Anam Cara

7

A

TTRACTION

: T

HE

E

ROS OF

B

EAUTY

T

HE

E

XCITEMENT OF

A

TTRACTION

A space must be maintained or desire ends.

ANNE CARSON

THERE IS A LOVELY DISARRAY THAT COMES WITH ATTRACTION. When you find yourself deeply attracted to someone, you gradually begin to lose your grip on the frames that order your life. Indeed, much of your life becomes blurred as that countenance comes into clearer focus. A relentless magnet draws all your thoughts towards it. Wherever you are, you find yourself thinking about the one who has become the horizon of your longing. When you are together, time becomes unmercifully swift. It always ends too soon. No sooner have you parted than you are already imagining your next meeting, counting the hours. The magnetic draw of that presence renders you delightfully helpless. A stranger you never knew until recently has invaded your mind; every fibre of your being longs to be closer. You have fallen into the vortex of Eros where words become gossamer light and kisses kindle fires. You want to erase distance and become one with the flame. You grow innocent and careless. And Eros can take many forms. Sometimes it can be slow, subtle and indirect, building quietly without anyone else even suspecting. Sometimes it can come at you.

It is always astonishing how love can strike. No context is love-proof, no convention or commitment impervious. Even a lifestyle which is perfectly insulated, where the personality is controlled, all the days ordered and all actions in sequence, can to its own dismay find that an unexpected spark has landed; it begins to smoulder until it is finally unquenchable. The force of Eros always brings disturbance; in the concealed terrain of the human heart Eros remains a light sleeper.

E

ROS

A

WAKENS THE

S

PRING

CREATION IS IMBUED WITH EROS. EACH LANDSCAPE, EACH SEASON has its own quiet Eros. In contrast to the glory of autumnal colour which is like the flaming of a final twilight, winter is a chaste season. Nothing flourishes. Every field and tree is cleaned back to its bare form. The night of winter comes in clear and sure. Against the bleak grey whatever muted colour endures seems ghost-like. But as ever, the circle travels on to its own beginning. And just when the amnesia seems absolute, the first tones of spring commence their infant flaming. Within a short while the exiled Eros of nature stages a magnificent return. From the dark under-life of cold fields, infinite tribes of grass ascend. Skeleton trees allow themselves a shimmering of leaves. Flowers arrive as if this were the place they had always dreamed. Having travelled through thousands of miles of sky and ocean, swallows return to their favourite holiday nests in outdoor sheds. Local birds become passionate architects high up in the network of trees. The terse silence of winter has given way to the symphony of spring. Eros has awakened. The shadow-dream of winter is coming to life in every corner. Birth is the inner and outer song of spring. If winter is the oldest season, then spring is the youngest season. The Eros of the earth calls forth the beauty of spring.

TERRA ILLUMINATA

THE BEAUTY OF THE DIVINE MIND DREAMED A CREATION THAT CAN never be lonesome simply because it is always in conversation with itself. Even high in the mountains you can come upon a field which through the centuries has grown intense with the personal elements of its own silent conversation: every spring, absent flowers return again to their familiar sanctuary beneath huge persistent stones whose surfaces are always deepening ever so slightly with the restless engraving of wind and rain. Far away from the industry and interference of human hands, such a field has always been quietly at work, enriching the constellation of its own countenance. In traditional farming, the farmer never simply used the land. The farmer also lived among his fields. Sometimes he experienced a deeper affinity with his fields than with his neighbours. He was alert to the slightest change in their countenances; his heart anticipated the variations that each new season added.

Eros is a divine force. It infuses all the earth. Yet, too often, in our culture Eros is equated with lust and sexual greed. But it is a more profound and sacred force than this. Eros is the light of wisdom that awakens and guides the sensuous. It is the energy that illuminates the earth. Without it, the earth would be a bare, cold planet for Eros is the soul of the earth. In the embrace of Eros the earth becomes a terra illuminata. Amidst the vast expanse of fields and seas, the providence of Eros awakens and sustains the longing of the earth. This is the nerve source of all attraction, creativity and procreation. Eros is the mother of life, the force that has brought us here. It constantly kindles in us the flame of beauty and the desire for the Beautiful as a path towards growth and transformation.

