Taking the time to sit in the shade of a tree and read a book is something we often long to do, however, it might not be a practice we get to experience.

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Take some time in the shade of these trees.
 

Below is a little bit of a book (pages 156-159). 
If you like it, you can get the whole book here:  Joel McKerrow, ‘Woven. A Faith for the Dissatisfied’.

 

"Understanding ourselves in context

Celtic spirituality holds that we are never just a single person. Who we are cannot be help within the notion of 'mind, body and spirit' as so many believe. Rather mind, body, spirit, land and people are threads of our personhood. We cannot understand who we are separate from understanding ourselves in the context of the land we are from, the land where we were born and the land where we now walk. We cannot understand ourselves separate from the people and the stories that came before us - the history that paved the way to our existence. Our ancestors. The great cloud of witnesses. 

Our individual selves are so woven in with the world around us that we would be remiss to think of ourselves as just individuals. So many of the great religious traditions and indigenous cultures hold the same. The Woven Self moves away from individually identity to understand the self in the context of others - not in the dependence of the Sculpted but with a sense of self that stems from a place of belonging and interdependence. A spirituality that is integrated. 

I grew up between the mountains and the sea, on the east coast of Australia at the base of Mount Keira - or, as the Indigenous peoples of the area call her, 'Geera'. Geera, along with her sisters Mimosa, Wilga, Lilli Pilli, Wattle and Clematis, were the daughters of Oola-boola-woo, the West Wind. According to Indigenous mythology, these children were naughty and as punishment Geera's sisters were thrown into the sea and became the five islands that lie just off the coast of Wollongong. Geera was left alone on top of the escarpment. There she would bend over to watch the lives of the local Aboriginal tribes and look out to sea to see her sisters. Eventually she turned to stone and the dust and leaves and earth built up around her so that she became part of the escarpment.

It is there she now stays. Watching. Waiting. She watched the day I was born below the mountain. She watched me grow from child to man. 

This was the landscape that help me as a child and teenager. This was the land of my birth. I was formed and watched over by the land that holds together the mountains and the ocean. The silent peaks and the curved valleys. The constant ebb and flow of the ocean's tides washing up onto the shore. 

We would go down to the beach in the summer sun whenever we could, and there we would fling ourselves into the chaos of the waves. We would sit out upon the rolling sea on our bords and watch the sun gather in the day and take it behind the mountains. We would sit out on a jetty with my dad catching fish and learning life. This was my place in the world: the sea salt ingrained in my skin, the wildness of the ocean, the patience of the mountain, the giving of the valleys. This was what gave me my sense of being, my place of home. 

We are dependent on this mother as a newborn. It is high time we bring to her the honour she deserves. For the earth is graceful in the way she opens up such a space within herself for us to dwell during our short lifetime. Indeed, as soon as we were birthed into existence, we arrived in a physical reality where place opened up a space for us to inhabit. How we go about inhabiting this space should be a governing reality in our life. A constant shaping force of desire to live in harmony with her, to cultivate the best out of her and to let her call the best out of us. 

My evangelical Christian upbringing never upheld land as an important reality to shape one's existence around. Yet well-known Old Testament scholar and theologian Walter Brueggermann says, 'Land is a central, if not the central theme of biblical faith'. 

To be woven with the land is thus a crucial movement forward, for the spiritual growth of any human occurs always within a particular place, a locale, a landscape, a home. People can fully grow in all facets of who they are only when they realise this and seek to walk in the reality of their feet being upon the earth. We are part of a sacred geography, and it is central to any form of spiritual growth that we seek to attain. 

A woven sense of place is when one allows oneself to step back into the presence and rhythm of the landscape around. To live in harmonious mutuality with her. To listen to the stories she is telling. The aesthetic of the landscape is the memory of a place. The landscape tells a story: the story of Geera, the story of the blood in her soil as the Indigenous people were slaughtered upon her by the colonisers. 

To learn the narrative to the land you were birthed in and now dwell in is to learn the narrative of your own story. The two are inseparable. You are one with the earth. You can never be separate from her. You may live within her, but she too lives within you. 

I purposely do not tell more of Celtic Christianity here. My fear is that in doing so you may think it is your answer - that you may seek to appropriate this tradition to solve your own spiritual and life perplexities. It will not. No tradition is the answer. It has much to offer, absolutely. It was the framework that helped me move from an unraveled existence into a woven way of being. But for others it may be the very sculpted reality they need to break from. Celtic Christianity is a fishbowl like any other tradition. 

The point of sharing this journey is to show that just as the unravelling of my life was brought on by a few key inciting events that led to years of travelling in what felt like wilderness, so the weaving back together came through a moment or two of direct encounter with a new way of being and then a slow restitching over time. A frog being boiled. Not realising something was changing until it had changed. 

The movement into the Woven often comes silently. Without fanfare. It comes
through community
through vulnerable conversations 
through people willing to come alongside the Unraveled 
through books 
through ritual and repetition 
through whispers of intuition 
through pilgrimage
through questions 
through a 'going through the motions' until the motions become real again 
through dialogue with those who have managed to hold their worlds together
through dialogue with those who have not 
through risk 
through courage
through persistence."