The Wild Reed: Mistwalking

Wednesday, January 15, 2020

Mistwalking

I'm currently reading Frank MacEowen's 2002 book, The Mist-Filled Path: Celtic Wisdom for Exiles, Wanderers, and Seekers. It's a book from which I'm gaining both insight and enjoyment.

From the start, MacEowen is clear to point out that he is not attempting an anthropological thesis about the Celtic world or an archaeological treatise on the Iron Age Celts or a scholarly/historical exploration of Celtic religions and culture. Rather, he seeks to “articulate how we may truly live in the spirit of the wheel, an ancient symbol used in the druidic traditions of Ireland, the shamanic traditions worldwide, and even in the Celtic-Christian tradition of earth-honoring mysticism.”

This sacred wheel, MacEowen contends, “is the cycle of our days, the circle of our horizon, the Celtic wheel of living.”

Continues MacEowen:

The central aim of this book is to articulate a way of seeing the world and a possible way for being in it that re-enlivens a relationship to that which is holy. I have come to call this the Mist-Filled Path, mist being a teacher or tutelary spirit for me in my childhood. It is an invitation into a slower, more ancient earth rhythm as it has been worked with in the living streams of perennial Celtic spirituality, animism, druidic philosophy, shamanism, and mysticism. It is a particular kind of orientation, one that looks to restore the ancient dialogue between the human being and the sacred world.

Over the next few weeks I'll be sharing excerpts from The Mist-Filled Path, starting today with an excerpt from the book's foreword written by Tom Cowan. Enjoy!

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There are reasons to love the mist. . . . The mist is a threshold state in Celtic spirituality. It is sacred. We might even think of mist as a sacrament in the old Catholic sense of that term: an outward sign of an interior state of grace. As Frank MacEowen explains it, mist consciousness is druid consciousness, saint consciousness, shaman consciousness, and Christ consciousness. It is the awareness and perspective of a person standing at the threshold of sacred experience.

. . . Longing too is a holy state for those not afraid, as Frank puts it, to surrender themselves to the great pull that lures us into life, to places we have not yet dreamed of, places where the Great Shaper of Life longs to shape us. [We are invited to] lean into that Divine Power so that we might discover its presence and then honor and celebrate it in simple events of the day.

The Celtic spirit, like the Celtic mind, does not want to get locked into a rigid framework with no way of escape. Like the mist, the spirit wants to shift, rise, disappear, and return. Frank knows this. The rich treasure of Celtic mysticism – pagan, Christian, and postmodern – is not a hoard for dragons to guard, but more like a sail to hoist into the wind to let the elements of God decide direction and destination. With an exciting boldness Frank pulls the old ways out of our many pasts and into the present but always with a sensitivity to what is authentic and appropriate for these new times and places. Nor is he blind to parallel teachings from other cultures and centuries that support, enhance, and make sense of the older Celtic ways. You will find in The Mist-Filled Path the indigenous wisdom of Africa, Asia, and Native America, Sufi and Buddhist teachings, some renegade Catholic ideas, a touch of modern depth psychology, and ideas about social and environmental activism, all seen through a Celtic lens. You can trust this guide as his eye wanders over the vast mystic landscape, and he points out the next steps on our pilgrimage. We are, to use his phrase, “people of the wandering fire,” and we need to know the geography of the modern world we wander through if we hope to interact intelligently with others of different beliefs and values.

If you take this book to heart, it will not make you look like a strange remnant of a lost civilization caught in a modern time warp, trying to find your way back into a mythic past. As presented here, Celtic spirituality is not a romanticized artifact or an atavistic throwback to earlier times but a modern ethos for dealing with environmental crises, the poor and homeless, the uncertainties of a hostile and dangerous world, and the mind-numbing, spirit-numbing boredom that our consumer culture generates in so many people.

. . . The Mist-Filled Path is an engaging, lyrically written account of old Celtic ways and a challenging manifesto to live them in the twenty-first century. . . . You will realize, I hope, as I did in reading these pages, the great joy that comes from mistwalking.