I've been getting back to my love for the Emerald country of late; I guess it started a few weeks ago, but I've been listening to Iona's new cd...very beautiful, and loving the last bit of summer. I was reading some stuff about some of the Irish madmen, like Saint Patrick, and St. Francis of Assisi, who "prayed and danced with pagan abandon." As Chesterton writes about Assisi, "St. Francis did in a definite sense make the very act of living an art, though it was an unpremeditated art. Many of his acts will seem grotesque and puzzling to a rationalistic taste." He was a mystic of the truest sense, not hiding from the world, not escaping into his ideals, but changing the things around him through the power of individuality and relationship with God. He had a dream in which he was fighting in a great battle so when he awoke from it he ran off to the Crusades to join the cause. But he soon got very sick, and had to return home in which he heard a voice say "you mistook the meaning of the vision." Out of great humility, he realized the call had been to the poor, the lepers of his town whence he thereafter threw himself into the service of.
Some things about the Celtic I identify with:
love/natural inclination for art and music
sense of the supernatural; no boundaries between secular and Christian
appreciation of nature
loyal and passionate
family/clan oriented churches instead of hierarchical establishments
fiery spirit, witty humor
