Anam Cara

A Generous Heart Is Never Lonesome

It is important to pray for those who are given in to our care in the world. Each person walks a unique pathway through the world. You have your own work, gifts, difficulties, and commitments. In order to take your place and contribute to the light of the world, you need to honour all these different dimensions of your life. Adjacent to all your activity in the world, there is also present in your life a small group of people who are directly in your care. They are usually family and some intimate friends who come to dwell at the centre of your life. These people are sent to you with gifts and challenges. In turn, you have a duty to look out for them. These people are in your soul-care. When someone is really close to you, you are in each other’s soul-care. Because of the calling of your own life, you cannot be continually there. Yet in the affection of prayer, you can carry the icons of their presence on the altar of your heart. Often unknown to the world, you secretly carry these friends in your heart and from heart to heart you bless, mind, and care for each other. In the Celtic tradition, it was always recognized that if you sent blessings out from your heart, they multiplied and returned again to bless your own life. A generous heart is never lonesome. A generous heart has luck. The lonesomeness of contemporary life is partly due to the failure of generosity. Increasingly, we compete with each other for the goods, for image, and status. The one can only ascend if the other is put down; there is only so much room on the pedestal. The old class system may have largely vanished, but our new system has a more subtle but equally lethal need for hierarchy. We forget that competition is false. An old rule in thought is that you can only compare like with like. No two individuals in the world are alike. Consequently, it is false to compare people and continue to foster such a destructive ideology of competitiveness. We damage the sanctuary of each other’s presence by building such false standards of comparison and competition. We have been seduced by competitiveness. And so easily. Because of the bogus certainties it supplies.