Yesterday, I attended my first ever writer’s workshop. Well, ‘work’ for her, more ‘shop’ for me. I was reintroduced to the power of the perfect verb, and then lured away from over-use of rich, saucy, jaunty, or sultry adjectives (no extra charge for the built in analogy) and ultimately warned against falling in love with our own words.

Crap.

Just as juicy was my education in the necessity of nixing unnecessary words that simply tumble off the pen in a mottled ramshackle verbosity more for my own prideful perusal than to either advance the craft itself or, God forbid, get better at said craft.

See what I mean? Yeah, that’s why I went.

Lois Keffer, award winning author, editor and educator (I was not paid for the shameless plug) sat patiently through what, for her, seemed elementary, elemental; foundational. For us, it was the educational equivalent of a satiating a drunk’s need for naughty nectar. Her presence was steady without being stuffy and a quiet patience followed equally encouraging words. I’m not quite as strutty with my own material now, as I was the day before yesterday.

Again, crap.

Writing is not something I sat down to do one day because there was nothing good on the Comedy channel (although one certainly can help the other). Writing as art or leisure was once a foreign concept. And, although I’ve always loved wordy stuff, it never really crossed my mind before last year that writing was that and more besides.

It is prayer.

The act of dotting pages with jots and tittles becomes more captivating with each page. Despite the fact that the pages I write do not always titillate like good words should, it is becoming contemplative space for me; a non-lingual thin place. To speak too often is to bloat the air with noise, unlearned, opinionated or simply unneeded. Unless one has had the experience of silent retreat, words spoken will continue to dominate our daily experience robbing us of the larger intervals between them. Those are the places with gifts to give. They might otherwise tease us out of lethargy or pain if given the opportunity. Silence gives us pause to listen to no words and to more words. Different words. Holy words. Perhaps even healing words.

To write is not to speak. Not to speak means we must listen. To listen promises new gifts of love and insight. To write what we hear brings others into the dance with us.

Maybe that’s why I went.

When one thinks of the term Celt or Celtic what images spring to mind? Is it the Pictish war-paint donned by William Wallace in Braveheart as he prepares to take Scottish troops into yet another conflagration with England? Is it the Military Tattoo at Edinburgh Castle where hundreds of overly plumed peacock pipers and drummers march to and fro in a celebration of Scotland’s warring past? Is it the drunken party at the local pub as it becomes abundantly apparent that you’ve walked into some secret society, all of whom are experts on their instruments, can drink more than any human should be capable of but with whom you feel completely welcome? Is it the great standing crosses of Ireland? Is it Larry Bird?

Whatever one may think of the Celts, one thing is sure: they were a people absolutely unique in history and centuries ahead of their time. They were an oral culture, a bardic people of story, song, poetry and mythology. As such there exists a great deal of misunderstanding regarding their exact history. In fact, they seem quite simply to have passed out of existence like a fisherman’s boat sailing into the morning mist.

One example of this relates to something I play on the bagpipes: Piobaireachd. Let me tell you how that is spelled: P I O B A I R E A C H D. It was never their intention to leave any letters for anyone else. Piobaireachd is the comingling of 2 Scots Gaelic words: piobaire, or piping with eachd meaning music. Hence, piped or piping music. Piobaireachd is the classical music of the highland bagpipe and is loosely based on the musical idea of a theme and variations. It was most likely developed by a highland clan dynasty of the MacCrimmons. But since there remains so little written evidence of the clan and their history, many believe them and their development of piobaireachd to be the fanciful fabrications of folklore.

There is plenty that we do know that can benefit us, however. The Christianity that emerged in Ireland, Cornwall, Brittany, Gaul, Isle of Man, Scotland and Wales possessed some valuable gifts. I list but a few.

The Celtic Christianity that thrived, undivided, from roughly the fifth through the twelfth centuries, is as deeply influenced by the culture in which it was birthed as the culture that was transformed by it. It is the child of the pagan culture that preceded it. We rationalists squirm a little at this idea.

We need the Celts because of their love for the poetic imagination and artistic creativity, building on a rich tradition of bards who sang the shared stories and exploits of her kin.

We need the Celts because of their similar love for kinship, relations and the warmth of a hearth. Their love of hearth and kinship translated in spiritual terms to what they called “anam cara” or “soul friends”, those with whom they shared their deepest joys, fears, sins, hopes, dreams.

The Celts were forever at odds with Mother Rome. To my mind, this equates to a paradox or at least to a willing suspension of seeming opposites. On one hand they were as profoundly Catholic as any other sect of Medieval Christendom. In the wearing of the tonsure they were the Nascar, permed mullet crowd. They yearned to be part of the larger Christian family. That is the Celtic way. On the other, they ever marched to the beat of their own drum – a Catholicism swimming in the quasi-pagan, swarthier style of the brooding Celts. They were both in and out.