C

ALLING TO

E

ACH

O

THER

But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only

aftershocks of the main inevitable boundary that creates Eros:

the boundary of flesh and self between you and me.

ANNE CARSON

THE CALL OF EROS IS AT THE HEART OF THE HUMAN PERSON. Although each of us is fashioned in careful incompletion, we were created to long for each other. The secret of our completion can only be found in the other. Huge differences may separate us, yet they are exactly what draw us to each other. It is as though forged together we form one presence, for each of us has half of a language that the other seeks. When we approach each other and become one, a new fluency comes alive. A lost world retrieves itself when our words build a new circle. While the call to each other is exciting and intoxicating in its bond of attraction, it is exceptionally complex and tender and, handled indelicately, can bring incredible pain. We can awaken in each other possibilities beyond our wildest dreams. The conversation of togetherness is a primal and indeed perennial conversation. Despite the thousands of years of human interaction, it all begins anew, as if for the first time, when two people fall in love. The force of their encounter makes a real clearance; through the power of Eros they discover the beauty in each other. Stretching across the distance towards each other, they begin to awaken all the primal echoes where nothing can be presumed but almost everything can be expected.

Eros can be a hugely complex force that sometimes inclines towards gravity and darkness. Eros can pull life towards the edges and depths where death lurks. From ancient times a kinship has been acknowledged between Eros and Thanatos, the death instinct. Surfing the tides of Eros one comes to feel that the life-force of joy could surge through all limitations, even death; or indeed there is such a homecoming in Eros when one succumbs to its force and abandons self in the sweet dying of complete release.

T

HE

B

EAUTY OF

S

KIN

We are made immortal by this kiss, by the contemplation of beauty.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

THE INSTINCT, RHYTHM AND RADIANCE OF THE HUMAN BODY come alive vividly when we make love. We slip down into a more ancient penumbral rhythm where the wisdom of the body claims its own grace, ease and joy. The act of love is rich in symbolism and ambivalence. It arises on that temporary, total threshold between solitude and intimacy, skin and soul, feeling and thought, memory and future. When it is a real expression of love, it can become an act of great beauty which brings celebration, wonder, delight, closeness and shelter. The old notion of the soul being hidden somewhere deep within the body serves only to intensify the loneliness of the love act as the attempt of two solitudes to bridge their distance. However, when we understand that the body is in the soul, intimacy and union seem unavoidable because the soul as the radiance of the body is already entwined with the lover.

L

OVE

N

OTES

Your clear shoulder

When the clothes have gone

Seems so sure of us.

Gently, hands

Caress and kindle

The glow, the skin

Delights to know.

Your tongue,

A tiny peninsula

Curves, stretches

Longing to give way.

Currents swell, calm,

Flow blue flamed

And sea sweat

Beads flesh.

Scruples of hair

Linger across your eyes,

Order tossed to the wild.

Sounds entwine,

Say our names,

The cry becomes

A whisper to

Breathe clay open.

And the return

Is from a distant kingdom,

Where there were

Neither mirrors

Nor eyes.

One could write a philosophy of beauty using the family of concepts which includes glimpse, glance, touch, taste and whisper, all of which suggest a special style of attention which is patient and reverent, content with a suggestion or a clue and then willing through its own imagination to fill out the invitation of beauty. We know this in our own experience. When we become uncertain in love, we wonder if our partner loves us or not. We fear the well may have run dry and our insecurity deepens. The smallest whisper of love can restore confidence and sureness.

T

HE

B

EAUTY O

F L

OVE

:

E

VERY

R

ISK FOR

G

ROWTH

W

ILL

B

E

R

EWARDED

Since once (livelong the day) my prayer measured

A love along your face, I’ve raged and variously

Had all smiles and butchery daily acquainting

You of the springing bloodshot and the tear.

Since there (spun into a sudden place to discover)

We first lay down in the nightly body of the year,

Fast wakened up new midnights from our bed,

Moved off to other sweet opposites, I’ve bled

My look along your heart, my thorns about your head.

