The Seannachie
My Grandma, Margaret Ramsay, did not only weave clothes and ship sails. She opened the minds of her children and grandchildren with stories. She wove into the young lives of her five children and nine grandchildren the history, legends, values and wisdom of the Celtic peoples of Scotland and Ireland. She was a Seannachie.
How did people learn before modern organised education? Before the modern era, storytelling served as the primary means of education across cultures and throughout history. Stories, myths, legends, capture something of our common humanity? But stories also tell us how we're different. Each nation is different and each person. Each one of us has his or her own personal story. This is true of every being of the earth, animals, trees, flowers, mountains and valleys, fish and creatures of the ocean, rivers and streams, the very earth itself. Take one teaspoonful of soil anywhere on the earth and it will be unique. Soil scientists can analyse that spoonful of soil, list the phenomenal number of different individual cells, then test whether criminals bear traces on their clothes or possessions.
The earth is evolving in three different ways, according to the great Thomas Berry.
Firstly, each individual being is becoming more and more unique and different.
Secondly, each being is more and more connected to all other beings. We are becoming a communion of beings.
Thirdly, each being is evolving into ever greater interiority, soulfulness, inner identity.
"The earth is not a collection of objects. It is a communion of subjects." Thomas Berry
Our beauty lies in this uniqueness, this difference, although it seems we all somehow manage to grow the wrong way. We get dis-connected and hurt, stop liking ourselves, and fail to see our own value and goodness, fail to develop gifts and qualities. Spirituality is all about how to get back on track. This writing shares my own attempt to reconnect, to evolve, to discover the world and my uniqueness in it. I'm connecting with you. I welcome any help or contribution readers can give me.
An old Jewish story of creation from the mystical Jewish theologian Isaac Luria…………….
“In the beginning (he says) the Creator of the Universe, deciding to make a world, drew in the divine breath - contracted – in order to make room for the creation coming into being. In this enlarged space, the creator then set vessels, and into the vessels poured the brilliance of divine light. The light was too brilliant for the vessels, however, and unable to contain it; they shattered all over the universe. Since that time, the work of human beings has been to go about the universe, picking up the shards of creation and trying to mend and transform the vessels by refashioning them (with?) work called ‘the repair of the world.”
in Hebrew, "Tikkun olam".
Our next meeting is at Nant Hall Church Hall, Nant Hall Road Prestatyn LL19 9LR on Sat 22nd February at 10.30am till 12 noon.