Anam Cara

What is the source of the light that banishes our fear? I read a lovely sentence in a Hindu book years ago which said, consciousness always shines with the light from beyond itself. One of my images of the divine is that it is light in some form, and that the divine light works very tenderly with human freedom. If you don’t believe that the light is there, you will experience the darkness. But if you believe the light is there, and if you call the light towards you, and if you call it into whatever you’re involved in, the light will never fail you. I often think that what the heart of the Christian mystery, the Resurrection, means is that at the heart of darkness—to use Joseph Conrad’s phrase—there isn’t darkness but the eternal candle. In Connemara, the seandaoine used to say when somebody died, Tá a choinneal múchta, his candle is quenched. I asked an old man one day why he would say that, and he said, I often heard as a small lad that when you’re born, there’s a candle lit for you in the eternal world, and the length of your life is the length of the candle! Thought, creative thought particularly, is about quarrying for or liberating light. There is light inside in everything that happens to you.

One of the really sad things is when people get involved in situations in their relationships where it becomes totally destructive, and where they fix on each other on the mutual points of gravity and poverty. It is so hard for them to believe that hidden in the heart of this poverty, there is light. Much of our impoverishment derives precisely and directly from a failure of imagination, because there is some very tenuous and very special linkage between expectation and gift. If you do expect something with reverence and compassion, it will come towards you and be given to you. The proof of that is, people who have been through hell on this earth, and it still somehow hasn’t tarnished or dulled their essence. Within the awfulness that was happening to them, they were somehow given the grace to find the buried light and it minded them. As it is said in the Bible, “Not a hair on your head will be harmed.” I think of that lovely phrase “Do not be afraid”; it is repeated 366 times in the Bible. That is once for every day and, as somebody said, once for no reason at all!

SHELTER

There is a special shelter around every person. One of the things that all children should be taught when they are growing up is that there is a shelter around them, but that they won’t feel the shelter if they don’t expect it and if they don’t know that it is there. That shelter is the shelter of your soul, it is the shelter of your God and it is the shelter of your angel. I know that angels are back in fashion now, and a lot of the thinking about angels is very soft thinking. I feel that there is given to each of us an angel’s spirit to shelter and protect us and mind us. If you don’t think that spirit is beside you, then you may never feel its presence, but if you do begin to tune into it and become aware of it, you will be astounded at the gentleness, the encouragement and the inspiration that your angel will bring you. There is some beautiful work done by an American psychologist called David Miller on the whole idea of angels and inspiration. One of the great places of wonder is inspiration. The lovely thing about the concept of wonder is that it completely escapes the grid of control and predictability. It seems to witness to another sense of sourcing which cannot be programmed, which can be expected and which is always received with surprise. One of the lovely things about Anglo-Saxon linguistic philosophy is that it has made us aware of the fact that we shouldn’t approach the essence of a thing by trying to get a hard definition of it. We should try more to gather the family of concepts or ideas which belong to a reality. If you look at the concept of wonder, you have presences like surprise, expectation, celebration, inspiration, unpredictability, participation, mystery. There is a wonderful German philosopher called Hans-Georg Gadamer who said in his book Truth and Method that a horizon is something towards which we move but it is also something that moves along with us. One nice metaphor of human growth would be that you could be always moving to a new horizon, not abandoning the former ones, but in the graciousness of memory’s loyalty actually bringing them along with you so that you are coming to new places all the time. One of the lovely things about wonder is that it is also the sister of novelty and newness and freshness.

IMAGINATION