Imagination
Celtic art, life, myth, stories, and poetry are gloriously imaginative.
It's hard to look at the pages of an illuminated manuscript such as The Book of Kells and not consider the possibility that it was actually created by the Divine imagination flowing through the creativity of the monks, nuns, and artists that created such magnificent pieces. Celtic imagination has given us stories of sea monsters, giants, fairies, people who live in both the Earthly and spiritual worlds simultaneously, the mist of the veil between us and the otherworld, sea creatures both fierce and sensual, small tricksters who disrupt our controlled lives, tales of magnificent and sacrificial love, and stories of animals who are often more wise and divine than we ever know ourselves to be.
Celtic Christians (and non-Christians as well) consider imagination to be a spiritual discipline. Sadly in our modern culture, imagination is often assigned to the realm of hobby or, even worse, abandoned entirely and given to the select few that we call "artists". Yet, in our heart of hearts we know that our essence is one of creativity. We pay big money to be entertained by the imaginations of movie creators, writers, and musicians. We delight in the stories that we read to our children. And who doesn't know the joy of sitting and doodling a small sketch or writing a line of poetry and getting swept away, just for a moment, from the cares of this life and lifted into the very present awareness of that which is greater and wiser and more majestic than my little problems. And I'm sure there's not one among us that hasn't looked at the absurd and fantastic multifaceted versions of life that come in the form of hundreds of thousands of species of animal and plant. Stare at an octopus for a moment and see that the Creator takes great pride in the absurd while also creating life that is magnificent in its wisdom and creative in its own right.
We are created in the image of the Creator.
Christians, adherents to all forms of Nature aware spiritualities, and many of world religious traditions refer to God as some form of "Creator". Isn't that a marvelous word. Not Maker (although that word is used as well), not Owner, not Producer, but Creator. All that is all that shall ever be is a stroke of the Artists brush. All is breathed out from Life. All is being breathed back into Life. And all bears the creative impulse that Life imbues. To be creative is not just to have fun, or to be illogical for a moment, or to escape reality. It is to embody the very heartbeat of the Creator. It is to co-create Life. It is to commune with God. One of the joys of encountering creativity in all it's forms is that we humans keep telling the same stories over and over again through our imaginations. We tell the themes that have always been in the human heart, placed there by Creator. We struggle with our existence and find that the story has been told repeatedly and that it must be retold by each creature in its own time and in its unique way. One of the great paradoxes is that our individual expressions are both unique to us and are also part of the ongoing expression of age-old themes that have always been the expression of the Author of Life.
-Kirk Webb, director of The Celtic Center