Anam Cara

Our age is also very functional. There are goals and purposes and programs for everything. The lovely thing about Eckhart is his absolute suspicion of the program. People got hooked on a program which became an end in itself. Our world today is haunted and obsessed by functional thinking which sees everything in terms of a process. Eckhart keeps God and the mystical way totally free of that thinking. He says that God is God and without a why: non habet quare; Ipsum est quare omnium et omnibus—He is the why of everything and to everything. A later follower of Eckhart, Angelus Silesius, wrote a beautiful short mystical poem called “Ohne Warum” (Without Why):

The rose is without why

She blooms because she blooms

She does not care for herself

Asks not if she is seen

One of the beautiful things in Eckhart is the idea of letting things be. So many people wonder what they should do, how they should work. For Eckhart, none of this matters. The most important thing to focus on is how you should be. That is really mindfulness of presence. All intimacy, love, belonging, creativity is not when the grubby little hands of our functional minds get into the mystery, but when we stand back and let the mystery be, become enveloped in it so that it extends us and deepens us.

Finally, Eckhart has the lovely idea of Gelassenheit. Gelassen is the German for “calmness.” Even when things go against you and the rhythm in your life takes you to awkward and lonely places, you can still maintain a stillness which is in your soul and will connect you and give you an inviolable belonging and togetherness. You won’t get that from a program but you can awaken it in your own heart.

For Presence

Awaken to the mystery of being here

and enter the quiet immensity of your own presence.

Have joy and peace in the temple of your senses.

Receive encouragement when new frontiers beckon.

Respond to the call of your gift and the courage to follow its path.

Let the flame of anger free you of all falsity.

May warmth of heart keep your presence aflame.

May anxiety never linger about you.

May your outer dignity mirror an inner dignity of soul.

Take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek no attention.

Be consoled in the secret symmetry of your soul.

May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven around the heart of wonder.

From To Bless the Space Between Us

LANDSCAPE

“Landscape has a soul and a presence, and landscape—living in the mode of silence—is always wrapped in seamless prayer.”

For the radio series “This Place Speaks to Me,” I invited contributors to choose a particular location that appealed to them and “enthuse” about that appeal in a location recording. They chose a range of sites—a town, a bog, a jail, a monastic ruin. John O’Donohue chose the “holy mountain” of Máméan in Connemara. Máméan has association with St. Patrick and has long been a place of pilgrimage. So it was that John and I began our pilgrimage on a misty morning in August 2000.

MÁMÉAN

On this beautiful foggy morning—the ideal landscape to see these mountains in—we are at the foot of Máméan in the middle of the Connemara mountains. There is a deep layer of cloud halfway down the mountain. The light is very mute. In certain places the morning sun is coming through the clouds, making the fog very white, and there is a stream flowing to our right, coming down the mountain. There is a great stillness. The sheep are all in their first stage of morning activity, grazing away, in their lovely Zen kind of nonchalance. We are about to ascend…

I wasn’t born here in Connemara but I have lived here a long time and I really find the landscape an incredible presence, a companion in my life. People often think of the Connemara landscape as very lonesome. I live in a little cottage down here, and in some strange way you are never lonesome here, because if you look out the window, there is the constant drama of the landscape unfolding before you in the different light that is always at play here. I have never known a landscape that is as dependent on light as the Connemara landscape. When the light is here the whole place is luminous and really alive with such subtlety of color. When the light goes, the landscape is so eerie and in the grip of gravity. I’ve always been very moved by this, and several years ago I tried to express it in a poem called “Connemara in Our Mind.”

Connemara in Our Mind

It gave us

the hungry landscapes

resting upon

the unalleviated

bog-dream,

put us out

there, where

tenderness never settled,

except for the odd nest

of grouse mutterings

in the grieving rushes,

washed our eyes

in the glories of light.

In an instant

the whole place flares

in a glaze of pools,

as if a kind sun

let a red net

sink through the bog,

reach down to a forgotten

infancy of granite,

and dredge up

a haul of colors

that play and sparkle

through the smother of bog,

pinks, yellows,

amber and orange.