Welcome to my Blog - Celtic Crossings

(Photo caption: Dr. Hurst atop Dun I, the highest point on the island of Iona)

I have spent over 30 years in the parish ministry, writing sermons every week. Even when we moved to another church, I kept up the discipline, feeling that delivering sermons written in another time and in another place would be like offering my congregation stale bread when they needed a fresh slice of the gospel to inform and to challenge their present existence. My years as a parish pastor came to an end last summer when I accepted an interim position as an associate presbytery executive in Sacramento, California. Suddenly, I found myself in an entirely different mode as a minister in the Presbyterian Church. At first, it was refreshing not to “fret” over next week’s texts. But then I remembered how much I enjoyed writing these 15 minute polemics for my congregations, and I found myself missing one of the more time consuming aspects of parish ministry. Enter my good friend Mary Duval who not only encouraged me to enter blog-dom, but who volunteered to do all the creative stuff to make this blog appealing to any who would find it interesting. You might want to check out her art and her insights at www.artbymj.blogspot.com.

CelticCrossings is a theme I came up with for this blog because it raises a particular world view that includes a socio-theological reference that intersects with a traveler’s musings or reflections. There are many of you out there who can be far more conversant on things Celtic than I – I know because I have read some of your postings. But there is a degree of self-awareness which leads me to posit that much of my latter theological beliefs have been shaped by my reading and by my traveling in Celtic lands. There is so much that is ancient in this word Celtic and there is so much that is post-modern or “new age” in this concept. There are elements of celtic thought and theology in the writings of such people as J.R.R. Tolkien, Frederick Buechner, W. H. Auden, C. S. Lewis and George MacDonald. Among Protestant churches, the celtic cross has long been a recognizable symbol, particularly among Presbyterian churches. Throughout the life of this blog, you will see many that I have photographed in my travels, most of which were headstones in cemeteries to mark the life of a fellow traveler on this cobbled road of faith.

Thus we come to the word “crossings.” In each of our lives, we come to places where we just stop and go no further; or where we come to a place where we are distracted or diverted to go a different way than we had intended, or we come a place and decide to cross over to the other side. It is in the crossing that I believe the greatest learning takes place and it is in the crossing that our greatest fears most often surface and must be confronted. Fear of failing, or fear of embarrassment, or fear of doing the wrong thing, are often the greatest impediment to growth and learning. Perhaps that is why the Bible has the exhortation: “Fear not …” come from the heavenly messengers of God before a significant event is about to take place.

One of the things I would like to investigate in this blog is how such crossings open us to experience God in ways we may never have imagined. The Celts had an expression for where the spiritual and the physical came together in close proximity. They called it a “thin place.” George McLeod, a Presbyterian minister from Glasgow, Scotland, once used this expression in reference to Iona, a small island off the west coast of Scotland. McLeod believed that on this place where Columba ostensibly brought Christianity to Scotland, one could experience that “thin place” where the physical realities and the hardships of life rub up against the spiritual aspects of life. McLeod devoted his life to rebuilding the abbey on Iona and to making it a community for worship, meditation, and study for people of all faiths and backgrounds to come an experience this thin place for themselves. Indeed, when I “crossed” over to Iona in the early 90s, I sensed it to be a thin place for me, and I have been back several times to plumb the depths of that initial experience.

In future blogs, I will share with you some of the other places where I – or friends of mine – have experienced crossings in our lives where God’s grace endured and fears were relieved. I invite you to share with me your own crossings as God’s grace and support were manifest in the thin places of your own life.