W.S. GRAHAM, ‘Two Love Poems’

NONE OF US COMES TO A NEW RELATIONSHIP WITH EMPTY HANDS. We carry within us powerfully the images of the masculine and the feminine. The images of the father and the mother are in the blood and in the mind, the images of those who have loved us and we have loved and the damaged images where we were wounded. Because they have been carried across an endless landscape of years, those images have become set in the mind and have become the lens through which we tend to view the masculine and the feminine. Frequently, it is difficult for us to see each other through the net of patterns that entwines us. Yet the magic of new love can be the energy it releases. We become urgent and passionate. New thresholds open and the grace of a new beginning becomes possible. Life quickens with fresh invitations when we can recognize and celebrate the complexity and delight of the feminine and the masculine.

Love is a great shelter within which vulnerability can be shown and gradually healed. The awakening and growth of love is quite fascinating. It seems to arrive from nowhere. This calls two strangers from the crowd. Up to that point they have known nothing of each other. The one did not even know the other existed. The space between them was as clear as the space between two stones in a field. Around each individual form there is no imprint or trace of the life of the other. They are distant and foreign to each other, free of each other. Then Eros shoots his arrows and the delightful wound of attraction opens. They become a shelter for each other; as Yeats says:

When my arms wrap you round I press

My heart upon the loveliness

That has long faded from the world.

Cut clear from the anonymity of the crowd, these two people are already taking leave of their status as strangers. They begin to approach each other. This act of approaching is instinctive and excited; but it is also innocent. Gradually they come to learn the narrative of each other’s lives, the subtle nuances of a personality become visible.

Yet to love someone is an art. It does not come simply or cheaply but is a lifetime’s work. It remains a huge risk to entrust the fragile barque of identity to the wide and precarious depths of another person’s life. There will be storms. There will also be times when the emerging beauty of the voyage will bring unexpected joy. Deeply buried hurts will resolve and release themselves. Shakespeare distils this in Sonnet 30:

But if the while I think on thee (dear friend)

All losses are restored, and sorrows end.

Healing light will flow into the unknown region of the heart. It is as though twilight were awakening in the inner night. It is astounding how love can change a person. Where there was fear, courage begins to dawn. Trapped confusion gives way to fresh clarity. In old walls, unexpected doors open and the heart awakens with the desire ‘to live everything’.

The decision to enter into a lifelong commitment is to cross a decisive threshold. This decision focuses the two lives and cuts them clear from everyone else in the world. Goethe speaks of how commitment not only deepens the unity between two people, but also invites providence to open towards them with new gifts and the special shelter of even greater kindness. They have taken a huge risk. In the world of business risk is always precarious and when one is in the arena of quantity, a risk can mean one will lose everything. In the world of soul, I have seldom seen anyone take a risk for growth that was not rewarded a thousand times over, for to trust to experience is to grow, to learn, to develop.

Yet to choose is to stand out, to cut oneself off from the shelter of the group and future possibility, it is an invitation to steer a direct course into an unknown future. When one becomes so visible and definite, one leaves cover and becomes visible to other forces, forces which might be quite hostile. This is the poignancy at the heart of the commitment ceremony. The two new pilgrims set out on their unknown voyage. They want to begin, to take the first steps of their new life in the house of wise and intuitive shelter, the house of God. They join together first inside the circle of blessing, which their friends draw around them. The grounding recognition here is that the journey ahead is a great adventure. It is also a step into the unknown, a journey for which there is no map. Anything could befall them on the way.

T

O THE

H

OUSE OF

B

EAUTY TO

B

LESS THE

J

OURNEY

TIME LIVES DIFFERENTLY IN THE HOUSE OF GOD. WHEN YOU DRIVE through a city, town or village, the house of God stands out. It is unlike any other house. The contrast was infinitely clearer in former times. Many modern churches lack architectural beauty; they imitate the surrounding blandness. In former times when people were much poorer, they struggled sometimes for decades to build a church. Resources and moneys were gathered from every corner in order to erect a beautiful house where the divine presence could trust itself among us, a beautiful house where the reverence of great ritual could at special times unveil the glory of the divine. Beauty in its ultimate presence is divine glory. I have had the delightful experience of travelling through some small French village and visiting a local church. Outside the day is seared with summer light. Then you enter the beautiful kept-darkness of the church. Magnificent stained glass absorbs the white fire of outside light; it harnesses the fire into its narrative of colour. And among the sleep of dark stone a sequence of cobalt blue, indigo or golden yellow comes alive. To the pilgrim who breaks his journey to come in and pray, they offer shy yet beautiful light that restores your seeing. And you remember who you are. For a while you come to sense the providence that secretly shapes and guides your life. Your burdened mind relents and your soul comes to ease in the shelter of the divine.

