Anam Cara

EACH HEART HOLDS A DIFFERENT WORLD AND OFTEN ITS NET OF desires is entangled and confused. At other times, things clarify and the God of beauty makes everything luminous. Most of the time, however, God remains a question. And within its private silence, each heart follows the question across landscapes no-one else sees.

From the earliest religions onwards the divine has been imaged in terms of mythic or ancestral stories. It is interesting here that the divine is never seen as a purely abstract force, like energy for instance. The divine is always portrayed with human qualities naturally writ large on an epic scale. Greek mythology is a wonder-world of epic portraits. The Gods combine power and personality as they stretch within the chains of necessity. The transition then to philosophical reflection considers God as abstract. As Christianity awakens out of Judaism, it emerges into a vibrant world of imaginative thought that inherits both traditions and somehow manages to think them together. Indeed, this concept of God is one of the finest achievements of Christian thought. Over centuries, in conversation with the greatest minds of medieval and classical antiquity, Christian thought developed a notion of God as person and stayed faithful to both mythological and philosophical thinking. God is not an invisible, anonymous abstract force. Poetry and philosophy are one here.

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THE SENSE OF GOD AS A PERSON HAS DIMINISHED CONSIDERABLY IN the Western Christian tradition. New Age spirituality, fundamentalism and mainstream religions all speak of God as a force; either a soft benevolent force, a hard force or a moral force. And yet, perhaps, the sense of divine intimacy and warmth, the sense of divine imagination and the suggestion of the numinous depths of God then become empty. God could become a nameless, bland energy. The beauty of the notion of person is the way it gathers the horizontal and the vertical into one form or centre. This is the way we picture the infinite. It ranges from the deepest depths to the highest summit and it extends on every side, endlessly. When we imagine God as person, it gives all this infinity personality, warmth and intimacy. The cosmos seems no longer anonymous or echoless. The Christian tradition has been very careful to nuance the concept of person in relation to God. When we acknowledge God as person, we sense an actual someone to whom we can relate. Given that one of the most beautiful things about being human is the ability to encounter another person, it is natural that we should want that experience with the deepest source of everything also to be intimate and personal. The notion of an infinite person who is pure love means we are using the term ‘person’ in a transfigured sense; there is no control or despotic power here, rather a sublime quickening of our every potential for passion, creativity, compassion and freedom.

Our exploration of beauty has considered many of the forms in which beauty appears. These forms included places, things, events and experiences. However, when we speak of God as beauty, we are speaking of the beauty of who-ness. The who question is the most numinous and mysterious of questions. The self is unlike any other thing in the world: though it appears in time and space, it is beyond them. The who-ness of someone can never be finally named, known, claimed, controlled or predicted. The who is beyond all frames and frontiers and dwells in the mystery of its own reflexivity and infinity. Who has no map. When we claim that God is beauty, we are claiming for beauty all the adventure, mystery, infinity and autonomy of divine who-ness. Beauty is the inconceivable made so intimate that it illuminates our hearts.

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