Anam Cara

This is always the pathos at the end of autumn as colour dies into winter; it is also the pathos of each life whose moments of beauty are forming and dissolving like music. If we see God as the Keeper of Transience, then somewhere in the eternal world there is a door without our name on it, the repository where the unfathomed beauty of our chain of days still lives. If eternity is the deeper nature of time, then the vanishing is not a final loss or emptiness. Vanishing is disappearance through visible surface into eternal embrace. We cannot lose what is eternal. Meister Eckhart is trenchant on the limitation and falsity of time: ‘Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time.’

T

HE

V

ISIBLE AND THE

I

NVISIBLE

IN BEAUTY WE WERE DREAMED AND CREATED, AND OFFERED A LIFE in a world where beauty arises to awaken, surprise and call us. The outer unfolding of our lives is internally sustained and ordered by this invisible beauty. Furthermore, whenever we awaken beauty, we are helping to make God present in the world. Consequently the rituals and liturgies of religion can be occasions where beauty truly comes alive. The beauty of God is reachable for everyone and can be awakened in all dimensions of our experience. This also calls us to love and respect the world and to care for the earth.

On the surface, beauty confers grandeur on order, attractiveness on goodness, graciousness on truth and Eros on Being. Thomas Aquinas and the medieval thinkers wisely recognized that beauty was at the heart of reality; it was where truth, unity, goodness and presence came together. Without beauty they would be separated and inclined towards destructive conflict with each other. Accompanied by beauty, truth gains graciousness and compassion. Beauty holds harmony at the heart of unity and prevents its collapse into the most haunted chaos. In the presence of beauty, goodness attracts desire and beauty makes presence luminous and evokes its mystery. There is a profound equality at the heart of beauty; a graciousness which recognizes and encourages the call of individuality but invites it to serve the dream and creative vision of community. Without beauty the Eros of growth and creativity would dry up. As Simone Weil says: ‘Desire contains something of the absolute and if it fails . . . the absolute is transferred to the obstacle.’

B

EAUTY AND

C

REATIVITY AS

B

IRTH

Who would have thought my shrivelled heart

Could have recovered greenness?

GEORGE HERBERT, ‘The Flower’

ONE OF THE MOST LUMINOUS DOCUMENTS OF CLASSICAL antiquity is the Symposium of Plato. It is a reflection on the notions of love, goodness and beauty. For Plato beauty was not a private experience of self-indulgence or pleasure. Beauty was internally related to love and goodness. The basic human drive is the desire for the Good. In the beginning Love was born of beauty, ‘from then on the ability to love beauty has created all the good things that exist for gods and men’. Plato understands love as a spirit that works on that threshold between the divine and the mortal. At the heart of the Symposium there is a constant recognition of creation as the urgent arena of creativity. The heart of human identity is the capacity and desire for birthing. To be is to become creative and bring forth the beautiful:

All humans are pregnant, physically and spiritually, and when we reach our prime, our nature desires to give birth. Nature is not capable of giving birth in the ugly, but only in the beautiful. Now this is a divine act, and this pregnancy and birth impart immortality to a living being that is mortal. But it is impossible for these things to come about in the inharmonious. The ugly clashes with all that is divine, while beauty is in harmony with it. Therefore the role of the goddess of childbirth is played by beauty. And because of this, whenever something pregnant approaches the beautiful it becomes gentle and pours out gladness both in the begetting and the birth. But whenever it approaches the ugly, it shrinks into itself, sullen and upset. It turns away, is repelled, and refuses to give birth. It holds back and carries the burden of what it has inside itself with pain. In fact, within the pregnant one, who is teeming with life, there is a violent fluttering before the beautiful, through which it will be released from the great pain of childbirth which it has . . .