The Apostolic Celtic Church

12/25/2022

Christmas blessings and holiday greetings. May this season bring you peace.

09/19/2022

In this episode, our guest Dr. Lyle Wilson talks about the meeting point between spirituality, Qigong and the modern day workplace.

08/07/2022

Greetings and blessings! Please meet our newest bishop, the Most Reverend Dan Duval, consecrated August 6, 2022, at the Interfaith Community Sanctuary in Seattle, WA.

04/17/2022

The blessings of Easter to each of us. May the Christ consciousness transform us this and every day.

04/04/2021

Greetings to all this Easter Sunday! May we each arise this day and every day in the Oneness of the Christ.

12/25/2020

Greetings and Christmastide blessings. May we each hear and respond to the invitational call of the celebration of the Incarnation.

We are invited to be the innkeeper, to say yes rather than no, to make room in the inn of our hearts for the Christ.

We’re invited to be midwives to Mary, to aid her in bringing the Christ into the world.

And we’re invited to be Mary, to bring the Christ into the world of our own being.

Jesus, at the height of his ministry, invited us into this way of being and acting in the world more emphatically;
Love God.
Love neighbor.
Love self.
Even stated this way it is an invitation, because we have to say yes for the magic of Christmas to become real.

Peace,

Lyle

07/28/2020

07/22/2020

“ENVIRONMENTAL STEWARDSHIP - The earth is holy, and we have a Divine call to care for the living things with whom we share our planet.” – Anamchara Books

Central to a Celtic Christian understanding of life and our place in it is the given that Creation is the first Bible, the first and ongoing revelation of God. That the Divine is everywhere and in all of creation. This core appreciation that we can find God revealed in every aspect of our world engenders a reverential approach to all things and beings and, as stated above, places upon us “…a Divine call to care for the living things with whom we share our planet.”

Much violence to our earth and our fellow creatures has been justified by quoting Genesis 1:26-28, with typical translations proclaiming that humans are created to “rule” or have “dominion” over non-human beings and to “subdue” the earth. I want to explore these poor translations from the Hebrew to help shine a Celtic light on our role in creation.

According to Ellen F. Davis, the Amos Ragan Kearns Distinguished Professor of Bible and Practical Theology at Duke Divinity School, a better way to understand and translate that key phrase in Genesis 1:26 would be “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness, so they may exercise skilled mastery among the fish of the sea and among the birds of the air and among every living creature that moves on the ground.”. When we see ourselves as being images of God, God’s eyes and ears and hands on Earth, then we better appreciate that we are being called upon to serve these creatures with our God-given talents by helping them develop and open into their own fullest expression – God had created them and blessed them and seen them as good in the verses just prior.

Similarly, the Hebrew word translated as subdue in Genesis 1:28 “…fill the earth and subdue it….” Is better understood in the same exercise of skilled mastery, of nurturing the earth to optimize its ability to support all the life on the planet. When these verses are taken together and using these better translations, our mandate as humans shifts from one that has been confused as domination over, to being one of service to, all of creation.

The Divine call for caring service includes caring for the earth itself. To revisit our opening quote, “The earth is holy,”. Through the mystical tradition of St. John, Celtic spirituality sees all the earth as sacred and spoken into being by God. John Scotus Eriugena, the 9th century Irish theologian, describes it as “the most beautiful firmness of the earth…always being born” and filled with “the ineffable fertility of the Divine goodness”. We are called, then, to be stewards of the earth and all living things upon it, from a place among rather than over our fellow creatures, a repositioning that requires of us humility rather than hubris.

In “Sounds of the Eternal: A Celtic Psalter”, John Philip Newell offers this prayer that speaks to me of our place in and among all of creation:

In the silence before time began,
in the quiet of the womb,
in the stillness of early morning
is your beauty.
At the heart of all creation,
at the birth of every creature,
at the center of each moment
is your splendour.
Rekindle in us the sparks of your beauty,
that we may be part of the splendour of this moment.
Rekindle in us the sparks of your beauty,
that we may be part of the blazing splendour
that burns from the heart of this moment.

