Anam Cara

ALL THROUGH YOUR LIFE YOUR SOUL TAKES CARE OF YOU. DESPITE its best brightness, your mind can never illuminate what your life is doing. You are always in a state of knowing, but that knowing, while often lucid and deep, is more often faltering and shadowed. At times you feel immensely present in your life, rooted in what is happening to you, utterly there. At other times you are only vaguely in your life; things are blurred, confusion or distraction owns your days. In such times you remain attached to the earth by only the slightest thread. Yet through all these times, your soul is alive and awakened, gathering, sheltering and guiding your ways and days in the world. In effect, your soul is your secret shelter. Without ever surfacing or becoming explicit, your soul takes care of you. Never once while you are here does your soul lose touch with the eternal. Your soul makes sure that God’s dream for you is always edging towards fulfilment even when at times the opposite seems to be the case. At times of immense suffering or the most ecstatic joy, your life breaks through the shadowing and you come to sense that something else is minding and guiding you. This is the nature of the consolation and infinitely tender embrace your soul always provides for you. If this is true of the flow of your days, how much more tender must that caring be at the time of your death when the river reaches the edge of the cliff?

At the deepest heart of your life, in your soul, there is no fear of death. Your soul is well prepared for the arrival of death for it knows that death cannot destroy you. It will change you, and change you beyond recognition to those you leave behind, but death cannot disassemble you.

All through your life, the most precious experiences seemed to vanish. Transience turns everything to air. You look behind and see no sign even of a yesterday that was so intense. Yet in truth, nothing ever disappears, nothing is lost. Everything that happens to us in the world passes into us. It all becomes part of the inner temple of the soul and it can never be lost. This is the art of the soul: to harvest your deeper life from all the seasons of your experience. This is probably why the soul never surfaces fully. The intimacy and tenderness of its light would blind us. We continue in our days to wander between the shadowing and the brightening, while all the time a more subtle brightness sustains us. If we could but realize the sureness around us, we would be much more courageous in our lives. The frames of anxiety that keep us caged would dissolve. We would live the life we love and in that way, day by day, free our future from the weight of regret.

N

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OMENT OF

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OU

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ILL

B

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OST

IN THE

C

ROSSING

When night asks

who I am I answer, Your own, and am not lonely.

LI-YOUNG LEE

AT THE TIME OF DEATH, THE SOUL KNOWS HOW TO PROTECT ITS precious cargo. While death will stop and empty the body, the soul will ferry your essence into eternal life. Not one moment of you will be lost in the crossing. Eternal life is the province of the soul; this is where the soul is at home. For your soul, then, death is indeed a homecoming. Naturally the soul will feel the sadness of withdrawal from the visible world. Ultimately, however, physical death must also be an adventure for the soul. There must be excitement for the soul at the edge of such transformation, and joy in bringing the bright essence of a life’s harvest into eternity. Perhaps this is the reason why at a deathbed you often notice that another presence takes over. The taut lonesomeness of the death struggle eases; below the personality and physical body some other level of the person’s spirit has awakened. You look at the dying and sense that they are now beginning to belong more fully to the unseen world. Indeed, they will often tell you that they have just glimpsed the countenance of some long-departed friend or family member. Already their vision is altering. Now they are beginning to see the eternal tracings of the invisible world. It can be an incredible thing to really look into the eyes of the dying. Often you see such beauty dawning there. It is as if the whole tenderness and dispersed beauty of the person’s life focuses in their eyes.