Praise of the Celtic

This is a tribute to my favorite song, and to the places, in my dreams, where its melody takes me.

Praise of the Celtic

This early spring morning in my beautiful Kentucky I am swinging on my back porch while keeping the cadence of a song deep within my heart. Another time is calling. I feel the lure of ancestral ties, those woven in haunting melodies. I seem to feel the cool touch of morning mountain air as it sweeps down the peaks and through the valleys of the eastern side of my state and channels across this wide land straight into my heart. I think in my spirit, I have been transported to another place in another time...

The wind blew around the corner of the cabin bringing a fresh aroma of pine to the small porch where she sits, a little woman with fatigue and restlessness both imprinted on the sharp features of her pre-aged, yet beautiful face. Two young children are at play in the dust puddle near the stone step, around which the house was built in times beyond her memory.

The sun, that was slow to arrive hung over the tall chestnut oaks that were skillfully clinging by their roots just above the outcropping of sheer rock clinging to the face of her mountainside. A morning breeze had finally cleared the mist from the cut-through path that followed the gyrating curves of a steeply falling rushing creek of roiling water.

If her husband were quick with the hook and line, there would be pan-fried trout for the last meal this day. This was a good thing to look forward to; and the thought of that treat started her foot to tapping a slow beat in time with the ancient melody running through her memory. The music and words had been passed down by those who sat on this porch long before her days on this remote mountain top.

The melody began across the sea in a far-away emerald country, a land of pleasant people of Celtic lineage, musical people. Their lives were expressed in the music that they sang. Red blood baths of famine and war washed across their home places in the bad days. So to the strings of the fiddles and mandolins and the reeds of the flute, the music crossed a mighty ocean carried in the hearts of seeking people.

And in the way that music has, it blew across the new land riding upon the lips and hidden in the soul of the brave frontiersmen, coming to rest in the steeps and valleys of the Appalachia, in the high land of Kentucky and there it took its stand. Added then was the poignant tones of the dulcimer and the music settled and took on a renewed life. It soothed and eased the ones for whom faith, freedom and new beginning were held so dear.

Still on the porch she rocks, the gentle woman, picks up a mandolin of old, and she is gone away from Kentucky for a while, to the places only verse and song can take her. A slow swaying is propelled by an arm as her chest is rising and falling with the words that echo thought the timber stand, over the sweeping vista of treetops, mingling with the hard drumming of water falling over rocks that seem to be the very bones of the earth.

Listen, listen to her words hear the freedom in her voice as she praises in deep musical antiquity her Lord and God…

This song is thought to be one of the earliest Celtic hymns recorded with the written word. Could you hear the melody, did you feel the emotion of the faithful true ever-new words? A mood for worship is set, with praises for the King we are longing to see. Praying words, "Only You, Lord be my focus always, You, who are my best thought, my inheritance, and my treasure."

I love and celebrate the new praise songs that move me emotionally, while I value the old ones for they take me back through the centuries to an awareness of those who carried a love for the Savior deep in their hearts. I can relate to the little woman, many women, who serenaded my Lord on their porches long ago and those that do today. Somewhere, someone is doing so in this very moment; listen...