We need the Celts because they insisted on the equality of all people in the eyes of God. They celebrated an egalitarianism in everything even allowing women to perform the Mass, a heresy of the first order even in contemporary, post Vatican II Catholicism! While worshippers throughout Europe frequented any number of great cathedrals, the Celts preferred smaller, homemade altars around which they would celebrate a deeply intimate Eucharist. Especially irksome to Rome was their liturgical calendar taken more from Druidic astrology than the accepted Church calendar. They were rogue in every imaginable way!

We need the Celts because of the monastic communities that flowered in Britain and elsewhere that became centers of classical education and learning, even possessive of literature outlawed by the Holy Roman Empire. As such, it can be said without exaggeration that the Celts kept knowledge alive and growing throughout the Middle Ages.

We need the Celts for their great love for the natural world and for preaching a God who loved it, too. They attached particular significance to particular animals, numbers, places and natural objects. Their spirituality was mystical in character, bathed in silence and solitude but rooted squarely in the everyday. It was a rich blend of the immanence and transcendence of God.

We need the Celts because of their unquenchably adventurous spirits, well known as explorers and/or missionaries to many places. Some have suggested that they may have been some of the earliest explorers to South America where Peruvian artwork mimics Celtic knot work.

We need the Celts to broaden our sense of time. They had an understanding of time that was less chronological than kairotic. In other words, they were not especially linear in their approach to life, love, faith and relationships. They valued the cyclical dimension of time, believing that by immersing themselves in the seasons of the year and uniting their lives with the liturgical seasons of the church, they could more effectively celebrate their journey through the sacredness of time.

We need the Celts for a further distinctive, related to their concept of time; their appreciation of ordinary life. Theirs was a spirituality characterized by gratitude, and in their stories we find them worshipping God in their daily work and very ordinary chores. We, as they, can see our daily lives as a revelation of God’s love.

We need the Celts since their spirituality has great ecumenical value, transcending the differences, which have divided Christians in the East and the West since before the Reformation.

We need the Celts because, unlike we who are often more interested in what to believe than Who to follow, their Christianity was a way of life, a spirituality lived gratefully each day, one day at a time.

Finally, we need the Celts because they give us reason and opportunity to party in the presence of the God who loves us. I’m in.

What began as a mild curiosity in childhood evolved into a warm literary fascination through grade school, which in turn blossomed into a full-blown creative passion post grad school. The sound and shape, texture and nuance of words and phrases with their multitudinous meanings now provide hours of catharsis. Airplanes are a great place to explore this need for alphabetic euphoria.

Although the literary pursuit does not produce an euphoria akin to a good Scotch, the smokey taste in a dry mouth comes pretty close to the exhale of a sexy sentence. There’s a refreshing frothiness to a passable poem or satisfying turn of phrase that delights as does a good cigar. Words writ well (or that feel good at least) burn slow and warm in the mouth and fill the senses in similar fashion. I suppose it’s rather counter intuitive then, given the time required to relish a good cigar with friends, to spew out a few words crammed between two, probably delightful, people on a long flight.

Hypocrite? Maybe.

Wordy wannabe? Sure.

The wait needed to brew the perfect pot of tea, make an omelette and even set the table for one is the same tender, doting patience asked to erect the perfect poem, or at least forage for the perfect word in an imperfect poem.

So then, one airplane seat, made slightly less uncomfortable by pen and journal, a barely passable cup of coffee and time on my hands and vive la libre et bien écrire!

As I’ve written elsewhere, I love to journal. I’ve been doing so, poorly, since about 1985. As such, it has not been an uncommon thing to receive new journals at Christmas or for birthdays. It’s especially meaningful when my boys buy new journals for me. My younger son, Graeme, bought my last one. It is now full of my life; spillings of poetry, life musings and assorted literary brick-a-brack. I used a bookmark he once made for my wife that, along with his delightful pre-pubescent picture on it also contains the words “I love you Mom!” How could that not be life changing?

What follows is a typical example of what I might write in any given journal, especially a new one. And, as you shall see, there is no small irony in the sharing thereof.

“I wonder how many times I’ve had the experience of pen on paper, the brand new journal? Most notable is that both my sons have purchased new journals for me; Graeme a few years ago and now, this Christmas, mere hours ago, my older son, Calum. It is beautiful, leather bound and handmade in India (I guess, in the interest of appreciation for the thoughtfulness of my son, I’ll temporarily suspend my moral suspicion as to who may have constructed it!).

My spotty, irregular journalling discipline would be a poor picture indeed of how deeply meaningful it is for me. Yet, in spite of that fact I know so little about the art of creative chronicling one’s life journey. The greatest benefit of journalling is also its greatest challenge: slowing down long enough to consider, carefully and lovingly, one’s pilgrimage with God and others. It is one thing to write about life events. It is quite another to probe and record one’s thoughts assiduously, faithfully, prayerfully.

