Celtic Spirituality & Sacred Skinny Dipping - with Nick Mayhew Smith

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Spiritual Wanderlust Podcast. I'm your host, Kelly Deutsch. And today we have an episode unlike any you've probably heard before. We are going to be talking with the author and theologian Nick Mayhew Smith, whose work is dedicated to recovering ancient wisdom, particularly of the Celts.

He spent several years seeking out Celtic holy places and has sought to understand them from the inside out by imitating the wild practices done by Celtic monks and hermits, which we will talk about today. And one of those practices is a passion of Nix, that of sacred bathing. You might think of it as a spiritual practice of skinny dipping, though it was once common in Christianity, it has since been forgotten or...

perhaps deliberately snuffed out. Nick is the author of several bestselling books, including The Naked Hermit, Landscape Liturgies, Britain's Holiest Places, which was then turned into a BBC series, and more. We share a love for nature. for mystery and for the numinous. So I am delighted to have him on the show today. Welcome, Nick. Thank you very much indeed, Kelly. Looking forward to our journey.

absolutely to start us off today i would love to hear a little bit about how you would describe your spirituality and how you arrived there Thank you. Well, it's a good question. It's a large mixture. And what I've tried to do increasingly over the years is to kind of get out and to... to travel and to touch and to reach and to experience. So a lot of my work has been on pilgrimage. And I wrote a book originally that was kind of the beginning of my journey.

2011 called Britain's Holiest Places and I started traveling off and obviously I was expecting to see a lot of churches and cathedrals given our heritage but then I kept coming across all these kind of like corners of the countryside and the landscape as well. Sacred mountains where things had happened, bays where... Celtic saints in particular had gone and bathed, as you say, that was part of it. Sacred trees as well. And so there was this kind of other layer, this kind of...

spiritually significant landscape that I kept bumping up against. And so I was really drawn by that because obviously we don't tend to incorporate that in our worship nowadays. I don't know how often you... climb a mountain to say your evening prayers, Kelly. But people don't tend to go in that deep. And so it was from there I then decided you can really need to take a joke too far. And I went to do a PhD.

on that subject to say why? Why were Christians in particular so drawn into the natural world to worship? So that's been my trajectory really, is following through. both in space and traveling through places, but also in time going back to see these earlier forms of spirituality. Yeah. Can I ask how that...

interest was originally sparked, even explore those spiritual landscapes, because you started out as a journalist and a publisher, right? I mean, have you always been interested in, you know, the spiritual depths and it started as an interest as a journalist or was there? some other catalyst? Very good question. And it actually comes down partly to my experiences through my background. My mother is from New Zealand.

And when I went as an 18-year-old to New Zealand with my eyes wide open to this world of freedom and not having mum and dad telling me what to do, I was exploring some of the landscapes and it was there. There's a very strong sense of Maori spirituality. in the landscape and I stayed on my uncle's farm.

in the middle of the north island and he was talking about in new zealand they've got huge farms like america and britain you've got like i don't know half a hectare anything that's kind of that's that's big but but there he had this vast he said oh yeah there's a lake somewhere over there that's got this island on it which had a Maori pa which is a kind of ceremonial fortified village area. And I went off to find it on my own and it was a misty landscape and I was there and, you know.

some independence for the first time and I made it out there's a little sort of path of land to connect to this ancient um landscape that's forgotten and you could see the ridges where where the You know, people long gone before us had made their home, this naturally defensive site. And that still sits with me now, the Maori kind of landscape spirituality. And then second, adding to that. My wife is from Russia, Ukraine.

I would say we're feeling more Ukrainian than any other part at the moment, it must be said. And she came here and she had a very pronounced spirituality. This is 20 years ago. about again the landscape orthodoxy has a very embodied sense of the sacred with a lot of pilgrimage sites and so we went to the bookshop together to buy a book on sacred heritage in Britain and we couldn't find one.

So I just thought, well, someone needs to write one. And in the end, I had the free time and the income to just devote. the time and energy to actually write the book. So if you like, it's kind of started as a bit of a love letter to my wife to help her find her feet in this unfamiliar land. That's lovely. I like that.

I'm curious what you discovered. I mean, you said that a big part of this was, and I think you stated in some of your books as well, like how, the underlying question is like, how do we usefully... and spiritually connect with the natural world and what has drawn these ancient peoples and humanity over all of time to the natural world. And if you had to say like, you know, in a minute or so, what did you discover? Like, why is that a draw?

I think I can answer it in a minute very easily. You just need to go out there and be there and connect. It doesn't need to be mediated by any one tradition. And it's such a meeting place. Even today, I was doing a landscape liturgy.

in uh Gloucestershire just about 100 miles from London last weekend and we went out onto this hilltop and it was at the top of this hill is this ancient um earthwork long barren that was three four thousand years old on a hilltop um and we went up there and we did our prayers and everything else and just as we were coming down we noticed on a tree it's a very large ancient tree

And we went over because some bright things caught our eye. And somebody had made kind of like a shrine to someone who passed away recently. They'd pinned their memories. of someone who died to this hilltop and this ancient tree. And there we were on a long barrow. doing the same thing, honouring the shades of our ancestors. So it's really the very large narratives that you can meet. It's a very good meeting place.

