Anam Cara

Sometimes it is difficult to know when you are getting a gift. Its arrival is often a shock; at the beginning it might seem to be the furthest thing from a gift that you could imagine. Looking from now, we cannot glimpse the shape of our destiny; its subtle weave only comes to light in retrospect. There is so much about ourselves that we do not know. After Freud’s descriptions of the subconscious, we tend to imagine that the subconscious holds all kinds of misshapen forms. We forget that the darkness of the unknown within us is also a fecund soil urgent with seeds of new possibility. The beauty of the gift is the secret way it awakens us to growth. Without alerting our anxiety or forcing confrontation, the gift has placed us on the path of change almost before we realize it. And much of the change in our lives happens through struggle and pain. We are confronted with an unattractive direction that we have to take. For weeks or months we have to travel through limbo; the comfort and security of our familiar belonging lies far behind us. Where we will belong next has not yet become clear. The days become a struggle of endurance. Yet when the light and the ease return, we recognize the change that has been achieved. The gift bequeaths change in a completely different way. Quietly it undoes the knots of false netting that had us entangled and before we have time to realize what has happened, we find ourselves released into a new fluency. Like a parent to the soul, the gift carries us carefully over torn ground until our feet stand free in a serene place where we can recognize that we have been blessed.

Every life is blessed with a different sequence of gifts. Often the gift arrives secretly and you only find it later. Or perhaps you are looking back over time as you would look through an old drawer and you come upon something that you had put away ages ago. You rediscover the gift and enter again into its wonder. This is one of the lovely capacities of memory: the reawakening of new blessing through the rediscovery of old gifts in forgotten corners. It is this prospect that animates faith.

F

AITH

: T

HE

A

TTRACTION TO

D

IVINE

B

EAUTY

Fornocht do chonac thú

a áille na háille

Naked have I seen thee

O Beauty of Beauty

PATRICK PEARSE

FAITH IS ATTRACTION TO THE DIVINE. FOR TOO LONG FAITH HAS been presented as a weak form of knowledge. Yet whilst faith seems feeble in the realm of evidence and proof, beauty always attracts us. It strikes our sensibility in a way that makes us respond. Our response to beauty is unlaboured. Even in unknown ways, our lives are charged with attraction towards divine beauty. The infinity of the beauty which is God is a feast for the soul. The beauty of God increases and deepens our own beauty. We enter the secret symmetry of the Divine Imagination.

When we consider faith as a response to Divine Beauty, we begin to glimpse its creativity and passion. Faith is no blind piety but a primal attraction, the deepest resonance of the self drawn to the elegance of its ancient origin. Faith has its own aesthetic of dignity, light and proportion. Something in us senses and knows how perfectly the contours of the soul fit the divine embrace. It is the deepest dream of the soul to be in the intimacy of Divine Beauty. At that depth an atmosphere of elegance presides. Such a profound attraction turns the body into a force-field of divine quickening. The whole self is taken up in the embrace of the divine tenderness. The classic image for this encounter of God and the soul is that of the Lover and the Beloved. It is majestically expressed in the Canticle of St John of the Cross:

Upon a gloomy night

With all my cares to loving ardours flushed,

O venture of delight!

With nobody in sight

I went abroad when all my house was hushed.

In safety, in disguise,

In darkness up the secret stair I crept,

O happy enterprise!

Concealed from my eyes

When all my house at length in silence slept.

Upon that lucky night

In secrecy, inscrutable to sight,

I went without discerning

And with no other light

Except for that which in my heart was burning.

It lit and led me through

More certain than the light of noonday clear

To where One waited near

Whose presence well I knew,

There where no other presence might appear.

Oh night that was my guide!

Oh darkness dearer than the morning’s pride,

Oh night that joined the lover

To the beloved bride

Transfiguring them each into the other.

Within my flowering breast

Which only for himself entire I save

He sank into his rest

And all my gifts I gave

Lulled by the airs with which the cedars wave.

Over the ramparts fanned

While the fresh wind was fluttering his tresses,

With his serenest hand

My neck he wounded, and

Suspended every sense with its caresses.

Lost to myself I stayed

My face upon my lover having laid

From all endeavour ceasing:

And all my cares releasing

Threw them amongst the lilies there to fade.

(translated by Roy Campbell)