Posted on 06/14/2014 1:52:51 PM PDT by NYer
Archaeologists says they have discovered an "incredibly important" medieval convent, cemetery and Tudor mansion in Ceredigion.
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| Archaeologists working on the Llanllyr nunnery excavation [Credit: BBC] |
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| The mansion depicted on a drawing by Thomas Dinely in 1684 [Credit: BBC] |
Good job! I’m 50% Welsh, and had no clue. My Grandfather would have though.
This custom may be related to Biblical piety. In the Holy Land you can find a shrine over the spring that issued from the staff of Moses and the Well of Beersheba, and, if I remember correctly, Moses’ well near Mount Nebo. The Jordan was also associated with miracles, such as the healing of Naaman the Syrian, who had leprosy.
Reformation-supporting governments destroyed wells and springs associated with Catholic saints, including the most famous one in Britain, the Holy Spring of Our Lady of Walsingham.
Modern historians are increasingly questioning the Reformation assumption that these were originally pagan wells. There's a book from around 20 years ago called "The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles" which debunks the idea that these were taken over from the Druids and so forth.
Oddly enough, just as modern historians and archaeologists are to some extent disproving that these wells were sites of Druid rituals, modern-day pagans are claiming them. But they are so bogus: they have no historic connection with pre-Christian paganism, and remarkably little interest in actual history as opposed to fabricated-from-whole-cloth fantasy.
I'm no expert, but that's as much as I (think I) know.
So yeah, they may have had miraculous wells or healing springs associated with the convent.
The left is doing the same today in America.
Okay. Thank you for the education, my FRiend.
Excellent. My wife will be interested.
Of course not. Neither was Bob Marley and his group.
Medieval meditation does not have a great deal in common with Zen. Even contemplation, which at first glance is closer, does not. Are you familiar with the Ladder of Monks?
The Welsh have cooked up a rare bit of knowledge here.
For later.
Of course Scala Claustralium has nothing in common with Zen, after all its just a very separate path, which cannot ever have any similaritoes to anything, its so unique and so historically unprecedented.
I hang out at Pontrhydfendigaid all the time ...
Distinction would be more helpful than hyperbole.
Lectio, oratio, meditatio, contemplatio. Prayer can be used as a translation of either the second species, or of the genus. The species have been articulated and delineated more clearly over time, but in the big picture Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross made the last major contributions, and they were largely summing up what had beem already articulated over the previous five centuries, which in turn was a reworking of the patristic era.
To treat a medieval Welsh monastery as somehow a foreign body to the continuity of western monasticism with a foreign approach to prayer is inept in terms of western religious life. To the extent that contemporary practices in some communities are foreign to the tradition, it is because in certain currents there has been a turn away from the entire tradition, and in other currents (Everard Mercurian deserves a great deal of credit here) that have focussed upon some aspects of the tradition and rejected others. Very often the communities that reject everything had rejected or lost a portion of the tradition generations earlier, and it seems are attempting to fill a real gap by creating a bigger gap.
LOL! I was thinking the same thing! What a name.
All human minds work basically the same. A fact much forgotten.
They largely have the same starting point, and they largely have the same potential (particularly in the spiritual realm), but what is done (or not done) to develop the potential has a huge impact on what they are capable of at a given instant. One point of the Ladder of Monks, and many other works, is that the method of development matters.
This is why a meaningful distinction may be made between various activities involving the will and/or intellect in the spiritual life.
A system that integrates the Gifts of the Spirit will be different from one that does not—which is better would depend on whether or not the Gifts of the Spirit are grounded in reality.
Yes, some of Thomas Cromwells work, no doubt.
There were a lot of different factors at work in this -
1. The "Enlightenment" distaste for revealed religion of any sort, thus any miracle must be pagan, not our nice rational Church of England.
2. The protestant distaste for Catholicism's local, physical associations and a desire to stamp out devotions to the saints as "a fond thing, vainly invented" led to a disavowal of the site of any miracle. This is why Walsingham, for example, was razed to the ground and the ancient statue of Our Lady formally burned in London.
3. The "cool" factor - pagans are SO much cooler than plain old ordinary Christians!
4. It sells, tourists eat it up. See No. 3.
5. Historical ignorance. Surprisingly prevalent.
Bigg red, the above, #37, may interest you.
He single-handedly led the Druidic Revival and fabricated a bunch of nonsense about supposed pagan rituals.
The former "Arch-Druid of Canterbury" - Rowan Williams (no relation to Ed so far as I know) - attended one of his organization's Druidic Festivals and was invested in some sort of office.
Utter silliness bearing very little relation to reality. But the tourists (and the Welsh nationalists) just eat this stuff up.
Thanks for pinging me to her comments.
Yes, it certainly makes sense.
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