In a great religious tradition, the house of God is a special place. The church, the temple, the mosque is where a community gathers to hear God. Cumulatively, over years the interior becomes threaded with the desires, intimacies and longings of a community. The interior of God’s house is not a vacant space; it is the place where the spiritual Eros of a community collects. This interior is richly textured with the aura of those who have worshipped there. When one enters there one does not simply enter a building; rather one enters unknowingly the gathered memory. This house is a living archive of transcendence. This is the space where the voice of God became audible, where that tranquillity which the world cannot give waits to comfort the mind. People have come into this house with burdens of heart that could find healing nowhere else in the world. They have come in here for shelter when storms have unravelled every stitch of meaning from their lives. And they have come in too to give thanks for blessings and gifts they could never have earned. The house of God is a frontier region, an intense threshold where the visible world meets the ultimate but subtle structures of the invisible world. We enter this silence and stillness in order to decipher the creative depths of the divine imagination that dreams our lives. Somewhere in this kept-darkness the affection that created us waits to bless and heal us.

T

HE

S

ANCTUARY OF

S

UBTLE

P

RESENCE

In silence we must wrap much of our life, because

it is too fine for speech.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

THIS SANCTUARY HOLDS A SPECIAL PRIVACY. WITHIN THIS EMBRACE there is no barrier between you and the intimacy of the divine heart. Nor is there a barrier between you and the dead. The outside world is relentless in its urgency and stress; the politics of the obvious dominates everything. Subtle presence is largely unable to register its companionship with us. The dead are abandoned in their graveyards to grow deeper into the stillness of the forgotten. But in this sanctuary their subtle presence hovers nearer; here is where time deepens to reveal its eternal embrace. For eternal life is eternal memory. In its natural silence and deep rituals, space opens here to coax the eternal more fully among us. Within this sacred space, time loses its linearity, its loneliness. It opens up and suggests itself as an ancient circle of belonging in which past and future, time lived and time to be lived, form ultimate presence. From ancient times people have understood the house of God to be the sacred ground from where it is wise to begin a journey: initiation as the journey of life in Spirit, and requiem as the beginning of the invisible journey.

In all our talk about the institutional church in the West, in our anger and disappointment at its theological blindness and abuse of power and person, we have fatally forgotten the harvest of healing presence that dwells in the house of God. In our desperate search for meaning and healing, we rush through our towns and cities on our way to work, therapy or doctors. We pass by these huge sanctuaries of absolute presence, totally oblivious of the divine welcome that awaits us, a welcome that is waiting to embrace us and call us.

A B

LESSING

B

RIGHTENS THE

R

OAD

THIS SANCTUARY IS THE PLACE WHERE THE NEW COUPLE INVOKE blessing and protection on the fragile world of ‘betweenness’ that has begun to develop and grow from that clear space where once they were strangers to each other. In some intuitive way, it is as though this sacred beginning already knows more than them. The beauty of a blessing always issues from a deeper place in time. Though the words are intoned on a particular day on a special occasion, the light of the blessing reaches towards them from eternal time where memory and future live within the one circle. The blessing of their journey already knows more about the journey than the new couple do. The Celtic Imagination had a profound sense of how a blessing could awaken and evoke the deepest potential of a situation. The Celts understood that all beginning risks the unknown; a blessing was intended to be a shelter of light around the pilgrim and the place. A blessing brightens the road; the heart is no longer completely vulnerable to the dark. The journey can lead anywhere; it can even bring new guests to the earth.

