Anam Cara

THE NOTION OF THE DIVINE PERSON ALSO GROUNDS THE DEPTH and intimacy of human affection. If you listen to your affection or attraction to someone, you can sense that there is more than the two of you there. There is also present a third force – the affection itself as a threshold where your two lives meet and engage each other. This finds primal expression in the notion of the Trinity. The affection between Son and Father is so utterly alive as to be not merely a bond but an other person, the Holy Spirit. That constant, passionate spill-over of pure affection is the Spirit. This is the Spirit of affection in which we live and move in each moment and it is at the heart of the Christian notion of God. The Holy Spirit holds the tension of God, and is both the abyss and summit of the knowing between Father and Son. The Son is the first Other in the universe. The Spirit is that secret path of affinity that holds the kinship warm even in the coldest, most negative spaces between Self and Other. What is utterly alien to you can eventually yield a glimpse of affinity with you. Between every separate thing, beneath the slow time-film that rolls forth each day and night, in the cold unknown between strangers, in the limbo land of numbed indifference and even in the vast distance between centuries and their lost memory, there exists another world, an invisible world where all this separation and distance is embraced. The Holy Spirit presides there, holding together that vast terrain of the ‘between’. It can be somewhat misleading to overemphasize the Holy Spirit. Perhaps the meaning might emerge more clearly if we occasionally referred to all that space between simply as holy Spirit. The space between seems empty to the eye; yet to the imagination it is vibrant with pathways towards beauty. Divine space has a latent grandeur. The Holy Spirit is the spirit of primal Eros, the between that is forever quickening, the source of all the gifts that turn up in our lives.

P

ROVIDENCE

F

ORE

-

BRIGHTENS

O

UR

P

ATH

Our love is

a sister of the light;

deftly, she unwinds

our shadowed nets.

THE GIFT COMES FROM THIS IN-BETWEEN WORLD THAT KNOWS and holds much of the geography of our destiny, a secret climate of profound kindness that sends us bouquets of light and colour when we experience forlorn times. The attentive wisdom of this in-between world is what we call providence. It is a foreknowing that is always at work, watching out for us. Providence is the power of latent blessing that fore-brightens our pathway. The providence that shelters and guides us knows infinitely more than we can about who we are, where we are going and what we require in order to become who we were dreamed to become. It is only when we look back that we can discern how we were being secretly minded; we discern the meaning in something that was opaque and difficult and we begin to see how it deepened our sensibility and refined our spirit. Providence shelters our hearts and blesses our lives with beauty.

Providence is another name for the kindness of God. If we could realize how wise the providence around us is, it would give us immense confidence on our journey. The irony is that we don’t need to worry. We can take a lot more risks than we realize. It is interesting to ask: what are the limits you have set for your life? Where are the lines of these limits? Why do you think you cannot go beyond them? How real are they? Did you construct these limits out of anxiety and fear? If you were to go beyond your most solidly set limits, what difference would it make to your life? What are you missing by remaining confined?

The awakening to the beauty of your creativity can totally change the way you view limits. When you see the limit not as a confining barrier but as a threshold, you are already beyond. The beauty of imagination helps you to see the limit as an invitation to venture forth and view the world and your role in it as full of beautiful possibilities. You become aware of new possibilities in how you feel, think and act. The interim, the in-between world is brisk with possibility. And possibility is the gift of creativity.

A

LL

B

EAUTY

I

S A

G

IFT

The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting.

SHAKESPEARE, Sonnet 87

MANY OF THE MOST LUMINOUS GIFTS OF OUR LIVES ARRIVE AS complete surprises. A gift is the most beautiful of intrusions. It arrives undeserved and unexpected. It comes ashore in our hearts carefully formed to fit exactly the shape of a hunger we might not even know we had. The gift comes with no price tag, no demand that puts us under an obligation. Every gift has an inner lamp that casts a new brightness over an undiscovered field of the heart. In this light we discover and bring to birth something new within us. Regardless of how carefully we examine the path of its arrival, the eyes of our mind can never unveil the true source of the gift. The gift keeps its reason secret. Some unexpected path opened in the interim world and the gift was already on its way towards us.