Celtic Way of Prayer: The Recovery of the Religious Imagination » (Reprint)

Esther de Waal lives in a small cottage on the Welsh/English border. After studying and teaching history at Cambridge University, she married, had four sons, and moved to Canterbury, where she lived in a house that had been part of the medieval monastic community. She leads retreats, lectures, and travels widely. Her major interests are the fields of the Benedictine and Celtic traditions.

Esther de Waal, one of Celtic Christianity's preeminent scholars, shows how this tradition of worship draws on both the pre-Christian past and on the fullness of the Gospel. It is also an enlightening glimpse at the history, folklore, and liturgy of the Celtic people.

Esther de Waal introduces readers to monastic prayer and praise (the foundation stone of Celtic Christianity), early Irish litanies, medieval Welsh praise poems, and the wealth of blessings derived from an oral tradition that made prayer a part of daily life. Through this invigorating book, readers enter a world in which ritual and rhythm, nature and seasons, images and symbols play an essential role. A welcome contrast to modern worship, Celtic prayer is liberating and, like a living spring, forever fresh.

Publishers Weekly

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.)