Anam Cara Read online

  All presence depends on consciousness. Where there is a depth of awareness, there is a reverence for presence. Where consciousness is dulled, distant, or blind, the presence grows faint and vanishes. Consequently, awareness is one of the greatest gifts you can bring to your friendship. Many people have an anam ara of whom they are not truly aware. Their lack of awareness cloaks the friend’s presence and causes feelings of distance and absence. Sadly, it is often loss that awakens presence, by then it is too late. It is wise to pray for the grace of recognition. Inspired by awareness, you may then discover beside you the anam ara of whom your longing has always dreamed.

  The Celtic tradition recognized that an anam-ara friendship was graced with affection. Friendship awakens affection. The heart learns a new art of feeling. Such friendship is neither cerebral nor abstract. In Celtic tradition, the anam ara was not merely a metaphor or ideal. It was a soul-bond that existed as a recognized and admired social construct. It altered the meaning of identity and perception. When your affection is kindled, the world of your intellect takes on a new tenderness and compassion. The anam ara brings epistemological integration and healing. You look and see and understand differently. Initially, this can be disruptive and awkward, but it gradually refines your sensibility and transforms your way of being in the world. Most fundamentalism, greed, violence, and oppression can be traced back to the separation of idea and affection. For too long we have been blind to the cognitive riches of feeling and the affective depth of ideas. Aristotle said in De Anima, “Perception is ex hypothesi a form of affection and being moved; and the same goes for thinking and knowing…. Thinking particularly is like a peculiar affection of the soul.” The anam-ara perspective is sublime because it permits us to enter this unity of ancient belonging.

  INTIMACY AS SACRED

  In our culture, there is an excessive concentration on the notion of relationship. People talk incessantly about relationships. It is a constant theme on television, film, and in the media. Technology and media are not uniting the world. They pretend to provide a world that is internetted, but in reality, all they deliver is a simulated world of shadows. Accordingly, they make our human world more anonymous and lonely. In a world where the computer replaces human encounter and psychology replaces religion, it is no wonder that there is an obsession with relationship. Unfortunately, however, “relationship” has become an empty center around which our lonely hunger forages for warmth and belonging. Much of the public language of intimacy is hollow, and its incessant repetition only betrays the complete absence of intimacy. Real intimacy is a sacred experience. It never exposes its secret trust and belonging to the voyeuristic eye of a neon culture. Real intimacy is of the soul, and the soul is reserved.

  The Bible says that no one can see God and live. In a transferred sense, no person can see himself and live. All you can ever achieve is a sense of your soul. You gain little glimpses of its light, colors, and contours. You feel the inspiration of its possibilities and the wonder of its mysteries. In the Celtic tradition, and especially in the Gaelic language, there is a refined sense of the sacredness that the approach to another person should embody. The word hello does not exist in Gaelic. The way that you encounter someone is through blessing. You say, Dia Dhuit, God be with you. They respond, Dia is Muire dhuit, God and Mary be with you. When you are leaving a person, you say, Go gcumhdaí Dia thu, May God come to your assistance or Go gcoinne Dia thú, May God keep you. The ritual of encounter is framed at the beginning and at the end with blessing. Regularly throughout conversation in Gaelic, there is explicit recognition that the divine is present in others. This presence is also recognized and embodied in old sayings such as, “the hand of the stranger is the hand of God.” The stranger does not come accidentally; he brings a particular gift and illumination.

  THE MYSTERY OF APPROACH

  For years I have had an idea for a short story about a world where you would approach only one person in the course of your life. Naturally, one would have to subtract biological considerations from this assumption in order to draw this imaginary world. You would have to practice years of silence before the mystery of presence in the Other, then you could begin to approach. In the course of your life, you might approach only one or two people. This idea gains in reality if you view your life carefully and distinguish between acquaintances and friends. A friend is different from an acquaintance. Friendship is a deeper and more sacred connection. Shakespeare has a beautiful phrase for this: “The friends thou hast and their attention tried, grapple them to your soul with hoops of steel.” So a friend is incredibly precious. A friend is a loved one who awakens your life in order to free the wild possibilities within you.

  Ireland is a land of many ruins. Ruins are not empty. They are sacred places full of presence. A friend of mine, a priest in Connemara, was going to build a parking lot outside his church. There was a ruin nearby that had been vacated for fifty or sixty years. He went to the man whose family had lived there long ago and asked the man to give him the stones for the foundation. The man refused. The priest asked why, and the man said, “Céard a dhéanfadh anamacha mo mhuinitíre ansin?”—that is, “What would the souls of my ancestors do then?” The implication was that even in this ruin long since vacated, the souls of those who had once lived there still had a particular affinity and attachment to this place. The life and passion of a person leave an imprint on the ether of a place. Love does not remain within the heart, it flows out to build secret tabernacles in a landscape.

