Anam Cara

Imagination is one of the closest presences in the whole family of wonder. In a way, imagination is a quality of all these different presences, and imagination is the threshold at which they begin to emerge. Imagination never pretends to know it all. It never demands or claims an absolute standpoint, but it always relishes and celebrates the fact it is on the threshold where it cannot see everything. The kind of knowing that is in imagination is knowing through exploration. It is not predetermined concepts or ideas. I think that every person, particularly the child, has incredible imagination. When you think of the way that each of us came into the world, we were actually for the first several years of our lives absolute practitioners—every little girl and little boy was a priestess and priest of the imagination. They completely participated in the world through the power of imagination. Imagination is also very, very compassionate. It will never take one side of a polarity or a contradiction, but it will try to weave both together and to embrace them. When you look at the fact that a human always inhabits a threshold, then you see the power of imagination. Each person is always on the threshold between their inner world and their outer world, between light and darkness, between known and unknown, between question and quest, between fact and possibility. This threshold runs through every experience that we have, and our only real guide to this world is the imagination. One of the lovely things a person can do for another person is to awaken the power and sacrament of their imagination, because when you awaken someone’s imagination, you are giving them a new kingdom, a new world. William Blake said that Christ is the imagination, which I think is one of the most beautiful theological statements I have ever heard. If you look at the place of Christ, the Son of God, and the whole story of the creation, he was the first “other” that ever was, and I believe, therefore, the prism of all difference that is. Imagination in the Blakeian sense is about the awakening to and the recognition of the sacredness of all the difference that is. Where the imagination is alive, wonder is completely alive. Where the imagination is alive, possibility is awake because imagination is the great friend of possibility. Possibilities are always more interesting than facts. We shouldn’t frown on facts, but our world is congested with them. Facts are retarded possibilities, they are possibilities that have already been actualized. But for every fact that becomes a fact, there are seven, eight, maybe five hundred possibilities hanging around in the background that didn’t make it into the place where they could be elected and realized as the actual fact. It is very interesting to look at what you consider real and to think that it is always peopled by a background presence of unrealized possibilities. That is one of the fascinating things in going through the world—you wonder at destiny, at the way that your life actually flows and moves and grows. I have a great suspicion of an awful lot of what is paraded as moral decision and moral rectitude and moral recognition. I think there is a beautiful morality of possibility to be written, because placing all the emphasis on moral choice is very limiting. Choice is always about loss: you choose one thing over the other several things. And maybe the soul doesn’t want to do that. It is a very interesting question: whether in the course of your life, you had to choose one direction, if in actual fact, unknown to you in the invisible area of your life, in the unknown area of your life, your other unchosen lives might not actually travel with you as well. Maybe one of the great surprises we will get in the wonder moment of after-death is that when we wake up and straighten up in that new kingdom, we will find that all our unchosen and unlived lives are there to welcome us as well.

LANDSCAPE

Humans have tamed landscape. They have floors, which make the ground level. There are roads and streets which make it easy to walk on. In a way, when humans are in the land, they are always on their way to somewhere else, whereas the ultimate faithfulness in life is the faithfulness of landscape. Landscape is always there. It has a Zen-like stillness to it, and when you come back after ten years or forty years, you’ll always find it in the same place. That is captured in the old Irish seanfhocal, which says, Castar na daoine ar a chéile, ach ní chastar na sléibhte ar a chéile—people meet, but the mountains never actually meet.