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The Divine Wisdom Hedge School
Fàilte chridheil! A very warm welcome to you from The Divine Wisdom Hedge School. In the tradition of my Gaelic ancestors, a grove of trees (or the space beyond a hedge-row, i.e., in the wild, beyond the boundaries of ordinary, sanctioned human affairs) has always been considered the supernal place for sacred gathering: for teaching and learning, for engaging in spiritual formation, and for the celebration of ritual. Historically, throughout the Celtic lands, the grove (or sometimes a single sacred tree) was roughly akin to a pre-Christian ekklesía (‘church’), and it took centuries of Christianization to get our people indoors into the de-wilded environment of the ecclesial building. In Gaelic culture, a later descendant of the druidic ‘sacred grove’ or nemeton was the hedge school, a secret sanctuary of ancestral learning and the preservation of native language and culture. For us today in The Divine Wisdom Hedge School, the sacred space beyond the hedge-row is a place for the transmission of forgotten or endangered ancestral knowledge, and it is also a sanctuary of re-wilding. See below for more information about The Divine Wisdom Hedge School.
About the Hedge School
A' Challaid-Sgoil Gliocas Nèamhach (The Divine Wisdom Hedge School) is a hybrid (i.e., both digital and in-person) environment in which sacred teachings are offered to all sincere and humble seekers who demonstrate their desire for wisdom. As founder and teacher of The Divine Wisdom Hedge School, I offer whatever knowledge I can to support my students, and do so in the tradition of my ancient ancestors: gathered around the proverbial hearthfire, sharing insights handed on from the old ones, gleaned through many years of study and contemplation, and whispered from the unseen world.
Though the perspective I speak from is always rooted in the ancestral, the teaching I offer in this context is not limited to my ancestral inheritance alone, but also draws widely from my knowledge as a mystical theologian and scholar of comparative religion focused particularly on pre-Christian Western esotericism, early Christian mystical theology, indigenous European beliefs, and diverse animistic traditions. The central aim of my teaching is always the re-wilding of souls and the unraveling of toxic conditioning from the dominator forces that have long colonized our ancestral customs and indigenous ways of relating with the sacred; that have alienated us from the true spiritual richness that constitutes our deepest birthright on this living Earth.
What is a 'Hedge School'?
While The Divine Wisdom Hedge School is primarily a place of learning and formation, it is also a fellowship, particularly for core members who have been involved in the life of the Collaid-Sgoil for some years. This environment of learning and spiritual deepening is akin to the hedge schools of late medieval and early modern Gaelic cultures, which were (illegal) gatherings of educational pursuit secreted away from the colonizing English, who would kill or imprison anyone engaged in such assemblies. These gatherings sought to preserve the native Gaelic language, history, and customs through the tyranny of brutal colonialism. Hedge schools evolved out of the older medieval tradition of poetic schools, which trained poet-seers and bards (also often in secret, hidden from the persecutory eyes of Church authorities), and these in turn were preservations of the deeply ancestral (druidic) practice of gathering in sacred groves to educate those in training to become members of the sacral class. The hedge schools were led by individual teachers who were highly educated in native Gaelic and Classical subjects, and, under the weight of persecution, continually risked their lives to hand on something of their ancestral inheritance. Teachers were compensated for their teaching by each student directly. In Irish society in the eighteenth century, these schools also sometimes functioned as 'minor seminaries' for the training of priests, since Catholic Christian religiosity was outlawed by the Protestant English colonizers.
In many ways, the model of the hedge school is again highly relevant now, not only in the Gaelic nations, but also in the diasporic nations, where peoples of all ancestry (but perhaps especially those of European descent) find themselves in 'cultural orphanhood', devoid of and hungering for deep-rooted connection to the Land and to an ancestral spiritual inheritance they can call their own, or simply be deeply nourished, enriched, and shaped by. At the same time, the rapidly dissolving institutional religious structures of the Christianized West remain deeply suspicious of, hostile to, or at very least utterly unequipped to receive or discuss traditions of indigenous wisdom and religiosity, from any source. I feel that such wisdom traditions are crucial for the spiritual salvation of all human persons, and, by extension, for the life and well-being of every living creature who dwells on the body of this living Earth, our Mother. As such, the hope and aim of The Divine Wisdom Hedge School is to continue to grow as a community of learning, formation, and cultural preservation, to deepen the knowledge, compassion, and spiritual capacity of all who step across the threshold of our 'hedge', in order that more and more people in the West would once again learn to be clear conduits for true blessing, and to place their feet on a path of real wisdom and divinization, not for their own sakes, but for the life and liberation of all sentient beings.
Gather with Us
Join us in our twice-monthly Cnuasach, which is how we refer to our classes or teaching sessions. The Gàidhlig term cnuasach means 'gathering together', 'collecting', 'assembling', but it also means 'ruminating', or, 'pondering', and implies in this context a gathering of persons with the shared aim of reflecting together on sacred things, in order to gain new valuable insight into life and the journey of the soul. In Cnuasach, students gather on Zoom or in person for spiritual learning, meditation, holy conversation, and fellowship.
Cnuasach is currently held the SECOND and FOURTH MONDAYS of each month, from 5:00pm - 6:30pm Pacific Time. Please inquire via the Contact page for more information about joining us and getting added to the Hedge School email list, where course topics and dates are regularly announced.
Our year is divided into two terms, which run from Lughnasadh (early August) to Samhain (late November), and Samhain to Beltaine (early May), respectively. Each term has its own themes and areas of focus. New students are welcome to join at any time, with approval from Father Brendan. Past teaching sessions may be made available to new students in the form of video recordings. As with each live teaching session, recordings of past sessions are made accessible on a donation basis.
The required donation (eineach) for attending Cnuasach is requested on a sliding scale, from $15 - $35, in order to make the sessions accessible to as many sincere seekers as possible. Donations should be made by PayPal or Venmo before each session. The Gaelic term eineach means 'generosity', 'gift', or 'bounty'. In Buddhism, it is assumed that to share dāna ('gift', 'generosity') is an essential practice for generating merit, virtue, productive karma or 'blessing' (Tib. gewa), all of which help not only those who are receiving, but also the one who is giving the offering, by establishing in his or her mind-stream a pattern of generosity, virtuousness, and the optimal circumstances for the arising of wisdom. By extension, such sharing of abundance positively affects of the whole of Life and in some way aids all in the vast matrix of interbeing. These are things worth reflecting on for anyone who is genuinely pursuing spiritual transformation for the benefit of all beings.
I am most grateful for your generosity in supporting this sacred work, and I hope you will partner with me in helping to bring the light of wisdom and the capacity for liberative transformation to an ailing world in desperate need of spiritual nourishment and direction.
I warmly invite you to come sit at our hearth beyond the verge, to open the hands of your heart and receive some pregnant seeds of transformative possibility, to enjoy a cup of tì (‘tea’) and some spiritual conversation with us, and to meet our open, loving, and supportive community of learning and spiritual practice. Gun robh mìle math agad ('A thousand good things to you')! With abundant blessings from the realm of wild spirits, from the secret places beneath the living Earth, and the mysterious dark between the stars,
Father Brendan (An t-Athair Brèanainn)