Anam Cara

Each life is enfolded within a circle of time and if we imagine this circle as porous, occasionally, as we journey through our days, time suddenly deepens and all fragmentation coheres as we slip into eternal presence. Eternal time dwells deep in ordinary time. As we say, such moments become timeless and what is timeless does not pass away; it lives for ever. Eternity is then not to be considered as an infinite quantity of days. There is the image of eternity as an endless desert. Once every hundred years a raven comes and takes away one grain of sand and eternity will last until all the sand is removed. Caught between the shadowing and brightening of our days, we can have no clear view, yet our glimpses of the eternal world would suggest that it is not a matter of infinite quantity so much as a pure refinement of presence. And maybe this is the unseen gift that death will bring, namely, a refinement that transfigures us in order that we may dwell completely in eternal presence. Again this would not be foreign to us. Indeed the times of deepest delight in life are those moments when everything comes together and we feel divinely alive. Time opens and the eternal enfolds us. Though we slip back again into the breakage of days and moments, we never lose that feel of the eternal.

‘B

EHOLD

, I A

M

M

AKING

A

LL

T

HINGS

N

EW

’

MEMORY IS THE PLACE WHERE OUR VANISHED DAYS SECRETLY gather. Already within the passage of time there is a harvesting of our experience. Without memory, you would not be who you are. All that has happened to you in your life awakens and unfolds your individuality. All that has hurt you, gladdened you, deepened you and challenged you tells you who you are. Your experience is your most intimate creation. No-one else knows your experience in the way you do. No-one else sees what has happened to you in the same way as you see it. Something that seems trivial to another could be heart-rending to you. When you love someone and come to know them, you learn to tune your heart to the rhythm of their sensitivity. Through all your time together, this attunement becomes the ground of your ability to understand, forgive and care for each other. When someone you love is dying, your sorrow is for the loss of them and the loss of the world they carry. Eternal life must mean that neither the person nor their world is lost. Eternal life must mean the continuity beyond death of that individual life and that individual world.

Eternal life must also mean that one day we will be together again with the ones we love. This is the beauty of the notion of resurrection. In much contemporary thinking there is the tendency to view death as a simple dissolution whereby the body returns to mother earth and the spirit slips into the air to become one with the universe. While this claims a certain elemental continuity, it cannot be described as the eternal life of the individual. This view would accept death as a reversal and unravelling of the mysterious and intricate weaving of an individual life and it seems to offer very little. Indeed, all it delivers is a bland description of death as an elemental physical process. The intimacy and mystery of the individual life is merely loosed into anonymous, vague energy. In contrast, the resurrection promise is the continuity of the individual life in transfigured form. We will be ourselves. We will recognize each other and we will be together, reunited for eternity.

‘I W

ONDER

I

F

T

HERE

I

S

G

RASS IN

H

EAVEN

’

MUCH OF OUR CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY HAS PRESENTED HEAVEN AS an idealized realm somewhere at the outposts of infinite space. Heaven has to be as distant as possible from the shadow-lands of human imperfection. The distance also seemed to account for the absence and silence of the dead. Such a distant, pure region was always too abstract for the folk-mind. I remember one delightful conversation where the abstraction was punctured. When I was a child I heard an old neighbouring woman ask my father: ‘Paddy, I wonder if there is grass in heaven?’ With my child’s eye I could imagine a sweep of green after-grass breathing in the silver realm of heaven! If we were to imagine heaven as a state rather than a place, we could say that heaven is as near as God and there is nothing as close as God. Heaven is not elsewhere. It is here, in the unseen, beside us.