Review by Booklist Review
De Waal and Moorhouse both approach the Irish monastic tradition, with its roots in Celtic animism, though each does so quite differently. De Waal bases her essays on the beautiful prayers and poems recorded by medieval Irish monks and collected by nineteenth-and twentieth-century folklorists. She explores practices such as peregrinatio, the uniquely Celtic style of pilgrimage in which the journey itself, rather than a specific site, is the objective; a solitude that finds hermetic deserts even in rainy lands and leads to a more profound understanding of the interconnectedness of all life; and the uses of "soul-friends" and penances in attaining spiritual peace. Her prose is richly textured and sensuous, her grasp of the material full and subtle. In the first half of his book, Moorhouse re-creates fictionally the lives of monks on the Skelligs--14 rocky, wind-lashed islands off Ireland's west coast, on which a monastic tradition thrived from the sixth through the thirteenth centuries. How did men survive physically, much less spiritually and emotionally, in such dire circumstances? Moorhouse imagines daily life, the rough edges of interpersonal conflict, and the changes the monks would have endured as Christian doctrine altered with the centuries. Most important, he vividly conjures the spiritual struggles the monks withstood and the great peace they sometimes realized. In the book's second half, Moorhouse explains in detail the major figures, traditions, and controversies of Irish Christianity, especially in its monastic form. --Patricia Monaghan
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this beautiful book, retreat leader de Waal recovers the spirituality of Celtic religion and integrates it into a kind of guidebook. Through Celtic poems, songs, Irish litanies and medieval Welsh praise poems, de Waal conducts the reader on what she calls a "peregrinatio," or journey into prayer. Believing that the metaphor of a journey comes closest both to the Celtic way of prayer and to our contemporary description of seeking spirituality, de Waal traverses what she calls the "common realities of life: time, presence, solitariness, dark forces" to demonstrate how prayer may be integrated into the fabric of daily life. In addition, she recovers Celtic symbols as ways of enriching the religious imagination. Finally, she asserts that discovering the rhythms of natural life provides a "corrective to our cerebral emphasis on prayer which has for too long stifled our approach to prayer." (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Historian and retreat leader de Waal explores the rich legacy of Celtic songs, poems, prayers, and blessings that grew out of the dynamic meeting of Christian monasticism with an older, communal way of life ordered by kinship, a rural sense of place, the pattern of the seasons, and the cycles of birth and death. The author does a fine job tracing the strands that make Celtic Christianity compelling and unique. An important addition to Celtic literature for both general readers and specialists. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
