the culture, and reflected a monastic, peaceful, loving expression of the faith that seems to have been somewhat friendlier to women and strove to connect to nature.
In the southeastern areas, where the Roman legions had established military towns and outposts, there were also Christians who planted Christianity in its more Roman form.
These two expressions of the story of Jesus evolved separately. In 597 A.D. Pope Gregory the Great was moved to send missionaries from the now powerful and highly organized church in Rome to England . . . unaware that the faith had been planted some centuries earlier among the local tribes.
The missionaries, were led by Augustine (a Benedictine monk and head of a monastery) and were confronted by local British monks who followed different rules and customs. The two forms of Christianity were in conflict until the Roman “use” was established at the Synod of Whitby in 664 A.D.
What were these early Celtic liturgies like? We don’t know for sure, only that they were not uniform and were influenced by local customs. Monks and scholars of later centuries pulled pieces of the Celtic liturgy together from a variety of resources, and Fr. Wally Draeger has gathered the fragments of this scholarship into a recognizable and usable “Celtic” liturgy.
Thanks to the 5:00 pm worship community at Grace Episcopal Church, Traverse City, Michigan.
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