Anam Cara Read online

  The face always reveals who you are, and what life has done to you. Yet it is difficult for you to see the shape of your own life; your life is too near you. Others can decipher much of your mystery from your face. Portrait artists admit that it is exceptionally difficult to render the human face. Traditionally, the eyes are said to be the windows of the soul. The mouth is also difficult to render in the individual portrait. In some strange way the line of the mouth seems to betray the contour of the life; a tight mouth often suggests meanness of spirit. There is a strange symmetry in the way the soul writes the story of its life in the contours of the face.

  THE BODY IS THE ANGEL OF THE SOUL

  The human body is beautiful. It is such a privilege to be embodied. You have a relationship to a place through the body. It is no wonder that humans have always been fascinated by place. Place offers us a home here; without place we would literally have no where. Landscape is the ultimate where; and in landscape the house that we call home is our intimate place. The home is decorated and personalized; it takes on the soul of the person who lives there and becomes the mirror of the spirit. Yet in the deepest sense, the body is the most intimate place. Your body is your clay home; your body is the only home that you have in this universe. It is in and through your body that your soul becomes visible and real for you. Your body is the home of your soul on earth.

  Often there seems to be an uncanny appropriateness between the soul and the shape and physical presence of the body. This is not true in all instances, but frequently it yields an insight into the nature of a person’s inner world. There is a secret relationship between our physical being and the rhythm of our soul. The body is the place where the soul shows itself. A friend from Connemara once said to me that the body is the angel of the soul. The body is the angel who expresses and minds the soul; we should always pay loving attention to our bodies. The body has often been a scapegoat for the deceptions and poisons of the mind. A primordial innocence surrounds the body, an incredible brightness and goodness. The body is the angel of the life.

  The body can be home to a great range and intensity of presence. Theater is a striking illustration. An actor has enough internal space available to take in a character and let it inhabit him totally, so that the character’s voice, mind, and action find subtle and immediate expression through the actor’s body. The body of the actor becomes the character’s presence. The most exuberant expression of the body is in dance. Dance theater is wonderful. The dance becomes fluent sculpture. The body shapes the emptiness poignantly and majestically. The exciting example of this in the Irish tradition is sean nós dancing, where the dancer mirrors in his body the wild flow of the traditional music.

  The body is much sinned against, even in a religion based on the Incarnation. Religion has often presented the body as the source of evil, ambiguity, lust, and seduction. This is utterly false and irreverent. The body is sacred. The origin of much of this negative thinking is in a false interpretation of Greek philosophy. The Greeks were beautiful thinkers precisely because of the emphasis they placed on the divine. The divine haunted them, and they endeavored in language and concept to echo the divine and find some mirror for its presence. They were acutely aware of the gravity in the body and how it seemed to drag the divine too much toward the earth. They misconceived this attraction to the earth and saw in it a conflict with the world of the divine. They had no conception of the Incarnation, no inkling of the Resurrection.

  When the Christian tradition incorporated Greek philosophy, it brought this dualism into its thought world. The soul was understood as beautiful, bright, and good. The desire to be with God belonged to the nature of the soul. Were it not for the unfortunate gravity of the body, the soul could constantly inhabit the eternal. In this way, a great suspicion of the body entered the Christian tradition. Coupled with this is the fact that a theology of sensual love never flowered in the Christian tradition. One of the few places the erotic appears is in the beautiful canticle the Song of Songs. It celebrates the sensuous and sensual with wonderful passion and gentleness. This text is an exception; and it is surprising that it was allowed into the Canon of Scripture. In subsequent Christian tradition, and especially among the Church Fathers, there was a deep suspicion of the body and a negative obsession with sexuality. Sex and sexuality were portrayed as a potential danger to one’s eternal salvation. The Christian tradition has often undervalued and mistreated the sacred presence of the body. Artists, however, have been wonderfully inspired by the Christian tradition. A beautiful example is Bernini’s Teresa in Ecstasy. Teresa’s body is caught in the throes of an ecstacy where the sensuous and the mystical are no longer separable.

  THE BODY AS MIRROR OF THE SOUL

  The body is a sacrament. The old, traditional definition of sacrament captures this beautifully. A sacrament is a visible sign of invisible grace. In that definition there is a fine acknowledgment of how the unseen world comes to expression in the visible world. This desire for expression lies deep at the heart of the invisible world. All our inner life and intimacy of soul longs to find an outer mirror. It longs for a form in which it can be seen, felt, and touched. The body is the mirror where the secret world of the soul comes to expression. The body is a sacred threshold; and it deserves to be respected, minded, and understood in its spiritual nature. This sense of the body is wonderfully expressed in an amazing phrase from the Catholic tradition: The body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit holds the intimacy and distance of the Trinity alert and personified. To describe the human body as the temple of the Holy Spirit recognizes that the body is suffused with wild and vital divinity. This theological insight shows that the sensuous is sacred in the deepest sense.