Yeah, absolutely. Can you tell me a little bit about landscape liturgies and what you mean by that? Because I think for some people We think of literally taking church outside, like you go and have a mass or communion service or read scriptures or something out there. And for other people, it's something entirely different. So I'm curious what you mean by that. That's a really good question to look at. Landscape Liturgies was a book where I wanted to go.

And look at forms of worship that take place outdoors. And there's any number of books now which talk about forest church and outdoor spirituality, which are great. And I think they show a kind of yearning. what I wanted to do was just go back through some of the very ancient texts and practices, just to see actually, how grounded is this in tradition? How much of this is just us answering a kind of modern?

and feeling of disconnect with the environment and environmental damage. And actually you can find it right the way through 2,000 years of Christian history. And I found one prayer. from Anglo-Saxon times over a spring, natural spring of water. And I had to get it translated because no one's translated into English. I worked with a colleague, Sarah Brush, brilliant writer and theologian.

And she translated this for me. And it was just seeing this text not being said over a world for a thousand years. And it talks about the... the sin and the neglect of human pollution that damages this watercourse. 1,200 years later, there we are still standing there. And it's got more acutely expressed. So to make that connection and to see. that really large body of theology, of tradition that Christianity has behind it, makes me feel this is a bit more grounded.

um than than people might think so it's you know in any religion tradition and is important precedent is important that's the nature of religion but i wanted to ground some of this this kind of yearning for better connection and a better relationship with the history. And I found it. I wasn't expecting to find quite so much, but I really did. Especially so explicitly. I think that's something that a lot of us...

can draw from, you know, like scriptures or something like that where we're like, oh, we should care for the environment. See, it says in the Bible, you know, things like that. But to have actual prayers where they're like, hey. We're kind of messing things up already 1,200 years ago. And to see that kind of attention and care, I personally haven't seen many texts like that. So that's kind of exciting to discover.

It was. And I found about, I set off saying I'm going to find 100. And in the end, I got to about 80, I think, which are in the book. So I didn't find quite as much as I would have hoped for. But the quality of what I found, the depth of it, the idea, the blessings of a tree that we found, rituals for even mountaintop rituals, talked about going up the mountain to pray, but people would climb up.

um mountains for the feast of Saint Michael the archaic who has found you know the mountaintop is the place of um revelation of the divine where you go to meet angels where you go to meet god in in again across all religions it's not hard to think of examples across the board so mountaintop rituals as well and you know all these practices

which do actually, they really resonate today. I mean, obviously, back 1000 years ago, they weren't thinking we're going to destroy the planet's natural environment in the same way. But they were well aware that negligence, and they call it the sin of negligence, was a threat and a risk to health.

yeah and to life and there are there were early saints who would you know would pray for animals and would take them in and give them sanctuary i'm curious So the Celts were concerned about nature, not only as something that they needed to protect and revere, but...

um like the example i remember you gave was of columba and you know he's kind of one of the big three of the celtic saints and how he directed more spiritual energies to the lands and the locks of Scotland than he did to the people. Like, why was that? Why was nature so central in Celtic Christianity? And what has happened to that since? That was exactly it, Kelly. That's where it came from, is I was reading these texts and I could see...

They put so much focus. I mean, you think, did you even have any time to preach the gospel? You great missionaries, they were so busy interacting and, you know, talking to birds and swimming in the lakes. encountering all the kind of storied landscapes. That was their kind of big mission. And I wanted to look at it and to see what on earth was going on. Why? Why would you do all that? And it did start to become clear.

after only a few months really getting into my PhD, that what the saints were doing there was actually were trying to find ways to find a common currency with the tribal people of Britain. These bits of Britain... were outside the Roman Empire and it's possibly this is the first place.

where Christianity went into a non-imperial mindset and a non-imperial culture, which I think is interesting for places, you know, like in America as well, where you didn't also have that kind of Greco-Roman, you were colonial, if you like. you know, colonized with Christianity. That was true in Scotland and in Ireland in particular, places where the Romans hadn't established.

a civilization where there wasn't a sense of law and order, of morality, of rules and so on that governed in the way that the kind of philosophy of Greco-Roman. cultures had, civilizations had. These were people who still very much revered the power of the natural world. The mountaintop was a place of...

danger. It was a non-human place. The water and the sea were seen as hostile, unpredictable, antagonistic even to human needs. And so for them... they weren't really concerned with questions of justice and, you know, the kind of St. Paul and that very traditional form of... preaching, they were really interested in the environment and what went on. So in order for the Celtic missionaries to actually gain any traction...

