Anam Cara

1

T

HE

C

ALL OF

B

EAUTY

Thy light alone –

Gives grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’

EVERY LIFE IS BRAIDED WITH LUMINOUS MOMENTS.

I was with a friend out on Loch Corrib, the largest lake in the West of Ireland. It was a beautiful summer’s day. Time had come to rest in the silence and stillness that presided there. The lake slept without a ripple. A grey-blue haze enfolded everything. There was no division any more between earth and sky. Reaching far into the distance, everything was suffused in a majestic blue light. The mountains of Conamara seemed like pile upon pile of delicate blue; you felt you could almost reach out your hand and pull them towards you. No object protruded anywhere. Trees, stones, fields and islands had forgotten themselves in the daze of blue. Then, suddenly, a harsh flutter as near us the lake surface split and a huge cormorant flew from inside the water and struck up into the air. Its ragged black wings and large awkward shape were like an eruption from the underworld. Against the finely woven blue everywhere its strange form fluttered and gleamed in absolute black. She had the place to herself. She was the one clear object to be seen. And as if to conceal the source as she soared, she left her shadow thistling the lake surface. This was an event of pure disclosure: a sudden epiphany from between the worlds. The strange beauty of the cormorant was a counterpoint to the dreamlike delicacy of the lake and the landscape. Sometimes beauty is that unpredictable; a threshold we had never noticed opens, mystery comes alive around us and we realize how the earth is full of concealed beauty. St Augustine expressed this memorably: ‘I asked the earth, I asked the sea and the deeps, among the living animals, the things that creep. I asked the winds that blow, I asked the heavens, the sun, the moon, the stars, and to all things that stand at the doors of my flesh . . . My question was the gaze I turned to them. Their answer was their beauty.’

B

EAUTY

I

S

Q

UIETLY

W

OVEN THROUGH

O

UR

D

AYS

WHEN WE HEAR THE WORD ‘BEAUTY’, WE INEVITABLY THINK THAT beauty belongs in a special elite realm where only the extraordinary dwells. Yet without realizing it, each day each one of us is visited by beauty. When you actually listen to people, it is surprising how often beauty is mentioned. A world without beauty would be unbearable. Indeed the subtle touches of beauty are what enable most people to survive. Yet beauty is so quietly woven through our ordinary days that we hardly notice it. Everywhere there is tenderness, care and kindness, there is beauty. Despite our natural difficulties with our parents, each of us has in our memory moments of deep love we shared with them. Perhaps it was a moment in which you became aware of some infinite tenderness in the way your mother gazed upon you, and you knew that her heart would always carry you as tenderly as it carried herself. Or it might have been a phrase of affection that has continued to sound around your life like a bright circle of blessing.

In Greek the word for ‘the beautiful’ is to kalon. It is related to the word kalein which includes the notion of ‘call’. When we experience beauty, we feel called. The Beautiful stirs passion and urgency in us and calls us forth from aloneness into the warmth and wonder of an eternal embrace. It unites us again with the neglected and forgotten grandeur of life. The call of beauty is not a cold call into the dark or the unknown; in some instinctive way we know that beauty is no stranger. We respond with joy to the call of beauty because in an instant it can awaken under the layers of the heart a forgotten brightness. Plato said: ‘Beauty was ours in all its brightness . . . Whole were we who celebrated that festival’ (Phaedrus).

