Tag: spirituality

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Exploring Celtic Spirituality: A Guide for the Holiday Season

Having some time today to explore a bit, anticipating the coming of the holiday season, full of special days, rituals, holidays of all cultures and my own time to slow, pray, meditate and review my life of this year.

As I’ve been discovering more and more about my connections to spiritual traditions of Scotland and France, I discovered the Celtic Spirituality shared in this writing by Gary @ Holy Heretics

https://holyheretics.substack.com/p/ep-82-celtic-spirituality-wjohn-philip?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1603235&post_id=151990139&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1m5dk&triedRedirect=true

This is a new writer, blogger and podcaster that I’ve discovered and find many areas of these posts that are very resonate for me. I’m hoping that you will take time in this season of beauty, Light, and (hopefully) reflection as we approach the Winter Solstice and all of the ceremonies, rituals of Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hannukah, Solstice, Kwaaza, and more as we approach a new year. May you be blessed.

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Journey to Ancestral Lands: My Spiritual Connection

As earlier posts perhaps introduced you to aspects of my spiritual journey, I’ve also shared about Gary Alan Taylor @Holy Heretics and the writings, interviews and thoughts posted there. Great stuff!

This recent post really called to me: https://holyheretics.substack.com/p/the-secret-of-smithfield The Secret of Smithfield – the church of St. Bartholomew in London. Hidden away a bit but beautiful and drawing me in. We’re planning a trip to England this year, spending a short time in London before heading north to York and Lincoln, the Cotswalds and then home. I’m putting this one on my list as a place to visit away from the busy city.

Credit to Jiří Komůrka from his posting of this picture about 2024, found on Google when I went to look at images of St. Bart’s. Thank you, Jiri!

Thank you to Gary who shared about “morphic resonance” and I wrote him a note to share places that I’ve felt this way – Chartres Cathedral, the Basilica of St. Servatius, the prairies of South Dakota, standing on the lands, farms, cemeteries of my Ancestors, the Temple of Dendara in Egypt ….. and more. Places where peace came strongly, emotions welled, and even occasions (at St. Servatius and Chartres) where “synchronistic” choir or evenson happened in what seemed like events just for us. The prairies of South Dakota help to remove my “horizon deficit disorder” from living in tree-enveloped Michigan, so that on the prairies at night, I see the Milky Way without interference or horizon to horizon of the land, the coming of a huge thunderstorm or the gentle lilt of a meadowlark.

You’ve probably felt this too? Places that were so special that you keep wanting to go back or live there or just dwell, even for a moment, to calm your mind and heart into a reality beyond this one (is this reality or just something temporarily created …. I’m working on that one). Let me know in your comments – always good to connect with fellow travelers in this way.

The connection to places, lands that my ancestors lived on, farmed, died on was fed greatly by our trip to Nova Scotia in the fall of 2023. I haven’t yet made time to write about it as I’m still deeply moving through the emotions of being there, finding their former lands, learning about the horror of the Expulsion of them by the English – forcibly sending them away from their beloved Nouveau France or Acadia – to places that weren’t Catholic, didn’t speak French and did not welcome them. A people in exile, trauma and forced separation …. it is painful in ways I didn’t expect. I’ll write about it someday but for how, standing on their lands, the ancient cemeteries, the Dauphin River (now the Annapolis River) – I felt things in my body, my emotions, that I’d never felt before. More later …

But in the meantime, St. Bart’s calls … and I must go. Watch for my future post about the journey there, ok? And let me know the places that call you – ancestrally, spiritually, specially!

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A new year, new opportunities and au revoir!

2018 …. The new year began with so many hopes, joys, heartbreak and opportunities.    Change is inevitable, right?  Yes, and always happening but some changes are just a lot to take and others are just noted without much emotion, and then there are the ones that you can recognize as “watershed moments” – those times when you have an earthquake hitting you and you know that you will never be the same again.

That’s the way December morphed into January – a new year, new opportunities and au revoir.  A new year – filled with excitement about some new roles for me personally, Lineage Journeys as a company, and new opportunities – for both!

It’s not without some trepidation that I am wildly excited to be presenting at RootsTech 2018 AND the National Genealogical Society’s 2018 Conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan …. AND (very new information!) at the 2018 Northwest Genealogy Conference in Seattle, Washington.  AND …. ::::::::drum role:::::::::: one of my presentations (You CAN Take It With You:  Mobile Genealogy Tools) will be taped!!!!   OMG!!  Yes, I’m excited.  Lots of new opportunities and a remodeled website, with subscriptions coming in (thank you to everyone who is interested!).

