Anam Cara

I believe that the death of every animal and every person creates a kind of an invisible ruin in the world, and that, as the world gets older, it becomes more full with these invisible ruins of vanished presence. Emily Dickinson puts it beautifully when she says:

Absence disembodies—so does Death

hiding individuals from the Earth

It is exactly that act of hiding that causes absence. We are so vulnerable to absence because we desire presence so deeply.

PRESENCE

One of the deepest longings of the human heart is for real presence. Real presence is the goal of truth, the ideal of love and the intentionality of prayer here and in the beatific vision in the hereafter. Real presence is the heart of the incarnation and it is also the heart of the Eucharist. This is where imagination works so beautifully with the absences and emptiness of life. It always tries to find a shape of words or music or color or stone that will in some way incarnate new presence to fill the absence. I remember once in Venice, during an amazing music festival, I attended an outdoor concert in Piazza San Marco, with Stravinsky’s music and a ballet, and the moon was full and the sea was wild. There were certain moments in that concert when moon and ocean and dance and music and audience congealed into one pulse—an amazing experience of unity, and, in some strange way, a breakthrough to real presence. When we experience real presence, we break through to that which is latently in us, that is eternal, but which the normal daily round of life keeps distant from us.

ALIENATION

The social world is usually governed by a sophisticated and very intricate grammar of absence. You think of the work you do and the people you work with. You think of people who do work that you wouldn’t like, people who have to hit the one bolt every twenty seconds for a full day. There is no way that you could do that, unless, of course, you were a saint or a Zen mystic, with real intention. The only way you can do it is by somehow being in conditioned reflex and being actually absent and away elsewhere. That is what I think Karl Marx had in mind when he talked about alienation; in some sense there are certain kinds of functions which diminish and empty our own self-presence and make us absent to our own lives. To do these things continuously in this divided way brings us far away from who we are and from what we are called to do here. That is real alienation.

WELCOME ABSENCE

Of course, sometimes it is lovely to be absent from things. I am reminded of a writer who, in describing a character, said, “He has quite a good presence, but a perfectly delightful absence!” In other words, when he wasn’t around, happiness increased in some way. There’s a lovely Palestinian American poet that I like, called Naomi Shihab Nye, who has a wonderful poem called “The Art of Disappearing” that I would like to read.

When they say, “Don’t I know you?”

say “No.”

When they invite you to a party,

remember what parties are like

before answering.

Someone telling you in a loud voice

they once wrote a poem.

Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.

Then reply.

If they say, “We should get together,”

say, “Why?”

It’s not that you don’t love them anymore.

You’re trying to remember something

too important to forget.

Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.

Tell them you have a new project.

It will never be finished.

When someone recognizes you in a grocery

store,

nod briefly and become a cabbage.

When someone you haven’t seen in ten years

appears at the door,

don’t start singing him all your new songs.

You will never catch up.

Walk around feeling like a leaf.

Know you could tumble any second.

Then decide what to do with your time.

The art of disappearing certainly has its own kind of value. In a strange way, in modern society we seem to be inhabiting the world of absence more than presence through the whole world of technology and virtual reality. Very often it seems that the driven nature of contemporary society is turning us into the ultimate harvesters of absence, that is, ghosts in our own lives.

In post-modern culture, the mind is particularly homeless, haunted by a sense of absence that it can neither understand nor transfigure. Many of the traditional shelters have fallen down. Religion seems more and more, certainly in its official presentation, to speak in an idiom that is unable to converse with the modern spiritual hunger. Politics seems devoid of vision and is becoming more and more synonymous with economics. Consumerist culture worships accumulation and power, and creates, with incredible arrogance, its own hollow and gaudy hierarchies. In this country, in our admiration for the achievement and velocity of the Celtic Tiger, we are refusing to notice the paw-marks of its ravages and the unglamorous remains of its prey.

FALSE ABSENCE