Beauty does not linger, it only visits. Yet beauty’s visitation affects us and invites us into its rhythm, it calls us to feel, think and act beautifully in the world: to create and live a life that awakens the Beautiful. A life without delight is only half a life. Lest this be construed as a plea for decadence or a self-indulgence that is blind to the horrors of the world, we should remember that beauty does not restrict its visitations only to those whom fortune or circumstances favour. Indeed, it is often the whispers and glimpses of beauty which enable people to endure on desperate frontiers. Even, and perhaps especially, in the bleakest times, we can still discover and awaken beauty; these are precisely the times when we need it most. Nowhere else can we find the joy that beauty brings. Joy is not simply the fruit of circumstance; we can choose to be joyous independent of what is happening around us. The joyful heart sees and reads the world with a sense of freedom and graciousness. Despite all the difficult turns on the road, it never loses sight of the world as a gift. St Augustine said: ‘The soul is weighed in the balance by what delights her. Delight or enjoyment sets the soul in her ordered place. Where the delight is, there is the treasure.’ Perhaps this is why there is such delight in beauty. In the midst of fragmentation and distress beauty draws the soul into an experience where an elegant order prevails. This brings a lovely tranquillity and satisfies the desire of the soul. When the Beautiful continues on its way, the soul has been strengthened by a delight that will further assist her in transfiguring struggle.

T

HE

F

IRST

F

ACE

: I

NTIMATIONS OF

B

EAUTY

A blind man recognizes a beloved face by barely touching it

with seeing fingers, and tears of joy, the true joy of recognition,

will fall from his eyes after a long separation.

OSIP MANDELSTAM, ‘The Word and Culture’

EVEN AMIDST CHAOS AND DISORDER, SOMETHING IN THE HUMAN mind continues still to seek beauty. From our very first moments in the world we seem to be on a quest for beauty. The first thing the new infant sees is the human face. That sighting affects us deeply; for instinctively we seek shelter, confirmation and belonging in the face of the mother. We cannot remember that time; but most of us spent endless hours of our early time simply gazing up into the face of the mother. No other subsequent image in the world will ever rival the significance of the face. The lives of those we know, need and love all dwell behind faces. We are inevitably drawn to the beauty of the face for it is there that we had our first inkling of beauty. In its form, presence and balance of left and right, the face offers the first intimation of the symmetry and order that lies at the heart of beauty. Without that hidden order and rhythm of pattern, there could be no beauty. Nature is full of hidden geometry and harmony, as is the human mind; and the creations of the mind that awaken or recreate this sense of pattern and order tend to awaken or unveil beauty. Symmetry satisfies us and coheres with our need for meaning and shelter in the world. Indeed, the notion of symmetry is central to the beauty of mathematics and science. It seems that physicists in choosing between different theories often feel that the more symmetrical one, generally, is the more beautiful and the truer.

Science tells us that the more symmetrical a face is, the more beautiful it is. Though order is necessary for beauty, the interesting thing is that a face that is not overburdened by structural perfection can still be very beautiful. More often than not it is the inner beauty of heart and mind that illuminates the face. A smile can completely transform a face. Ultimately, it is the soul that makes the face beautiful. Each face is its own landscape and is quietly vibrant with the invisible textures of memory, story, dream, need, want and gift that make up the beauty of the individual life. This is also the grace that love brings into one’s life. As the soul can render the face luminous so too can love turn up the hidden light within a person’s life. Love changes the way we see ourselves and others. We feel beautiful when we are loved, and to evoke an awareness of beauty in another is to give them a precious gift they will never lose. When we say from our heart to someone: ‘You are beautiful’, it is more than a statement or platitude, it is a recognition and invocation of the dignity, grandeur and grace of their spirit. There is something in the nature of beauty that goes beyond personality, good looks, image and fashion. When we affirm another’s beauty, we affirm something that cannot be owned or drawn into the grid of smallmindedness or emotional need. There is profound nobility in beauty that can elevate a life, bring it into harmony with the artistry of its eternal source and destination. Perhaps Beauty does not linger because she wishes to whet our appetite and refine our longing so that we enter more fully into the limitless harvest of our inner inheritance.

T

HE

J

EWEL WITHIN THE

F

LEETING

M

OMENT

BEYOND THE VEILS OF LANGUAGE AND THE NOISE OF ACTIVITY, the most profound events of our lives take place in those fleeting moments where something else shines through, something that can never be fixed in language, something given as quietly as the gift of your next breath. Days and nights unfold in the confidence and continuity of sequence. Most days take no notice of us; but then every so often there is a moment when time seems to crystallize. A voice changes tone and a deeper music becomes audible. A gaze holds and a hidden presence is glimpsed.

