Living Between Worlds: Place and Journey in Celtic Spirituality.

By Philip Sheldrake Cowley, $9.95, 114 pp.

Philip Sheldrake is one of the more sophisticated writers in the area of Christian spirituality. His Spirituality and History (Crossroad, 1992), already praised in these notes, is now a standard work. His present volume derives from his research interest in the relationship of spirituality and place. Drawing on the scholarly work of Nora Chadwick, Kathleen Hughes, and Lisa Bitel, this essay is an economical and highly readable meditation on the Christianity of Celtic culture.

There is a huge amount of romantic New Ageish blather written about Celtic religiosity. Sheldrake is correctly resistant to strolling into such green mists. He stays close to the sources, has a good eye for historical nuance, and a winsome prose style. With that combination of skills, he is able to be quite informative about Celtic monasticism (noting, for example, that such communities were, in instances, like villages which included married monks and their families), the character and role of Celtic crosses, the Celtic urge for pilgrimage and wandering as a dialectical counterpoint to monastic stability, and the lovely religious literature produced by these Christians.

Sheldrake is especially good on the tensions that existed in Celtic spirituality. Christian (monastic) life was located in seclusion, but not so isolated as to forbid interaction with people, just as it organized itself in a pattern that reflected the social construction of the population as a whole. The emphasis on pilgrimage and self-exile is a complex reality that had penitential elements, missionary ones, and a strong sense of trust in Providence. Finally, although the attention of this spirituality to the natural world has been romanticized in "green" (that is, ecological) terms, Sheldrake notes that the ancient Celts did not worry themselves about nature (such a modem anxiety reflects our own alienation from the natural world), but they did meditate profoundly about how to live with the natural world since, as he writes, "they lived in constant contact with it and could not afford to be disrespectful of it."

Living between Worlds reminds us that Christian spirituality is a complex reality whose study recovers for us forgotten or neglected insights in the living out of the gospel. Sheldrake is not insensitive to the darker elements of Celtic life (its ferocious penitential elements) and is equally careful not to go beyond what the sources tell us (for example, about the links between Celtic Christianity and the Druids). The result is a highly readable book which may lead the reader to seek out other works mentioned in the brief bibliography. One source I intend to look at is the recent edition of the Carmina Gadelica--a collection of texts that reflect the oral tradition of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland; behind these texts may well stand an older stratum of Celtic prayers and devotions.