Customer Reviews

Sun Dancing: Life in a Medieval Irish Monastery and How Celtic Spirituality Influenced the WWorld

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This book will capture your interest and will leave you hanging with more questions. If your interest is in the field of archaeology, etc, you will probably want to "pass by, Horseman." However, if you're like me and you just want to know what was happening to the average peasant and believer on the banks of the River of history, then this book is for you. G. Moorehouse, does a smash up job of bringing to life the spirit of the Celtic monks who changed the world. The book is divided into two parts: the first being a "faction", that is a historically accurate fictional account of day to day life in the monastery of Sceilig Michail. In this section, he attempts to penetrate the Celtic mind and I have to give him credit for this. If in any way, he failed, it is only because the truly Celtic Christian mind was lost to us after the Great Schism of 1054 and after their valiant and heroic resistance, Eire finally fell to the Roman church. (We should all mourn what might have been contributed to Byzantium because it is the less for all that!)

The second section deals in the facts, insofar as they are known, and as cold as the stones that pious Celtic hands pressed into service, to build the monasteries of Iona, Lindisfarne, Sceilig Michail. The bibliography alone is worth every penny, the price of the book and I highly recommend it as much for Mr. Moorehouse's attempt to plumb the depths of the celtic Christian heart, as for it's more scholarly attributes.

If you're looking for new age nonsense about "Celtic" spirituality, move on. If you are looking for the Orthodoxy (big O intended) of the Celts, you've come to the right place. Moorehouse skirts the issue, and never directly says it outright, but the message of this book is loud and clear: The origin of Celtic Christianity lies in the East, with Eastern Orthodoxy and not with Roman pontiffs. Nobody, with any knowledge will fail to recognize the obvious: St. John Cassian's prayer and method of use (pre-cursor of the Jesus prayer), the monastic cell rules, the ascetism of St. Anthony and other Desert Fathers.

In the end, what one is left with is this: Iona, Lindisfarne, and Sceilig Michail are not so far away as they may appear in the mist. They may, and must, be re-built each day in our own hearts with a Christianity that is Orthodox and that is lived each day, without fail.

If you've ever stood on the rocks of Skellig Michael, or peered at them from safe ground across the tossing waves, you've thought to yourself, "only crazy people and seagulls would live there". You would be wrong - passionate maybe, maybe not crazy. This story of the monks on Skellig Michael, part history, part fiction, speaks of the loneliness and of being alone - which are not the same things - and the astonishing strength that can come from the most unexpected places when one person or a group of people who share a focus come together. Even the early pages that detail the types of ink used in the glorious illuminated manuscripts of Clanmacnoise draw you into this passion and this focus. It's an incredible story of life on a rock in the middle of nowhere that provided a continuous line of education and religion (like it or not) in a time beyond our imagination.

Sun Dancing is a fascinating look at this period of Irish history. The arrangment of the fictionalized account, backed by in-depth commentaries in the second half is novel and a joyful way to present the materials gathered. I hope Mr. Moorhouse writes many more books of this sort as I practically swallowed this one whole, and now have to go back and re-read it to savor it all over again!

As the reviewer from the Atlantic Monthly points out, this book is half history, half historical fiction. This gave me a fundamental problem in getting into the book. The first half is decently written and attempts to get in the heads of various Irish monks in the Middle Ages, the second half provides the facts to back up the conjecture of the first. I preferred the second half, though that may be because I tend to enjoy my history a bit harder than most. I just didn't like the structure of the book. To me, what this book really is is a novella about an Irish Monastery on a rocky island with a novella-sized end note section. The end notes were more relevant for research. I don't question the scholarship of the work, just the presentation. Overall, not bad, but if you can get past the strange way it's put together (unlike me) you'll probably enjoy it.

Skellig Michael (Michael's Rock) is a tiny, steep, pinnacle of an island off the coast of Ireland. For 600 years during the early middle ages, it served as a Celtic Monastery. Travel writer Geoffrey Moorhouse tells of the rigors of the isolated lives of the monks, via an imaginative, partly fictional reconstruction of key experiences such as surviving Viking raids, existence in a bare stone beehive hut, and preserving the essence of Celtic Christianity, away from the tentacles of Rome.

The second half of the book is more scholarly but drier and less engaging. Nevertheless, Skellig Michael by its remoteness has remained relatively unchanged, and the evidence that researchers have been gathering from it has been aptly elucidated by Moorhouse; a valuable snapshot of Christianity in one of its variant early forms.

This book's best quality is that it lacks the pretension of Cahill's "How the Irish Saved Civilization." We see the Irish monks' lives at close range, in much detail and with sympathy. The monks are not portrayed as kooks but as devotees of Christ who expected His return at any minute.

Anyone who visits Ireland's haunting Skellig Islands asks themselves the same question: What have life must have been like for the incredibly dedicated monks who, for hundreds of years, inhabited one of the most isolated, forbidding, harshest, difficult places on earth?

Moorhouse answers this question well with a brilliantly conceived historical novel, which explores not only how these men lived, but also why they chose such a difficult life. The picture Moorhouse paints of daily life is detailed and, one has to conclude, highly accurate. Even more moving, though, are the characters he develops and the insights into what must have been in the minds of men who sacrificed all for a faith that was tested 24 hours a day.

Unlike many historical novels, Sun Dancing is not overly simplistic, its characters are not flat and transparent. What could possibly drive men to survive near starvation, Viking raids, a brutal climate, and isolation that would drive many mad? Read this book, and you will begin to understand.

It is not a book about Ireland; it is a book about what human beings will do--and endure--in the name of their faith. Highly recommended.

Who would ever connect the title SUN DANCING with Irish Monasticism lived out on what has the be one of the bleakest, most forbidding islands in the world? The book is a riveting story of how monks lived on that island and the scholarly evidence to prove that the story is pretty much what happened at that time. It was a much more severe type of monasticism that developed independently of traditional Western monasticism based on the Rule of St. Benedict.

A must read for those looking for heroes that live by deep faith.

This book was not what I expected. And not in a good way. I had to FORCE myself through it.

I would not recommend it.

Nor would I buy it again if I could do it over.

Fun for anyone with even slight interest in history, Christian religion, etc. Part story, part historical text, very clever and interesting. I got bored about halfway through, which is why I didn't give this book a better rating, but I did finish it later and I thoroughly enjoyed it.