One year in university at the end of the semester I returned home for the summer holidays. When I walked into the kitchen my father looked up at me and I saw something in his gaze that I had never seen before. Some finality had entered his looking. Whether it was out in the mountains or among the fields around the house, his eyes had glimpsed a door opening towards him. His countenance had become more luminous and his natural gentleness was being claimed by a new silence. As we held each other for a moment in that gaze I knew death had picked his name out. Days later illness arrived and in three weeks the door of death had closed behind him. The gaze had revealed everything; time had stood still. The image of that gaze has always remained with me for it was a moment of the deepest and most tender knowing, a moment radiant with the strange beauty of sadness.

‘I

N

D

IFFICULT

T

IMES TO

K

EEP

S

OMETHING

B

EAUTIFUL IN

Y

OUR HEART

’

THERE ARE TIMES WHEN LIFE SEEMS LITTLE MORE THAN A MATTER of struggle and endurance, when difficulty and disappointment form a crust around the heart. Because it can be deeply hurt, the heart hardens. There are corners in every heart which are utterly devoid of illusion, places where we know and remember the nature of devastation. Yet though the music of the heart may grow faint, there is in each of us an unprotected place that beauty can always reach out and touch. It was Blaise Pascal who said: In difficult times you should always carry something beautiful in your mind.

Rilke said that during such times we should endeavour to stay close to one simple thing in nature. When the mind is festering with trouble or the heart torn, we can find healing among the silence of mountains or fields, or listen to the simple, steadying rhythm of waves. The slowness and the stillness gradually take us over. Our breathing deepens and our hearts calm and our hungers relent. When serenity is restored, new perspectives open to us and difficulty can begin to seem like an invitation to new growth. This is also the experience of prayer. The tired machinations of the ego are abandoned. It no longer needs to push or prove itself in the combat of competition. Beneath the frenetic streams of thought, the quieter, elemental nature of the self takes over and calms our presence. Rather than taking us out of ourselves, nature coaxes us deeper inwards, teaches us to rest in the serenity of our elemental nature. When we go out among nature, clay is returning to clay. We are returning to participate in the stillness of the earth which first dreamed us. This stillness is rich and fecund. One might think that an invitation to enter into the stillness of nature is merely naïve romanticism that likes to indulge itself and escape from the cut and thrust of life into some narcissistic cocoon. This invitation to friendship with nature does of course entail a willingness to be alone out there. Yet this aloneness is anything but lonely. Solitude gradually clarifies the heart until a true tranquillity is reached. The irony is that at the heart of that aloneness you feel intimately connected with the world. Indeed, the beauty of nature is often the wisest balm for it gently relieves and releases the caged mind. Calmness flows in to wash away anxiety and worry. The thirteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart always encouraged such calmness: Gelassenheit. Over against the world with all its turbulence, distraction and worry, one should cultivate a style of mind that can reach through to an inner stillness and calm. The world cannot ruffle the dignity of a soul that dwells in its own tranquillity. Gradually, this serenity will begin to pervade our seeing and change the way we look at things.

T

O

B

EAUTIFY THE

G

AZE

THE HUMAN GAZE IS NOT THE CLOSED, FIXED VIEW OF A CAMERA but is creative and constructive. Both the gaze that sees and the object that is seen construct themselves simultaneously in the one act of vision. So much depends then on how we see things. More often than not the style of gaze determines what we see. There are many things near us that we never notice simply because of the way we see. The way we look at things has a huge influence on what becomes visible for us. If a house has been closed up for a long time, a film of dust settles on the windows. Decayed residue gradually manages to seal out the light. When we go into such a place, we smell the dankness of sour and fetid air. The same thing can happen in the rooms of the mind. If one has become stuck in a certain narrow or predictable way of seeing, the outside light cannot bring colour into one’s life. Eventually the windows of the mind become blinded by an imperceptible film of dead thought and old feeling so that the air within becomes stale, life lessens and the outside world loses its invitation and challenge. When no fresh light can come into the mind, the colour and beauty fade from life. There is an uncanny symmetry between the inner and the outer world. Each person is the sole inhabitant of their own inner world; no-one else can get in there to configure how things are seen. Each of us is responsible for how we see, and how we see determines what we see. Seeing is not merely a physical act: the heart of vision is shaped by the state of soul. When the soul is alive to beauty, we begin to see life in a fresh and vital way. The old habits of seeing are broken. The coating of dead dust falls from the windows. Freed from their dead forms the elements of one’s life reveal new urgency and possibility.

