Anam Cara - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора John O'Donohue (ч. 431)

EAUTY

Indeed, the nature of the gods, so subtle . . .

LUCRETIUS

INSHIP WITH THE

EYOND

: L

OVE OF

EAUTY

OUR VALLEY OPENS OUT ONTO THE OCEAN. AS CHILDREN walking to school each morning we often wondered at how the ocean seemed to rise up towards the line of the horizon. Out there fishing boats seemed higher up. This elevation into the beyond only made the ocean more mysterious. The sea was always treated as a mystery. The old people used to say: everything that is on the land is in the sea; if you ever saw a mermaid on the shore, you had to be very careful because she would try to get you to come between her and the ocean, then she would drown you. There were also stories about lost treasures and secret villages under the sea. All this mystery was echoed in a memorable poem we learned in school. It had the unforgettable first line: ‘Tháinig long ó Valparaiso’: a ship arrived from Valparaiso. The very sound of the word ‘Valparaiso’ conjured up images of all that was foreign and exotic, a dream-world which had mysteries and wonders beyond our wildest imaginings. Somewhere on the other side of our ocean its waves were breaking on the magical kingdom of Valparaiso.

The human heart is always drawn beyond the here and now. Human presence never finally gathers anywhere; we are never simply or clearly here. No-one stands up straight and direct in the world, each of us is leaning forward into the future that is rising towards us. In its very structure, the body strains towards the beyond: the eyes and the hands reach out, the voice and the words, the Eros and the listening are all drawn beyond. Thoughts are of course the ultimate pilgrims; this means that the beyond is also within us and this is the source of desire in us. At the centre of the mind’s mirror there is a splinter of horizon that never allows us to see anything without some trace of desire in it. The beyond is constantly beckoning us in dream, thought and feeling; it protrudes into the present and into presence. This is what makes us urgent, passionate and open. This ardent kinship with beyond is at the heart of our love of beauty.

Beauty addresses us from a place beyond; it captures our complete attention because it resonates with the sense of the beyond in us. Beauty is the ideal visitation; it settles at once into the ‘elsewhere’ within us. It is as if we are in exile and home comes to visit us for a while. This is some of the completion and satisfaction we feel in the presence of the Beautiful. When the ship draws in to the pier, we discover that it has brought the treasures of Valparaiso along with it!

EART

: P

RISM FOR

EAUTY

If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess

exactly what we desire.

SIMONE WEIL, ‘To Desire without an Object’

AS FARAWAY LIGHT YIELDS ITS HARVEST OF COLOURS WHEN IT passes through a prism, beauty opens out its radiance when it shines through the human heart. The heart is the place where beauty arrives; here is where it can be felt, recognized and shared. If there was no heart, beauty could never reach us. Through the heart beauty can pervade every cell of the body and fill us. To use a word that feels like it sounds: this is the thrill of beauty through us. Perhaps this is why we sometimes feel the absence of beauty in our lives; we have allowed the prism to become dull and darkened; though the light is near, it cannot enter to have its inlay of beauty diffused. Sometimes absence is merely arrested appearance. Compassion and attention keep the prism clear so that beauty may illuminate our life. Prayer of course is the supreme way we lift our limited selves towards the light, and ask it to shine into us.

EART AS

ABERNACLE

THE HEART IS WHERE THE NATURE, FEELING AND INTIMACY OF A life dwell and without heart the world grows suddenly cold. In its desire for beauty, it reaches towards the beyond. This poignant straining suggests that beauty is the homeland of the heart. When it can dwell in beauty the heart is home. The human heart is the masterpiece of the primal artist. When God created it, it was fashioned for an eternal kinship with beauty; God knew that the human heart would always be wedded to him in desire; for the other name of God is beauty. The heart is the tabernacle of divine beauty. St John of the Cross puts this poetically:

I did not have to ask my heart what it wanted

because of all the desires I have ever known,

just one did I cling to

for it was the essence of all desire:

to know beauty.

EAUTY

: T

ADIANCE OF THE

TERNAL

The nature of love is this, that it attracts to beauty and links the

unbeautiful with the beautiful.

MARSILIO FICINO

WHILE BEAUTY GLADDENS OUR HEARTS, IT MAKES US LONELY TOO for what cannot be. True beauty is woven through the heart of life and is ever engaged with forces of ignorance, darkness, ugliness and negativity; yet domination and power are not beauty’s way. Beauty works from within these conflicts of forces and her brightening may or may not appear. Where beauty seems absent, she is often hidden and still at work in the slow industry of transformation. So much of beauty is not immediately apparent and indeed it could take a long time before it becomes visible. It often takes a lot of struggle and committed attention and generosity, even sacrifice, in order to create beauty. This work of beauty is slow and patient; it is the transformation through which the darkness of suffering eventually glimmers with the learned refinement of true radiance. The soul that struggles for the emergence of beauty reaches towards God and labours on that threshold between visible and invisible, time and eternity. The possibility and promise of this threshold is caught wonderfully by Marguerite Porete, the twelfth-century mystic:

Such a Soul often hears what she hears not,

and often sees what she sees not,

and so often she is there where she is not,

and so often she feels what she feels not.

For thousands of years this theme has inspired artists. The dark, haunted image of Jesus on the cross is made to yield some shimmer of its incomprehensible light. Dostoevsky suggested this too, when he said: ‘Perhaps it is beauty that will save us in the end.’

