Anam Cara

May the relief of laughter rinse through your

soul.

As the wind loves to call things to dance,

May your gravity be lightened by grace.

Like the dignity of moonlight restoring the

earth,

May your thoughts incline with reverence and

respect.

As water takes whatever shape it is in,

So free may you be about who you become.

As silence smiles on the other side of what’s said,

May your sense of irony bring perspective.

As time remains free of all that it frames,

May your mind stay clear of all it names.

May your prayer of listening deepen enough

To hear in the depths the laughter of God.

From To Bless the Space Between Us

AGING

“Old age can be a time of great liberation and freedom.”

The six-part series “L Plus” was a practical guide to the later years of life. One aspect of those years that needed to be addressed was the onset of old age and ultimately mortality. John had written so positively and poetically in Anam Cara about aging and death that I wished to include him as a contributor to the series. This conversation was recorded in the office of Marriage Relationship and Counseling Services in Dublin, where John had given a talk in April 1998.

THE NEGATIVE SIDE

One of the amazing recognitions of Celtic spirituality and wisdom is the sisterhood of nature and the soul. The body is made out of clay. It has the memory of the earth in it, and not just the memory of the earth, but also in some strange, subtle, almost silent way, it has the rhythms of the seasons in it too. G. B. Shaw said that youth is wasted on the young, so springtime is always a season that somehow resembles the energy of youth. Autumntime seems to mirror the gathering and the harvest of old age. One of the amazing lines in the Bible that I really like is a line from the prophet Haggai, who says, “You have sown so much and harvested so little.” I feel that old age and aging is a time of great gathering, a time of sifting and a time of reaping the rewards of forgotten and neglected experience. Contemporary society worships youth: it worships strength; it worships image. It has a whole ideology of externality and it has no refined sense of the subtlety of the soul, the secrecy of the heart. Especially, it has no sensitivity of these interim regions where the great gatherings happen in human life.

Admittedly old age is a very difficult time—and I can’t talk about it from within because I still have a bit of youth left in me!—but it is a time when the body becomes more infirm, when you could be ill, when you could be alone, and it is also a time maybe when you become dependent. When I think of my own future and getting old, one of the things that would really disturb me would be my lack of autonomy and freedom, that I could be dependent on other people to go places, to take me out, to mind me, to get things for me, bring things in to me. I think that we need in our society to be very sensitive to that diminishing of the body’s vigor and passion and possibility and the lack of freedom that goes with that, especially when illness comes in old age. It must be very frightening for a person if you’re trying to forget that death is ahead and you’re trying to live every day as it comes, yet illness comes. Illness is the precursor of death when you’re old, and it frightens you, and small illness knocks a lot more out of you than it would have when you were a young person. So there is that whole tide of negativity that the old have to deal with. When you walk down the street and see an old person walking slowly, you just overtake them and go on. But you wouldn’t notice the achievement of that person looking for what they need, shopping or whatever, and being able to come back home. When an old person goes for a day out and comes back home and recovers from it, it’s almost a celebration.

It reminds me of the great Polish director Kieślowski, who made The Ten Commandments and Three Colors. Always in his films there is a crucial moment in the evolution of the plot when an old man or an old woman, anonymous figures, just pass by and the camera lingers on them. It is like an oracle or an omen of the future of time for these characters, who are in the midst of great passion and trying to work things out.

HARVEST TIME