We have often heard that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This is usually taken to mean that the sense of beauty is utterly subjective; there is no accounting for taste because each person’s taste is different. The statement has another, more subtle meaning: if our style of looking becomes beautiful, then beauty will become visible and shine forth for us. We will be surprised to discover beauty in unexpected places where the ungraceful eye would never linger. The graced eye can glimpse beauty anywhere, for beauty does not reserve itself for special elite moments or instances; it does not wait for perfection but is present already secretly in everything. When we beautify our gaze, the grace of hidden beauty becomes our joy and our sanctuary.

‘B

EAUTY

, E

VER

A

NCIENT

, E

VER

N

EW

’

Beauty was a reversion to the pre-divine lingering in man as a

memory of something that existed before his presence . . .

prior to the Gods.

HERMANN BROCH

ST AUGUSTINE TESTIFIES TO THE PERMANENCE AND ETERNITY OF beauty when he writes: ‘Too late came I to love thee! Beauty, ever ancient, ever new, too late came I to love thee!’ Yet beauty is never stale; it is never the same. Beauty is always new in every different presence and it quickens distinctively each time. When we gaze at the faces we love, we often notice how the days and years continue to enrich these faces with ever new textures of presence. The experience of beauty always resembles a beginning. A clearance opens in the heart for something new. Perhaps this is why it always seems to embrace us completely and satisfies something profound in us. Beauty touches and renews our hope when it takes us out of the grid of ordinary time and brings us to another place, a place where history ceases and the weight of memory relents, a place ever ancient and ever new. For a while our hearts become young again, inspired with new vision and possibility. Meister Eckhart says: ‘Time makes us old. Eternity keeps us young.’

It is quite fascinating how beauty touches the mind. No-one is immune to beauty. Regardless of background, burdens or limitations, when we find ourselves in a place of great beauty, clarity, recognition and excitement awaken in us. It is never a neutral experience. Despite all our disaffection with what can sometimes seem a harsh and cynical world, there is an eternal beckoning at the heart of beauty that touches what is still innocent in us. This sense of beauty was classically expressed early in the Western mystical tradition by Pseudo-Dionysius in his book The Divine Names. This work was to exercise a profound and continuous influence on all subsequent philosophical mysticism. He writes poetically of the flowing light of beauty and how it fills and brightens every form:

That, beautiful beyond being, is said to be Beauty – for

It gives beauty from itself in a manner appropriate to each,

It causes the consonance and splendour of all,

It flashes forth upon all, after the manner of light, the

Beauty producing gifts of its flowing ray,

It calls to itself,

When it is called beauty.

To behold beauty dignifies your life; it heals you and calls you out beyond the smallness of your own self-limitation to experience new horizons. To experience beauty is to have your life enlarged.

L

IKE THE

M

OON ON

B

REAKING

T

IDE

:

T

HE

G

LIMPSE OF

B

EAUTY

There is nothing as beautiful as the sadness of one

who is blind in Granada.

SPANISH PROVERB

TRUE BEAUTY IS NUMINOUS. WHEN A PERSON HAS BEAUTY, HER presence is full of radiance. In German, they say such a person has a ‘grosse Ausstrahlung’, literally, ‘a flowing forth of radiance’. The individual is no longer confined within the frame of her own identity. There is a light in beauty which no frontier can limit or contain; it has a distinctive dignity. Like consciousness, beauty shines with a light from beyond itself. In medieval thought, Albert Magnus spoke of beauty as the brilliance of an object’s form shining forth in its sensible presence.