N

EGLECTED

B

EAUTY

:

T

HE

W

ONDER OF

C

REATING A

N

EW

L

IFE

WE MAY REFLECT ON HOW IMAGINATION AND CREATIVITY CALL beauty forth; how the reverence of the creative eye can discern beauty in the most unlikely guises. Yet so often we forget that one of the greatest miracles of beauty is the event of bringing a child into the world. Outside of your work and its creative force, the beautiful places you have seen, the compassion you have offered, the insights you have achieved, the sufferings you have managed to endure, those you have loved, the miracle each day of the world’s beauty ebbing towards your attention, even the beautiful Unease of God – none of these can compare with the unbelievable presence of your own flesh and blood smiling up at you in the face of a little baby.

W

OMAN

: W

OMB OF

B

EING

THERE IS NO OTHER WAY INTO THE WORLD EXCEPT THROUGH THE body of the woman. Woman is the portal to the universe. She is also the womb of Being. Each person in the world commenced life as a minuscule trace within the depths of the mother whose womb is the space where that trace expands and opens to assume human form. In terms of one’s later identity and destiny abroad in the world, this is the time of ultimate formation and influence. In human encounter, there is nothing nearer than this; no two humans can ever come closer than when one is forming inside the other’s depths. Naturally the relationship is hugely imbalanced: the one is a complete person, the other is minuscule and is just beginning a journey towards identity through absorbing life from the mother. Yet within the night of her body, each is helplessly open to the other. No man ever comes nearer to a woman. No woman ever comes nearer to a woman. This intricate nurturing and unfolding into identity takes place below the light in the physical subconscious of her body. The mother sees nothing. The whole journey is a hidden one. It is the longest human journey from the invisible to the visible. From every inner pathway, the labyrinth of her body brings a flow of life to form and free this inner pilgrim. Imagine the incredible events that are coming to form within the embryo: how each particle of growth is like the formation of a world from fragments.

T

HE

P

URE

C

RY

T

HAT

E

NCIRCLES THE

R

IPPLE OF

B

EGINNING

TO BE A PARENT IS TO BE INVITED INTO THE NATURAL DEPTHS OF divine creativity. Mothers and fathers inhabit the secret of God’s heart. They open a sacred door in the soul for a most vulnerable and intimate stranger to enter and inherit the earth. Though it comes to be through the gradual rhythms of nature in that warm space between two lovers, the creation of a child is an event that takes place on the cliff-edge of Nothingness. From the infinite and unknown Nowhere of the invisible world, someone is brought into Being. The stranger comes from eternity into time, from the pitch black night of Otherness into the dawn of a human countenance, from the penumbral depth and silence of the earth into the word-filled, wave-shaped music of consciousness. When two lovers lie down to consummate their hunger for each other, somewhere a pore opens in the infinite and their love surges beyond their names, hearts and minds to assume an independent human form. Regardless of who they are, where they go, how they live or love or suffer, from now on the form of this child will always be between them. In some instinctive surge, they have unknowingly entered that place outside memory and dream. In the deepest well of the night their pure cry, like a moon-glimpse, encircles a ghost ripple of beginning. Drawn within the pulse of time, the ripple secretly structures itself into the faint spiral of visibility, an embryo soul.

Being a parent is also the unromantic endurance of watching over, providing and caring for your child. In psychological and spiritual circles people talk of overcoming the ego. Being a loving parent is work that guarantees the transformation of the ego for in the work of rearing children the limits of your selfishness, need and smallness are continually challenged. Somehow you find within your heart a love that is willing to stretch further and further. In this sense, the work of parenting is profoundly blessed work. Some people pray in words; in the work of raising children, parents pray every day with every fibre of their being. The world of your child takes up the horizon of your heart. When you bring a child into the world, you become vulnerable in a new way. You have become unprotected against the world, unprotected now in a place where nothing can cover or shelter you. And yet protection is all you long for: protection for your child. When he had his first child, a friend told of his joy but also of how surprised he was to find himself thinking so much about his own mortality. Somewhere in his nature, he saw himself as a protective frontier between the world and the tiny infant. The sight of a newborn baby evokes fragile beauty: the miniature fingers and toes, the soft, new skin with its special scent and the first tracings of expression on the new face. Indeed, the beauty of the newborn infant can stir gentleness in the hardest heart.