Peace,

Lyle

07/19/2020

"HOPE - The Divine asks that we look first for the good rather than the evil in all things.” – Anamchara Books

I echoed Jesus’ teaching from Matthew 13, the Parable of the Sower, in my last post and I will revisit it today in light of the quality of hope. How does good soil become good? What makes it different from the hard-packed path or the rocky ground or the thorn-choked dirt? Cultivation. Eyes that see and ears that hear are not necessarily innate characteristics for a lot of us. We need to practice. Just as a gardener or farmer transforms an area for planting into good friable soil by breaking up hardpan and removing rocks and thorns, we can become more hopeful by daily practicing an approach to life that prioritizes seeing the good in people and in situations first. It is important to note this preferential seeing is not a call to ignore the things that don’t serve. It is ever important to be pragmatic. This hopeful approach to our world simply positions us to better contribute and to benefit in myriad ways from that contribution.

Thomas Hanna, a somatic educator and author and someone whose work has had a profound impact on mine, wrote about preferential seeing in this way: “Expectation is the leading edge of a belief system, and it has the curious feature of being self-justifying. As a leading edge, it predetermines our future. It programs what is to come, so that 60 years later one human smiles and affirms the progress of his life, saying, ‘This is just what I expected’, but another, who also says, ‘This is just what I expected,” grimaces at his self-predicted decrepitude. Both got what they expected. They could not imagine it happening any other way.”

When our inner farmer sees the possibilities in our own ground and in that of others, when we predispose ourselves with a hopeful outlook to recognize those indicators of the nearness of the realm of heaven in people and situations, when that is our expectation, we begin to see hope everywhere.

07/18/2020

Before I begin expanding on the Celtic distinctives listed in a previous post, I want to say something important. None of the qualities I’ll discuss here are exclusively Celtic or even exclusively Christian. What I hope to express is when we consciously cultivate each of these qualities, they coalesce into a beautiful way of engaging with life that recognizes the integral role each of us plays in the larger whole of creation, one that flows to us from our Celtic spiritual forbears. When these qualities become outward manifestations of how we love God and each other and ourselves, our lives and the lives of those we touch become richer. And for those of us walking in this Celtic way as our expression of Christianity, these qualities become integral to the warp and weft of the tapestry of our lives, and their regular practice helps create eyes that see and ears that hear the presence of the Divine in everyone and in all of Creation.

Peace

07/13/2020

As promised in yesterday's post, I want to begin a dialogue on the distinctives of a Celtic spirituality. For a jumping off point, let's look at eight qualities as defined by the folks at Anamchara books as being central to a definition of Celtic spirituality. I'll expand on each of them in future posts and add to this list some of my own.

"HOPE - The Divine asks that we look first for the good rather than the evil in all things.

ENVIRONMENTAL STEWARDSHIP - The earth is holy, and we have a Divine call to care for the living things with whom we share our planet.

HOLISM - Dualistic concepts of good versus bad and spiritual versus physical are deceptive, for the sacred is present in all times and places; we cannot compartmentalize life.

DIVINE IMMANENCE - God (regardless of what metaphors we may use for the Divine Spirit) is present in Nature, humanity, and in all things.

MYSTERY - The world is full of wonder - things that are beyond our comprehension - and the Otherworld is just next door.

HOSPITALITY - We are called to welcome the stranger - into our land, our homes, and our hearts - no matter who she is or what he looks like.

EQUALITY - All of us - regardless of our skin color, gender, age, politics, religion, or any other factor - are valuable; we are each necessary pieces contributing to a cosmic community."

07/12/2020

Sunday musings

I am re-reading Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s “The Phenomenon of Man”, more slowly and appreciatively this time, and it has me thinking about languages. Teilhard was both a scientist and a priest and strove in his work and in his writings to create interpretive bridges between the languages used by each, to help us appreciate that each is attempting to put into words our yearning to understand our lives, our world, and the cosmos.

Sometime in the last few years I heard the statistic that there were at the time over 30,000 different denominations of Christianity. That number is likely higher now. I have been asking how, in the cacophony of all those voices using different words to describe a common aspiration, does anyone wanting to know more find a voice and a path with which they resonate?

As my response to that question, I have determined to present over the next while and in several posts, some of the distinctives of our Celtic expression of Christianity in the hope that this language set and way of expressing love will be, to quote Madeleine L’Engle “…a light so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.” Please stay tuned!

Peace,

Lyle