Fighting and drinking their way across Europe. Or not.

When I was preparing for my 2010 pilgrimage from Iona to Lindisfarne, most of my reading centred around Celtic Christianity. If you're interested in this subject then get yourself a copy of Donald Meek's 'The Quest for Celtic Christianity'. Read it, read it again, and then keep it handy to hit anyone with when they invite you to their Celtic Christian Messy Matins or whatever.

This year my reading has been much more focused on the Celts in general. Heavens to Betsy it's a minefield. Up until January I'd believed what's apparently called the 'standard model' of the history of the Celts. This was a rather marvellous story of a people from Central Europe who over the course of many centuries fought and drank their way across Europe until they reached the continent's westernmost shore and there was nowhere else for them to go. It stirs images of this great Warrior People staring out across the Atlantic bereft; rather like the story of Alexander the Great weeping because there were no more worlds to conquer. There's something darkly romantic about this 'standard model'.

Unfortunately the 'standard model' is not very popular anymore, with one author writing that 'the persistence of the standard model is puzzling...' ('The Celts: Search for a Civilization', by Alice Roberts). Some go further still and reject the very idea of a Celtic people. In his book 'The Atlantic Celts', Simon James writes that 'the 'canonical' story of the island Celts is much more an invention than a discovery'. Broadly speaking the new narrative is that in this country the idea of a Celtic people was an eighteenth-century reaction to the expanding power of England and the corresponding draining of power from Scotland, Ireland and Wales. The story of the Celts was a defiant story of a people who had lived on these islands much longer than the English interlopers, who were just the Johnny-come-lately offspring of French invaders. Or something like that.

I've also read that the Celts originated in Portugal and then moved up and down the Atlantic seaboard all the way to the Hebrides and beyond, largely as a result of trade. Oh, and then there are other historians who are claiming that new DNA evidence suggests that the 'standard model' might have had something to it after all.

Exactly.

What I've found most thought-provoking about all this is the idea that sometimes the stories we tell of our histories are more about the needs of the present moment, than about the verifiable truths of the past. 

Iona, 2010

I wrote in an earlier post that part of my sense of 'exile' is born of a sense that I have lost hold of my own 'history'. Some of that history has been lost, some of it has been wilfully distorted, some of it I think I chose to let go of. Across these weeks ahead I pray I rediscover and reclaim my history as a way of coming 'home' to myself.

St Columba's history is contested too. Some people claim that he was sent into exile and excommunicated for a while as a punishment for a battle he instigated, others claim that he left voluntarily as a missionary. Some believe that he went to Scotland to convert the Picts, some that he went to Scotland as a kind of ambassador to the Picts. Although I largely accept the story of Columba's fall and exile because I think the weight of the evidence supports it, I realize that I am also drawn to it because it resonates with a story I need to hear, the story of my faith; the story of sin and redemption, of failure and new beginnings, the story of a light that shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

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When the walking proper starts tomorrow, I'll head up each blog with a summary of how far I've walked, how long for, the weather etc, just as I did fifteen years ago. However, as part of my fostering a sense of thanksgiving on this pilgrimage I'm going to conclude each blog with something that I'm particularly thankful for that day. So to begin:

Thanksgiving: for James and Barnaby's mum for agreeing to look after them over these four weeks so that I could go for a walk. Thanks too to her parents and anyone else who's helping out with those amazing boys of mine.