Anam Cara

NONE OF US COMES TO A NEW RELATIONSHIP WITH EMPTY HANDS. We carry within us powerfully the images of the masculine and the feminine. The images of the father and the mother are in the blood and in the mind, the images of those who have loved us and we have loved and the damaged images where we were wounded. Because they have been carried across an endless landscape of years, those images have become set in the mind and have become the lens through which we tend to view the masculine and the feminine. Frequently, it is difficult for us to see each other through the net of patterns that entwines us. Yet the magic of new love can be the energy it releases. We become urgent and passionate. New thresholds open and the grace of a new beginning becomes possible. Life quickens with fresh invitations when we can recognize and celebrate the complexity and delight of the feminine and the masculine.

Love is a great shelter within which vulnerability can be shown and gradually healed. The awakening and growth of love is quite fascinating. It seems to arrive from nowhere. This calls two strangers from the crowd. Up to that point they have known nothing of each other. The one did not even know the other existed. The space between them was as clear as the space between two stones in a field. Around each individual form there is no imprint or trace of the life of the other. They are distant and foreign to each other, free of each other. Then Eros shoots his arrows and the delightful wound of attraction opens. They become a shelter for each other; as Yeats says:

When my arms wrap you round I press

My heart upon the loveliness

That has long faded from the world.

Cut clear from the anonymity of the crowd, these two people are already taking leave of their status as strangers. They begin to approach each other. This act of approaching is instinctive and excited; but it is also innocent. Gradually they come to learn the narrative of each other’s lives, the subtle nuances of a personality become visible.

Yet to love someone is an art. It does not come simply or cheaply but is a lifetime’s work. It remains a huge risk to entrust the fragile barque of identity to the wide and precarious depths of another person’s life. There will be storms. There will also be times when the emerging beauty of the voyage will bring unexpected joy. Deeply buried hurts will resolve and release themselves. Shakespeare distils this in Sonnet 30:

But if the while I think on thee (dear friend)

All losses are restored, and sorrows end.

Healing light will flow into the unknown region of the heart. It is as though twilight were awakening in the inner night. It is astounding how love can change a person. Where there was fear, courage begins to dawn. Trapped confusion gives way to fresh clarity. In old walls, unexpected doors open and the heart awakens with the desire ‘to live everything’.

The decision to enter into a lifelong commitment is to cross a decisive threshold. This decision focuses the two lives and cuts them clear from everyone else in the world. Goethe speaks of how commitment not only deepens the unity between two people, but also invites providence to open towards them with new gifts and the special shelter of even greater kindness. They have taken a huge risk. In the world of business risk is always precarious and when one is in the arena of quantity, a risk can mean one will lose everything. In the world of soul, I have seldom seen anyone take a risk for growth that was not rewarded a thousand times over, for to trust to experience is to grow, to learn, to develop.

Yet to choose is to stand out, to cut oneself off from the shelter of the group and future possibility, it is an invitation to steer a direct course into an unknown future. When one becomes so visible and definite, one leaves cover and becomes visible to other forces, forces which might be quite hostile. This is the poignancy at the heart of the commitment ceremony. The two new pilgrims set out on their unknown voyage. They want to begin, to take the first steps of their new life in the house of wise and intuitive shelter, the house of God. They join together first inside the circle of blessing, which their friends draw around them. The grounding recognition here is that the journey ahead is a great adventure. It is also a step into the unknown, a journey for which there is no map. Anything could befall them on the way.

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