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Draw near: Confessing sin without wallowing

Lynne Baab • Tuesday August 16 2022

Esther de Waal, in her book The Celtic Way of Prayer, writes about the sense of guilt that bedeviled her childhood, the feeling of never being good enough, of failing again and again in trying to measure up. In Celtic Christian prayers she found something different, a complete absence of that kind of self-focused guilt, and a joy in Jesus’s gift of forgiveness. She writes that in the Celtic poems and songs,

“I have found sorrow, deep sorrow, many tears, an outpouring of grief, but it is never turned on itself, never the kind of sorrow that becomes inward, self-destructive guilt, feeding...

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Draw near: Feeling unworthy as an obstacle to prayer

Lynne Baab • Tuesday August 9 2022

“For many years I believed I couldn’t even approach God in prayer until I had dutifully catalogued a litany of the sins I had committed since the last time I had prayed. Quite often the process of prayer made me feel unworthy, unholy, and exhausted by my own inadequacy. And I was taught, and indeed believed, that these were the things I was always supposed to feel – inadequate and unworthy – so that I could be properly grateful for the extension of divine grace. The consequence was that sometimes it simply felt better not to pray.” —Britney Cooper, professor at Rutgers...

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Draw near: Tune our hearts

Lynne Baab • Tuesday August 2 2022

Come, thou Fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing thy grace; streams of mercy, never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise. Teach me some melodious sonnet, sung by flaming tongues above. Praise the mount I'm fixed upon it mount of God's redeeming love.

Robert Robinson was 22 years old when he penned those words in 1758 as a hymn for Pentecost. He was in transition from his work as a hairdresser in London to the preacher he would become. Notice the two things this verse asks for: “tune my heart to sing thy grace,” and “teach me some melodious sonnet sung by flaming tongues above.” Jesus’s...

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Draw near: Learning from Celtic Christian thankfulness

Lynne Baab • Tuesday July 26 2022

A look at some of the themes attributed to Celtic Christianity can enrich our thoughts about gratitude. What we call “Celtic Christianity” flourished from about the fifth to ninth centuries throughout the British Isles, but was particularly concentrated in the west and north: Cornwall, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. There were also Celts in Brittany in France.

The Celts were described briefly in Greek literature in the centuries before and after Jesus, but very little is known about the pre-Christian Celts. We do know that in the Roman Empire the Celts were renowned for their ability to learn very long stories and poems...

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