Anam Cara

And finally, to come on to one of the great absences from the world, which everyone complains about, and that is the absence of God. Particularly in our century, with the Holocaust and the world wars, Yugoslavia and all the rest of it, there’s a great cry out against the absence of God. In the eighteenth century, Hegel said God was dead, and then in the nineteenth century, Nietzsche took that up; it is an old question. In the classical tradition, theologians were aware of the absence of God as well. There was the notion of the Deus absconditus, the absconded or vanished God. One of the points of absolute subversive realism of the Christian story is that Christ came out of the safety of the sky and stood in Calvary against the absolute silence of God and carried the suffering of the world. The Crucifixion is that bleak place where no certainty can ever settle, and the realism of that is incredibly truthful to the depth and power of absence that suffering and pain and oppression bring to the world. And that is what the Eucharist is about; in the Eucharist you have the most amazing symphony of complete presence based on the ultimate absence and the ultimate kind of emptiness. It is fascinating, too, that sometimes absence creates new possibility. When the carpenter rose from the dead, they wanted him to stay around, and he said no, that he must go, in order to let the Spirit come. So sometimes that which is absent allows something new to emerge.

DEATH

The final absence I want to deal with is the absence that none of us will be finally able to avoid—your own absence from the earth, and that will happen to us in death. Death is the ultimate absence. Part of the sadness of contemporary society that has lost its mystical and mythological webbing is that we can no longer converse with the dead, and we are no longer aware of them. The dead are notoriously absent from us. I think that you can characterize your life in different ways. One of the ways is the time before someone that is close to you dies, and the time afterwards. That happened for me when my uncle died. I would like to read this poem, called “November Questions,” where I tried to trawl the vacancy of his absence for some little glimpse or signal of who he was now, or where he was.

November Questions

Where did you go

when your eyes closed

and you were cloaked

in the ancient cold?

How did we seem,

huddled around

the hospital bed?

Did we loom as

figures do in dream?

As your skin drained,

became vellum,

a splinter of whitethorn

from your battle with a bush

in the Seangharraí

stood out in your thumb.

Did your new feet

take you beyond

to fields of Elysia

or did you come back

along Caherbeanna mountain

where every rock

knows your step?

Did you have to go

to a place unknown?

Were there friendly faces

to welcome you,

help you settle in?

Did you recognize anyone?

Did it take long

to lose

the web of scent,

the honey smell of old hay,

the whiff of wild mint

and the wet odor of the earth

you turned every spring?

Did sounds become

unlinked,

the bellow of cows

let into fresh winterage

the purr of a stray breeze

over the Coillín,

the ring of the galvanized bucket

that fed the hens,

the clink of limestone

loose over a scailp

in the Ciorcán?

Did you miss

the delight of your gaze

at the end of a day’s work

over a black garden,

a new wall

or a field cleared of rock?

Have you someone there

that you can talk to,

someone who is drawn

to the life you carry?

With your new eyes

can you see from within?

Is it we who seem

outside?

From Echoes of Memory

There is one force that pervades both presence and absence, cannot be located particularly anywhere, and can be subtracted from nowhere, and that force is spirit. We talk of absence and space, and absence and time, but we can never talk about the absence of spirit, because spirit, by nature and definition, can never be absent. So, all space is spiritual space, and in spiritual space there is no real distance. And this raises the question I would like to end with—a fascinating question: while we are here in the world, where is it that we are absent from?

For Absence

May you know that absence is alive within hidden

presence, that nothing is ever lost or forgotten.

May the absences in your life grow full of eternal echo.

May you sense around you the secret Elsewhere where the presences that have left you dwell.

May you be generous in your embrace of loss.

May the sore well of grief turn into a seamless flow of presence.

May your compassion reach out to the ones we never hear from.

May you have the courage to speak for the excluded ones.

May you become the gracious and passionate subject of your own life.

May you not disrespect your mystery through brittle words or false belonging.

May you be embraced by God in whom dawn and twilight are one.

May your longing inhabit its dreams within the Great Belonging.

From To Bless the Space Between Us

DAWN MASS