Anam Cara

COURTESY IS THE UNACKNOWLEDGED HEART OF CIVILITY; IT IS A disposition towards others which is graceful, polite, kind and considerate. Courtesy also includes some sense of old-world formality; it is the opposite of coarseness and self-presuming familiarity. Courtesy invites dignity. Dignity is one of the most beautiful qualities in presence. The true style of the soul is dignity. Where dignity prevails, there is an atmosphere of confidence, poise and sureness. A person of dignity is aligned with the beauty within; this is why dignity is unassailable from without. Dignity does not intrude or force itself. God gives us life and the world in each moment; he gave us these gifts with the other precious gift, the gift of freedom. Divine courtesy gives graciously and never intrudes on the dignity of our freedom. The most precious and personal gifts of our lives arrive with no divine signature or code of instructions. In that sublime space where God holds us, a space of infinite graciousness where we are cherished and loved, there the soul comes to bathe in the stream of mercy! This is at the heart of George Herbert’s poem ‘Love’:

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,

Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack

From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,

If I lack’d any thing.

Gracious love absolves the guest of all feelings of unworthiness and unease. There is so much to be learned of Divine Beauty from the silence of God.

I

NTO

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EAUTIFUL

D

ANGER

WHILE BEAUTY USUALLY QUICKENS OUR SENSES, AWAKENS OUR delight and invites wonder, there are occasions when the force of beauty is disturbing and even frightening. Beauty can arrive in such a clear and absolute sweep that it throws the heart sideways. It takes over completely and we are overwhelmed, unsure what to do or how to be in the presence of this radiance. The authority of such beauty unnerves us for a while. This is of course an exceptional experience of beauty, yet it befalls everyone at some time. It could be the beauty of a person, the beauty of nature, music, painting, poetry or the unseen beauty of kindness, compassion, love or revelation. For a while we are caught up in the majestic otherness of beauty. It is an experience in which the sheer eternal force of the soul strains the mortal frame; the natural gravity of the body no longer grounds one. This causes unease and yet the unease is still somehow delightful. Perhaps this is what Rilke was thinking of in the first Duino Elegy:

And if I cried, who’d listen to me in those angelic

Orders? Even if one of them suddenly held me

To his heart, I’d vanish in his overwhelming

Presence. ‘Because beauty’s nothing

But the start of terror we can hardly bear,

And we adore it because of the serene scorn

It could kill us with. Every angel’s terrifying.’

In the face of such beauty our bodies feel paper thin; this beauty could undo us. Eventually, time comes to our rescue and its pedestrian sequence calms us again.

Beauty manifests God. However, beyond what becomes manifest is the realm of God which is primal beauty. This is the splendour of divine Otherness which the human mind cannot even begin to imagine. We would dissolve in the light of that beauty. The sublime loveliness of the divine form would unravel every texture, every cell of our being. Out of this unknown, unknowable source flow the forms of everything that is. This primal beauty is suggested by the image of the beatific vision where the soul and God become the one gaze. To enter this pure presence is the dream and desire of the contemplative heart.

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HE

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ONTEMPLATIVE

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IFE

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C

REATING A

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PACE TO

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ECEIVE

D

IVINE

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EAUTY

THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE IS TOO DANGEROUS AND SEVERE TO remain a gratifying project of the ego. It would be the utmost psychic recklessness to venture where, indeed, angels fear to tread. Only the secret grace of destiny brings one through such a life. It is easy and even delightful to speak about God from a safe distance, and in fact most public and social discourse about God is little more than loose talk. It may be well intentioned, but it is a language dictated by the grammar of surface or spiritual correctness. The contemplative speaks from a different place. The words taste of fire. They are pilgrim words. Of all journeys this is the ultimate journey. There is nothing else but God and there is no cheap consolation or easy entry to the banquet. The doorway is narrow and often located in the most unattractive setting. The texts of the contemplatives are alive with danger and possibility. They are not theories but a visceral straining to suggest what the touch of God is like. There is intense fire in the contemplative imagination. This is where fresh revelation is forged. In the play St Joan, by George Bernard Shaw, Joan tells her inquisitor that she hears voices that come from God. The inquisitor says, ‘They come from your imagination.’ Joan answers, ‘Of course, that is how the messages of God come to us.’