Beauty is not to be captured or controlled for there is something intrinsically elusive in its nature. More like a visitation than a solid fact, beauty invests the aura of a person or infuses a landscape with an unexpected intimacy that satisfies our longing. True beauty cannot be invented or manufactured. We ‘cannot bear very much reality’. Neither, it seems, can we bear very much beauty. The glimpse, the touch of beauty is enough to quicken our hearts with the longing for the divine. Beauty never finally satisfies though she intensifies our longing and refines it. Were the human person simply soul, beauty would be an absolute embrace. We are, however, threshold creatures of deep ambivalence and when beauty touches the matrix of human selfhood, it can only be just that: a touch.

‘W

HEN

N

IGHT

H

OLDS

S

WAY AND THE

F

OREST

I

S

F

REE OF

S

TRANGERS

’ – B

EAUTY

C

OMES

BEAUTY ENJOYS A PROFOUND AND ANCIENT AUTONOMY. TRUE beauty is from elsewhere, a pure gift. It cannot be programmed nor its arrival foreseen. It never falls simply into the old patterns of what is already there nor is it frivolous or burdened with leaden solemnity. Frequently, beauty is playful like dancing sunlight, it cannot be predicted, and in the most unlikely scene or situation can suddenly emerge. This spontaneity and playfulness often subverts our self-importance and throws our plans and intentions into disarray. Without intending it, we find ourselves coming alive with a sense of celebration and delight. The pedestrian sequence of a working day breaks, a new door opens and the heart recognizes the silent majesty of the ordinary. The things we never notice, like health, friends and love, emerge from their subdued presence and stand out in their true radiance as gifts we could never have earned or achieved.

Beauty cannot be forced. It alone decides when it will come and sometimes it is the last thing we expect and the very last thing to arrive. Creative artists know this well. Great skill and inspiration set the context or scene where beauty might emerge. But it is not the mind of the artist alone that can determine whether beauty will arrive or not. There is a wonderful passage in Rilke’s essay on Rodin where he discusses this mysterious dimension of beauty. Rodin’s art ‘was not based upon any great idea, but upon the conscientious realisation of something small, upon something capable of achievement, upon a matter of technique. There was no arrogance in him, he devoted himself to this insignificant and difficult aspect of beauty which he could survey, command and judge. The other, the greater beauty must come when all was ready for it as animals come to drink when night holds sway and the forest is free of strangers.’ This can also be true in the soul. When we devote some calm time to the heart and come off the treadmill of stress and distraction, we can enter into the beauty within. Each of us can prepare for that inner arrival: where ‘night holds sway’ and the inner forest becomes ‘free of strangers’.

In the cut and thrust of life experience, beauty frequently emerges when either great love or great sacrifice elevates an experience above its daily confine to another level of presence and possibility. Beauty is not quotidian, it is a rare delight. The Irish seanfhocal (proverb) says: An rud is annamh is iontach, i.e. that which is wonderful is seldom.

Though beauty is autonomous, there seem to be occasions when human presence can become congruent with her will. In creative work no amount of force or mechanical management can guarantee beauty. Suddenly, without expecting it, beauty is there. Yet ultimately beauty is a profound illumination of presence, a stirring of the invisible in visible form and in order to receive this, we need to cultivate a new style of approaching the world.

T

OWARDS A

R

EVERENCE OF

A

PPROACH

. . . seeing that as I went, I left my beatitude behind me.

DANTE, La Vita Nuova

WHEN BEAUTY TOUCHES OUR LIVES, THE MOMENT BECOMES luminous. These grace-moments are gifts that surprise us. When we look beyond the moment to our life journey, perhaps we can choose a new rhythm of journeying which would be more conscious of beauty and more open to inviting her to disclose herself to us in all the situations we travel through.