  The body is also very truthful. You know from your own life that your body rarely lies. Your mind can deceive you and put all kinds of barriers between you and your nature; but your body does not lie. Your body tells you, if you attend to it, how your life is and whether you are living from your soul or from the labyrinths of your negativity. The body also has a wonderful intelligence. All of our movements, indeed everything we do, demands the most refined and detailed cooperation of each of our senses. The human body is the most complex, refined, and harmonious totality.

  The body is your only home in the universe. It is your house of belonging here in the world. It is a very sacred temple. To spend time in silence before the mystery of your body brings you toward wisdom and holiness. It is unfortunate that often only when we are ill do we realize how tender, fragile, and precious is the house of belonging called the body. When you visit people who are ill or who are awaiting surgery, you can encourage them to have a conversation with the body area that is unwell. Suggest that they talk to it as a partner, thank it for all it has done, for what it has suffered, and ask forgiveness of it for whatever pressure it may have had to endure. Each part of the body holds the memory of its own experience.

  Your body is, in essence, a crowd of different members who work in harmony to make your belonging in the world possible. We should avoid the false dualism that separates the soul from the body. The soul is not simply within the body, hidden somewhere within its recesses. The truth is rather the converse. Your body is in the soul, and the soul suffuses you completely. Therefore, all around you there is a secret and beautiful soul-light. This recognition suggests a new art of prayer: Close your eyes and relax into your body. Imagine a light all around you, the light of your soul. Then with your breath, draw that light into your body and bring it with your breath through every area of your body.

  This is a lovely way to pray, because you are bringing the soul-light, the shadowed shelter that surrounds you, right into the physical earth and clay of your presence. One of the oldest meditations is to imagine the light coming into you, and then on your outward breath to imagine you are exhaling the darkness or an inner charcoal residue. People who are ill can be encouraged to pray physically in this way. When you bring cleansing, healing soul-light into your body, you heal
the neglected, tormented places. Your body knows you very intimately; it is aware of your whole spirit and soul life. Far sooner than your mind, your body knows how privileged it is to be here. It is also aware of the presence of death. There is a wisdom in your physical, bodily presence that is luminous and profound. Frequently the illnesses that come to us result from our self-neglect and our failure to listen to the voice of the body. The inner voices of the body want to speak to us, to inform us of the truths beneath the fixed surface of our external lives.

  FOR THE CELTS, THE VISIBLE AND THE INVISIBLE ARE ONE

  The body has had such a low and negative profile in the world of spirituality because spirit has been understood more in terms of the air element than the earth element. The air is the region of the invisible; it is the region of breath and thought. When you confine spirit to this region alone, the physical becomes immediately diminished. This is a great mistake, for there is nothing in the universe as sensuous as God. The wildness of God is the sensuousness of God. Nature is the direct expression of the divine imagination. It is the most intimate reflection of God’s sense of beauty. Nature is the mirror of the divine imagination and the mother of all sensuality; therefore it is unorthodox to understand spirit in terms of the invisible alone. Ironically, divinity and spirit derive their power and energy precisely from this tension between the visible and the invisible. Everything in the world of soul has a deep desire and longing for visible form; this is exactly where the power of the imagination lives.

  The imagination is the faculty that bridges, co-presents, and co-articulates the visible and the invisible. In the Celtic world, for instance, there was a wonderful sense of how the visible and the invisible moved in and out of each other. In the West of Ireland, there are many stories about ghosts, spirits, or fairies who had a special association with particular places; to the mind of the local people these legends were as natural as the landscape. For instance, there is a tradition that a lone bush in a field should never be cut down. The implication is that it may be a secret gathering place for spirits. There are many other places that are considered to be fairy forts. The local people would never build there or intrude in any way on that sacred ground.

  THE CHILDREN OF LIR

  One of the amazing aspects of the Celtic world is the idea of shape shifting. This becomes possible only when the physical is animate and passionate. The essence or soul of a thing is not limited to its particular or present shape. Soul has a fluency and energy that is not to be caged within any fixed form. Consequently, in the Celtic tradition there is a fascinating interflow between soul and matter and between time and eternity. This rhythm also includes and engages the human body. The human body is a mirror and expression of the world of soul. One of the most poignant illustrations of this in the Celtic tradition is the beautiful legend of the children of Lir.

