Alternative Readings

My copy of Celebrating the Seasons is a bit worn and battered now. It was brought out as a companion volume to Celebrating Common Prayer, the Daily Office book produced in the 1990s by the Anglican Franciscans and which became the model for the daily prayer services included in Common Worship from 2000 which most of us use now. Celebrating the Seasons is a compendium of spiritual readings for each day of the liturgical year; most of them are extracts from sermons or scriptural commentaries though there is also a bit of poetry or hymnody. The most refreshing feature is that the readings come from the whole scope of Christian history, from St Irenaeus of Lyons and the Desert Fathers, through medieval mystics such as Mechtilde of Magdeburg and Puritan divines to modern poets including RS Thomas. I've used these passages alongside my daily morning Bible reading as a means of trying to find some thoughts to help shape the day.

But I have been reading them for years now so they are perhaps unhelpfully familiar! Just lately I remembered that a few years ago I was given Celtic Daily Prayer, the office book of the Northumbria Community, and when I was planning our Forest Church I looked to see whether there was any helpful material - there wasn't, but I found in the book two cycles of daily readings. Where Celebrating the Seasons concentrates on theological meditation, Celtic Daily Prayer is more experiential, including far more material that reflects the lives of the saints. At least, the saints in the 'Celtic tradition' - a phrase I usually shy away from, as the people who use it customarily leave out how tough the holy people in that tradition were, and major instead on the 'hello clouds, hello sky' stereotype of Celtic spirituality. But my few days' reading in this book so far has produced an account of St Columba scorning the idea of going to sleep on straw as self-indulgent luxury and instead taking his rest on a stone with another as a pillow, so I think the authors are not unaware of what Celtic Christians were really like. 

I will, for a while anyway, put aside the thumbed pages of Celebrating the Seasons and try something different. It's not too radical a step!