Anam Cara

TIME LIVES DIFFERENTLY IN THE HOUSE OF GOD. WHEN YOU DRIVE through a city, town or village, the house of God stands out. It is unlike any other house. The contrast was infinitely clearer in former times. Many modern churches lack architectural beauty; they imitate the surrounding blandness. In former times when people were much poorer, they struggled sometimes for decades to build a church. Resources and moneys were gathered from every corner in order to erect a beautiful house where the divine presence could trust itself among us, a beautiful house where the reverence of great ritual could at special times unveil the glory of the divine. Beauty in its ultimate presence is divine glory. I have had the delightful experience of travelling through some small French village and visiting a local church. Outside the day is seared with summer light. Then you enter the beautiful kept-darkness of the church. Magnificent stained glass absorbs the white fire of outside light; it harnesses the fire into its narrative of colour. And among the sleep of dark stone a sequence of cobalt blue, indigo or golden yellow comes alive. To the pilgrim who breaks his journey to come in and pray, they offer shy yet beautiful light that restores your seeing. And you remember who you are. For a while you come to sense the providence that secretly shapes and guides your life. Your burdened mind relents and your soul comes to ease in the shelter of the divine.

In a great religious tradition, the house of God is a special place. The church, the temple, the mosque is where a community gathers to hear God. Cumulatively, over years the interior becomes threaded with the desires, intimacies and longings of a community. The interior of God’s house is not a vacant space; it is the place where the spiritual Eros of a community collects. This interior is richly textured with the aura of those who have worshipped there. When one enters there one does not simply enter a building; rather one enters unknowingly the gathered memory. This house is a living archive of transcendence. This is the space where the voice of God became audible, where that tranquillity which the world cannot give waits to comfort the mind. People have come into this house with burdens of heart that could find healing nowhere else in the world. They have come in here for shelter when storms have unravelled every stitch of meaning from their lives. And they have come in too to give thanks for blessings and gifts they could never have earned. The house of God is a frontier region, an intense threshold where the visible world meets the ultimate but subtle structures of the invisible world. We enter this silence and stillness in order to decipher the creative depths of the divine imagination that dreams our lives. Somewhere in this kept-darkness the affection that created us waits to bless and heal us.

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HE

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ANCTUARY OF

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UBTLE

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RESENCE

In silence we must wrap much of our life, because

it is too fine for speech.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

THIS SANCTUARY HOLDS A SPECIAL PRIVACY. WITHIN THIS EMBRACE there is no barrier between you and the intimacy of the divine heart. Nor is there a barrier between you and the dead. The outside world is relentless in its urgency and stress; the politics of the obvious dominates everything. Subtle presence is largely unable to register its companionship with us. The dead are abandoned in their graveyards to grow deeper into the stillness of the forgotten. But in this sanctuary their subtle presence hovers nearer; here is where time deepens to reveal its eternal embrace. For eternal life is eternal memory. In its natural silence and deep rituals, space opens here to coax the eternal more fully among us. Within this sacred space, time loses its linearity, its loneliness. It opens up and suggests itself as an ancient circle of belonging in which past and future, time lived and time to be lived, form ultimate presence. From ancient times people have understood the house of God to be the sacred ground from where it is wise to begin a journey: initiation as the journey of life in Spirit, and requiem as the beginning of the invisible journey.

In all our talk about the institutional church in the West, in our anger and disappointment at its theological blindness and abuse of power and person, we have fatally forgotten the harvest of healing presence that dwells in the house of God. In our desperate search for meaning and healing, we rush through our towns and cities on our way to work, therapy or doctors. We pass by these huge sanctuaries of absolute presence, totally oblivious of the divine welcome that awaits us, a welcome that is waiting to embrace us and call us.

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LESSING

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RIGHTENS THE

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OAD