  Central to the ancient Irish mind was the mythological world of the Tuatha Dé Dannan, the tribe that lived under the surface of the earth in Ireland; this myth has imbued the whole landscape with a numinous depth and presence. Lir was a chieftain in the world of the Tuatha Dé Dannan, and he had conflict with the king in that region. In order to resolve the conflict, a marriage agreement was made. The king had three daughters, and he offered Lir one of them in marriage. They married and had two children. Shortly thereafter they had two more children, but then unfortunately Lir’s wife died. Lir came again to the king, and the king gave him his second daughter. She watched over him and the children, but she became jealous when she saw that he dedicated most of his attention to the children. She noticed that even her own father, the king, had a very special affection for the children. Over the years, the jealousy grew in her heart until she finally took the children in her chariot and, with a touch of her druidic magic wand, turned them into four swans. They were condemned to spend nine hundred years in exile on the oceans around Ireland. Even though they were in swan form, they still retained their human minds and full human identities. When Christianity came to Ireland, they were finally returned to human form, but as old decrepit people. There is such poignance in the description of their journey in the wilderness as animal shapes imbued with human presence. This is a deeply Celtic story that shows how the world of nature finds a bridge to the animal world. The story also demonstrates that there is a profound confluence of intimacy between the human and the animal world. When they were swans, the song of the children of Lir had the power to heal and console people. The pathos of the story is deepened by the vulnerable openness of the animal world to the human.

  The animals are more ancient than us. They were here for millennia before humans surfaced on the earth. Animals are our ancient brothers and sisters. They enjoy a seamless presence—a lyrical unity with the earth. Animals live outside in the wind, in the waters, in the mountains, and in the clay. The knowing of the earth is in them. The Zen-like silence and thereness of the landscape is mirrored in the silence and solitude of animals. Animals know nothing of Freud, Jesus, Buddha, Wall Street, the Pentagon, or the Vatican. They live outside the politics of human intention. Somehow they already inhabit the eternal. The Celtic mind recognized the ancient belonging and knowing of the animal world. The dignity, beauty, and wisdom of the animal world was not diminished by any false hierarchy or human arrogance. Somewhere in the Celtic mind was a grounding perception that humans are the inheritors of this deeper world. This finds playful expression in the following ninth-century poem.

  THE SCHOLAR AND HIS CAT

  I and Pangur Bán my cat,

  ’Tis like a task we are at:

  Hunting mice is his delight,

  Hunting words I sit all night

  Better far than praise of men

  ’Tis to sit with book and pen;

  Pangur bears me no ill will

  He too plies his simple skill.

  ’Tis a merry thing to see

  At our tasks how glad are we,

  When at home we sit and find

  Entertainment to our mind.

  Oftentimes a mouse will stray

  In the hero Pangur’s way;

  Oftentimes my keen thought set

  Takes a meaning in its net.

  ’Gainst the wall he sets his eye

  Full and fierce and sharp and sly;

  ’Gainst the wall of knowledge I

  All my little wisdom try.

  When a mouse darts from its den

  O how glad is Pangur then!

  O what gladness do I prove

  When I solve the doubts I love!

  So in peace our tasks we ply,

  Pangur Bán, my cat and I;

  In our arts we find our bliss,

  I have mine and he has his.

  Practice every day has made

  Pangur perfect in his trade;

  I get wisdom day and night

  Turning darkness into light.

  (TRANS. ROBIN FLOWER)

  For the Celts, the world is always latently and actively spiritual. The depth of this interflow is also apparent in the power of language in the Celtic world. Language itself had power to cause events and to divine events yet to happen. Chants and spells could actually reverse a whole course of negative destiny and bring forth something new and good. In the Celtic world, and especially in the Celtic world of the senses, there was no barrier between soul and body. Each was natural to the other. The soul was the sister of the body, the body the sister of the soul. As yet there was no negative splitting of dualistic Christian morality, which later did so much damage to these two lovely and enfolded presences. The world of Celtic consciousness enjoyed this unified and lyrical sensuous spirituality.

  Light is the mother of life. The sun brings light or color. It causes grasses, crops, leaves, and flowers to grow. The sun brings forth the erotic charge of the curved earth; it awakens her wild sensuousness. In this Gaelic poem, the sun is worshiped as the eye and face of God. The rich vitalism of the Celtic sensibility finds lyrical expression here.

  The eye of the grea
t God,

  The eye of the god of glory,

  The eye of the king of hosts,

  The eye of the king of the living.

  Pouring upon us

  At each time and season,

  Pouring upon us

  gently and generously

  Glory to thee

  Thou glorious sun.

  Glory to thee, thou son

  Face of the God of life.

  (TRANS. A. CARMICHAEL)

  A SPIRITUALITY OF TRANSFIGURATION

  Spirituality is the art of transfiguration. We should not force ourselves to change by hammering our lives into any predetermined shape. We do not need to operate according to the idea of a predetermined program or plan for our lives. Rather, we need to practice a new art of attention to the inner rhythm of our days and lives. This attention brings a new awareness of our own human and divine presence. A dramatic example of this kind of transfiguration is one all parents know. You watch your children carefully, but one day they surprise you: You still recognize them, but your knowledge of them is insufficient. You have to start listening to them all over again.