Rather than waving their finger and, you know, telling people what to do with their morality and so on, they actually had to engage in the here and now. And that meant quelling storms. That meant making friends with animals. And it meant going into the kind of... contested, spiritually contested places in the landscape, the dangerous places, caves, I fear a lot, water is regular, and mountaintops, places which are not...

really hospitable to human life and not useful for humans that's where they went in order to show they came with a message of one creator god who had dominion over the mountaintops over the depths of the sea So it was a kind of, you know, you could say, oh, this is a wonderful bunch of, you know, they were just proto-environmentalists.

It wasn't really quite that. I mean, it's lovely and it's very nature focused, but there was a real missionary purpose to it was my theory. And I think that I haven't heard anybody. you know passionately rejected or so i think it makes certainly makes sense anyway it seems logical so i think it was a missionary um a missionary church which helps explain also what kind of fizzled out a bit yeah

What do you think then made the difference between the Celts and European Christians? Because you point out in Naked Hermit how in Europe there was a lot more like... cutting down of the sacred tree, you know, and they would just like decimate, like kind of knocking over idols kind of situation. Whereas over in the Celtic lands, it was like they embraced it or they kind of baptized it. We're like, this is now dedicated to Saint so-and-so.

you know, or the holy wells. It's not like they dried them up or something, you know, it's they just dedicated it to Mary or, you know, some other saint. What made that difference? Well, as other people have pointed out, Christianity was spread through Europe after its early period of being obviously persecuted with basically imperial backing.

So you could go to, and St Martin of Tours, a great missionary saint who travelled across, was a French saint around the year 400, just at the end of the Roman Empire, could travel around. He had political power as well as spiritual power. And there's a story of him chopping down a sacred pine tree. Now you can do that if you're... You've got the kind of civic forces on your side and military support and the police on your side. You can wade in.

And he had large entourages with him. He had been himself a senior soldier, high-ranking soldier. And, you know, he was friends with, you know, imperial... kind of power brokers. He was a city saint based in Tor. Civilisation means built around the cities. So he had that power. Going in as a missionary to tribal Britain and encountering a sacred tree. You haven't got that back up, so you can't go and impose this new faith by any sort of force. So it had to be negotiated and more sophisticated.

form of evangelism, if you like, of mission. It had to be by the simple lack of the infrastructure to impose it. It had to be... touching hearts and minds, really. And, you know, to some of Christianity's shame, a bit less coercive than it might be otherwise. So I think that's a large part of it. It had to be more sympathetic. which is great i mean it's

I was going to say, I mean, can you imagine what history would have been like had, you know, the entire approach been that way instead of having, you know, such an imperial kind of overbearing? I have no doubt that there were people who, you know, were genuine converts, but there certainly is. the example to the contrary as well. Absolutely.

So I wanted to ask a little bit about some of your personal experiences in all of this, because you spent a lot of time living on the edge like the Celts did, you know, sleeping in remote caves or traveling to isolated islands. praying the Psalms nude in the ice cold ocean. And there's one point in your book, you said, this was in The Naked Hermit, you said, I discovered in the life of a Celtic hermit.

cold and hardship, but also joy and comfort, solitude, but also solace, discomfort, along with the feeling of remarkable connection to the natural world. There is also disgracefully a little bit of swearing. And I was, I love, I love the kind of the light and the dark, the chiaroscuro, if you will, of that contrast. And I'm wondering if you could share a few stories about that, like what that was like for you, even emotionally to experience some of these remote.

Well, I have to say there's one hermit island which haunts my memories even today, St Herbert's Island, and it features on the cover of three of my books, including this recent one, Britain's Pilgrim Places. island in the Lake District where a hermit called St Herbert went and he went to do his devotions there. and to pray and to connect to the natural world. And so I decided I would spend the night on this remote island myself. And I rode out.

one evening. And it's still remote even today. It's just a small island, about an acre or so. And I pulled up my inflatable boat and sort of hid it, although there's no one on the lake at all. And I set up camp. And there is a ruin of a hermit kind of cell, as they're called, a sort of circular building with the stones. You can see where this saint prayed. And I sat there in the evening just...

sitting watching the sun go down and the stars come out and the lake, there'd been a storm and it slowly stilled and the mountains reflected around it. And I had this amazing sense. For the first time, I understood what the spirituality is when you and the natural world are in a common condition. So I was isolated. I was a long way from other people.

I couldn't row back. It was dark. I was isolated. But so was the land I was on. It is also isolated. So the land and me... were sharing that common condition which you don't normally get you can do if you kind of push in there are other ways you know when you share food with animals and so on and and there are other things like that but to actually feel

I know it's cliche, but connected to nature when you actually think me and the island, we're both in it together. We're both on this journey. And also... Back through time, the Hermit, all those years before St Herbert, you know, around the year 700, he'd also felt that very same deep connection to that island. It was a place he loved. drinking the draught of heavenly delight as a contemporary of his wrote. That's what he was doing.