Yet what you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach. Many of the ancient cultures practised careful rituals of approach. An encounter of depth and spirit was preceded by careful preparation and often involved a carefully phased journey of approach. Attention, respect and worthiness belonged to the event of nearing and disclosure. In China they tell the story of subjects from Mongolia who travelled vast distances to see the emperor. In Beijing, they had to practise for months the decorum appropriate to that moment of encounter. When the emperor finally passed, they could not even look up. The whole journey was rewarded with a mere glimpse of the emperor’s feet. In the New Testament, a woman who had bled for years healed instantly when she touched the hem of Jesus’s garment.

Our culture has little respect for privacy; we no longer recognize the sacred zone around each person. We feel we have a right to blunder unannounced into any area we wish. Because we have lost reverence of approach, we should not be too surprised at the lack of quality and beauty in our experience. At the heart of things is a secret law of balance and when our approach is respectful, sensitive and worthy, gifts of healing, challenge and creativity open to us. A gracious approach is the key that unlocks the treasure of encounter. The way we are present to each other is frequently superficial. We become more interested in ‘connection’ rather than communion. In many areas of our lives the rich potential of friendship and love remains out of our reach because we push towards ‘connection’. When we deaden our own depths, we cannot strike a resonance in those we meet or in the work we do. A reverence of approach awakens depth and enables us to be truly present where we are. When we approach with reverence great things decide to approach us. Our real life comes to the surface and its light awakens the concealed beauty in things. When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us. The rushed heart and the arrogant mind lack the gentleness and patience to enter that embrace. Beauty is mysterious, a slow presence who waits for the ready, expectant heart. When the heart becomes attuned to her restrained glimmerings, it learns to recognize her intimations more frequently in places it would never have lingered before.

T

HE

E

TERNAL

P

LACES

T

HAT

G

RACE THE

J

OURNEY

OFTEN WE APPROACH THINGS WITH GREED AND URGENCY. WE do not like to wait. As we wait at the vertical altar to go on-line, we become frustrated by the extra few seconds the machine needs to find its mind. Computer makers are constantly at work to cut the transition time; the flick from world to cyber-world must become seamless. We live under the imperative of the stand-alone digital instant; and it is uncanny how neatly that instant has become the measure not alone of time but also of space. Classically, the understanding of life, the unfolding of identity and creativity, the notion of growth and discovery were articulated through the metaphor of the journey. Virgil’s Aeneid is the journey from fallen Troy to the glory of the new city of Rome. Homer’s Odyssey is a great mystical journey home. Dante’s Divine Comedy is an epic journey through hell and purgatory until the arrival in Paradise. Each human life is the journey from childhood to a realized adult life. Each day is a journey out of darkness into light. Each friendship and love is the intimate journey where the soul is born and grows. The journey is the drama of the heart’s voyage into the tide of possibilities which open before it. Indeed, a book is a path of words which takes the heart in new directions.

In the Celtic tradition, warriors and monks undertook incredible journeys of imagination and spirit. The journey to the eternal, invisible world was called the imram. In Irish lyric poetry of the eighth century there is the story of the Immram Curaig Máile Dúin, The Voyage of Mael Duin’s Currach. Mael Duin and his companions made a voyage and visited many wondrous islands. One day they came upon an island surrounded by a fence of brass. All around the fence was a beautiful pool, elevated high above the waves. Before the pool was a bridge. Mael Duin’s warriors attempted time and again to climb up onto the island but kept slipping off the bridge of glass and plunging back down into the ocean. Then:

Towards them came a gentle white-throated woman

Whose nature was free from folly and whose deed

Was fair; she was clad in radiant raiment of

Swanlike brightness.

Her fair cloak, which was shining and beautiful, was

Surrounded by a hem of red gold. About her feet were

Silver sandals on which to rest.

Upon her bosom she wore a white brooch of

Wondrous silver, inlaid with woven gold of loveliest

Workmanship.

On her head fair yellow hair gleamed like gold; graceful

Were her steps and regal her fine stately movements.

