Anam Cara

Prologue

I REMEMBER AS A CHILD discovering the echo of sound. It was the first time that my father took me up the mountain to herd the cattle. As we passed a limestone cliff, he called out to the cattle in the distance. His call had barely ended when it was copied exactly and sent forth again by the stone. It was a fascinating discovery. I tried out my own voice and the echo returned faithfully every time. It was as if the solid limestone mountains had secret hearing and voice. Their natural stillness and silence suddenly broke forth in an exact mimic of the human voice, indicating that there is a resonant heart in the depths of silence; the stone responds in a symmetry of sound. Hearing one’s echo out among the lonely mountains seems to suggest that one is not alone. Landscape and nature know us and the returning echo seems to confirm that we belong here. We live in a world that responds to our longing; it is a place where the echoes always return, even if sometimes slowly. It is as if the dynamic symmetry of the echo comprised the radius of an invisible but powerful circle of belonging.

The hunger to belong is at the heart of our nature. Cut off from others, we atrophy and turn in on ourselves. The sense of belonging is the natural balance of our lives. Mostly, we do not need to make an issue of belonging. When we belong, we take it for granted. There is some innocent childlike side to the human heart that is always deeply hurt when we are excluded. Belonging suggests warmth, understanding, and embrace. No one was created for isolation. When we become isolated, we are prone to being damaged; our minds lose their flexibility and natural kindness; we become vulnerable to fear and negativity. The sense of belonging keeps you in balance amidst the inner and outer immensities. The ancient and eternal values of human life—truth, unity, goodness, justice, beauty, and love are all statements of true belonging; they are the also the secret intention and dream of human longing.

Wherever there is distance, there is longing. Yet there is some strange wisdom in the fact of distance. It is interesting to remember that the light that sustains life here on earth comes from elsewhere. Light is the mother of life. Yet the sun and the moon are not on the earth; they bless us with light across the vast distances. We are protected and blessed in our distance. Were we nearer to the sun, the earth would be consumed in its fire; it is the distance that makes the fire kind. Nothing in creation is ever totally at home in itself. No thing is ultimately at one with itself. Everything that is alive holds distance within itself. This is especially true of the human self. It is the deepest intimacy which is nevertheless infused with infinite distance. There is some strange sense in which distance and closeness are sisters, the two sides of the one experience. Distance awakens longing; closeness is belonging. Yet they are always in a dynamic interflow with each other. When we fix or locate them definitively, we injure our growth. It is an interesting imaginative exercise to interchange them: to consider what is near as distant and to consider the distant as intimate.

Our hunger to belong is the longing to find a bridge across the distance from isolation to intimacy. Every one longs for intimacy and dreams of a nest of belonging in which one is embraced, seen, and loved. Something within each of us cries out for belonging. We can have all the world has to offer in terms of status, achievement, and possessions. Yet without a sense of belonging it all seems empty and pointless. Like the tree that puts roots deep into the clay, each of us needs the anchor of belonging in order to bend with the storms and reach towards the light. Like the ocean that returns each time to the same shore, a sense of belonging liberates us to trust fully the rhythm of loss and longing; it also shelters us from the loneliness of life. Though we may not reflect too frequently on the vast infinity that surrounds us, something within us is always aware of it. Such infinity can be anonymous and threatening; it makes us feel inconsequential and tiny. Unknown to us this intensifies our hunger to belong. The universe is too big for us; we long for a sure nest to shelter. The sense of belonging also shelters us from the inner infinity which each of us secretly carries. There is a huge abyss within every mind. When we belong, we have an outside mooring to prevent us from falling into ourselves.

Each one of us journeys alone to this world and it is our nature to seek out belonging. Each of us carries a unique world within our hearts. Each soul is a different shape. No one feels your life as you do; no one experiences things the way you do. Your life is a totally unique story and only you really know it from within. No one knows what your experience is like. The experience of each of us is opaque and inaccessible to outsiders. Yet no individual is sealed off or hermetically self-enclosed. Though each soul is individual and unique, by its very nature the soul cannot cut itself off from the world. The deepest nature of the soul is relationship. Consequently, it is your soul that longs to belong; it is also your soul that makes all belonging possible. No soul is private or merely mortal. As well as being the vital principle of your individual life, your soul is also ancient and eternal and weaves you into the great tapestry of spirit that connects everything everywhere. There is a lovely balance at the heart of our nature: each of us is utterly unique and yet we live in the most intimate kinship with everyone and everything else. Belonging is not merely shelter from being separate and different. Its more profound intention is the awakening of the Great Belonging which embraces everything. Our hunger to belong is the desire to awaken this hidden affinity. Then we know that we are not outsiders cut off from everything, but rather participants at the heart of creation. Each of us brings something alive in the world that no one else can. There is a profound necessity at the heart of individuality. When your life awakens and you begin to sense the destiny that brought you here, you endeavour to live a life that is generous and worthy of the blessing and invitation that is always calling you.

