Anam Cara

This canticle expresses the divine Eros of mystical love. It has all the elements of the private world of tenderness, belonging, excitement, waiting and union which a great love poem would wish to have. It is a poem about ultimate freedom, an absolute leavetaking of limited identity, an arrival at a field beyond care and worry. This is beautifully caught in the utter surprise of the image of the lilies in the last line, which echoes of course that passage where Jesus enjoins us not to worry: ‘Behold the lilies of the field; they neither spin nor weave, yet I say unto you that Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.’ Once you taste of the divine, you can never fully return to anything else. For to find and love God is an extraordinary adventure. God is the true love of the soul; in the divine embrace all Eros is transfigured.

T

HE

S

ENSUOUSNESS OF

G

OD

THE SENSUOUS IS SACRED. FOR TOO LONG IN THE CHRISTIAN tradition we have demonized the sensuous and pitted the ‘dim senses’ against the ‘majestic soul’. This turned God into an abstract ghost, aloof and untouchable; and it made the senses the gateways to sin. But the world is the body of God. Hopkins is the great poet of God’s beauty. He writes:

Glory be to God for dappled things . . .

All things counter, original, spare, strange; . . .

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

Everything can be an occasion of God. The elemental presence of the divine is everywhere: wind, water, earth and fire witness to the urgency, passion and tactility of God. From these elements God fashioned the universe. It is not that God is reduced to a force of nature or that aspects of nature become mere images of God. Nature is divine raiment; the touch and flow and force of God touches us here but the divine presence is not exhausted by this. Both sensuousness of nature and our senses make the divine presence visible in the world. Nature was the first scripture, and at the heart of Celtic spirituality is this intuition: to be out in nature is to be near God. When we begin to awaken to the beauty which is the Sensuous God, we discover the holiness of our bodies and our earth.

W

ILD

E

LEGANCE

The rose which here on earth is now perceived by me,

Has blossomed thus in God from all eternity.

ANGELUS SILESIUS

BEAUTY INVITES US TOWARDS PROFOUND ELEGANCE OF SOUL. IT reminds us that we are heirs to elegance and nobility of spirit and encourages us to awaken the divinity within us. We are no longer trapped in mental frames of self-reduction or self-denunciation. Instead, we feel the desire to celebrate, to give ourselves over to the dance of joy and delight. The overwhelming beauty which is God pervades the texture of our soul, transforming all smallness, limitation and self-division. The mystics speak of the excitement of such unity. This is how Marguerite Porete describes it: ‘Such a Soul, says Love, swims in the sea of joy, that is in the sea of delights, flowing and running out of the Divinity. And so she feels no joy, for she is joy itself. She swims and flows in Joy . . . for she dwells in Joy and Joy dwells in her.’ Because the nature of the heart is desire for beauty, to discover that it is so ardently desired by the one it desires brings overpowering joy.

The Christian tradition, loaded down with heavy institutional and moralistic accretions, has forgotten and neglected the Beautiful Dance that God is. The Sufi tradition has remained faithful to the wild elegance of the divine through its dancing dervishes. In the Hindu tradition, the Gods also dance.

When we acknowledge the wild beauty of God, we begin to glimpse the potential holiness of our neglected wildness. As humans, citizens and believers, we have become domesticated beyond belief. We have fallen out of rhythm with our natural wildness. What we now call ‘being wild’ is often misshapen, destructive and violent. The natural wildness as the fluency of the soul at one with beauty is foreign to us. The call of the wild is a call to the elemental levels of the soul, the places of intuition, kinship, swiftness, fluency and the consolation of the lonesome that is not lonely. Our fear of our own wildness derives in part from our fear of the formless; but the wild is not the formless – it holds immense refinement and, indeed, clarity. The wild has a profound simplicity that carries none of the false burdens of brokenness or self-conflict; it flows naturally as one, elegant and seamless.

D

IGNITY AND

D

IVINE

C

OURTESY