Activity

How beautiful to enter again briefly into this wonderful conversation! Thank you, ALL, for its richness.
We have just returned from a magnificent two days of reunion with John Philip Newell, in Charlotte, NC, where we celebrated together a ‘ritual’ of what is for us, a glorious collaboration. A few years ago we found each other and created A Celtic Mass for Peace. The Celtic stream of ‘spirituality’ is, as many know, phenomenally inclusive, Earth and Creation based, ecstatically connected to the inner wisdom traditions and embraced Christianity in Cosmic awareness. On Saturday evening at dinner, John Philip, Paula, myself, and Chip Edens, the unbelievably brilliant Episcopal Rector of this very large congregation, conversed deeply about…..everything. The next day, in the celebration of the Celtic Mass and following conversation with John Philip, both spectacular visual images of the Cosmos, the great standing stones and crosses in the open landscapes, and frequent references to deep time, the ‘Great Flaring Forth’, and other references to our vast evolving Universe flowed freely. This ancient ritual of sharing bread and wine, under the infinite sky, with hearts, minds, and bodies broken open, for the over 800 people present, was the kind of ‘ritual’ that both celebrates and births new possibilities for emerging ‘symbiotic/synergistic unity’ (Cynthia Bourgeault)……or ‘The Creation of a Self-Creating World’.
And having just heard Matthew Fox say: (paraphrase)……’our rituals must evoke BEAUTY, for if they do not, they will not serve us’…..reminds us that in every small daily practice, or in the great celebrations of ancient or emerging ‘traditions’, beauty can guide us as it does the surgeon, the mathematician, the artist.