In post-modern culture there is a deep hunger to belong. An increasing majority of people feel isolated and marginalised. Experience is haunted by fragmentation. Many of the traditional shelters are in ruins. Society is losing the art of fostering community. Consumerism is now propelling life towards the lonely isolation of individualism. Technology pretends to unite us, yet more often than not all it delivers are simulated images. The “global village” has no roads or neighbours; it is a faceless limbo from which all individuality has been abstracted. Politics seems devoid of the imagination that calls forth vision and ideals; it is becoming ever more synonymous with the functionalism of economic pragmatism. Many of the keepers of the great religious traditions now seem to be frightened functionaries; in a more uniform culture, their management skills would be efficient and successful. In a pluralistic and deeply fragmented culture, they seem unable to converse with the complexities and hungers of our longing. From this perspective, it seems that we are in the midst of a huge crisis of belonging. When the outer cultural shelters are in ruins, we need to explore and reawaken the depths of belonging in the human mind and soul; perhaps, the recognition of the depth of our hunger to belong may gradually assist us in awakening new and unexpected possibilities of community and friendship.

In a universe of absolute stillness, there would be no question about belonging. Everything would be at one in the same eternal still life. The sway of nature and the swerve of thought means that space and distance are alive with longing. No thing can be itself completely without the other. No one can be herself without the other sisters and brothers. The one who dreamed the universe loved circles and created everything with such beautiful incompletion that we need the others to complete the circles of identity, belonging, and creativity. Life is full of magnetic interims that call what is separate and different to become one, to enter into the art and presence of belonging.

Our world is suffused with beauty. There are landscapes, oceans, paintings, and music whose beauty awakens in our hearts a sense of the eternal. Yet nowhere do we feel so deeply encountered as we do in the presence of another human being. There is something in another human presence that is equal to our longing and soul. The human heart is a theater of longing. One of our deepest longings is to find love and friendship. In the Celtic tradition there was the beautiful notion of the Anam-Cara. Anam is the Irish word for “soul” and Cara is the word for “friend.” In the Anam-Cara friendship, you were joined in an ancient way with the friend of your soul. This was a bond that neither space nor time could damage. The friendship awakened an eternal echo in the hearts of the friends; they entered into a circle of intimate belonging with each other. The Anam-Cara friendship afforded a spiritual space to all the other longings of the human heart.

There is a divine restlessness in the human heart. Though our bodies maintain an outer stability and consistency, the heart is an eternal nomad. No circle of belonging can ever contain all the longings of the human heart. As Shakespeare said, we have “immortal longings.” All human creativity issues from the urgency of longing. Literally and physically, each of us is a child of longing—conceived in the passionate desire of our parents for each other. All growth is the desire of the soul to refine and enlarge its presence. The human body is a temple of sensuous spirit. In every moment our senses reach out in longing to engage the world. Movement, colour, and shape engage the affections of the eye; tone, sound, and silence call continually to our hearing; touch, fragrance, and taste also bring us into intimacy with the world. Our sensuous longing is inevitably immediate and passionate: the caress on the skin, the twilight that enthrals your seeing, Fauré’s Requiem which suffuses the depths of your hearing, the unexpected fragrance of a perfume, the icon of the face that you love. As long as we live in the temple of the senses, longing will eternally call us.

In the inner world, thoughts are, as Meister Eckhart said “our inner senses.” The eros of thought is the longing that voyages inwards to discover the secret landscapes of soul, mind, and memory. Through our thoughts, we discover who we are and which presences inhabit our hearts. Thought puts a face on experience and probes the mystery of things. It looks below the surface and seeks the substance. Everything humans have done on earth is an expression of thought. Without thinking none of it would have happened. From the ancient monuments to modern architecture, from the cave paintings to e-mail, from the Druids to modern ritual, human thought has continually incarnated human longing. The world that we have fashioned with its history and culture expresses the diversity and complexity of human longing. Work is human desire in action.

