Anam Cara

The world of touch includes the whole world of sexuality; this is probably the most tender aspect of human presence. When you are sexual with someone, you have let them right into your world. The world of sexuality is a sacred world of presence. The world of Eros is one of the devastated casualties of contemporary commercialism and greed. George Steiner has written powerfully about this. He shows how the words of intimacy, the night words of eros and affection, the secret words of love, have been vacated in the neon day of greed and consumerism. We desperately need to retrieve these gentle and sacred words of touch in order to be able to engage our full human nature. When you look at your inner world of soul, ask yourself how your sense of touch has developed. How do you actually touch things? Are you alive or awakened to the power of touch both as a sensuous and tender and healing force? A retrieval of touch can bring a new depth into your life; and it can heal, strengthen you, and bring you closer to yourself.

Touch is such an immediate sense. It can bring you in from the false world, the famine world of exile and image. Rediscovering the sense of touch returns you to the hearth of your own spirit, enabling you to experience again warmth, tenderness, and belonging. At the highest moments of human intensity, words become silent. Then the language of touch really speaks. When you are lost in the black valley of pain, words grow frail and dumb. To be embraced and held warmly brings the only shelter and consolation. Conversely, when you are completely happy, touch becomes an ecstatic language.

Touch offers the deepest clue to the mystery of encounter, awakening, and belonging. It is the secret, affective content of every connection and association. The energy, warmth, and invitation of touch come ultimately from the divine. The Holy Spirit is the wild and passionate side of God, the tactile spirit whose touch is around you, bringing you close to yourself and to others. The Holy Spirit makes these distances attractive and laces them with fragrances of affinity and belonging. Graced distances make strangers friends. Your beloved and your friends were once strangers. Somehow at a particular time, they came from the distance toward your life. Their arrival seemed so accidental and contingent. Now your life is unimaginable without them. Similarly, your identity and vision are composed of a certain constellation of ideas and feelings that surfaced from the depths of distance within you. To lose these now would be to lose yourself. You live and move on divine ground. This is what St. Augustine said of God: “You are more intimate to me than I am to myself.” The subtle immediacy of God, the Holy Spirit, touches your soul and tenderly weaves your ways and your days.

CELTIC SENSUOUSNESS

The world of Celtic spirituality is completely at home with the rhythm and wisdom of the senses. When you read Celtic nature poetry, you see that all the senses are alerted: You hear the sound of the winds, you taste the fruits, and above all you get a wonderful sense of how nature touches human presence. Celtic spirituality also has a great awareness of the sense of vision, particularly in relation to the spirit world. The Celtic eye has a great sense of that interim world between the invisible and the visible. This is referred to in scholarship as the imaginal world, the world where the angels live. The Celtic eye loves this interim world. In Celtic spirituality, we find a new bridge between the visible and the invisible; this comes to expression beautifully in its poetry and blessings. These two worlds are no longer separate. They flow naturally, gracefully, and lyrically in and out of each other.

A Blessing for the Senses

May your body be blessed.

May you realize that your body is a faithful and beautiful

friend of your soul.

And may you be peaceful and joyful and recognize that your

senses are sacred thresholds.

May you realize that holiness is mindful, gazing, feeling,

hearing, and touching.

May your senses gather you and bring you home.

May your senses always enable you to celebrate the universe

and the mystery and possibilities in your presence here.

May the Eros of the Earth bless you.

THREESOLITUDE IS LUMINOUS

THE WORLD OF THE SOUL IS SECRET