And the most amazing sense of warmth came with me. I had been skinny dipping in that lake saying my night psalms as these Celtic hermits did, which is very timeless in itself because you divest yourself of everything. it wouldn't be any different to what he did. I mean, I had literally nothing at all to mark out.

You know, I was there in the lake with nothing on as he had been. That was it. That was as raw and elemental as you can get. No detail was different. So to do that and then to connect to him. I felt strangely warmed, as they say. So I didn't feel cold the rest of that night. I was just aglow. And I had this amazing sense of peace and connection radiating out. And it was, the word I would use, it was just a real.

and profound sense of love of that common condition of us being in real sympathy with one another. That's beautiful. I sometimes wonder if one of the reasons why nature is so...

such a spiritual experience for humans across the board. You know, it's not just like there's a few weirdos who were like, oh, this is where I go to commune with God, but it seems like something built into human nature. And I kind of wonder if... Part of the reason for that is just that nature is so good at being itself, you know, that it draws us into being ourselves more fully. And I love even just the imagery of being like naked and completely divested.

everything because there is something very raw and real about that, being stripped of everything instead of all of our facades, whether metaphorical or literal. Yeah. And I, I often think there's a lot that I have to learn from, you know, a tree or a squirrel or, you know, even just pondering how there are different.

each creature has a different nature, right? You know, so squirrel is meant to scurry about. And so sometimes our insides are like, okay, there's a lot to get done. And I'm kind of in a hurry and I'm on go mode. But then there's also like the nature of a cloud that just kind of often floats.

And sometimes I need to, you know, calm my insides to do that as well. And so learning, I think, from the pace of nature, from how well they inhabit their own selves is something that we can learn from as well. Oh, completely. I was reading your book, Spiritual Wanderlust, before we came on, and I was very taken there. You're talking about St Augustine and St John of the Cross, talking about the nothingness of emptying yourself, of going, you know, divesting yourself.

those worries and thoughts down to the nothing the nakedness I mean that's the word used and the nada the nothing to find God and it really struck me there is a there is a kind of monastic discipline behind this the Evagrius Ponticus, a name to reckon with, he was one of the very earliest monastic pioneers who would basically set up the kind of monastic disciplines in the desert. And he advised...

people who wanted to be monks and hermits, he even said to them, don't take the Bible with you when you go into the desert because it will distract you. It's like, wow, are you even saying that you shouldn't take the Bible? because it would take you away from god it's like how far are you going here and some of those early desert monks would actually kind of go the full monty and strip off as well and and just live completely

wild and naked in the desert for quite extended periods of time. And it's about as, you know, absolutely raw, minimalist, primal, stripping it back as you can get. And in that... They talked about finding God in these kind of really deep immersions into the natural world. And again, there, the desert. If you're naked in the desert, the desert is a place of, it is naked itself. It's got very little plant life. It's got very little...

protection and so on. It is bare. It's a bare landscape. And if you are there, again, in common condition with the desert, that's pretty intense. And I think if you are going to find God... you know all the way through the the bible the promised land it's the the desert is where you go to find god even even in jesus's mission he climbs up the mountain

in order for the transfiguration when God speaks or goes beyond the city to the Jordan to go in. The wild places of the natural world are so often where God is found. You look to the wilderness and they saw God, as it says in Exodus. Yeah, yeah.

I find that so curious that you can go back to the Desert Fathers or you can go back to John Cashin and some of these others and they explicitly have practices and recommend practices to their monks. I mean, John Cashin, the one who influenced, you know, most of, you know, Christian monasticism, both in the West and the East. And like...

Like, what happened to that? And why have Christians never heard of that? What was that? Well, John Cashin was the man who translated and brought Evagrius Ponticus, who I was just talking about, to Europe. So that's exactly the link. He was, and he would talk about these, what you can do through bodily deprivation and so on in Europe.

Partly, especially living in Britain, it's not as dry as it is in the desert in Egypt. We do get a lot of rain. I live near Wimbledon and the tennis has already been stopped today because the rain is falling. on this summer outdoor sporting event. So, you know, you do have the landscape's very different here. And I think to try and map some of that spirituality.

onto a European landscape is different. So I do think that that kind of nature spirituality will and has to take on different complexions depending where you are. And I'm sure when we talk again, I'll be looking a bit more about some of the traditions I can find in American nature spirituality, of which there is, you know, quite a lot. The early Methodists there, for example.

um something you can't do here very much but they had these large camp meetings here you just get rained on every five minutes but um that worked well in america and that's that And that's really quite transformative of Christianity, in the same way that you had the monasticism, these big outdoor camp meetings of the early Christians coming to America.

enjoying the more favourable climate, really have left us with the idea, arguably, of the festival, the Christian festival, and possibly even the notion that a megachurch is possible, a very large church, a very large gathering. you know, really large gatherings taking place, which were possible because of that. So I think the landscape, the climate, the conditions, they are...

