Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul Quotes

“The extent to which we faithfully address this issue will be the extent to which we either serve the world's well-being, by helping reawaken it to a sense of the sacred in all things, or continue to be irrelevant to the word's well-being, by inferring that sacredness is somehow the property only of certain people and certain places rather than the birthright and essence of all.”
― John Philip Newell, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know and Healing the World

“What most endangers us as an earth community today is that we have neglected our interrelationships - as countries, faiths, and races. The reality is that we need one another. We will be well to the extent that we all are well. We will be truly strong to the extent that we faithfully protect one another's well-being, not simply the well-being of our people, our community, or our species.”
― John Philip Newell, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know and Healing the World

“I wish I were so ‘Sequoiacal,’” he writes, “that I could descend from these mountains like a John the Baptist to preach the green-brown woods to all the juiceless world . . . crying, ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of Sequoia is at hand.”
― John Philip Newell, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know and Healing the World

“Our work, rather, is to help reawaken the sense of the sacred that is already deep in the human soul, our primordial relationship with nature, our ancient mother love of the earth. We can be part of its rising again.”
― John Philip Newell, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know and Healing the World

“What MacLeod found in the scriptures is that it is precisely in the material realm that the divine is to be found. Christ, he said, came in a body and healed bodies and fed bodies. He came to save us body and soul. In other words, for MacLeod it was the material interwoven with the spiritual. It was about caring for our body-souls and the body-soul of the earth and all people. MacLeod taught the holiness of wholeness. Holiness, he said, is essentially about “healthiness.”8 It is about healthy relationship with the earth and one another as individuals, communities, and nations. The words holy and whole are derived from the same root, the Middle English word hale, which means “health.” The pursuit of holiness is the pursuit of healthiness in our lives and world. It is not soul salvation, he would say; it is whole salvation, for we are not called to be escape artists. We are not called to seek liberation from the world, but a liberation of the world. The time of salvation is here and now, for healing must be here and now. Salve means “healing ointment.” To be part of salv-ation is to be part of healing in the world, of bringing what is torn and infected among us back into health and relationship again.”
― John Philip Newell, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know and Healing the World

“What MacLeod found in the scriptures is that it is precisely in the material realm that the divine is to be found. Christ, he said, came in a body and healed bodies and fed bodies. He came to save us body and soul. In other words, for MacLeod it was the material interwoven with the spiritual. It was about caring for our body-souls and the body-soul of the earth and all people. MacLeod taught the holiness of wholeness.”
― John Philip Newell, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know and Healing the World

“if you were to meet him on the High Street in Edinburgh or on a quiet pathway on Iona, you would tend to get not “Good morning” or “How are you today?” but “Do you believe in nonviolence?” He would ask it with such assertiveness that you felt terrified to disagree. MacLeod was perhaps the most aggressive pacifist the modern world has known! But it wasn’t always, “Do you believe in nonviolence?” In a nation that was the home of Presbyterianism, it was sometimes the much more playful question, “Are you a Presbyterian or a Christian?” MacLeod was forever challenging the definitions we use to describe ourselves. Always he wanted his listeners to think again about the boxes into which we have placed ourselves when we speak about nations, races, and religions.”
― John Philip Newell, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know and Healing the World

“There were radical implications to teaching the sacredness of matter as well as the sacredness of the feminine and its power to break through barriers that have been used to separate us from each other.”
― John Philip Newell, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know and Healing the World

“The poetry is already there, deep in the matter of the earth, even in its geological formations. It is in the stuff and interrelationship of the universe. Our role is to translate it into human speech and action, both individually and collectively.”
― John Philip Newell, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know and Healing the World

“We are not called to be masters of the earth but lovers of the earth, harnessing what we have acquired in the development of our civilization and scientific knowledge to server her, not dominate her. Part of what we owe the earth right now is the space and time she needs to heal from the damage we have inflicted on her.”
― John Philip Newell, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know and Healing the World

“Again, we need consciousness of soul, a waking up to the sacred interrelationship of all things, of every species and life-form, race and nation.”
― John Philip Newell, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know and Healing the World

“In a sense we are all being invited to remember what at some level we knew in the innocence of our childhood, but have since forgotten or come to doubt, that light is woven through all things like a thread of gold.”
― John Philip Newell, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know and Healing the World

“Evil can cause horrible suffering, but its very nature is self-destructive.”
― John Philip Newell, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know and Healing the World

“To look for the flow of the divine in all things is not to disregard the external authorities of religion, nation or culture. But it is always to consult also the compass of the soul and our place of inner knowing. So often we have been given the impression that faith primarily means accepting doctrinal beliefs or precepts that have been dispensed from above. Religious leaders appeal to scripture or the prerogative of tradition, often forgetting that these outward authorities need to be read and appraised through the lens of our inner knowing and the deepest experiences of our lives in relation to the earth and one another.”
― John Philip Newell, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know and Healing the World

“We live in a threshold moment. We are waking up to the earth again. We are awakening to the feminine and the desire to faithfully tend the interrelationship of all things. In this moment, politically, culturally, and religiously, we are witnessing the death throes of a shadow form of masculine power that has arrayed itself over against the earth and over against the sacredness of the feminine. This shadow form of power, however, has no ultimate future, for it is essentially false in its betrayal of the earth and the feminine. So in fear it is lashing out with unprecedented force. But it is not the deep spirit of this moment in time. Something else is trying to be born.”
― John Philip Newell, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know and Healing the World

“We know things in the core of our being that we have not necessarily been taught, and some of this deep knowing may actually be at odds with what our society or religion has tried to teach us.”
― John Philip Newell, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know and Healing the World

“At the doorway between faiths we can stand and bow, awakening to what the soul deeply knows, that wisdom is to be found and reverenced way beyond the boundaries of any one tradition. We need these many wisdom traditions. They are given not to compete with each other, but to complete each other.”
― John Philip Newell, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know and Healing the World

“We now know too much about the interrelatedness of all life to pretend that well-being can be sought for one part alone and not for the whole, for only one religion, one nation, one species.”
― John Philip Newell, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know and Healing the World

“We are living at a critical moment of history. Will we truly awaken to the sacredness of every person regardless of gender, race, or religion? Holders of power, both political and religious, are obstructing this work, and some of them are even denying the need for it. But they cannot destroy the vision of sacredness that has welled up again and again over the centuries and is now demanding our attention, perhaps like never before. There is hope. And it is a hope based on our deepest knowing, that every human being is sacred, body and soul.”
― John Philip Newell, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know and Healing the World

“If we are to see a true reawakening to the sacredness of the earth and harness the deepest energies of our being to serve this awareness, we need a strong inner authority in our own souls to challenge the religious, political, and social systems that have recklessly ignored or denied this sacredness and are imperiling the very future of the world. Our capacity to know the flow of the divine in all things,”
― John Philip Newell, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know and Healing the World

“REFLECTION: SACRED SOUL WORDS OF AWARENESS You have been graced with the dignity of divine birth, says Pelagius. Live this dignity in your life, safeguard it in one another, and protect it in every human being. (Reflect for a brief time on the ways this wisdom applies to your life.) PRAYER OF AWARENESS Awake, O my soul, And know the sacred dignity of your being. Awake to it in every living soul this day. Honor it, defend it, In heart and mind, in word and deed.”
― John Philip Newell, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know and Healing the World