wfn.org | ACNS3418 A Complete Celtic Worship Resource

["Anglican Communion News Service" <acnslist@anglicancommunion.org>]

ACNS 3418     |     WALES     |     23 APRIL 2003 

A Complete Celtic Worship Resource

[University of Wales, Lampeter] A new book, A Celtic Primer, has just been
launched by Brendan O'Malley, Dean of Chapel at the University of Wales,
Lampeter. The traditional meaning of a Primer is that it taught people their
prayers and taught children how to read. The origin of the Primer as a manual
of devotion lies in the Prayer of the Hours chanted in early medieval
monasteries.

This Celtic Primer is intended to be used as a companion to the Bible,
encouraging people to use the Bible itself as the ideal Book of Prayer.
Prayers within it have been drawn from Welsh, Irish, Scottish, and Breton
texts. It is several books in one - a daily prayer book, a reader in Celtic
spirituality and poetry and it contains the complete Psalter, which was the
prayer book of the Celtic saints. It also contains a Celtic Eucharist with
three Eucharistic prayers, which would have been the ones used in the Celtic
world.

"This collected text is very much a working liturgy. In common with the Stowe
Missal, little in it is unique; I have employed these prayers because of
their beauty and form and because they are the spiritual font from which the
Church of the Celts drew their inspiration," comments Brendan O'Malley.

A Celtic Primer is published by Canterbury Press (ISBN 1-85311-490-1) at
#14.99. It has also been published in the USA by Continuum where there is
significant interest in Celtic Christianity. The book ties in with the part
of the MA in Celtic Spirituality which Brendan O'Malley will be teaching next
year at the University of Wales, Lampeter: Liturgy, Prayer and Worship in the
Celtic tradition and its application to today's world.

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respectively.
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