The Rev. Kurt Neilson, answers questions about his book, Urban Iona, Celtic Hospitality in the City. The book was released on February 1 by Morehouse Publishing.

How do you think this book speaks to seekers today?

Ours is an age in which pilgrimage makes sense. There is much noise and irresolvable conflict in most religious communities about questions of truth, doctrine, and interpretation. Spiritual seekers do not want to find themselves in the midst of these partisan arguments, hoping to choose the side that is “right”. They want God, they want Christ, they want healing and wholeness and integrity and hope. This is a universal hunger and longing in the human soul. It leads us all, religious or not, onto pilgrimage, onto a journey to the sacred places of our past and our people and to our own sacred story of family and personal history. This book is the account of my own ongoing, unfinished journey, making connections with the spiritual roots of my ancestors as well as their broken family story which is my own. I think that such a story, told well and honestly, connects with the longing and brokenness and search for healing and integrity which belongs to us all.

Why Ireland and the Celtic Church ? What does the ancient Celtic Christian experience have to say to the contemporary world?

Most established manifestations of religious faith end up looking and feeling like the surrounding culture, mirroring its loves and hates, its strengths as well as its blindness and prejudices. That is abundantly clear today. Our own nation hosts highly visible and vocal interpretations of the Christian narrative which mirror the loves and hates, fears and prejudices of Americans and their culture over the more life-giving and challenging aspects of the message of Jesus. This message includes the imperative to peace-making and justice, empathic care for the poor, and the radical challenge of God to us all. This co-option of Gospel to culture is an old, old story, constantly repeated throughout history, and has strong parallels in all the great religious traditions of the world. By re-capturing and re-interpreting the Celtic Christian experience, a “lost story” put aside by the “winners” in the church arguments of that day, we re-claim a resource to call into question our religious and cultural assumptions and to allow the radical nature of the Gospel to break into our reality with freshness and power.

You tell some tales that stretch the credulity of more skeptical readers. What do you say to those who will read tales of visions and find it hard, to say the least, to suspend their disbelief?

I have a deep faith in the power of story to move us, engage us, allow us to have fun with images and symbols, and to lead all of us, no matter how skeptical, to a new and wondrous place where we can see ourselves and our world and even God with new eyes. The point is not to get lost in questions like “Did these things happen just like this or did they not, ‘objectively’ speaking?” Instead, I hope that readers will accept the stories as stories and, as one wise child said, believe at least that “A true story may not be true on the outside, but it is true on the inside.”

What do you think has been the greatest “success” of the attempted application of Celtic Christian principles in your congregation and neighborhood?

We have spoken aloud an audacious dream and vision, and it has fired us in ever more surprising ways. It has attracted to us gifted fellow-pilgrims who have seen our community as a safe place in which to dream and to risk. We have begun a process of constantly stretching our own sense of congregational boundaries, leaving us open to new people and new questions. And this process has won us new friends beyond our borders, among the neighbors and beyond who have recognized the dreamer and the pilgrim within themselves and have come to trust us. This latter has been especially important and wondrous, as here in the Northwest as well as elsewhere Christians have earned the reputation of being a religious arm of the most conservative elements in American culture and politics. We’re not trusted outside of our own borders, and all too often we do not even trust one another as we squabble about the same predictable issues. But we can trust the pilgrim and the dreamer and those who make themselves vulnerable by imagining and working towards a more just, more trusting, more compassionate world.