Anam Cara

We are always on our way from darkness into light. Every morning, we come out of the dark territories of dreaming into waking awareness of the day. Every night, no matter how long, breaks again and the light of dawn comes. At birth each of us made a journey from darkness into light, from the warm secure darkness of the womb into the light of the world. So we are no strangers to darkness and we are special friends of the light. A human life is guided, balanced and poised by the light of the mind and spirit of the person. In the darkness of our bodies, and particularly of our brains, the light of the mind is attuned and alive. There are great primal thresholds in life, and one of the most beautiful and most encouraging and most healing is the threshold of dawn, when darkness gives way to the light and novelty and wonder of a new day. Days are where we live our lives, where everything happens to us. It’s lovely to think that at the heart of our belief in God, there is a young man, a carpenter from a small town, who braved in an extreme way the darkness of the human journey and took upon his tender shoulders, in a most brutal and harrowing way, all darkness everywhere. He took it to the summit of Calvary, where that darkness was turned into a light that never quenched.

Here in north Clare there is the tradition of winterage, where cattle are put out for new grazing. In doing this, some people went astray in the night and “Jack O’Lantern” was blamed for this. Old people will tell you that the way to break this spell was to turn your coat inside out. On Resurrection morning the dark and lonesome cross was turned inside out. When the cross hits your life, a loneliness, a blindness and a darkness come all around you. Darkness and lostness are the worst parts of suffering. The wonder of the Resurrection is that this darkness was opened out and at the heart of the darkness a secret light was discovered. Each one of us who has come here hasn’t come to this place out of curiosity but we have come because we know the need that is in our lives and we know the frailty that is in our hearts and minds. We are strangers in the world. In our journey through life anything can befall us. It seems to be very difficult for us as humans to learn how to love, to learn how to let the fear and the resentment and the blindness fall away from us and to come into the special joy and peace and freedom of love. No matter how assured or competent we may feel, there is none of us who has not large territories of fear in our hearts, fear of sharing ourselves, of opening ourselves, of entering life. That is why we come to an ancient holy place like this, before the dawn, to let the new tender light of the Resurrection touch our helpless fear and transfigure it and open it into courage. We come here also because we have all been hurt in our lives. One of the beauties of Easter morning is that the light that comes with Christ is a gentle but penetrating light. There is no hurt anywhere within us, no matter in what crevices it might be buried, but that the light of this Easter can reach it and heal it.

To be born is to be chosen. None of us is accidentally in the world. We are sent here because there is something special for each of us to do here that could not be done by someone else. One of the wisdoms of living a full life is to try and sense what it is you were sent here for and to try and let the hindrances that block you from that fall away so that you can claim completely the life that was so generously offered to you. We were all reared in a world that concentrated on sin and sinfulness, but I believe that when we come into the eternal world we won’t so much be checked for our failures, but we will be asked whether we honored the possibilities that were placed inside us when we were so carefully fashioned out of the clay. There are limitless possibilities within each one of us and, if we give ourselves any chance at all, it is unknown what we are capable of. So on this Easter morning, let us look again at the lives we have been so generously given and let us let fall away the useless baggage that we carry—old pains, old habits, old ways of seeing and feeling—and let us have the courage to begin again. Life is very short, and we are no sooner here than it is time to depart again, and we should use to the full the time that we still have.

We don’t realize all the good we can do. A kind, encouraging word or a helping hand can bring many a person through dark valleys in their lives. We weren’t put here to make money or to acquire status or reputation. We were sent here to search for the light of Easter in our hearts, and when we find it we are meant to give it away generously. The dawn that is rising this Easter morning is a gift to our hearts and we are meant to celebrate it and to carry away from this holy, ancient place the gifts of healing and light and the courage of a new beginning.

Silent Reflection