Why do they still come? Fourteen hundred years after a handful of Celtic monks withdrew to tiny islands in the sea, and almost a thousand years after the last of them disappeared, a steady streams of modern men and women make the difficult trek to these isolated places. Why? What did the ancient monks know that we have forgotten, or remember only dimly? What are we looking for when we journey to such sacred places? We are looking, among other things, for wisdom-for clues about how to live in a frantic, materialistic, care-worn world that is, in many ways, hostile to life. And we sense that those who lived here so long ago, though they have left very little behind, have something to teach us. In Search of Sacred Places: Looking for Wisdom on Celtic Holy Islands is the story of a reluctant pilgrimage, taken by a man with no great faith in sacred places. He is a man filled with modern questions and suspicions, who nonetheless returns home from these thin places with a better understanding of how to live.
This book interweaves spiritual quest, travel, memoir, history, theological reflection, cultural analysis, and personal introspection-all conveyed in an engaging, probing, and honest voice. It is a book for those on the hunt for meaning who share the hope that God has sown it throughout this world-perhaps more thickly in certain sacred places.