Anam Cara

The Longing for Real Presence

The deeper the intimacy and belonging, the more acute the sense of absence will be. It seems that real intimacy brings us in from the bleakness of exile. Intimacy is belonging. We come in from the distance and grow warm at the hearth of the friend’s soul. Now there are places within us that are no longer simply our own. Rather they are inhabited with the taste and colour of the friend’s presence. When the friend departs, the inner house of belonging falls to ruins; this is why absence holds such acute presence and poignancy. True belonging alters and re-creates your identity. When that belonging is fractured or lost, something of our deepest self departs. To open yourself is to risk losing yourself. Emily Dickinson says:

Absence disembodies

so does Death

hiding individuals from the Earth.

Absence hides the one you love. You desire to be with the beloved, to see her, hear her, rest in her presence. But she is hidden from your eyes though not hidden from your heart. Letters and photographs are no longer objects of joy to raise your heart; now they are filled with pathos. You find yourself in places you were together, and your heart is seared with absence.

We are vulnerable to absence because we so deeply desire presence. Some writer, referring to another, said, “He has quite a delightful presence but a perfect absence.” Obviously, happiness increased when the other was absent! The mind separates us, makes us absent from the earth. The privilege of the mind is its capacity for presence. There seems to be nothing else in Nature that can focus in such conscious presence. The deepest longing of the mind is for real presence. Real presence is the ideal of truth, love, and communication. Real presence is the ideal of prayer here and the beatific vision in the hereafter. Somewhere deep in the soul, our longing knows that we break through to the eternal when we are gathered in the shelter of presence. These are the moments of our deepest belonging. For a while, the restlessness and hunger within the heart grows still. The sense of being an outsider, a stranger here, ceases. For a while, we are home. This is such a satisfying and refreshing experience; it nourishes us to the roots.

Yet the experience of presence always remains fleeting and temporary. Not often do hunger, readiness, and grace conspire to bring our souls home; and when they do, the visit is inevitably short. The mind and time are doomed to move relentlessly onwards. All we achieve is the glimpse, the taste; we are not allowed to linger. We plunge forth again into the ever-diverse fields of new experience. Presence becomes broken, scattered, and fragmentary. We endeavour to be real. Yet so much of our presence is diminished by our role and its functions. Behind our many intricate and necessary social masks, we often secretly wonder who we are and daydream of letting everything derivative and secondhand fall away and living the life we love. We dream of leaving the daily round in which absence, rather than presence, seems to control and determine things. Most of our social world is governed by a sophisticated and subtle grammar of absence. In post-modern culture, we tend more and more to inhabit virtual reality rather than actual reality. More and more time is spent in the shadowlands of the computer world; this is a world which is all foreground but has no background. Many people have to earn their living in the world of function. Imagine someone in a factory assembly line who has to hit the same bolt every twenty seconds for the rest of his working life. You could not stay present in that kind of work unless you were a saint or a Zen mystic. In your heart you would have to be elsewhere. This work makes you absent. This is the absence that Karl Marx referred to as alienation. Much of modern life is lived in the territory of externality; if we succumb completely to the external, we will lose all sense of inner and personal presence. We will become the ultimate harvesters of absence, namely, ghosts in our own lives.