Mistwalking

Writes Tom Cowan in the foreward of Frank MacEowen's 2002 book, The Mist-Filled Path: Celtic Wisdom for Exiles, Wanderers, and Seekers . . .

There are reasons to love the mist. . . . The mist is a threshold state in Celtic spirituality. It is sacred. We might even think of mist as a sacrament in the old Catholic sense of that term: an outward sign of an interior state of grace. As Frank MacEowen explains it, mist consciousness is druid consciousness, saint consciousness, shaman consciousness, and Christ consciousness. It is the awareness and perspective of a person standing at the threshold of sacred experience.

. . . Longing too is a holy state for those not afraid, as Frank puts it, to surrender themselves to the great pull that lures us into life, to places we have not yet dreamed of, places where the Great Shaper of Life longs to shape us. [We are invited to] lean into that Divine Power so that we might discover its presence and then honor and celebrate it in simple events of the day.

The Celtic spirit, like the Celtic mind, does not want to get locked into a rigid framework with no way of escape. Like the mist, the spirit wants to shift, rise, disappear, and return. Frank knows this. The rich treasure of Celtic mysticism – pagan, Christian, and postmodern – is not a hoard for dragons to guard, but more like a sail to hoist into the wind to let the elements of God decide direction and destination. With an exciting boldness Frank pulls the old ways out of our many pasts and into the present but always with a sensitivity to what is authentic and appropriate for these new times and places. Nor is he blind to parallel teachings from other cultures and centuries that support, enhance, and make sense of the older Celtic ways. You will find in The Mist-Filled Path the indigenous wisdom of Africa, Asia, and Native America, Sufi and Buddhist teachings, some renegade Catholic ideas, a touch of modern depth psychology, and ideas about social and environmental activism, all seen through a Celtic lens. You can trust this guide as his eye wanders over the vast mystic landscape, and he points out the next steps on our pilgrimage. We are, to use his phrase, "people of the wandering fire," and we need to know the geography of the modern world we wander through if we hope to interact intelligently with others of different beliefs and values.

If you take this book to heart, it will not make you look like a strange remnant of a lost civilization caught in a modern time warp, trying to find your way back into a mythic past. As presented here, Celtic spirituality is not a romanticized artifact or an atavistic throwback to earlier times but a modern ethos for dealing with environmental crises, the poor and homeless, the uncertainties of a hostile and dangerous world, and the mind-numbing, spirit-numbing boredom that our consumer culture generates in so many people.

. . . The Mist-Filled Path is an engaging, lyrically written account of old Celtic ways and a challenging manifesto to live them in the twenty-first century. . . . You will realize, I hope, as I did in reading these pages, the great joy that comes from mistwalking.

– Tom Cowan

See also the previous posts:
• Thomas Moore on the Circling of Nature as the Best Way to Find Our Substance
• The Divine Masculine Principle
• Animal Energies
• “We Are Still Mythical”

Opening image: Jonathan Yule.