Anam Cara

Beauty is the goddess of birth. In her presence the passion and inner fullness of the gift flows forth in confidence and sureness. And it is through love that we reach a deeper perception of the true nature of beauty. In the Phaedrus, Plato has that remarkable passage where he describes how the soul awakens in the presence of beauty and recovers and grows her eternal wings; gravity and finitude can no longer contain her. According to Plato beauty encourages and invites creativity to unfold. When the soul reaches beyond all fragmentation and entanglement God will come to birth in it. Meister Eckhart says that it is of little consequence whether God exists or became incarnate if he does not come to birth in the soul.

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HEN THE

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IGHT OF

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OUR

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EGLECTED

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EAUTY

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HINES

What my God’s form may be, yourself you should perceive,

Who views himself in God gazes at God indeed.

ANGELUS SILESIUS

EVERYTHING THAT IS, IS IN GOD. THERE IS NOTHING OUTSIDE GOD. In some haunted yet tender way, God is also the most intimate dimension of every human mind and, in a sense, the most natural thing in the world is God. There is no distance or barrier between us and God. When there are barriers creating distance between us, they are our barriers, not God’s. God is like a light within the heart that nothing can extinguish. We can never lose God because God is twinned eternally to the soul. Once we awaken to the beauty which is God, there is a great sense of homecoming. The mercy of God is subversive affection that sees through our weakness until it illuminates again the reflection of beauty which is our essence. Regardless of who we are or what we have done, we never lose our dignity before God’s eyes. When the gaze of God falls on us, the light of our neglected beauty shines through the mirror of soul.

The beauty of God is the warmth of the divine affection. You did not invent yourself or bring yourself here. In terms of human time, the mystery of your individuality was dreamed for millions of years. Your strange and restless uniqueness is an intimate expression of God and who you are says something of who God is. You cannot divest yourself of your immortal clothing. The two longings deepest in your heart – the longing to love and to be loved – are not merely psychological needs; at a more profound level, they are the stirring of God within you. Your capacity to care is God; it is your beauty. Therefore, divine closeness is the secret of human vulnerability. We are not vulnerable simply because we are childlike adults in an imperfect world. We are vulnerable because we carry in us a deep strain of God’s caring. Our love for our friends and family, our concern for the world and for the earth, our compassion for the pain and desperation of others are not simply the product of an ‘unselfish gene’ within us, they issue from that strain of God in us that prizes above everything the kindness, the compassion and the beauty that love brings. Anywhere: in prayer, family, front line, hospital, brothel or prison, anywhere care comes alive, God is present.

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E

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RE

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LREADY AT THE

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EAST

   For his bounty,

There was no winter in ’t, an autumn ’twas

That grew the more by reaping.

SHAKESPEARE, Antony and Cleopatra

TO PARTICIPATE IN BEAUTY IS TO COME INTO THE PRESENCE OF the Holy. It is we who exile ourselves from God. Everything we feel, think and do is already happening within the divine shelter. To know this is to know one’s real beauty.

Though the human mind is intense with difference and variety it is shadowed by divisions and imbalance. God is pure verb, a permanent event, an eternal surge, a total quickening. Beauty’s diversity only deepens the flow of God’s presence; nothing is held back. This sense of lyrical presence is expressed vividly by the sixteenth-century mystical poet Angelus Silesius. He put many of Meister Eckhart’s insights into poetic form. His little poem ‘The Rose’ captures the grace and simplicity of pure presence and integrity:

The Rose is without why

She blooms because she blooms

She does not care for herself

Asks not if she is seen.

The poem is also a huge vindication of identity, the freedom and clarity of simply being yourself. Nothing else is needed. It is a poem of profound trust in the act of being. This makes for a pure clearance. There is no outside intrusion, no pressure to measure up to outside expectations. Nor is there any sense of inner division. The rose is content to be a rose: she is what she is. At another level the poem can be read as a hymn to the freedom of nature, how it avoids the oppressive clutter of intentionality and concept. And the rose is flourishing; she is at one with herself in the grace of growth. Nature as a whole performs for no man. How vastly different this is to the way we live our lives.