Anam Cara

When God’s voice whispers tenderness into that inner desert of thirst, the effect is ecstasy. The heart has been cleansed of everything that might distract from preparation for the guest; its longings have been woven into one strand. The truly contemplative heart has a passion and wildness that can celebrate the magic of God. Yet it knows that this is but a passing visitation and it has learned to distinguish emotion and presence. The contemplative heart also learns to love emptiness and absence because it believes that the beauty of God can only be glimpsed through the most severe lens of truth. The aesthetic of the contemplative heart insists on the ultimate conversation between beauty and truth. Only at the extremity of barest truth will the radical beauty of God become audible and visible. The ascetical life dreams of awakening beauty. When you are in the presence of a contemplative person, you can sense this. An atmosphere of stillness and a sense of clarity remind you who you are and recall your heart to the gentle wonder of the divine. There is subtle and refined beauty bequeathed by a life of prayer.

The contemplative is one who is drawn into the subversive gentleness of the divine presence. She knows that gentleness can be a greater force for transfiguration than any political, economic or media power; indeed, as we have seen, this gentleness can even transfigure death. And yet contemplative knowing is neither naïve nor strategic. In silence and solitude the contemplative has learned the mysteries of the heart’s fragility, smallness and darkness. Yet the contemplative is not content to engage her life with the tools and explanations of psychology. She has come to sense that the inner world goes deep, indeed deeper than the wounds and breakages that others inflict. The contemplative has broken through to that sanctuary in the soul where love dwells. Crucial to this contemplative journey is the trust and imagination to realize that regardless of how you have been damaged, there is within you a sanctuary of deep love, trust and belonging. This is the ancient dream, the masterpiece of divine creativity: the creation of the human heart. Before time – back in the winter of Nothingness and then all through the infinite springtime of evolution – the dream was the birth of an intimate well of kindness, care and love in the world, dwelling in the tabernacle of the human heart.

W

HERE

P

ERPETUAL

L

IGHT

A

WAITS THE

G

AZE OF THE

S

OUL

NO-ONE WAS SENT INTO THE WORLD WITHOUT BEING GIVEN THE infinite possibilities of the heart. It is sad that so many of us go through our lives without ever seeming to discover the depth and beauty of the heart. Most of us have only an inkling of who we are. We believe so easily the negativities we have been told and think that our lives are merely endurance tests or holding places for wounds that will weep for ever. Then there are always the wonderful surprises. For instance, we meet someone who has never had a chance in life and hard luck and brutality seem to have been their constant companions, yet in some way they secretly broke through to that inner sanctuary. Though awful suffering came to them, it never touched their essence. We sense in them a profound tranquillity and gentleness. It is as if the imagination has opened that inner door to the eternal treasures. Once we begin to glimpse who we really are, many lonesome burdens and false images fall away; our feet find new freedom on the pastures of possibility.

The contemplative uses experience as a theatre of divine nearness and companionship. It is ironic sometimes how naïvely we tend to write off the contemplative life as a domain of self-protected cosiness and uncritical belief when in truth the contemplative life is a calling to the most vulnerable and critical openness. There are times of huge aridity, sheer emotional endurance and a sense of the loss of God that is equal to the emptiness experienced in the most thorough atheism. When we look at religious people we often find the image over-predictable and imagine their minds to be tame and domesticated. Yet often behind that façade there dwells critical sensibility of the most refined rigour which endeavours to be completely vigilant and allow neither fear nor illusion to blur the mirror of Being. As Ibn Arabi says, ‘His appearance in his light is so intense that it overpowers our perception, so that we call his manifestation a veil.’ The contemplative is one who risks the eyes of her mind for the moment when the veil slips aside and the perpetual light shines through.

B

EYOND

I

MAGES

: T

HE

U

NRIPPLED

P

RESENCE