Living in harmony with the world and with each other

A review of John Philip Newell’s A New Harmony: The Spirit, The Earth, and The Human Soul. Jossey-Bass, 2011. Hardback, $19.95

John Philip Newell thinks in terms of the interconnectedness of all things,  from the most microscopic to the cosmic. There is nothing and no one that is unimportant. As Scottish poet Kenneth White so beautifully puts it, “My thanks for this handful of April days / for the white wind blowing / for the dark earth and the tangled grass / and the woman beside me walking.”

The feeling is one of utter connection with everything. It is where Newell began his journey many years ago as he began exploring the Celtic Christianity that once bloomed in the British Isles before it was nearly eradicated by the Roman Church with its top-down, otherworldly structure. 

For most of us raised, as I was, in Western religious and intellectual traditions, learning to see ourselves as connected with everything else that exists requires a radical shift in understanding and worldview. It means moving radically away from viewing our lives in individualistic/tribalistic terms and learning to see our lives as interconnected. “Our lives are part of the cosmos, and the cosmos is part of us. The life of humanity is not an appendix or an exception to the universe. It is a unique expression of the universe. And each of us carries the essence of the cosmos within it” (pages xi, xii). Quite a leap from the old Gospel song that goes “This world is not my home, I’m just a passing through” in which nothing and no one has any significance and “reality” is “somewhere beyond the blue” where our “treasures” are “stored up” for us. I found this not only unsatisfying, I found it deeply depressing; ultimately, I rejected it and with it, spirituality.

The imperative of the gospel, as the Celtic Church saw it, is one of learning to follow the way of love in our relationship with the world, with one another, with all other beings, and with the cosmos. As Pelagius is quoted as saying: “If we look with God's eyes, nothing on earth is ugly." “The danger,” Newell maintains, “has been to take our eyes off the imperative to love” in the most radical of ways in which we recognize and celebrate our interrelatedness with every other human being, every other species, and the world and the cosmos of which we are a part. “To truly love one’s family is to love the essence of every family. To truly love one’s nation is to enter a ‘genuine dialogue’ with the heart of every nation” and “to truly love God is to look for the sacred in everything that has being” (page 123).

This is a book that you’ll read more than once.

A clear 5 star read.

A Trustworthy Spiritual Guide For These Turbulent Times

Review of "Christ of the Celts: The Healing of Creation," by J. Philip Newell, Jossey-Bass, 2008

This book is much more than an introduction to the treasures of Celtic Christianity for our time. It is a response to what the author and many others see as a deep longing for peace in the world among nations and peoples today, a longing against which are ranged forces of fear and fragmentation "that are wedded to the mightiest political powers and religious fundamentalisms of the world today." A scholar of Celtic Christianity, Newell presents its unifying vision of a harmony that is at the core of all life, and its vision of Jesus of Nazareth as a unifying figure for today, a figure that has been controlled and obscured by the official Church from the fourth century on. Jesus and his ministry, Newell says, is not the property of the Church; he belongs to the world, to every religious tradition. He speaks to everyone, just as he spoke to everyone during the very brief career of what he regarded as his ministry, to heal the sick, free the downtrodden and oppressed, and turn the political and religious powers on its collective head, not by force, but by revealing how they systematically oppress the needy by exerting control over whom they regard as their "subjects". Newell documents this process very well within the history of Christianity, which moved away from a free-spirited "people of the Way" and into a tightly-controlled, imperially modeled hierarchy that robbed people of their freedom and their self-confidence, and punishing those who maintained a point of view more in line with that of Jesus, who preached and lived unity and loving-kindness.

It is high time for a change, and Newell's beautiful book is a clarion call for a more open and unifying spirit within Christianity and between people of all faiths. He is not alone here, and it is high time: Walter Wink ("The Human Being"), Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer ("Jesus Against Christianity", "Saving Christianity From Empire" and "Is Religion Killing Us?"), Philip Gulley and James Mulholland ("If Grace Is True: Why God Will Save Every Person") join him, as do Desmond Tutu, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama, and many, many others from across and beyond the religious spectrum. It is time that we listen to these people as guides for our future and the future of our world. It is way past high time for us to ignore and repudiate those who call for division, specialness, violence, resentment and hatred.

"Christ of the Celts" is a very important companion for anyone who seeks to live a more loving, compassionate and realistic life in these turbulent times.

It is not, however, going to be warmly received by the fundamentalist community, who are likely to regard it as another in a long line of heretical texts, and who miss the point of Jesus' ministry entirely.