Anam Cara

Between 1998 and 2010, the Céifin Institute (largely under the driving force of Fr. Harry Bohan) held a series of annual conferences in Ennis, Co. Clare. They took a hard look at “our society in the new millennium,” beginning with the prescient question “Are we forgetting something?” (I.e., in the midst of an economic boom, what has happened to our values?) These were stimulating and challenging events, addressed by high-powered speakers from home and abroad. For me as a broadcaster they were the source of many lively contributions to “The Open Mind,” in either interview or extract form. The theme for 1999 was “Working Towards Balance” and John O’Donohue was a guest speaker who undertook his own exploration of “Balance.” As an introduction to his talk, John read his poem “Thought-Work,” in which the working of the mind is compared to the work of the architect-crows he observed building their nests in the Burren.

Thought-Work

Off course from the frail music sought by words

And the path that always claims the journey,

In the pursuit of a more oblique rhythm,

Creating mostly its own geography,

The mind is an old crow

Who knows only to gather dead twigs,

Then take them back to the vacancy

Between the branches of the parent tree

And entwine them around the emptiness

With silence and unfailing patience

Until what was fallen, withered and lost

Is now set to fill with dreams as a nest.

From Conamara Blues

AN EXPLORATION OF BALANCE The Concept of Balance in a Theory of Creation

One of my favorite sentences in the Western philosophical tradition is from Leibniz; it was subsequently used by Schelling and Heidegger: “The real mystery is not that things are the way they are, but that there is something rather than nothing.” I think this is a great sentence, because it alerts one immediately to the mystery of the presence of things, which we so often tend to forget. In post-modern culture, we live increasingly in a virtual world and seem to have lost visceral and vital contact with the actual world.

Another way of looking at this statement is: the real mystery is that there is so much. Everywhere the human eye looks, everywhere the human mind turns, there is a huge panorama of diversity; the difference that lives in everything and between everything, the fact that no two stones, no two fields, no two faces or no two biographies are the same. The range and intensity of this difference is quite staggering. This is not an abstract thing. People who live in small farms in country areas could spend hours telling you about all the differences they experience between two places in the same field. Patrick Kavanagh spoke of the “undying difference in the corner of a field.”

The difference that inhabits experience and the world is not raw chaos; it has a certain structure. It is quite amazing to consider the hidden, implicit structures that exist in all the natural things. For instance, the way water falls so elegantly, always with structure. Even the water from the tires of a car as it goes down a highway or street can have a beautiful structure. There is huge differentiation in the world, and its structure often seems to be one of duality; in other words, two sides of the one object or reality.

If you reflect on your own experience, you will see that you are already familiar with duality. There is light and darkness, beginning and ending, inside and outside, above and below, masculine and feminine, divine and human, time and eternity, soul and sense, word and silence. The really fascinating thing is not that these dualities are there, but the threshold where they actually meet each other. I believe that any notion of balance that is really authentic has to work with the notion of threshold. Otherwise, balance is just a functional strategy without any ontological depth or grounding. In the Western tradition, that line, that threshold between light and darkness, between soul and body, God and human, between ourselves and nature has often been atrophied. When the threshold freezes, the two sides get cut off from each other and the result is dualism. That kind of separation has really blighted and damaged the Western tradition. You can see this in very simple ways. For instance, in Catholic Ireland there was a division between the soul and the senses. The senses were supposed to be bad, and the body pulled you down, whereas the soul wanted to bring you up. That split caused untold guilt and pain for people.