They do find their voice in different cultures and contexts. And I think that that would be true of Christianity over, you know, over the Atlantic, as we say, over when it reached you guys. You know, I think there are different. I don't think it's died out, but I do think it's gotten a bit less acute. I don't know there's many, well, I don't know there's any people living naked in Egypt at the moment anyway, as monks, which is where they kind of began.

But it moves, but it's still there. You know, these wells run deep. Yeah. How would you say that the sense of... climate and landscape and all of that environment, you know, you mentioned it was different in the desert in Egypt, but

I'm curious how the British Isles and especially the remoteness of it during that time period of Celtic Christianity in the early church, how that really influenced the... culture and the zeitgeist of the time, because they were just far flung from, you know, the rest of civilization. And so I'm curious what impact that had upon their culture. The really important point to remember is this was a tribal.

These were tribal people at the time. There were lots of small tribes. So you couldn't really come in and talk to them about... the idea of one overarching authority and sense of morality in the same way you can in an imperial context, when you obviously have the emperor who is, you know, and St Paul often, you know, talks about.

you know being a being a roman citizen as being part of the bigger whole the unifying overarching power that's not there in a tribal culture there weren't any cities either you know it was for some reason There was a sort of small scratching of chickens and so on that was London. And there were a few other, you know, settlements. None of them were really anything like the large cities in Europe with the large infrastructure.

um so it never became very urban here but um very civilized so it was always very tribal and so you had you know everywhere you went if you like felt remote there were no centers of power in that sense it was much more broken up which which then you know led itself to to um a more what i would say is a more sympathetic form of Christianity and a less centralised one which you know appeals obviously nowadays people are quite

sceptical about the established church so there is a sense there that it was small outposts minster churches rather than big cathedrals which were set up like little beacons bringing learning and agricultural techniques and kind of knowledge and a kind of like centre for pastoral care to a region that didn't have any infrastructure at all really.

you know, no proper roads or anything. You have this little body of quite well-educated people who could, you know, teach new techniques in fishing, say, as they did. Yeah, it makes sense why...

There's such a surge in interest in Celtic Christianity and Celtic spirituality, especially as there is also this surge in the efforts of decolonization, you know, and of people trying to figure out, like, what is particularly religious? and Christianity look like without such a colonial overtone. And so to be able to have a place in history and to have some of these ancient texts and traditions to go back to like, oh, look.

we've done this before. It just kind of was decentralized and, you know, it wasn't the dominant form of Christianity. So it's fun to be able to see other expressions that the imperial form is not the only form. That's really important. And I have to say, when I've done this talk, I gave a talk to the Methodist Conference last week. And I've been darting around quite a lot recently.

There, one African lady just stood up and said, thank you so much, because she said, actually, there's still an awful lot of this sense and culture. and I don't hear people talking about this as being a thing you're allowed to do and you look at a lot I studied this when I was lecturing here at Roehampton University in London. And I was lecturing about the use of the landscape and the heritage of faith. And so many of the first...

African churches which survive. It's just heartbreaking. They literally look like they've been picked up from Victorian England. These churches with their Gothic windows are made of stone. And just like... drops like a kind of spaceship onto these landscapes. And it's just, you know, there's so much ancient wisdom that remains. And when I was doing my research, a lot of people said, look at church configurations in Ethiopia particularly, and there there remains a sense of the sacred grove.

which is even to this day a really powerful place of ecological preservation and biodiversity. The idea that around the church you have the sacred grove, which shouldn't be exploited. It's such a wonderful... connection to see that there being again celebrated as being more authentic, more of the soil, more... more human if you like you know the word human means of the soil more truly enriched

and culturally deep and profound which i'm sure i haven't studied it and i'm not going to talk over anybody else from ethiopia who you know has these places But I'm sure there will be precedents dating back to before Christianity. of these sorts of landscape configurations, you know, sense of the sacred in the landscape. So I do think it's important at a post-colonial and a decolonising set of Christianity to look.

at some of these really old stories. There's so much value and treasure there. And so... Yeah, if you can do it in Britain, which is, you know, the chief proponent of colonial Christianity, if you like, if you can do it here and find deeper, richer, more... um more life-giving um to say the least bits of heritage you can do it anywhere at all and i think that's um that's something i would commend so somebody needs to go and write america's holiest places there you go yeah there are i mean

It's an interesting thing because I think a lot of the Indigenous... cultures have preserved that far better than Christianity has you know so I feel like that is also an invitation to that inter-spirituality and learning from each other because a lot of us who do live in colonial places um don't have as many um living traditions of that and sometimes need to look to our indigenous brothers and sisters to see what they have preserved you know kind of in spite of us

yeah and you'll find it's the number of times you it's just not hard to find um common ground literally uh when you're talking about the landscape common ground with other with other faces and so on which Which actually, if you approach it in a sense of humility and learning and dignity and no preconceptions about what's the right way to do Christianity.

um it's it's so rich and you know it's something i certainly i go back to new zealand when i can and it's something i've seen again and again there you know the the maori I've got married family through marriage, and so on, their own Christianity manages to weave some of this, I can only call it magic. It's just wonderful, the sense of the sacred and the powerful from numerous. numerous traditions which still live on and find richer expression interpreted as we always do for the modern age.

