The Celtic Way of Prayer

June 30, 1997
In this beautiful book, retreat leader de Waal recovers the spirituality of Celtic religion and integrates it into a kind of guidebook. Through Celtic poems, songs, Irish litanies and medieval Welsh praise poems, de Waal conducts the reader on what she calls a "peregrinatio," or journey into prayer. Believing that the metaphor of a journey comes closest both to the Celtic way of prayer and to our contemporary description of seeking spirituality, de Waal traverses what she calls the "common realities of life: time, presence, solitariness, dark forces" to demonstrate how prayer may be integrated into the fabric of daily life. In addition, she recovers Celtic symbols as ways of enriching the religious imagination. Finally, she asserts that discovering the rhythms of natural life provides a "corrective to our cerebral emphasis on prayer which has for too long stifled our approach to prayer."