Like a holy sanctuary in the lower portion of the huge

Bridge was a wave-bright well protected by the lovely

Bulk of a lid.

She poured lovely liquor but offered them none. She chanted wondrous music which lulled them to sleep. This lasted three days and then she led them to a feast in a banquet hall high above the ocean. While they were feasting she chanted ‘marvellous names’. She knew and called out the name of each young man. But then she was asked to satisfy the lust of Mael Duin. She upbraided the warriors for being undignified and false. Then she mysteriously enjoined them: ‘Ask the secret of the island, that I may be able to relate it to you.’ When morning had come, they awoke in their boat and the beautiful island had vanished, no-one knew where.

In its encounter with us beauty invites our dignity and graciousness. Often it beckons us from afar but holds us off until our hearts become more refined and receptive; then beauty draws us into her mysterious invisible embrace. However, when the coarse thought or grasping smallness protrudes, we can find ourselves forsaken, dropped down into the severance of our familiar, blind hungering.

W

HEN THE

S

ENSE OF

D

ESTINATION

B

ECOMES

G

RACIOUS, THE

J

OURNEY

C

AN

B

ECOME AN

A

DVENTURE OF

B

EAUTY

How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments

of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things.

ELAINE SCARRY

TRADITIONALLY, A JOURNEY WAS A RHYTHM OF THREE FORCES: time, self and space. Now the digital virus has truncated time and space. Marooned on each instant, we have forfeited the practice of patience, the attention to emergence and delight in the Eros of discovery. The self has become anxious for what the next instant might bring. This greed for destination obliterates the journey. The digital desire for the single instant schools the mind in false priority. Each instant proclaims its own authority and the present image demands the complete attention of the eye. There is no sense of natural sequence where an image is allowed to emerge from its background and context when the time is right, the eye is worthy and the heart is appropriate. The mechanics of electronic imaging reverses the incarnation of real encounter. But a great journey needs plenty of time. It should not be rushed; if it is, your life becomes a kind of abstract package tour devoid of beauty and meaning. There is such a constant whirr of movement that you never know where you are. You have no time to give yourself to the present experience. When you accumulate experiences at such a tempo, everything becomes thin. Consequently, you become ever more absent from your life and this fosters emptiness that haunts the heart.

When you regain a sense of your life as a journey of discovery, you return to rhythm with yourself. When you take the time to travel with reverence, a richer life unfolds before you. Moments of beauty begin to braid your days. When your mind becomes more acquainted with reverence, the light, grace and elegance of beauty find you more frequently. When the destination becomes gracious, the journey becomes an adventure of beauty. The wonder of the journey as a voyage of reverence and discovery finds lyrical expression in C.P. Cavafy’s poem ‘Ithaca’. He imagines the reader setting out on this journey to Ithaca, a journey rich with promise for senses and soul, rich with glad and difficult learning. The poem concludes with a wonderful evocation of the destination as midwife to the soul:

Ithaca gave you the beautiful journey.

Without her you would not have set out.

She has nothing more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not fooled you.

Having become so wise, with so much experience,

You will have understood, by then, what these Ithacas mean.

The poem advises great patience and never to hurry. Take your time and be everywhere you are.

N

OSTALGIA FOR THE

E

TERNAL

AT ITS HEART, THE JOURNEY OF EACH LIFE IS A PILGRIMAGE through unforeseen sacred places that enlarge and enrich the soul. On the way time often unveils its eternal interior. In the third century Plotinus wrote his Enneads. The Enneads is a wonderful cathedral of thought, a Chartres of late antiquity. The thinking of Plotinus is luminous with passion and nostalgia for the eternal:

This is the spirit that Beauty must ever induce, wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love and a trembling that is all delight. For the unseen all this may be felt as for the seen; and this is the Soul’s feel for it, every Soul in some degree, but those the more deeply that are the more truly apt to this higher love – just as all take delight in the beauty of the body but all are not stung as sharply, and those only that feel the keener wound are known as Lovers. These Lovers, then, lovers of the beauty outside of sense, must be made to declare themselves.