That may mean, it does mean in many cases, a Christian sensibility, but that doesn't have to be at all antagonistic. That can be a life-giving, enhancing and enriching thing. Yes, that's one thing that I love about...

Christianity is that it's... kind of sacramental incarnational core that I think a lot of us forget about. And that's, I loved how you said in The Naked Hermit, you said that the Celts saw the entirety of the cosmos as a canvas on which God's divine purpose. was written in every hue and color. And that sense of the cosmos as a canvas, the sense of the numinous everywhere, and you can see it in every leaf, in every beetle, in every cloud.

That is not something that is foreign to Christianity at all. I think it's something that's been forgotten. And I'm curious. how you would recommend the average human being, especially Western human being, how we might recover this sense of the numinous in our daily lives. That's really very largely key to what I found as well, is to find these ancient paths, messages, narratives in Christianity.

And the idea of, you know, we talk about Jesus as saviour, and it's all about saving us from our sins and so on. But actually, the early church was just as interested in Jesus Christ as creator. You know, John's gospel talks about the word was made flesh. It was that spoken, that moment of incarnation was Christ's operation. And so you have the... You have a creator God operating within and through creation. And that is the salvific purpose of God, is always to make new, to create.

And so I don't think you can separate out God as creator and God as saviour in the way we do now. I think if you actually see those two as part of the same... um divine pattern or the same this the same um kind of um divine desire for for humanity to be fulfilled i think those two weave together very well and i i think your

I think that idea of an incarnated God, you know, God was born as a naked little child, you know, that was, as we all come into the world, you know, that alone should make us take more. note of the material if God is there operating in and through that which God has created. And you have all these moments. The most significant moment is the baptism.

You know, God descends into the water and is washed by the water. And the water is, you know, the Jordan in particular, it's so rich with meaning. It's the waters of chaos at the very start. You've got God. going in and regracing creation, you know, reconnecting, reoffering hope, opening up those channels, that sense of...

of grace and an outpouring of love. It's not just that one spark with the seven day spark, but you've got a renewal. And I think really for us, that sense of... creation and recreation um the cycles um is a really really powerful message in christianity which is really underexploited and undercooked, I think. I don't hear that a lot. I hear so much about Christ as saviour, but not a lot about Christ as creator. Yes.

Okay, there's a lot of questions I want to ask. Okay, I want to ask you first, I'm going to change direction just slightly, but also segue from what you were just speaking about. Christ going into the water and also God being born as a naked baby. And I would like to hear a little bit more about sacred bathing because that experience of.

you know, going into the water of being completely naked. I imagine that a lot of Americans have never heard of this as a spiritual practice. And so I would love for you to share a little bit with our listeners. What exactly... It is like, what makes it sacred? Like, is it just some sort of like spiritual, like I'm going to baptize my experience of skinny dipping or is it like completely different? You know, what, what is this experience like?

Yes, I do wonder if this will work better in a European context than an American context. Certainly, my dad's, my mother's from New Zealand, my dad's from Germany, actually. So my German from New York is going, yes, of course, you know, strip off and jump in. Sure. I did look, you know, I have looked at the history as well. And I found that in the early church, there are 50.

written examples of saints stripping off and going into the water to say their prayers. And I think it was around 35 or so of them were in Britain and Ireland. So that's across the whole of Christendom, there were 50. But it was a really focused thing in Britain and Ireland. They were really keen to jump in the water. whenever it's described, almost invariably they're described as naked, they get undressed and so on. They do it on their own at night.

And so it wasn't it wasn't a kind of like a big exhibition of, you know, we're going to go off and show how brave and hardy we are. We're going to dive in. And so it was a kind of it was talked about and it was part of their cult, part of their fame. But it wasn't, you know, it was something that they did almost when they went up to a mountain to pray or when they went to a cave, they go on their own.

this going very deep into the landscape and I was looking at it and just wondering what why on earth would you do that as a devout Christian is go and divest yourself of all of your trappings and go into the sea to pray. And I looked really quite hard at what was said about why they did it. And I was looking at the early Celtic.

texts as well. And I suddenly came up with a match, a really close match with the baptismal liturgies of the day. So they would talk about emerging as pure as from the unspotted womb, you know, pure as being... when they were born so it's a born again metaphor about coming out of the sea and being washed and it's almost as if they were kind of like turning the whole of the natural world into a font

You know, so they actually saw that the operation of the sacrament that we can announce like a couple of drops on a baby's head. And that's your limit. That's the power of the water. But for them, the power of the water to cleanse and to be those waters of chaos out of which creation came. was so powerful that they kind of wrote it large across the whole landscape. So the whole ocean is like a kind of font, if you like, where the sacraments take place, where that sacramental action, God's grace.

um is given out so from you know a bit of kind of like cheeky skinny dipping on the sly to uh in the evenings and so on and you know it's you know cold water bathing's got a bit of a an attachment now to actually seeing it as being a really profound and deep part of Christian mission that talked about redeeming the landscape, bringing that all into Christian tradition, was amazing.