Even the most caring parents will leave inevitable trails of damage. This is a natural part of the ‘dark industry’ of imperfection and brokenness that lies within every one of us. But it remains true that deep behind the visible surface of our society there are incredible, unseen people who give everything they are and everything they have to their children. They are the secret priests and priestesses who work away unostentatiously in the vineyards of soul-making. Although often arduous and painful, ultimately it is tender, vulnerable work, a work of fragile yet wondrous beauty.

T

HE

S

URPRISE OF

H

EARING

W

HAT

Y

OU

M

EAN

TO

Y

OUR

P

ARENTS

A GLIMPSE CAN HOLD A WORLD. A FRIEND OF MINE OFTEN TALKS TO parents of children who are preparing for the sacrament of confirmation. Such events are great family occasions. My friend always recommends that each parent separately takes the child away quietly before the day comes. The child would be invited to do something they loved or go somewhere they liked. But the parent would use the occasion to tell their child how they feel about him/her. Given that an adolescent already has huge resistance to anything resembling articulated parental love, this needs to be done swiftly, almost like an insert of phrases that achieve entry before the child can reject them: ‘I have wanted to say this to you for a long time. You’re going to cringe for a few moments . . . But it won’t take long. I just want you to know that we are really crazy about you. When I am away at work or travelling, I am always thinking about you. You are the centre of our lives. If anything were ever to happen to you, we would never get over it. And anything you ever go through, we will always be there for you. In the whole world, there is one door you can always come back to – no matter what happens to you in the world – and that door is here at home. We are so proud of you and we love you more than you will ever know. Now let’s go and do . . .’ Then cut it. Leave the words there. Go on and do what you had planned. This moment might be difficult, but it is one of the most valuable gifts a parent can give their child. The power of the word is amazing. The child will return to the words and never forget them. Often in the future during times of bewilderment and confusion, these words will be played and replayed. And it makes such a difference, especially in an unsheltered time, to recall words of recognition, affirmation and unconditional love. They help build that inner sanctuary where poise and belonging come to dwell.

The structures of convention in our world set the standards which are admired. They frequently operate according to the preferences of fashion and acceptance. Convention always excludes those who cannot or will not obey its imperatives. It tends to attack and belittle their way of being. The convention of marriage is often used to castigate the single parent. This is deeply unfair. For many wounded reasons a relationship can become impossible. Even with the best will in the world, it can emerge that two people would destroy each other, and even their children, if they were to remain together. They decide to separate and it falls to one of them to take the children. It is a daunting task to raise children on one’s own. The normal work and endurance is doubled. The parent has not a moment of peace. I know many single parents who are quietly, day in, day out living lives of celebration, sacrifice and encouragement. They manage to keep the relationship difficulties in their hearts and not allow their anger and hurt to leak out onto their children or let it alienate them from the estranged parent. Single parenting is work of great care and sheltering and those who find themselves in this situation deserve far more support and recognition.

A

FTER

B

IRTH

: S

HE

I

NHERITS

N

EARNESS

,

H

E

I

NHERITS

D

ISTANCE

EVERY BEGINNING IS OPAQUE. IT OCCURS IN A NEST THAT IS hidden, below the light. The womb is an archive of beginnings. It knows how to receive and nurture beginning. In a way, all later unfolding and growth is the task of truly inheriting beginning. For everyone on earth, woman is the beginning. We begin in woman. To inherit the feminine is an invitation and challenge to each of us. For the little girl-child this inheritance begins with an instinctive, subconscious affirmation: this is what I have to become – what my mother is – I will become a woman. For the boy-child this inheritance gradually structures itself into a negation: this is what I cannot become; though I have found form and dwelt within woman, it is impossible for me to become woman. This is perhaps where the silent lonesomeness of the masculine begins. The male child is thrown into the aloneness of his identity. He must acquaint himself with distance. He has to journey outwards, across space to find the father, to learn the presence and art of becoming a man. In primal contrast to the womb, to the deepest interior of the woman where he formed, he now has to approach the man. This is contact from outside. Regardless of how open, loving and gentle the father is, the child can at best only draw alongside an enclosed world. He has never been within it. The burden for him is longing, clarity and distance. For the girl, there is an equally tender and no less complex endeavour to decipher her identity. Formed within woman, her journey to become a woman is natural and instinctive. There is a natural continuity between her origin and identity. There are questions she must never face. Unlike the male, she is not confronted with discontinuity. She does not inherit the rupture. Rather than distance, she inherits nearness. Perhaps this is the source of the visceral immediacy, the ability to experience the inner rhythm of life, which the feminine enjoys and suffers. Her burden is to delineate the shape of her own identity against the breath-closeness of the mother-woman. For both male and female this is a lifelong journey of integration. If it becomes a single-focus issue for either, it can cause huge disruption and a crisis of identity. In this context, it is worth noting that Eros is also the force in us that loves wisdom.

