Photo: Iona Books
'It was an era when helmsmen rather than chaplains blessed new boats and when midwives as well as priests baptised newborn babies.'

Author, minister and broadcaster John L Bell has published a collection of his Thoughts for the Day, titled Thinking Out Loud, which were broadcast on Radio 4's Today programme.

Celtic connections ... a faithful perspective from the past

When people ask me what my favourite prayer is, they are sometimes surprised to hear me recite:

Bless, O God my little cow,
with its endearing second verse:
Bless O God each teat.
bless, O God, each finger,
God bless every drop
which falls into my pitcher.

Delightful, isn’t it? And it comes from an era when probably only one in seven people went to church, though over two thirds would have said they were Christians or espoused Christian values.

It was an era when helmsmen rather than chaplains blessed new boats and when midwives as well as priests baptised newborn babies.

Lingered

The Celtic period in British Church history thrived between the fifth and the seventh centuries and lingered on in outlying areas until well after the Reformation.

It helps to put a perspective on a survey published yesterday which suggested that there was a large disparity between avowal of religious belief and church attendance.

One could, of course, say analogously that there is a disparity between the minority of people who attend football matches, and the number of people who avow interest in the sport.

But I’ll keep with the old Celts and their prayers about milking, taking eggs from the hen, and putting babies to the breast.

Theirs was a world in which people often believed without the regular benefit of clergy and without an abundance of church buildings. So what they ingested by way of biblical truth and spiritual insight had immediately to be enfleshed in their everyday life.

Strictures

What happened when the churches grew larger in geographical spread and self-importance was that they developed traditions, strictures, a phalanx of officials and a distinctive culture and vocabulary … all of which survived as long as the churches had political power and could use moral coercion.

I want to suggest that, in a secular world, the perceived self-obsession of religious establishments with more of a theme-park mentality than a world-affirming mindset alienates people. It’s not that they are irreligious.

Rather they question loyalty to establishments whose engagement with political economy and global warming seems as limited as their ability to address breast-feeding or hand-milking.

And the issue for people of faith is whether God favours enclosures filled with harmless piety, or whether God – as the Bible often illustrates – has jumped out of the safe space to speak to and through people on the periphery.

This was broadcast in November 2005

• Thinking Out Loud is available from amazon.co.uk by clicking here

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