And as I said, you know, as I sail along, it was a tribal Britain where mountains and caves and particularly the sea and water were seen as places of malign spirits or antagonistic spirits to actually go in there.

And often the waters would miraculously calm when the saints went in, or animals would come, sea otters came when St Cuthbert prayed in the sea to warm his feet. So the idea there is that you're somehow... putting right that connection with creation that is manifestly wrong is that you're showing that that you know there is a divine order that's revealed um through christ that

creator god as well as the savior you're looking back and seeing that kind of primal um order of a loving creator god being reintroduced that makes sense i mean it's fun as well and it's it's yeah it's it's visceral and it wakes you up but for them there was a really really important kind of theological, spiritual, missionary message that was wrapped up so many ways they were going and embodying what they believed by having a skinny dip.

Yes, I love that because I think that's something that a lot of us are really hungry for is embodying what we believe, some sense of ritual that we're craving and to have this kind of ritualistic sign act. of putting right my relationship with nature, by actually immersing myself in it. There is certainly a sense of immersion when you go into a forest or something, but there's nothing more fully immersive than being in water and going head under and feeling the water on every...

you know, surface of your skin. I also like just the natural symbolism that it carries of vulnerability and exposure because... I think even just from a contemplative or, you know, more interior point of view, there's something like that is the core stance that we're we're required to have in order to enter into contemplation, right? Is that that sense of receptivity and vulnerability and kind of scary exposure, you know, I mean, it's, it is.

It feels like a risk to bear everything to the divine, whether on a physical level or on a spiritual level. So I think that's a really potent part of the experience, you know, from my own. point of view, I suppose. It is completely. And it's almost like because the hermits, if you go out into nature, you are leaving behind civilization. And you can't do that anymore fully.

than stripping off. And it's important that these hermits were alone because that was part of solitude. You're divesting yourself of... all trappings of human company and civilization. So it's almost a kind of, it was very connected to the hermit discipline. So you're leaving behind the town, you leave behind the people, you leave behind the roads, you leave behind the house.

And, you know, they just have huts made from branches. So you're leaving behind all those comforts. And if you follow that trajectory on, you will end up stripped off and wading into the water as well, because that's where it will take you. And you're never more alone. than you are when you're naked in a sea on a wild beach or something. That is all trappings, all company has been left behind. It embodies.

Again, when I said this spirituality is when you and the landscape have a common condition, there's nothing more common than it's just you. you know, the rocks and you're not different. You're not differentiated in any way. When I wear glasses, obviously, but I even take those off, which I really dislike. I don't mind stripping off because I'm half German, but taking off my glasses to go in.

That's when I'm really exposed and vulnerable and there's just nothing left. It's just me and my creator and God's creation into which I'm immersing. And those moments... Apart from anything else, just the cold. And this may be where the swearing comes in occasionally to begin with. But that cold, it really, really lives with you.

Because worship is, you know, when you do something physical with meaning, a ritual, in other words, you really, really remember it. It goes very, very deep. Yes, yes. I'm thinking... how I had a spiritual director as we were kind of working through just like questions of embodiment and what that means and how to be at home in your body. He suggested, he's like, try praying naked, you know, just like alone in my room. And I was like,

Oh, you know, but just to like attend to like, what is, how does that change the experience and what comes up for you internally? And, you know, just all of that. And I thought that was such an interesting. And I'm thankful for that, like as a place, as an encouragement of a place to start to just be more at home in your own skin, because as you were sharing there, you know, just being completely like stripped of everything.

What a better way to have kinship with the rest of creation, with all the animals, you know, who are all around you. It's like our, you know, pets and birds don't go flying around with pants on. I'm always struck St Francis, the first thing when he decided this was it, one of the stories goes he stripped everything off and dumped his clothes on his dad's doorstep and walked naked out of town to begin the life.

you know, that we know now, Saint Francis, who was, you know, as close to nature as possible. So that's a story told of him and one of the early monastic writers, Saint Jerome. would write, naked I follow the naked Christ. And there was for him a sense as well. And what I love about it is it's really another way of looking at the body as an expression of innocence.

which we don't really, you know, we've forgotten that a bit nowadays, are just a real kind of humility, if you like, and innocence, and to say there isn't any more side. And I think there is an important bit in Christianity. to say that it is in your own room and it is in the hermit solitude as well and so on. I think that is a dimension as well, this kind of solitary holiness, which we, you know, that's not.

