SIMPLICITY: A Celtic Woman by Philip Harnden

Posted on January 25, 2018

From Journeys of Simplicity

Hebridean householder and keeper of the songs, prayers, and blessings of Celtic Christianity.

Nineteenth century in the Outer Hebrides, those wild islands off the west coast of Scotland. A woman rises in the cold morning, her household still asleep. In her small hut – day in, day out – she begins the quiet, essential rhythms of daybreak: bathing her face, kindling the night-banked fire. With each act she breathes a prayer-of-three to the Trinity. Kneeling there on the earthen floor, she transforms her ordinary chores into sacrament, her daily journey into pilgrimage.

Esther de Waal, in her rich and sensitive writings on the Celtic way of prayer, so describes one anonymous woman of more than a hundred years ago.