Many of the really powerful forces in contemporary culture work to seduce human longing along the pathways of false satisfaction. When our longing becomes numbed, our sense of belonging becomes empty and cold; this intensifies the sense of isolation and distance that so many people now feel. Consumerism is the worship of the god of quantity; advertising is its liturgy. Advertising is schooling in false longing. More and more the world of image claims our longing. Image is mere surface veneer. It is no wonder that there is such a crisis of belonging now since there is no homeland in this external world of image and product. It is a famine field of the Spirit. Despite all the energy and development that have taken place many areas in modern life are losing their nature and grace.

The restlessness in the human heart will never be finally stilled by any person, project, or place. The longing is eternal. This is what constantly qualifies and enlarges our circles of belonging. There is a constant and vital tension between longing and belonging. Without the shelter of belonging, our longings would lack direction, focus, and context; they would be aimless and haunted, constantly tugging the heart in a myriad of opposing directions. Without belonging, our longing would be demented. As memory gathers and anchors time, so does belonging shelter longing. Belonging without longing would be empty and dead, a cold frame around emptiness. One often notices this in relationships where the longing has died; they have become arrangements, and there is no longer any shared or vital presence. When longing dies, creativity ceases. The arduous task of being a human is to balance longing and belonging so that they work with and against each other to ensure that all the potential and gifts that sleep in the clay of the heart may be awakened and realized in this one life. All our longing is but an eternal echo of the Divine Longing which has created us and sustains us here. Sheltered within the embrace of that Great Belonging we can dare to let our longing lead us towards the mountain of transfiguration.

In Greek mythology, the theme of longing and belonging finds poignant expression in the story of Echo. The nymph called Echo could only use her voice in repetition of another. Echo was one of the many who fell in love with the beautiful Narcissus. One day, she secretly follows Narcissus as he goes out hunting with friends, and although she longs to address him, she is unable to do so because she cannot speak first. Her chance to speak comes when Narcissus loses his friends. Alone and isolated, he calls and Echo seizes the opportunity to speak by repeating his words back to him. But when Narcissus calls to his friends, “Let us come together here,” Echo misunderstands him and, rushing to embrace him, reveals herself. Narcissus brutally rejects her and she is doomed to spend the rest of her life pining in demented longing for him.

Narcissus, of course, finally beholds his beauty in his reflection in a pool and falls in love with himself. But this love is torture to him, for, falling in love with himself, he is caught in an unbearable contradiction. In the figure of Narcissus, self and other collapse into one: he is both lover and beloved in one body. Unable to endure the torment of such desperate love that is its own object and can, therefore, never possess itself, he breaks the circle by killing himself. Echo is there at his death to repeat his desolate dying words.

In the subtle wisdom of Greek mythology it is no accident that Narcissus and Echo are paired. It is as if she externalizes the fatal symmetry of Narcissus’s self-obsession and his life path, which is littered with those he has rejected. The irony here is that he too will have to reject himself as well, with the same ferocity. Trapped within a sealed circle of self-belonging, his longing for himself leads to self-annihilation. He is unable to build any distance or otherness into his own self-love. It tells us much about the nature of Echo that her fate is twinned with his. She is totally vulnerable because she cannot speak first. Her name and nature are one. She longs for him and when he rejects her, she is doomed to a life of demented longing which reduces her to little more than a lonely, desperate voice.

A book is barely an object; it is a tender presence fashioned from words, the secret echoes of the mind. This book attempts a poetic and speculative exploration of the creative tension between longing and belonging. The text has a dual structure: a first layer of image, story, and reflection, and underlying this a more philosophical subtext which might invite a more personal journey of reflection. The modest hope is that in a broken world full of such eerie silence, this little reflection might clear a space in the heart so that the eternal echoes of your embrace in the shelter of the invisible circle of belonging may become audible. A true sense of belonging should allow us to become free and creative, and inhabit the silent depth within us. Such belonging would be flexible, open, and challenging. Unlike the loneliness of Echo, it should liberate us from the traps of falsity and obsession, and enable us to enter the circle of friendship at the heart of creation. There is a resonant heart in the depth of silence. When your true heart speaks, the echo will return to assure you that every moment of your presence happens in the shelter of the invisible circle. These eternal echoes will transfigure your hunger to belong.