Anam Cara

Sometimes the urgency of our hunger blinds us to the fact that we are already at the feast. To accept this can change everything: we are always home, never exiled. Although our minds constantly insist on seeing walls of separation, in reality most of the walls are mere veils. In every moment, everywhere, we are not even inches away from the divine presence.

Spirituality has to do with the transfiguration of distance, to come near to ourselves, to beauty and to God. At the heart of spirituality is the awakening of real presence. You cannot produce or force presence. When you are truly present, you are there as you are: image and pretension are left aside. Real presence is natural. Perhaps the secret of spiritual integrity has to do with an act of acceptance, namely, a recognition that you are always already within the divine embrace.

Rather than trying to set out like some isolated cosmonaut in search of God, maybe the secret is to let God find you. Instead of endeavouring to reach out in order to first find God, you realize you are now within the matrix and the adventure is the discovering of utterly new and unspoken dimensions of the inexhaustible divine; this brings with it a new sense of ease with your self and your solitude. John Keats wrote rapturously about this: ‘Though the most beautiful Creature were waiting for me at the end of a Journey or a Walk, though the carpet were of Silk, the Curtains of the morning clouds; the chairs and Sofa stuffed with Cygnet’s down, I should not feel – or rather Happiness would not be so fine as my Solitude is sublime. Then instead of what I have described, there is sublimity to welcome me home’ (Letter to G. and G. Keats, Oct. 1818).

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RACE

Treat Things Poetically.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

GRACE IS ONE OF THE MOST MAJESTIC WORDS IN THEOLOGY. IT suggests the sublime spontaneity of the divine which no theory or category could ever capture. Grace has its own elegance. It is above the mechanics of agenda or operation. No-one can set limits to the flow of grace. Its presence and force remain unmeasurable and unpredictable. Grace also suggests how fluent and seamless the divine presence is. There are no compartments, corners or breakages imaginable in the flow of grace. Grace is the permanent climate of divine kindness. It suggests a compassion and understanding for all the ambivalent and contradictory dimensions of the human experience and pain. This climate of kindness nurtures the sore landscape of the human heart and urges torn ground to heal and become fecund. Grace is the perennial infusion of springtime into the winter of bleakness.

Divine grace works without a programme; it does not labour under the leaden intention of a pre-existent, fixed plan. Meister Eckhart states: ‘God has no why, but is the why of everything and to everything’: deus non habet quare sed ipsum est quare omnium et omnibus. This is a subversive and liberating statement. It liberates God from entanglement in the mesh of our needs, speculations and moralistic agenda. This quality of the divine presence should be highlighted especially in a digital culture dominated by the mechanics of function. The claim ‘God has no why’ makes a wonderful clearance in a culture where most objects and modes of presence are either expression or functions of something else. In our times it is quite exceptional for a thing simply to be itself. The same is true of people. A slick politics of presentation and deliberateness now dominates most forms of presence and it is actually quite disarming to hear someone speak from their heart with no eye to the best camera angle. Such direct immediacy seems almost innocent and unsophisticated, yet it is so refreshing and real.

A God without a why is a God who is lyrical and full of grace, a God who has no other intention than simply ‘to be’. To learn that art of being is to become free of the burden of strategy, purpose and self-consciousness. God dwells totally in fluency of presence.

A large amount of human seriousness constructs itself around the question why? Answering this question often brings us into the labyrinth of psychological motivation, judgement, adulation or blame. A God without a ‘why’ sounds delightfully light and light-hearted, a God of humour without all the mental armour of deliberateness, caginess or expectation. There is that famous phrase in Exodus in response to the query of who God might be. God replies: ‘I am who am.’ The ‘I-am-ness’ of God is everything in God. Without a why God is never a self-target of Descartes’s ultra-self-conscious: ‘I think, therefore, I am’. The ‘I-am-ness’ is its own witness and vindication.

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NCONCEIVABLE

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NTIMATE

God created us for the limitless alone.

MARSILIO FICINO