Anam Cara

AS FARAWAY LIGHT YIELDS ITS HARVEST OF COLOURS WHEN IT passes through a prism, beauty opens out its radiance when it shines through the human heart. The heart is the place where beauty arrives; here is where it can be felt, recognized and shared. If there was no heart, beauty could never reach us. Through the heart beauty can pervade every cell of the body and fill us. To use a word that feels like it sounds: this is the thrill of beauty through us. Perhaps this is why we sometimes feel the absence of beauty in our lives; we have allowed the prism to become dull and darkened; though the light is near, it cannot enter to have its inlay of beauty diffused. Sometimes absence is merely arrested appearance. Compassion and attention keep the prism clear so that beauty may illuminate our life. Prayer of course is the supreme way we lift our limited selves towards the light, and ask it to shine into us.

T

HE

H

EART AS

T

ABERNACLE

THE HEART IS WHERE THE NATURE, FEELING AND INTIMACY OF A life dwell and without heart the world grows suddenly cold. In its desire for beauty, it reaches towards the beyond. This poignant straining suggests that beauty is the homeland of the heart. When it can dwell in beauty the heart is home. The human heart is the masterpiece of the primal artist. When God created it, it was fashioned for an eternal kinship with beauty; God knew that the human heart would always be wedded to him in desire; for the other name of God is beauty. The heart is the tabernacle of divine beauty. St John of the Cross puts this poetically:

I did not have to ask my heart what it wanted

because of all the desires I have ever known,

just one did I cling to

for it was the essence of all desire:

to know beauty.

B

EAUTY

: T

HE

R

ADIANCE OF THE

E

TERNAL

The nature of love is this, that it attracts to beauty and links the

unbeautiful with the beautiful.

MARSILIO FICINO

WHILE BEAUTY GLADDENS OUR HEARTS, IT MAKES US LONELY TOO for what cannot be. True beauty is woven through the heart of life and is ever engaged with forces of ignorance, darkness, ugliness and negativity; yet domination and power are not beauty’s way. Beauty works from within these conflicts of forces and her brightening may or may not appear. Where beauty seems absent, she is often hidden and still at work in the slow industry of transformation. So much of beauty is not immediately apparent and indeed it could take a long time before it becomes visible. It often takes a lot of struggle and committed attention and generosity, even sacrifice, in order to create beauty. This work of beauty is slow and patient; it is the transformation through which the darkness of suffering eventually glimmers with the learned refinement of true radiance. The soul that struggles for the emergence of beauty reaches towards God and labours on that threshold between visible and invisible, time and eternity. The possibility and promise of this threshold is caught wonderfully by Marguerite Porete, the twelfth-century mystic:

Such a Soul often hears what she hears not,

and often sees what she sees not,

and so often she is there where she is not,

and so often she feels what she feels not.

For thousands of years this theme has inspired artists. The dark, haunted image of Jesus on the cross is made to yield some shimmer of its incomprehensible light. Dostoevsky suggested this too, when he said: ‘Perhaps it is beauty that will save us in the end.’

G

OD

: K

EEPER OF

T

RANSIENCE

THOUGH WE LIVE IN TIME, BEAUTY SEEMS TO VISIT US FROM outside time, from eternity. Beauty turns vanishing time into something precious; it makes the moment luminous and indeed timeless. Yet one of the most agonizing aspects of beauty is that it does vanish. What we do not know or feel barely touches us, does not sadden us when it vanishes. However, beauty awakens, envelops, inspires and delights us; an experience of beauty turns a certain sequence of time into something unforgettable. Yet it still vanishes. The Japanese have the word aware to describe the ephemeral nature of beauty. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins is haunted by the same vanishing:

How to keep – is there any, any, is there none such, nowhere

known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or

catch or key to keep

Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, . . . from vanishing away?

‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’