I picked up Esther de Waal’s book next—The Celtic Way of Prayer.  And I think when I began reading that, it just really interested me.  It came out in the secular market.  And then I read other books.  I found some fascinating devotional books from the fifth, sixth centuries on.  The most impressive to me was one by a man named Alexander Carmichael who was a British tax collector.  As he was trying to collect taxes, he would listen to the prayers and songs of the people.  And he’d say to them, “Where did you get these songs?”  And they’d say, “Well my mother taught it to me.”  Or “my father taught it to me.”  He was on to a whole new strain of what we would call oral tradition.  These things weren’t written down.  And this was kind of customary among the Celtic peoples.  They didn’t trust the written word. 

When I got into that book—it’s called Carmina Gadelica and “Gaelic songs” is what it really means in the Latin—it was such a beautiful thing … the praise that came from these ancient peoples across the centuries.  At this time I didn’t have much of an understanding that the word Celtic among people who are anti-New Age or anti-humanist … well, I had no idea at that time that there was a backlog of disrespect toward the Celts.  That came later when I began to realize how many Wiccan meetings were being held on the island of Iona.  But what I discovered was, these people on Iona are kind of latecomers.  It was during the time of Patrick in the Irish Revival, when thousands of people came to Christ and were swept with passion across Europe.  And people were hungry for the Gospel.  And that whole way of life began to just really catch hold in Europe.  This passion they had to spread the Word of God was consuming.  These were some of my things, and I moved through this kind of literature.  And there were such beautiful things written about Jesus that I fell in love with the whole movement.

What did the Celts do when they prayed and what makes their way stand apart from how Christians pray today?

Well, first off they always were more Trinitarian.  Probably more than we are.  They saturated their prayers with the Trinity.  They would say, “I’m rising this morning to serve the God who created me, to serve his Son who redeemed me, to serve his Spirit who fills me.”  This was typical.  It wasn’t a rote thing that they did.  They addressed all three persons of the Trinity.  That was a huge thing for me, because I don’t generally hear of that among evangelicals.  We generally pray in Jesus’ name only—not that there’s anything desperately wrong with that since Jesus and God and the Spirit are all one.  Nonetheless, it’s kind of a partial theology.  It’s kind of like Saint Anselm who said, “God is within himself a sweet society.”  I love that.  And the Celts really believed that.