A Meditation on The Book of Kells
Last week I had the pleasure of poring over one of the great books of western civilization — The Book of Kells. It is enshrined in an 18th-century building at Trinity College in Dublin, and each year it draws upwards of a half-million visitors. That’s not bad, just to see a book that isn’t even in electronic form.
The Book of Kells more precisely is a book of the Gospels, and Irish monks crafted it around 800, most likely at the monastery of Iona, off the coast of Scotland. It is a copy of Saint Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, but all similarity to the work of that 4th-century Roman monk ends there. Entwined around the Latin verses are designs that had pleased the Celtic eye for centuries; but in the service of the Gospel they seem to take on a special exhuberance. Monsters and endless knots draw the eye, and one wonders what might be the reason for this. Whole pages of these designs, called carpet pages, dazzle us moderns, just as they did in the 9th century. To say that these pages are extraordinary is understatement; and for centuries many believed that only angels could have made them. But in fact only scribes steeped in the Celtic spiritual tradition could have done this.
The Irish monks made this Gospel Book for use in the liturgy, as well as for the glory of God. But they made an additional statement that should not be lost on us. Were you to look at the 4th- and 5th-century Bibles commissioned by the Roman emperors, you cannot help but notice the stately columns of text. If you give free rein to your mind, you will see on those pages the collonades of classical Roman and Greek buildings. And that was the point of the design. Christianity was not antithetical to classical culture. Rather, it married and merged with this culture. Christianity and Rome were not enemies; they were in fact entirely compatible.
When you examine The Book of Kells, you notice the absence of that classical layout. There are no elegant columns, because text and art weave together imaginatively, in a radically different way. Therein is one point we can draw from The Book of Kells. It vividly illustrates how the Celtic tradition had appropriated the Christian tradition, and each was at the service of the other. Christianity may have an otherwordly message, but it has no hesitation in blending with an exhuberant earthly culture. And to this union the Celts brought their own brand of enthusiasm. In this case the whole was far greater than the sum of its parts.
There is something awe-inspiring about gazing at a book that is 1200 years old. For one thing, its chances of survival were far slimmer than a building, and so it’s almost miraculous that we have The Book of Kells in front of us today. But beyond that, what could have gone through the minds of the scribes who made it? No doubt there were days when they questioned the point of this endless project. But there had to be days when they knew the spirit of God was working through their hands.
What the scribes did know was that this work would dazzle their brothers. But did they even consider that their work would inspire visitors from America, 1200 years later? I suspect not. They did what they did for their brothers and sisters, likely unaware that they would touch so many others, for so many centuries.
Perhaps that is one way to grasp the meaning of “losing oneself” for the sake of others. It’s almost too much to think that we can make some difference in this life, much less impact people a thousand years from now. But we slog on, sometimes absent-mindedly; and we do so for the sake of the few lives we think we can touch. In such self-emptying we are oblivious to the greater good we do, and that’s just as well. Today is the day the Lord gives us, and it’s tough enough to deal with that.
To me the tiny knots in The Book of Kells, symbols of eternity, suggest an important truth: it’s the little things that count most. I don’t know about you, but those little things are about all I can handle from one day to the next. I leave it to God to make good use of those little things, and it is God who weaves them together into the great carpet pages of our life. If the Lord does great things for us, that’s probably how God does it!
A Postscript to Dublin: The Hotel from Hell
Recenty I wrote about the construction besieging my floor in the monastery. With that in mind, a three-day trip to Dublin should have been a short but sweet solace. And could there be a more enticing refuge for a weary citizen of the North Star State than The North Star Hotel?
On paper it sounded perfect — an historic hotel with a lovely name in a charming town. It turned out to be too good to be true, and in fact it was one of those surprises that seasoned travellers dread. This place was a member of that elite chain, the Hotels from Hell, whose motto is “We’re not happy until you’re not happy.”
The steep stairs that led to the registration desk did not surprise me. That’s fair enough in a listed building. Even the additional flights to my room were something I could live with — and they could even serve as good exercise. But the drop-cloth that trailed down the hall to my room was ominous. And if I was surprised to see the painter working on my door, he seemed absolutely astonished to see me. Incredulous, but gracious, he stood back to let me squeeze through the door; and once I was safely inside, he resumed his patient work.
Only as I began to unpack did the full picture begin to unfold. In the room next door a trio of two hammers and a power saw started up; and I’m not sure what purpose the wall served other than to keep the dust on their side. It turns out that they were gutting the place. Then the entire room began to vibrate, and the rumble of what seemed to be an earthquake provided the base for the trio next door. I opened the curtains, and lo and behold, fifteen feet away, was an elevated track, carrying trains every minute or two. I closed the curtains, mainly because I didn’t really recognize any of the faces of the passengers going by.
That evening I and my colleague Jim visited five other hotels, to no avail. All knew our hotel by reputation; all were sympathetic; and all were full-up. The best we could do was a hotel ten miles out of the city — available the next day.
Morning came, and by 8:00 am each piece of the cacaphony was in place, at full force. But we were packed and eager to go, and we gratefully headed off to our day’s work. Once done, we hailed a taxi to pick up our bags and move on, and it was then that the full extent of our situation dawned on us. In an entirely neutral tone we gave him the name of our hotel. “Oh, Fawlty Towers,” was the driver’s reply. That’s when we realized that everyone in Dublin, except us, already knew about this place.
I’m not sure that The North Star deserves comparison to Monty Python’s grand hotel. For one thing, I suspect the owner was nowhere near as funny as John Cleese. But I will give The North Star some credit. Had it not been for them, we never would have roared off into the countryside, only to discover a beautiful retreat that atoned for everything.