And then an “au revoir” – on Christmas morning, my cousin and godfather, Harold “Hal” Nimer, Jr.  died suddenly as he was recovering from some back problems.  He was recovering but then was suddenly gone.  The genealogist-of-me could add another date to the family tree – Death Date.  Sigh …. he was a sweet, caring, loving husband, father, brother, grandfather, cousin and, in the family’s Lutheran tradition, he was my Godfather.  Memories rushed through my head of times spent mostly with his younger siblings as he was much older than me but his kind smile and loving ways, our recent breakfast together with his wife Judith and our cousin Lynda will now be the last memory of his long, successful life.  Au revoir – until we meet again.  He was buried on my birthday, December 29th.  That’s a week I won’t forget.  As a genealogist, it was a partly happy day as I got to spend time with Hal’s family, and all of Hal’s siblings (my cousins) were there and it was great to see them and talk about our happy memories as a family.  Seeing Hal’s kids and their kids, I enjoyed meeting them as I only heard about them from the proud sharing of Hal and Judy.  It was really good in that way and fostered lots of family history discussions and promises that we would all stay in touch.  And we will – a gathering is planned for July this year.

And another “au revoir” – a spiritual teacher, adopted Sister (“Hunka Sister” in the Lakota tradition), Mary Elizabeth Thunder died on December 28th and her funeral wake, ceremony and burial were over four days in January in Texas.  THAT was the “watershed moment”.   In so many ways,  it was a joyful reunion with friends from decades ago and the telling of funny, heart-felt, loving stories of challenges, fears, ceremonies, journeys and discoveries.  We cried, sang, mourned, hugged each other and held the family in our prayers and hearts, and did what we all knew we had to do – create a beautiful, meaningful, carefully thought-out, ceremony releasing her to the ancestors.  In the course of those days and since, the “watershed” was my recognition that there were things in my life that HAD to go, that were not providing growth, joy, love, or blessing but were contentious, nerve-wracking, negative and gut-wrenching.  I could hear Thunder’s voice – “Make it beautiful.  Live in beauty”.  And so I made the choices that I needed to make and I’m continuing to make.

Lineage Journeys are those we make with our genetic family and our adopted or chosen family.  We love them all and they enrich our lives.

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Watershed Moments

A “watershed moment” is a point in time in which you feel that something changed, that you changed, that life changed.

I had a moment/day like that recently. Actually it is more of a series of things that have happened. As a genealogist, there are moments in time that I recognize that I’m noting a date and it was a big deal for my ancestors. Someone died, someone was born, two people were married. There are so many of those moments as a genealogist that I honestly can say that they are dates in a computer sometimes to me … until my own “moment”.

You see … someone died. Actually there have been a series of deaths in the recent past (since my brother died in July 2013 actually) and this most recent death of a beloved “sister” has caused a shift. I put “sister” in quotation marks because, while she wasn’t a genetic sister, she was a sister of my heart … a teacher, friend, beloved leader and spiritual Elder. To me and many. And it was at her funeral and the four days of the wake and then burial ceremony, that I’ve been thinking about A LOT! Without going into all of that here, it DID make me think, as a genealogist of those “watershed moments” of my ancestors.

Perhaps it was in the mid-1860s when my Villeneuve (Amiot dit Villeneuve) ancestral family came from Maskinonge, Quebec to Marquette, Michigan area. My Elliot ancestors came from the same area to Ishpeming, Michigan in the 1880s. Then they all eventually ended up in the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan, in Houghton County – around Hancock and Boston Station and the mining communities. They met up there supposedly because they attended the same church. A Villeneuve girl married an Elliot boy, and an Elliot girl married a Villeneuve boy. In June, 1889 when Edward Elliot married Marie Louise Villeneuve in Ishpeming, was that a “watershed moment” for them? Did they recognize the importance of that day and the history that they would create together (they ended up having 18 kids!!!) that resulted in my grandmother? Did the day that great-grandfather Edward died in 1919, crushed by a shifting pile of coal that he was assigned to move, created that incredible “watershed moment” for great-grandmother Louise? She had a pile of children and now no husband. In the 1920 Census, she has eight children living with her. The two oldest sons are working so the family at least had an income but many of the children were very young. My grandmother, Mary Elsie Elliot had married Warner “Waino” Sutinen and was living nearby. Grandpa Warner was also a miner – I wonder if he was present when Edward was crushed … who told Great-Grandma Louise that he was severely injured (he later died of his injuries according to the newspaper account and his death certificate). Certainly, that would have been a “watershed moment” for both families.

Maybe it’s a function of the death of others that gives us “watershed moments” … it has been for me, early in this new year. Does everyone have moments like this?