Anam Cara

Possibility and change become growth within the shape of time that we call a day. Days are where we live. This rhythm shapes our lives. Your life takes the form of each new day that is given to you. The wonderful Polish poet Tadeusz Różewicz describes the difficulty of writing good poetry. A writer writes and writes and writes, and yet the harvest is so minimal. Nonetheless, Różewicz quotes an old dictum that says, “It is more difficult to spend a day well than to write a book.” A day is precious because each day is essentially the microcosm of your whole life. Each new day offers possibilities and promises that were never seen before. To engage with honor the full possibility of your life is to engage in a worthy way the possibility of your new day. Each day is different. In the Book of Revelation, God said, “The world of the past has gone…. Behold I am making all of creation new.” The new day deepens what has already happened and unfolds what is surprising, unpredictable, and creative. You may wish to change your life, you may be in therapy or religion, but your new vision remains merely talk until it enters the practice of your day.

THE CELTIC REVERENCE FOR THE DAY

Celtic spirituality has a great sense of the significance of each day, how the new day is sacred. The Celts never entered the day with a repetitious deadening perspective; they took each day as a new beginning. A lovely Celtic prayer articulates this sense of the day as a gift from God. The metaphor of vision suffuses the poem. There is an invocation that the human eye may “bless all it sees” and that God’s vision may guard and guide the day. The day is understood as a time of reflexive blessing that embraces God, self, others, and nature.

God bless to me the new day

never vouchsaved to me before

it is to bless thy own presence thou has given triumph

God.

Bless thou to me mine eye

may mine eye bless all it sees

I will bless my neighbor

may my neighbor bless me,

God give me a clean heart

let me not from sight of thine eye

bless to me my children and my wife

and bless to me my means and cattle.

(TRANS. A. CARMICHAEL)

For the Celtic person the new day was lived amidst nature. It is easy to have a creative sense of the day when you live in the presence of the great divinity called nature. For the Celtic people, nature was not matter, rather it was a luminous and numinous presence that had depth, possibility, and beauty.

There is also a beautiful invocation of the day in an ancient poem called “The Deer’s Cry”:

I arise today

Through God’s strength to direct me,

God’s might to uphold me,

God’s wisdom to guide me,

God’s eye to look before,

God’s ear to hear me,

God’s word to speak to me,

God’s hand to guard me,

God’s way to lie before me,

God’s shield to protect me.

God’s hosts to save me from snares of devils

From temptation of vices,

From everyone who shall wish me ill,

Afar and anear,

Alone and in a multitude.

(TRANS. KUNO MEYER)

This poem articulates the Celtic recognition of the omnipresence of God. The very act of awakening is recognized as a gift. At the threshold of a new day there is no arrogance; rather, a longing to praise. God is pictured in sensuous detail as the divine anam ara. At every moment and in every situation, God is the intimate, attentive, and encouraging friend.

This notion of the day as a sacred place offers a lovely frame for the creativity that a day can bring. Your life becomes the shape of the days you inhabit. Days enter us. Sadly, in modern life, the day is often a cage where a person can lose youthfulness, energy, and strength. The day is often experienced as a cage precisely because it is spent in the workplace. So many of our days and so much of our time is spent doing work that remains outside the territories of creativity and feeling. Negotiating the workplace can be complex and very difficult. Most of us work for someone else and lose so much of our energy. As a matter of fact, one of the definitions of energy is the ability to do work. Days spent caged make us tired and weary. In a city, all the morning traffic jams hold people who are barely out of the night and are sleepy, anxious, and frustrated. Pressure and stress have already stolen their day. In the evening, the same people are weary after a long workday. By the time they get home, they have no energy left to the desires, thoughts, and feelings that were neglected all day.