  DIARMUID AND GRÁINNE

  Traveling throughout Ireland, you will see beautiful stone shapes called dolmens. A dolmen is two massive, long tables of limestone, laid down parallel to each other. Over them as a kind of shelter is placed another giant capstone. In the Celtic tradition these were known as Leaba Dhiarmada agus Gráinne; that is, the bed of Diarmuid and Gráinne. The legend tells that Gráinne was to marry Fionn, chief of the Fianna, the old Celtic warriors. She fell in love with Diarmuid and threatened him with magical destruction if he refused to elope with her. The two of them eloped, and the Fianna chased them all over Ireland. They were cared for by the animals and received advice from wise people on how to evade their pursuers. They were told, for instance, not to spend more than two nights in any one place. But it was said that when they rested at night, Diarmuid put up the dolmen as a shelter for his lover. The actual archaeological evidence shows that these were burial places. The legend is more interesting and resonant. It is a lovely image of the helplessness that sometimes accompanies love. When you fall in love, common sense, rationality, and your normal serious, reserved, and respectable persona dissolve. Suddenly you are like an adolescent again; there is new fire in your life. You become revitalized. Where there is no passion, your soul is either asleep or absent. When your passion awakens, your soul becomes young and free and dances again. In this old Celtic legend, we see the power of love and the energy of passion. One of the most powerful poems about how this longing transfigures life is by Goethe and is called “Blessed Longing.”

  Tell no one else, only the wise

  For the crowd will sneer at one

  I wish to praise what is fully alive,

  What longs to flame toward death.

  When the calm enfolds the love-nights

  That created you, where you have created

  A feeling from the Unkown steals over you

  While the tranquil candle burns.

  You remain no longer caught

  In the peneumbral gloom

  You are stirred and new, you desire

  To soar to higher creativity.

  No distance makes you ambivalent.

  You come on wings, enchanted

  In such hunger for light, you

  Become the butterfly burnt to nothing.

  So long as you have not lived this:

  To die is to become new,

  You remain a gloomy guest

  On the dark earth.

  (TRANS. BY THE AUTHOR)

 
This poem captures the wonderful spiritual force at the heart of longing. It suggests that true vitality is hidden within longing. When you give in to creative passion, it will bring you to the ultimate thresholds of transfiguration and renewal. This growth causes pain, but it is a sacred pain. It would be much more tragic to have cautiously avoided these depths and remained marooned on the shiny surfaces of the banal.

  LOVE AS ANCIENT RECOGNITION

  Real friendship or love is not manufactured or achieved by an act of will or intention. Friendship is always an act of recognition. This metaphor of friendship can be grounded in the clay nature of the human body. When you find the person you love, an act of ancient recognition brings you together. It is as if millions of years before the silence of nature broke, your lover’s clay and your clay lay side by side. Then in the turning of the seasons, your one clay divided and separated. You began to rise as distinct clay forms, each housing a different individuality and destiny. Without even knowing it, your secret memory mourned your loss of each other. While your clay selves wandered for thousands of years through the universe, your longing for each other never faded. This metaphor helps to explain how in the moment of friendship two souls suddenly recognize each other. It could be a meeting on the street, or at a party or a lecture, or just a simple, banal introduction, then suddenly there is the flash of recognition and the embers of kinship glow. There is an awakening between you, a sense of ancient knowing. Love opens the door of ancient recognition. You enter. You come home to each other at last. As Euripides said, “Two friends, one soul.”

  In the classical tradition, this is wonderfully expressed in the Symposium, Plato’s magical dialogue on the nature of love. Plato adverts to the myth that humans in the beginning were not single individuals. Each person was two selves in one. Then they became separated; consequently, you spend your life looking for your other half. When you find and discover each other, it is through this act of profound recognition. In friendship, an ancient circle closes. That which is ancient between you will mind you, shelter you, and hold you together. When two people fall in love, each comes in out of the loneliness of exile, home to the one house of belonging. At weddings, it is appropriate to acknowledge the gracious destiny that enabled this couple to recognize each other when they met. Each recognized the other as the one in whom their heart could be at home. Love should never be a burden, for there is more between you than your mutual presence.

  THE CIRCLE OF BELONGING

  We need more resonant words to mirror this than the tired word relationship. Phrases like “an ancient circle closes” or “an ancient belonging awakens and discovers itself” help to bring out the deeper meaning and mystery of encounter. This is the more sacred language of the soul for togetherness and intimacy. When two people love each other, there is a third force between them. Sometimes when a friendship is in trouble, it is not to be healed by endless analysis or counseling. You need to change the rhythm of seeing each other and come in contact again with the ancient belonging that brought you together. If you invoke its power and presence around you, this ancient affinity will hold you together. Two people who are really awakened inhabit the one circle of belonging. They have awakened a more ancient force around them that will hold them together and mind them.

  Friendship needs a lot of nurturing. Often people devote their primary attention to the facts of their lives, to their situation, to their work, to their status. Most of their energy goes into doing. Meister Eckhart writes beautifully about this temptation. He says many people wonder where they should be and what they should do, when in fact they should be more concerned about how to be. The love side of your life is the place of greatest tenderness within you. In a culture preoccupied with fixities and definites and correspondingly impatient of mystery, it is difficult to step out from the transparency of false light into the more candlelit world of the soul. Perhaps the light of the soul is like Rembrandt’s light—that tawny, gold light for which Rembrandt’s work is known. This light gives you such a real sense of the depth and substance of the figures on whom it gently shines. It achieves a profound complexity of presence through the subtle use of shadow. Such golden earth-light is the natural sister of shadow and cradle of illumination.