That's not a major thing in Christianity, or it's not fully exploited as much as it could be, the idea of going into some very deep solitude. One of the greatest spiritual writers is Julian of Norwich, who lived locked away in a cell. in a small church in Norwich, in England. But there, she couldn't have been more curtailed in what she had around her. And yet, in that solitude, she gained the most... dazzling and piercing insights into the human condition and into God that were possible.

um you know by by retreating by going away and in in this very very interior life so there are riches to be found you know know yourself says over the um oracle at delphi that you know to know yourself is to know god there is that some truth in that you know we are made in god's image so let's not be shy let's not be you know condemnatory of what that actually means yes um in the right context so you know i always urge you know this is this you know think you know think this is a

a disciplined and a devotional thing to do and you can do it in your brain and you can do it in many ways but it can be done in a bodily way too it is that same trajectory Yes, I love the new kind of school of thought of theology of the body. Like, what can we learn about God?

from our very bodies you know if we are made in god's image then there is quite a bit to be learned from from this image that we bear so what what does that mean what there's just so much fodder for reflection there um that i think has been left touch for a lot of Christian history.

It is. I mean, even Paul talks about the parts of the body, talking about the working of the whole and so on. And within that, we should all be microcosms of that church. We do function in different ways. And he uses that image.

um and it's also interesting the way that the um you know the early church they were quite rude about greek and roman culture when they could be um but they want the one image that appears repeatedly positively in in the letters is the image of the athlete um stripped and you know we know that athletes competed with nothing on and the idea of the athlete um

being stripped and ready for the race. You know, that was a physical thing. That's a bodily thing, being kind of keyed up and being prepared and putting aside all the encumbrances that will stop you running that race. So there are bits, you know, the more you look, the more you can see, there is this narrative that's kind of, I would say, ripe for rediscovery and reinvention in the new age.

I've certainly enjoyed my journey anyway into the wilds. Yes, absolutely. Nick, you're also going to be joining us for the Celtic Spirituality School fairly soon. And I'm curious for anybody who... you know, is unfamiliar with that, what are you going to be sharing with us? What can we look forward to when you come to join us? Well, there, Kelly, it's very much for me is I would love to talk to people and tell some amazing stories about how you can do this yourself. What were these rituals?

There's several of them that form patterns that we can pick up and anybody literally very simply can do spiritual disciplines and practices. very very deeply seated in Christian tradition you know taking Jesus Christ as creator and savior as a model for some of them to go very deep and to actually just see ways in which some of this Celtic spirituality really finds very rich expression now, possibly with some things that people already do, feeding animals.

But when you're eating yourself as well, when you're having that common purpose and so on, there are ways to do it that we might even do now. One of the first things you do with your child is go and feed bread or whatever it is to the ducks in the park. and so on, some very simple things. But if you do it in a slightly ritualized way, where it has a meaning or significance, it can become a really...

lovely part of your faith. So I'll be exploring some adventures there that people can undertake. All of them very simple. you know all of them really doable and um i'll show how it how it has been done and can be done again in a christian tradition

Beautiful. Well, I'm really looking forward to that. For anybody who's interested, you can check us out at CelticSchool.org. And we have a whole series of wonderful speakers, including Nick Mayhew-Smith here, who we've been speaking with today, and other wonderful speakers. folks, Ilya Delio and John Philip Newell and various others. So please check us out. Nick, if people want to learn more about you or your books, where should they go?

I think probably the book I've written that sold the best and sells a lot is this one, Britain's Pilgrim Places, which I did with the British Pilgrimage Trust. And they've devised this wonderful network of... walks and pilgrimage places across Britain. Somebody needs to get on and do it for America if they're not doing it already, because it's been such a fantastic addition, not just to Christians, but to really the whole of...

You know, people across the board have found the old ways still have meaning and paths. So for me, this is a really big thing. Get people up and out, especially coming out of the pandemic. especially when we have all manner of anxieties and mental health problems and so on, getting up, going out in an intentional way to find healing and solace and connection to the land, to the history, to the heritage.

is something I'm, you can probably tell, I'm very passionate about. So yeah, this is the big book I did with the British Wilkenbridge Trust. They've got their logo down there, but you can find them online very easily. That's probably the... Certainly there's a guidebook to several hundred places around Britain.

I can imagine that being very popular, especially with our Celtic school, as there are many people who are either planning on going or want to go over and do Celtic pilgrimages and things like that. specific places you know that already have been researched and in one one location that they can buy a little a book in a package i think that will be very helpful for many people so thank you for sharing that

And thank you so much for joining us today. This was a delightful conversation. I really enjoyed it. Thank you, Kelly. My pleasure too. Absolutely. And thank you everyone for listening in today. See you next time.