Anam Cara

You should never allow any person or institution to own or control your longing. No one has a right to deny you the beautiful adventure of God by turning you into a serf of a cold and sinister deity. When you let that happen, it makes you homeless. You are a child of Divine Longing. In your deepest nature you are one with your God. As Meister Eckhart says so beautifully, “The eye with which I see God is God’s eye seeing me.”

That circle of seeing and presence is ultimate belonging. It is fascinating that Jesus did not stay on the earth. He made himself absent in order that the Holy Spirit could come. The ebb and flow of presence and absence is the current of our lives; each of them configures our time and space in the world. Yet there is a force that pervades both presence and absence: this is spirit. There is nowhere to locate spirit and neither can it be subtracted from anything. Spirit is everywhere. Spirit is in everything. By nature and definition, spirit can never be absent. Consequently, all space is spiritual space, and all time is secret eternity. All absence is full of hidden presence.

In the pulse-beat is the life and the longing, all embraced in the great circle of belonging, reaching everywhere, leaving nothing and no one out. This embrace is mostly concealed from us who climb the relentless and vanishing escalator of time and journey outside where space is lonesome with distance. All we hear are whispers, all we see are glimpses; but each of us has the divinity of imagination which warms our hearts with the beauty and depth of a world woven from glimpses and whispers, an eternal world that meets the gaze of our eyes and the echo of our voices to assure us that from all eternity we have belonged, and to answer the question that echoes at the heart of all longing: While we are here, where is it that we are absent from?

A BLESSING

May you know that absence is full of tender presence and that nothing is ever lost or forgotten.

May the absences in your life be full of eternal echo.

May you sense around you the secret Elsewhere which holds the presences that have left your life.

May you be generous in your embrace of loss.

May the sore well of grief turn into a well of seamless presence.

May your compassion reach out to the ones we never hear from and may you have the courage to speak out for the excluded ones.

May you become the gracious and passionate subject of your own life.

May you not disrespect your mystery through brittle words or false belonging.

May you be embraced by God in whom dawn and twilight are one, and may your belonging inhabit its deepest dreams within the shelter of the Great Belonging.

VESPERS

As light departs to let the earth be one with night

Silence deepens in the mind and thoughts grow slow;

The basket of twilight brims over with colours

Gathered from within the secret meadows of the day

And offered like blessings to the gathering Tenebrae.

After the day’s frenzy may the heart grow still,

Gracious in thought for all the day brought,

Surprises that dawn could never have dreamed,

The blue silence that came to still the mind,

The quiver of mystery at the edge of a glimpse,

The golden echoes of worlds behind voices.

Tense faces unable to hide what gripped the heart,

The abrupt cut of a glance or a phrase that hurt,

The flame of longing that distance darkened,

Bouquets of memory that gathered on the heart’s altar,

The thorns of absence in the rose of dream.

And the whole while the unknown underworld

Of the mind turning slowly in its secret orbit.

May the blessing of sleep bring refreshment and release

And the Angel of the moon call the rivers of dream

To soften the hardened earth of the outside life,

Disentangle from the trapped nets the hurt and sorrow

And awaken the young soul for the new tomorrow.

Suggested Further Reading

Gaston Bachelard. The Poetics of Space. Boston, 1969.

Jean Baudrillard. Fatal Strategies. New York, 1990.

Wendell Berry. Collected Poems. North Point Press, 1984.

Saint Bonaventure. The Journey of the Mind to God. Translated by P. Boehner, O.F.M. Hackett, 1993.