  THE KALYANA-MITRA

  The Buddhist tradition has a lovely concept of friendship, the notion of the Kalyana-mitra, the “noble friend.” Your Kalyana-mitra, your noble friend, will not accept pretension but will gently and very firmly confront you with your own blindness. No one can see his life totally. As there is a blind spot in the retina of the human eye, there is also in the soul a blind side where you are not able to see. Therefore you must depend on the one you love to see for you what you cannot see for yourself. Your Kalyana-mitra complements your vision in a kind and critical way. Such friendship is creative and critical; it is willing to negotiate awkward and uneven territories of contradiction and woundedness.

  One of the deepest longings of the human soul is the longing to be seen. In an ancient myth Narcissus looks into the pool, sees his own face, and becomes obsessed with it. Unfortunately, there is no mirror in the world where you can catch a glimpse of your soul. You cannot even see your own body completely. If you look behind you, the front of your body is out of view. You can never be fully visually present to your self. The one you love, your anam ara, your soul friend, is the truest mirror to reflect your soul. The honesty and clarity of true friendship also brings out the real contour of your spirit. It is beautiful to have such a presence in your life.

  THE SOUL AS DIVINE ECHO

  We are capable of such love and belonging because the soul holds the echo of a primal intimacy. When talking about primal things, the Germans talk of ursprüngliche Dinge—original things. There is an Ur-Intimität in der Seele; that is, a primal intimacy in the soul; this original echo whispers within every heart. The soul did not invent itself. It is a presence from the divine world, where intimacy has no limit or barrier.

  You can never love another person unless you are equally involved in the beautiful but difficult spiritual work of learning to love yourself. There is within each of us, at the soul level, an enriching fountain of love. In other words, you do not have to go outside yourself to know what love is. This is not selfishness, and it is not narcissism; they are negative obsessions with the need to be loved. Rather this is the wellspring of love within the heart. Through their need for love, people who lead solitary lives often stumble upon this great fountain. They learn to whisper awake the deep well of love within. This is not a question of forcing yourself to love yourself. It is more a question of exercising reserve, of inviting the wellspring of love that is, after all, your deepest nature to flow through your life. When this happens, the ground that has hardened within you grows soft again. Through a lack of love everything hardens. There is nothing as lonely in the world as that which has hardened or grown cold. Bitterness and coldness are the ultimate defeat.

  If you find that your heart has hardened, one of the gifts that you should give yourself is the gift of the inner wellspring. You should invite this inner fountain to free itself. You can work on yourself in order to unsilt this, so that gradually the nourishing waters begin in a lovely osmosis to infuse and pervade the hardened clay of your heart. Then the miracle of love happens within you. Where before there was hard, bleak, unyielding, dead ground, now there is growth, color, enrichment, and life flowing from the lovely wellspring of love. This is one of the most creative approaches in transfiguring what is negative within us. You are sent here to learn to love and to receive love. The greatest gift new love brings into your life is the awakening to the hidden love within. This makes you independent. You are now able to come close to the other, not out of need or with the wearying apparatus of projection, but out of genuine intimacy, affinity, and belonging. It is a freedom. Love should make you free. You become free of the hungry, blistering need with which you continually reach out to scrape affirmation, respect, and significance for yourself from things a
nd people outside yourself. To be holy is to be home, to be able to rest in the house of belonging that we call the soul.

  THE WELLSPRING OF LOVE WITHIN

  You can search far and in hungry places for love. It is a great consolation to know that there is a wellspring of love within yourself. If you trust that this wellspring is there, you will then be able to invite it to awaken. The following exercise could help develop awareness of this capacity. When you have moments on your own or spaces in your time, just focus on the well at the root of your soul. Imagine that nourishing stream of belonging, ease, peace, and delight. Feel, with your visual imagination, the refreshing waters of that well gradually flowing up through the arid earth of the neglected side of your heart. It is helpful to imagine this particularly before you sleep. Then during the night you will be in a constant flow of enrichment and belonging. You will find that when you awake at dawn, there will be a lovely, quiet happiness in your spirit.

  One of the most precious things you should always preserve in a friendship and in love is your own difference. It can happen within the circle of love that one person will tend to imitate the other or reimagine himself in the image of the other. While this may indicate a desire for total commitment, it is also destructive and dangerous. There was an old man I knew on an island off the West of Ireland. He had an unusual hobby. He used to collect photographs of newly married couples. He would then get a photograph of that couple some ten years later. From this second photograph, he would begin to demonstrate how one member of the couple was beginning to resemble the other. Often in a relationship there can be a subtle homogenizing force, which is destructive. The irony is that it is usually the difference between people that makes one person attractive to another. Consequently, this difference needs to be preserved and nurtured.