This is a magnificent evocation of what beauty is and does. Beauty induces atmosphere and spirit: wonder, delicious turbulence, love, longing and a trembling delight. Plotinus suggests that beauty embraces both visible and invisible worlds. We encounter and engage this beauty through the ‘feel’ of the soul. He defines lovers as those who feel this deeper wound of invisible beauty; he also suggests that these are secret, unknown lovers. The true sense of beauty belongs to the inner mystery of identity. Love of the beautiful is a secret and sacred passion.

Plotinus was keenly aware of the beauties of the natural world. However, these beauties had their source in the eternal world from which they were fugitives: they are ‘the beauties of the realm of sense, images and shadow pictures, Fugitives that have entered into Matter – To adore, and to ravish where they are seen . . .’ The world is a mixed, in-between place peopled by images and shadow-pictures. Eternal beauty cannot glow here in its full force or purity; nevertheless it is present as a fugitive and awakens our adoration when it is glimpsed.

The world of the senses is intensified with beauty that is meant to recall us to the higher and eternal forms of beauty. The physical thing in itself is not independently beautiful. Its beauty is made to shine through the elegance of its form: ‘In visible things . . . the beautiful thing is essentially symmetrical, patterned. Symmetry itself owes its beauty to a remoter principle.’ The force of invisible beauty infuses the visible object. This is the reason for ugliness: ‘An ugly thing is something that has not been mastered by pattern.’

For Plotinus beauty is never merely external. Beauty is ultimately an elegant, inner luminosity; it is bestowed by the soul: ‘For the soul . . . makes beautiful to the fullness of their capacity all things whatsoever that it grasps and moulds.’ Beauty is not simply surface appearance intended to indulge us or bestow temporary pleasure. Following Plato, Plotinus advocates the cultivation of a sense of beauty; this is a work of the soul, it is the cultivation of virtue and the clarification of the heart. The life-journey can be a journey of ascent to beauty. The longing at the heart of attraction is for union with the Beautiful. Not everything in us is beautiful. We need to undertake the meticulous work of clearance and clarification in order that our inner beauty may shine. The radiance of the Good makes beauty real:

But how are you to see into a virtuous Soul and know its loveliness? Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smooths there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your statue . . .

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EVERENCE

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ATHWAY TO

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EAUTY

IN ORDER TO BECOME ATTENTIVE TO BEAUTY, WE NEED TO rediscover the art of reverence. Our world seems to have lost all sense of reverence. We seldom even use the word any more. The notion of reverence is full of riches that we now need desperately. Put simply, it is appropriate that a human being should dwell on this earth with reverence. As children we became aware of the word ‘reverence’ as used to describe the way a person is present in prayer or liturgy. When a priest celebrated the mass with a sense of reverence, you sensed the depth of his presence to the mystery. Though the church was full of people, he was absorbed in something that could not be seen. Ultimately, reverence is respect before mystery. But it is more than an attitude of mind; reverence is also physical – a dignified attention of body showing that sacred is already here. Reverence is not to be reduced to a social posture. Reverence bestows dignity and it is only in the light of dignity that the beauty and mystery of a person will become visible. Reverence is not the stiff pious posture which remains frozen and lacks humour and play. To live with a sense of reverence is not to become a prisoner of a dull piety. Playfulness, humour and even a sense of the anarchic are companions of reverence because they insist on the proper proportion of the human presence in the light of the eternal. Reverence is also the companion of humility. When human hubris intrudes on or manipulates the sacred, the consequence is inevitably humiliation. In contrast, a sense of reverence includes the recognition that one is always in the presence of the sacred. To live with reverence is to live without judgement, prejudice and the saturation of consumerism. The consumerist heart becomes empty and lonesome because it has squandered reverence. As parent, child, lover, prayer or artist – a sense of reverence opens pathways of beauty to surprise us. The earth is full of thresholds where beauty awaits the wonder of our gaze.