by Lynn Schlossberger

The ancient Celtic Christian world remains an enigma that touches us at a deep spiritual level. Powerful images surface, and they seem incongruous. Archetypal waves pound against small, stony islands in the North Sea, where sea birds and contemplatives wait for God. Inside the cover of the Book [of Kells], delicate knotwork designs (the product of Celtic scriptorium) dazzle the eye with their intricacy, their gold illumination reflecting candlelight and visions of God's Presence unfurling from the Gospel text they illustrate. Somehow the work of the Holy Spirit has an imprint in both places, and they call out to be reconnected. More than a thousand years later, we are left to come to terms with fragmentary images of sacred spirals inscribed in stone, exposed to the sky, in remote, dramatic and dangerous places, and a dim awareness that the spiritual journey, in the Celtic Christian world, was connected to such places.

Surely one would have a companion for such a journey, with whom to share the silence, to reminisce. I imagine that the role of the Anamchara, or soul friend, was experienced as a thread winding through the Celtic tapestry of passionate experience of God's immanence, a meandering path in the wild Irish landscape. The natural world was certainly experienced as a rich source of metaphor for spiritual life. For example, Celtic Christians understood themselves as people who lived on boundaries, both physically and spiritually; St. Columbanus is quoted as describing his people as "living on the edge of the world." Boundary-places, like the rocky coastlines of their island homes, were seen as misty, fragrant, liminal places, places where the membrane separating physical and spiritual worlds became permeable under the right conditions. Every searcher was in need of reliable guidance, however; everyone needed a trusted soul friend, a life-companion, in the encounter with the sacred. The tradition that emerged was known as Anamchairde and each practitioner as Anamchara.

Wilderness and community had a mysterious, intertwined relationship in the Celtic landscape of the soul from the early 6th century, when the monastic form of Celtic Christian community became rooted, until the early 8th century, when the traditions of the Roman church ended their eccentric, Spirit-guided way of life. Wilderness and community belonged to one another. Movement between the two was understood to have great spiritual significance. Early Celtic spiritual pilgrims felt called to wander permanently away from their monastic communities, seeking a unique place to which they were called, their "place of resurrection." The finding of one's proper place in this world was an important image for Celtic spirituality; its reverence for nature included a deep sense of honoring each thing in the place where it belonged. By the 7th century, the spiritual practice of pilgrimage, with no planned destination, was becoming less common. People then sought rough niches in the close wilderness, places to stay for a period of time, quiet and immersed in God, remote enough for sacred abandonment of self but accessible enough to offer hospitality to visitors and Anamchairde to spiritual seekers.

The polarity between wilderness and community was expressed in Celtic monastic communities by a circular surrounding wall, the circle whose form is perfect, and symbolizes infinity. The space enclosed by a circle was sacred, and sacred space afforded blessing as well as sanctuary to those within. It was contrasted with the untamed, dangerous wilderness outside, into which anyone might be called at some point in their spiritual journey. Those within the monastic community, when called to contemplative experience, also formed sanctuaries within the sanctuary, the inner boundaries marked with high crosses. Boundary-places were meticulously tended and honored and may have been used for worship. Boundaries were generally not intended to exclude people but rather to assist the seeker with focus of attention within the landscape.

Like the desert monastics, the Celtic spiritual seeker might go into the wilderness specifically to live with uncertainty and with the darkness of those who are lost and struggling. But the Celtic tradition placed little emphasis on sinfulness and judgment, and it seems likely that the experience of darkness, of that which is alien, might have been understood as an encounter with the boundaries of one's own understanding of where home is, of what being at home means.

As in the ancient Celtic myths, the Anamchara is the guide in the journey that binds one's wilderness and one's hearth. If Celtic monastics sought the places of spiritual encounter in the landscape, even preferring to live "on the edge of the world," then there must be companionship suited to liminal places. It would be a natural part of Anamchairde to sit in places where the boundary between the physical and the spiritual worlds tended to dissolve, the place where one ran out of words to define what one knew of home, and to see what was given. Ultimately, one must make one's own pilgrimage; and yet, the journey to the islands in the sea requires companionship to do its work. If God was invited to be present to the seeker in some unfamiliar way in the wilderness, then it is surely essential to have a friend along. One must, after all, find a way back. Anamchairde would have to be a place of encounter between what one discovered of God and what one already knew and a place of entwining them. If the place of encounter really was the hypnotic island of one's imagined paradise, and one was at risk of becoming permanently lost, God would provide a reminder of the home for which one had words, in the person of the Anamchara.

Lynn is a member of Shalem's Spiritual Guidance Program, Summer 1997. This article is taken from one of her program papers.