No Easy Answers

I have this book of daily meditations called The Celtic Spirit, by Caitlín Matthews, that I picked up from my local thrift store one day and I’ve found it to be pretty instructive and inspiring at times. On occasion, I’ve marveled at how accurate a specific day's meditation was to my own life, but this morning’s entry for September 11th, left me speechless…

Cutting Through the Celtic Twilight 

Facks are chiels that winna ding. [Facts are things that cannot be shifted.] - Scots proverb

The reappreciation of the Celtic tradition in the nineteenth century led to an overly romantic view known as the “Celtic twilight”. Professor J.R.R. Tolkien once remarked that “anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight, which is not so much a twilight of the gods as of the reason.” It is a very dangerous place to inhabit, this twilight, as the poet W.B. Yeats discovered; he, who had himself been instrumental in the formation of that twilight, hit the hard iron of reality during the savage Irish civil war, writing in “The Stare’s Nest by My Window”:

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love.

Many of the popular myths and fantasies that have been woven around the Celts – some self-fabricated – have been designed largely to mantle the unpalatable facts of conquest, colonization, and cultural diminishment. Romantic traditions are tales that both colonizers and the colonized have spun after the event. The living, transformative myths are those that speak to us in all eras and conditions. But the minute we listen to romantic traditions, with their victimhood and inadequacy thinly veiled by bombast and boast, we mire in a quicksand that will suck us out of reality into a jealous cauldron where bitter nationalism and retributive terrorism can be brewed.

Take a hard look at the romantic traditions concerning your own people. What enemies to the common good are lurking behind them?
_________________________________________________

The book was published in 1999. At first, I didn't want to share this meditation in a public forum, because the mix of emotions and thoughts is complicated enough today, but ideas related to this meditation swirled and coalesced in my mind. I appreciate how it weaves a thread through many thoughts and ideas I’ve been mulling over and discussing with friends and family the past few months - injustice, tradition, culture, romanticism, nostalgia, myth, reality. In the past I might have found the message disheartening in its timelessness, but today it feels sobering and contemplative. Because of understanding gained through conversations with others, I have a new awareness of the tug between emotion and intellect in my mind when thinking about the complicated themes associated with September 11th, and the chain of events in the decade that followed. Perhaps when answers are hard to come by that awareness is enough.

For me the hardest part is still discerning between romanticism and reality, while quelling the judgment in my heart for those who feel and think differently than me. This is a challenge for all time, for all people across all situations. While we must seek to understand and learn, perhaps it is only with an awareness of our romantic human tendencies that we might rise above to discover those “living, transformative myths” – the shared truths that connect us, as well as those that divide.