Anam Cara

If we befriend the mystery of the soul, then we sense the secret depths to our life. And if we come to trust these depths and realize that here is where the significance of our life dwells, then we come to awaken more and more to our true life. Fear, falsity and the struggle for image cease to absorb us. We learn to live in the world but grow sure that we are not simply of the world. To awaken to the soul is to enter a new rhythm of dignity. Despite awkwardness, confusion and negativity, this rhythm of soul-elegance will continue to prevail. And when the invitation of death arrives, we will be given the strength and light to transfigure our fear. Strange as it may sound, we will come to trust death as the deeper dignity within us carries us through the travail of departure. At death the infinite within us will come good: there is no need to be afraid.

I

N THE

H

OUSE OF

E

TERNAL

B

ELONGING

B

IRTH AND

D

EATH

A

RE

O

NE

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar;

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

WORDSWORTH, ‘Ode. Intimations of Immortality’

NO THOUGHT CAN TAKE AWAY THE STRANGENESS OF DEATH. However you approach it, the fact that death awaits us but that its time and form remain unknown is strange. Nothing else that waits for us will make such a claim on us. Death weights the future. Imagine if you could say ‘I am glad that my death is behind me’ – what a different world you would be speaking from. Unfortunately, death dissolves subsequence and allows no afterwards and it assumes such power because it lies out of reach further down the line. In fact, it marks the end of the line. Perhaps if we could get beyond thinking of time as a line of life and life as a lifeline, we might be able to salvage a more hospitable understanding of death.

No sooner have we arrived on earth than we become excited hostages of the future. Our thoughts, words and actions are never neutral. Meanwhile behind us the future we have just traversed piles up. Claimed by the continuous generosity and promise of the future, we forget where we have come from. We forget our birth and we hardly ever think further back to the time before our birth. When we do think of birth in this way, an unexpected kinship emerges between death and birth. Each is the intimate and ultimate gateway. Birth is appearance; death is disappearance; or the reverse, for all we know. This kinship is unforgettably portrayed in the opening paragraph of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory:

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).

If we could see time as a circle, we might be better able to see how birth and death belong within the one embrace. Could it be that where we come from at birth is where we return to at death? When we think of birth and death together, death begins to lose its terror as an unknown abyss where the intimacy of a life is erased. If the light and beauty of who we are was dreamed and created in that realm before birth, then death is surely bringing us home to the house of our eternal belonging. And if everything we are is a gift from that home of dream, then our return will be a celebration of all we have awakened, realized and lived. Perhaps, deep within us there will be no great surprise at our return, for there may be a silent dimension of the heart which through all the years has never forgotten where it came from. Perhaps this is why beauty touches us so deeply. When beauty touches us, we remember who we are. We realize that we have come from the homeland of beauty.