Anam Cara

The language of my former heart . . .

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, ‘Tintern Abbey’

I

NTRODUCTION

It visits with inconstant glance

Each human heart and countenance;

Like hues and harmonies of evening, –

Like clouds in starlight widely spread, –

Like memory of music fled, –

Like aught that for its grace may be

Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate

With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon

Of human thought or form, – where art thou gone?

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’

T

HE

C

RY OF

O

UR

T

IMES

: T

O

A

WAKEN

B

EAUTY

WE LIVE BETWEEN THE ACT OF AWAKENING AND THE ACT OF surrender. Each morning we awaken to the light and the invitation to a new day in the world of time; each night we surrender to the dark to be taken to play in the world of dreams where time is no more. At birth we were awakened and emerged to become visible in the world. At death we will surrender again to the dark to become invisible. Awakening and surrender: they frame each day and each life; between them the journey where anything can happen, the beauty and the frailty. When the Celtic Imagination searched for the structures of shelter and meaning, it raised its eyes to the mountains and the heavens and put its trust in the faithful patterns of the sun, stars, moon and seasons. Long before them the Greeks too had raised the eye beyond the horizon and recognized the heavenly patterns of the cosmos. There they glimpsed a vision of order which was to become the heart of their understanding of beauty. All the frailty and uncertainty was seen to be ultimately sheltered by the eternal beauty which presides over all the journeys between awakening and surrender, the visible and the invisible, the light and the darkness.

The human soul is hungry for beauty; we seek it everywhere – in landscape, music, art, clothes, furniture, gardening, companionship, love, religion and in ourselves. No-one would desire not to be beautiful. When we experience the Beautiful, there is a sense of homecoming. Some of our most wonderful memories are of beautiful places where we felt immediately at home. We feel most alive in the presence of the Beautiful for it meets the needs of our soul. For a while the strains of struggle and endurance are relieved and our frailty is illuminated by a different light in which we come to glimpse behind the shudder of appearances the sure form of things. In the experience of beauty we awaken and surrender in the same act. Beauty brings a sense of completion and sureness. Without any of the usual calculation, we can slip into the Beautiful with the same ease as we slip into the seamless embrace of water; something ancient within us already trusts that this embrace will hold us.

These times are riven with anxiety and uncertainty, given the current global crisis. In the hearts of people some natural ease has been broken. It is astounding how this has reached deep into the heart. Our trust in the future has lost its innocence. We know now that anything can happen, from one minute to the next. The traditional structures of shelter are shaking, their foundations revealed to be no longer stone but sand. We are suddenly thrown back on ourselves. Politics, religion and economics and the institutions of family and community, all have become abruptly unsure. At first, it sounds completely naïve to suggest that now might be the time to invoke and awaken beauty. Yet this is exactly the claim that this book explores. Why? Because there is nowhere else to turn and we are desperate; furthermore, it is because we have so disastrously neglected the Beautiful that we now find ourselves in such terrible crisis.

T

HE

G

LOBAL

C

RISIS AND THE

V

IOLATION OF

B

EAUTY

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

RUMI