T

HE

B

EAUTY OF

W

ISDOM

She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

And all that’s best of dark and bright

Meet in her aspect and her eyes:

Thus mellow’d to that tender light

Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

LORD BYRON

FEMINISM HAS DONE MUCH TO LIBERATE WOMAN FROM THE shackles of patriarchal culture. It has opened up a new language of recognition of the female and retrieved the wisdom of the feminine from neglected and forgotten traditions. The art of knowing is the heart of wisdom. Knowledge is the key that opens the treasure-houses of presence and possibility. Indeed, beauty itself is a profound invitation to a new kind of knowing. The experience of beauty illuminates everything around it. It awakens deeper dimensions in the seeing of the heart and the mind. Naomi Wolf expresses this in ‘The Beauty Myth’:

A woman-loving definition of beauty supplants desperation with play, narcissism with self-love, dismemberment with wholeness, absence with presence, stillness with animation. It admits radiance: light coming out of the face and the body, rather than a spotlight on the body, dimming the self. It is sexual, various, and surprising. We will be able to see it in others and not be frightened, and able at last to see it in ourselves.

Traditionally, we have reserved the title ‘wisdom’ for the highest form of knowing. Wisdom is knowing which embraces the truest feeling of the heart and the most profound seeing of the mind. Wisdom illuminates the deepest nature of things. Such breadth and depth of seeing is no accidental glimpse into the secret of things. It takes long years to gather wisdom, or to come in to wisdom. This is why we so frequently hear the phrase ‘ancient wisdom’. It is Eros that draws us towards wisdom. In its depth, darkness and achieved poise, wisdom is the style of knowing that Eros loves. When knowing has been refined in the fires of all the seasons of spirit, it earns the title ‘wisdom’. It is an affirmation and recognition of the beauty of the feminine that in the overwhelmingly patriarchal Judaeo-Christian tradition wisdom was recognized as being feminine.

Wisdom is bright, and does not grow dim.

By those who love her she is readily seen,

And found by those who look for her.

Quick to anticipate those who desire her, she makes herself

known to them.

Watch for her early and you will have no trouble;

You will find her sitting at your gates.

Even to think about her is understanding fully grown;

Be on the alert for her and anxiety will quickly leave you.

She herself walks about looking for those who are worthy of her

And graciously shows herself to them as they go,

In every thought of theirs coming to meet them . . .

Book of Wisdom 6: 12–17

She it was I loved and searched for from my youth;

I resolved to have her as my bride,

I fell in love with her beauty.

Her closeness to God lends lustre to her noble birth,

Since the Lord of All has loved her.

Yes, she is an initiate in the mysteries of God’s knowledge,

Making choice of the works he is to do . . .

Book of Wisdom 8: 2–4

The writer identifies wisdom and beauty here. Later on there is the beautiful sentence: ‘For nothing is bitter in her company’ (Wisdom 8: 16). Wisdom is not just special knowledge about something. Wisdom is a way of being, a way of inhabiting the world. The beauty of wisdom is harmony, belonging and illumination of thought, action, heart and mind. A friendship with wisdom is the key to the door of Providence. Nowhere is that sense of the Eros of wisdom and the shelter of providence more tested than in suffering. True beauty must be able to engage the dark desolations of pain; perhaps it is on this frontier that its finest light appears?