Weaving Cords

Ten years ago my friend Michael Mitton published a book in the UK: Restoring the Woven Cord. It was picked up in the US by Twenty-Third Publications and printed with the title: The Soul of Celtic Spirituality In the Lives of Its Saints. (What WERE they thinking!?) The thesis of the book was his personal journey of weaving. It was not a weaving of cloth, but of strands of his spiritual life. He found a model in the lives of Celtic Christian saints from the 4th-11th centuries - not a perfect model by any means, but a certainly more useful than the models of Christian discipleship he found in contemporary Christian bodies.

Michael's journey parallelled my own. In 1993, a chance conversation netted me an invitation to a symposium on "Celtic Christianity: Roots for Renewal" being held in the UK in March 1994. That symposium introduced a new ministry, The St. Aidan Trust, and a new community, The Order of St. Aidan. As I read the elements of the Aidan Way of Life I knew I'd found what I had been searching for over the last quarter century. The result of that encounter led to the establishing of the Trust and the Order in the USA.

There's a great deal more to the story, and I'll probably deal with that in future postings. In the meantime, it's a sort of introduction to why this blog exists. Taking a style of Christianity that flourished in an agrarian and tribal society and applying it to an urban, individualistic world is no mean task. However, the hunger for wholeness drives us relentlessly, so far yielding some fairly encouraging results. These too I want to share.

Not being a very disciplined writer, creating a blog has intimidated me for some time. I've decided to risk it as a) I need to sort out what's going on and b) there are a fair number of our community who might want to chime in and c) just about everything useful I've learned in the last half century I've learned from listening to others. Till the next post...

The Holy Three in One guard and keep you.

Jack Stapleton+
St. Aidan Trust