Anam Cara

Some years ago I had a series of car accidents, one after another. I began to feel a darkness tightening around me. I realized that I needed to have that shell broken. I knew an old priest who was totally unconventional and deeply holy. I knelt down and he laid his frail hands on my head and blessed me in Latin. Then he put his hands under my arms and raised me up and said, “Ni tharloidh tada dhuit, anois a mhac”—“Nothing will happen to you now, son.” Immediately I felt that whatever negativity had had me in its sights had been dissuaded.

KINDNESS IS A MODE OF BLESSING

Perhaps we bless one another all the time, without even realizing it. When we show compassion or kindness to another, we are setting blessing in train. There is a way in which an act of kindness becomes an independent luminous thing, a kind of jewel box of light that might conceal itself for days or years, until one day when you are in desperate straits, you notice something on the floor at your feet, you reach for it, and you discover exactly the courage and vision for which you desperately hunger.

Perhaps this is also true of places. When you are in a certain place, great love or kindness happens; it imprints itself on the ether of the place. When we pass there, hungry and needy in spirit, that loving imprint shines on us like an icon. In folk culture one always knew where to go when sorrow darkened the heart. These places can also act like a poultice to take the poison out of the heart’s wounds. Rilke recommended that when life became turbulent and troublesome, it was wise to stay close to one simple thing in nature. A friend of mine who had great trouble with her mind told me once that she had brought a stone into her apartment, and when she felt her mind going, she would concentrate on the stone. She said, “There is a fierce sanity in stone.”

THE INNER FRIENDS OF THE HEART

It is such a privilege to have people who continue each day to bless us with their love and prayer. These inner friends of the heart confer on us inestimable gifts. In these times of greed and externality, there is such unusual beauty in having friends who practice profound faithfulness to us, praying for us each day without our ever knowing or remembering it. There are often lonesome frontiers we could never endure or cross without the inner sheltering of these friends. It is hard to live a true life that endeavors to be faithful to its own calling and not become haunted by the ghosts of negativity; therefore, it is not a luxury to have such friends; it is necessary.

I have always loved the shy beauty of country people who have quietly made their lives sacred. Their presence has the feel of unaffected authenticity. Theirs is a spirituality that draws no attention to itself; it is more beautiful than most institutional religious decorum or studied spirituality. These people have often lived through great difficulty, but their quiet and subtle lives never saw any need for brash declarations of spirit; rather they exhibited the shyness that is natural to the soul itself.

Much modern spirituality and psychology is full of loneliness. Much of it is the fruit of emptiness; it has not grown naturally from minds conversant with the eros of the earth. It lacks the rhythm and belonging of a true ecology of the heart; it has a hunger at its core that inevitably breeds narcissism and the mechanics of relentless self-observation, whereas the spirituality of country people seems always to issue from a sense of belonging to a deeper, more ultimate order. They see life as an act of creative service and the world as call to full participation. Theirs is a lifestyle infused with blessing. There are blessings for putting down the fire in the morning, blessings before and after meals, blessings for the start of work, blessings for the person who met you, blessings for the gifts a day brought, blessings of acceptance for the untoward elements that arrived, blessings for health, journeys, animals, and the dead. This weave of blessings is a constant activity of what is now called “mindfulness,” a recognition of the miracle of being here, on the constant shoreline of pure arrival. These blessings are also an acceptance of the transitory and terminal nature of all gifts that have arrived; they need not have come. It is also recognition that the spaces of home and landscape are the apertures through which divinity emerges to enfold us. The spirituality of the rural mind does not see time as routine or treadmill; time is a far more precious space where crevices open into the infinite, and where the rhythm of the eternal is felt to preside.

PERHAPS OUR FRIENDS AMONG THE DEAD ARE BLESSING US