Following on from yesterday’s thought from Celtic Lent on original sin or original blessing, today we jump on a few hundred years to the ninth century Celtic saint, John Scotus Eriugena.

Eriugena and the Celtic Christians did not believe salvation was about changing human beings to be acceptable to God but rather that salvation was about restoring us to be the person that God created us to be in the first place.

Eriugena writes:

‘Just as the skin of the human body is afflicted of the contagion and deformity of leprosy, so human nature was infected and corrupted … and made deformed and unlike its creator. When it is freed from this leprosy by the medicine of divine grace, it will be restored to its original fairness of form.’

As we travel towards Easter this challenges the traditional ideas that still remain from my upbringing in the western/latin/roman based church. ‘I am good, and embodied in the image of God’ is something I need to be reminding myself of daily. Maybe I need to develop some sort of chant or tun to help me with that. Good Friday, and Easter, is about us being restored to the person we were initially meant to be.

What does this mean to me and you today?