Anam Cara

THE CONTEMPLATIVE SENSIBILITY WANTS TO REACH BEYOND images and forms to dwell in the pure, unrippled presence of God. The tools of the contemplative are the finesse and rigour of stillness and silence. This is also the language of death: stillness and silence. In the midst of life, the contemplative chooses to dwell with death, to dare this primal companionship. The contemplative is the artist of the eternal: the one who listens patiently in the abyss of Nothingness for the whisper of beauty.

It would be naïve to restrict the domain of the contemplative exclusively to those who live in cloisters. To a greater or lesser degree every human heart is contemplative. In a small town near us there was a lovely writer and musician who lived a rather bohemian life; he was given sometimes to the drink but he had a beautiful, awakened mind. He was a kind of ‘undercover mystic’ and many people, especially young people, came to talk to him when they felt their minds troubling them. He was well aware of how lonesome and disturbing this could be. I once asked him how he had managed to live alone on that edge. He said: ‘I was a very young man when I first felt the burn of that old mystical flame within me. I realized immediately what an adventure and danger it would be and that there was no going back. On that day I made a bargain with myself, the bargain was: no matter what came I would always remain best friends with myself. I am old now but I never broke that bargain.’

O

N THE

F

RONTIER OF

B

EAUTY

:

T

O

R

EFINE

Y

OUR

C

ONTEMPLATIVE

H

EART

For beauty is the cause of harmony, of sympathy, of community.

Beauty unites all things and is the source of all things. It is the

great creating cause which bestirs the world and holds all

things in existence by the longing inside them to have beauty.

And there it is ahead of all as . . . the Beloved . . . toward which

all things move, since it is the longing for beauty which actually

brings them into being.

PSEUDO – DIONYSIUS, The Divine Names

PLACED WITHIN THE FRAME OF A UNIQUE AND DIFFERENT DESTINY each one of us is troubled by the ultimate questions. No-one else’s answer can satisfy the hunger in your heart. The beauty of the great questions is how they dwell differently in each mind. How they root deeper than all the surface chatter and image, how they continually disturb. Your deep questions grow quickly restless in the artificial clay of received opinion or stagnant thought. If you avoid that disturbance and try to quell these questions, it will cost you peace of mind. Sooner or later each one of us must succumb to our contemplative longing and gain either the courage or recklessness to begin our contemplative journey. The explicit religious contemplatives offer us inestimable shelter and guidance on this path. They have garnered the wisdom from a long tradition committed to nothing else but the pursuit of these questions. From some of their adventures they have brought back reports of those numinous territories and attempted to bring their kinetic geographies to word. The tradition has always cautioned against undertaking that journey alone. As on a climb in the Himalayas a guide or sherpa is recommended, when one is setting out, there is a lot to be learned from those who have gone before us. Those who publicly and committedly undertake the journey provide some signposts for those of us who are implicitly or secretly drawn in these directions.

In general, in a society there is an encouraging and creative tension between the explicit and the implicit. Those who are willing to stand out and take the risk of following their gift place a mirror to our unawakened gifts. To know they are there, day in day out, at the frontiers of their own limitation and vision, probing further into new possibility, enduring at lonely thresholds in the hope of discovery, to know they are willing to risk everything is both disturbing and comforting. The presence of the contemplative and the artist in a culture is ultimately an invitation to awaken and engage one’s neglected gifts, to enter more fully into the dream of the eternal that has brought us here to earth.