Anam Cara

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.