Spiritual Archive
The Spiritual Archive brings together four strands of spiritual enquiry: personal experience, Christian discernment, and an exploration of the sacred and ritual landscape of East Carmarthenshire. Running through them is a concern with the relationship between faith, spirit, place, nature and the unseen, and with discerning what should be preserved, questioned or challenged.
My Journal (or Spiritual Blog) is a personal record of spiritual experiences, reflections and events accumulated over many years. It documents a spiritual journey as it unfolded and preserves experiences and thoughts that might otherwise have been lost.
Gate Keeper reflects my understanding of the Christian responsibility of spiritual and theological discernment. A gate keeper has a responsibility to guard the Church against false doctrine and false spirits. These writings therefore examine and critique the work of Christian writers and theologians, testing ideas and teachings rather than accepting them simply because they are presented as Christian. It is an archive concerned with discernment: what should be welcomed through the gate, and what should remain outside.
High Places: The Ritual Landscape of East Carmarthenshire explores the mountains, stones, ancient sites, paths, springs and other places that form part of the region's sacred and ritual geography. It considers how earlier peoples may have understood and experienced these landscapes and how traces of those relationships survive in place-names, traditions, archaeology and folklore.
Two Worlds: The Pagan Past of East Carmarthenshire explores the spiritual world that preceded Christianity and the encounter between older traditions and the Christian faith. Rather than imagining a simple replacement of one world by another, it considers survival, adaptation, assimilation and tension — the ways in which older understandings of sacred place, nature and the unseen continued within a Christian landscape.
Together, the four collections explore experience and discernment, continuity and conflict, faith and landscape. They range from the intensely personal to the historical and theological, but share a concern with how human beings understand their relationship with the spiritual world and how we distinguish between traditions, experiences and teachings that give life and those that require questioning.