Even blogging, something else I enjoy immensely, is fast-paced by comparison, hampered only by the pace of my not inconsiderable typing skills. The sheer number of available words per minute on computer may in fact be counter-intuitive to the deeper interiority asked of me in writing out those same words.

What is it about our contemporary, Western mindset that demands such unsustainable productivity? Even as I write this I find myself thinking how much less efficient it is to write these words only to type them again an hour later for the benefit of my blog. Moreover, I can only surmise at the diminished capacity for memory and ongoing, dynamic interaction with my own interior life because of the ease of a ‘save’ button.

To sit quietly for long periods of time with small things, few words or simple thoughts is vanishing quickly from our cultural milieu. For our experience of time and space to provide enough interest it must be liberally peppered with constant stimuli, a veritable banquet of over-the-top sensory memorabilia. We are both products and victims of our own infantile detritus.

Anyway, I must now move on as this entry has taken much longer to write than the length of time it would take me to mindlessly watch a sit-com, fast forwarding through the commercials…

Fairly consistently, since about 1985, I’ve kept a journal. Well, I write in them. I write the stuff that happens to me in them, the stuff happening in and around me. It’s cathartic in one sense, having the cleansing effect of affecting a greater “soulishness” about the way I live and relate to my world. The visceral feel of pen on paper gives an immediate reminder of my mortality and the deeply sensory way God moves in us.

These days, however, I do most of my “writing” on computer and my pen is rusty, dulled through inactivity. It has sat, bored and undemanding, awaiting my return to saner pastures where the literary stream of consciousness I call writing gives voice once more to the complex confines of my inner circus. It is a life that always needs the light of day to prevent it from becoming just another cavernous, uninteresting drone of pedantic inactivity. Still, it acts as worthy opponent to any temptation toward self-aggrandizement. Try reading, honestly, your journalistic exploits twenty years after the fact and one is speedily confronted with the fact that the same shit I dealt with then is pretty much the same now, only with a few added layers of sophistication. This probably makes them more insidious since it is a common reality among us all to live out our lives, more or less, as the same person from start to finish. Our dissatisfaction with this reality dwells in kahoots with God’s unending desire to find us. The result is what we commonly call spiritual formation.

This morning’s exercise in stretching my spiritual muscles comes in the form of a feisty, deeply intelligent nun, sister Alice St. Hilaire. She is my friend, a fellow Ignatian and my spiritual director. If anyone can see through my often blinding hypocrisy it’s sister Alice. I have come to depend on this valuable insight lovingly offered. This is most likely because I live in a pretty consistent fog; a mushy, grey pudding of sleepy ambiguity and lack of focus all peppered liberally with self-doubt. There are always questions – so many questions, all of which become annoyingly absent the moment I sit down to sip tea and share God-talk with sister Alice.

She is never bothered by what bothers me. Am I to be intrigued or insulted by this? To be sure, it can be disconcerting whenever someone hears the most vulnerable bits of our lives and offers back ne’er a blink. It’s as though she is thinking, “alright, is that it, then? You’re all worked up about that?” A good spiritual director is one who listens to the story behind the story, ably stripping away the layers of our experience like Shrek’s onion. “Ogres have layers” he quips. If he only knew! They are adept at sensing where God might be in our unfolding narrative and never seem to be in a hurry to suggest broad, sweeping changes that might make things all better.

If I didn’t already have at least some rudimentary awakening to the things of God, such mental vapidity would seem cruelly disappointing. Of this one thing I am certain, God does not intrude upon our journey to provide certainty and a laundry list of perfectly satisfactory answers to all our queries. Countless souls, significantly greater than myself have discovered this long before me, Job being chief among them. If Job’s experience can be considered normative in any contemporary sense, we should take away the abiding idea that God does not exist to provide us with answers. Instead, God gives us better questions.

Every time I step into sister Alice’s quaint living room, the presence of God is thick in the place, literally dripping from the walls and windows and oozing out of the carpet. It smells faintly of whatever modest breakfast was consumed earlier and bears the years of humble struggle to survive in Yakima’s tough downtown, providing shards of light in the darkness there. Where my family and I dwell comfortably in “suburgatory” (thank you ABC) in our multi-bedroom home with our multi-vehicle mobility, she chooses to live in a quiet, unobtrusive peace in the midst of the despairing milieu of Yakima’s poor and destitute.

Sister Alice is fond of saying that the ways by which God has revealed Godself to me becomes who I am and paves the way for whatever may be next. If she is any indication of the ramifications of this statement, then I need to make the journey from pen to tea and back again. It is a trip exponentially greater than the sum of the miles involved. It is a foray into the heart of God.