For Celtic Christians, God was not a far-off deity, removed from the world and the affairs of human beings. On the contrary, God was all around them – in the landscape of sea and mountain, bog and forest, in the rising and setting of the sun, in the comings and goings of the days and seasons, in the rising and sitting, moving and working of the people. Everything was sacred.

Celtic spirituality is alive with this sense of the presence of God. The boundary between the sacred and the earthly is paper thin, if it is there at all. The ordinary and mundane in life is as filled with the presence of God as the awe-inspiring and majestic.

Celtic spirituality celebrates the little things in life and marks them with prayers and rituals. Getting up, washing, dressing, lighting the fire, going out to sow the seed – all these and many more carried out in the presence and to the glory of God and in partnership with Him. Life was not just lived, it was prayed.

As Douglas Hyde wrote, the Irish people “see the hand of God in every place, in every time and in every thing. They have this sense of life being embraced on all sides by God.”

The Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh expresses well this sense of the fullness of God immanent in our world:

“Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me…”

“ A humble scene in a backward place
Where no one important ever looked…
… beautiful, beautiful, beautiful God
Was breathing his love by a cutaway bog.”

In a very concrete way, the mystical sense, the sense that makes us aware and alive to the presence of God in and around us is essential to Celtic spirituality.

For us today too, it is important to see with this mystical eye, to let God be in our seeing, in our hearing, in our speaking. When we see in this way, we become aware that nothing and no-one is apart from God. All is grace.