: K

EEPER OF

RANSIENCE

THOUGH WE LIVE IN TIME, BEAUTY SEEMS TO VISIT US FROM outside time, from eternity. Beauty turns vanishing time into something precious; it makes the moment luminous and indeed timeless. Yet one of the most agonizing aspects of beauty is that it does vanish. What we do not know or feel barely touches us, does not sadden us when it vanishes. However, beauty awakens, envelops, inspires and delights us; an experience of beauty turns a certain sequence of time into something unforgettable. Yet it still vanishes. The Japanese have the word aware to describe the ephemeral nature of beauty. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins is haunted by the same vanishing:

How to keep – is there any, any, is there none such, nowhere

known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or

catch or key to keep

Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, . . . from vanishing away?

‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’

This is always the pathos at the end of autumn as colour dies into winter; it is also the pathos of each life whose moments of beauty are forming and dissolving like music. If we see God as the Keeper of Transience, then somewhere in the eternal world there is a door without our name on it, the repository where the unfathomed beauty of our chain of days still lives. If eternity is the deeper nature of time, then the vanishing is not a final loss or emptiness. Vanishing is disappearance through visible surface into eternal embrace. We cannot lose what is eternal. Meister Eckhart is trenchant on the limitation and falsity of time: ‘Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time.’

ISIBLE AND THE

NVISIBLE

IN BEAUTY WE WERE DREAMED AND CREATED, AND OFFERED A LIFE in a world where beauty arises to awaken, surprise and call us. The outer unfolding of our lives is internally sustained and ordered by this invisible beauty. Furthermore, whenever we awaken beauty, we are helping to make God present in the world. Consequently the rituals and liturgies of religion can be occasions where beauty truly comes alive. The beauty of God is reachable for everyone and can be awakened in all dimensions of our experience. This also calls us to love and respect the world and to care for the earth.

On the surface, beauty confers grandeur on order, attractiveness on goodness, graciousness on truth and Eros on Being. Thomas Aquinas and the medieval thinkers wisely recognized that beauty was at the heart of reality; it was where truth, unity, goodness and presence came together. Without beauty they would be separated and inclined towards destructive conflict with each other. Accompanied by beauty, truth gains graciousness and compassion. Beauty holds harmony at the heart of unity and prevents its collapse into the most haunted chaos. In the presence of beauty, goodness attracts desire and beauty makes presence luminous and evokes its mystery. There is a profound equality at the heart of beauty; a graciousness which recognizes and encourages the call of individuality but invites it to serve the dream and creative vision of community. Without beauty the Eros of growth and creativity would dry up. As Simone Weil says: ‘Desire contains something of the absolute and if it fails . . . the absolute is transferred to the obstacle.’

EAUTY AND

REATIVITY AS

IRTH

Who would have thought my shrivelled heart

Could have recovered greenness?

GEORGE HERBERT, ‘The Flower’

ONE OF THE MOST LUMINOUS DOCUMENTS OF CLASSICAL antiquity is the Symposium of Plato. It is a reflection on the notions of love, goodness and beauty. For Plato beauty was not a private experience of self-indulgence or pleasure. Beauty was internally related to love and goodness. The basic human drive is the desire for the Good. In the beginning Love was born of beauty, ‘from then on the ability to love beauty has created all the good things that exist for gods and men’. Plato understands love as a spirit that works on that threshold between the divine and the mortal. At the heart of the Symposium there is a constant recognition of creation as the urgent arena of creativity. The heart of human identity is the capacity and desire for birthing. To be is to become creative and bring forth the beautiful:

All humans are pregnant, physically and spiritually, and when we reach our prime, our nature desires to give birth. Nature is not capable of giving birth in the ugly, but only in the beautiful. Now this is a divine act, and this pregnancy and birth impart immortality to a living being that is mortal. But it is impossible for these things to come about in the inharmonious. The ugly clashes with all that is divine, while beauty is in harmony with it. Therefore the role of the goddess of childbirth is played by beauty. And because of this, whenever something pregnant approaches the beautiful it becomes gentle and pours out gladness both in the begetting and the birth. But whenever it approaches the ugly, it shrinks into itself, sullen and upset. It turns away, is repelled, and refuses to give birth. It holds back and carries the burden of what it has inside itself with pain. In fact, within the pregnant one, who is teeming with life, there is a violent fluttering before the beautiful, through which it will be released from the great pain of childbirth which it has . . .

Beauty is the goddess of birth. In her presence the passion and inner fullness of the gift flows forth in confidence and sureness. And it is through love that we reach a deeper perception of the true nature of beauty. In the Phaedrus, Plato has that remarkable passage where he describes how the soul awakens in the presence of beauty and recovers and grows her eternal wings; gravity and finitude can no longer contain her. According to Plato beauty encourages and invites creativity to unfold. When the soul reaches beyond all fragmentation and entanglement God will come to birth in it. Meister Eckhart says that it is of little consequence whether God exists or became incarnate if he does not come to birth in the soul.

HEN THE

IGHT OF

OUR

EGLECTED

EAUTY

HINES

What my God’s form may be, yourself you should perceive,

Who views himself in God gazes at God indeed.

ANGELUS SILESIUS

EVERYTHING THAT IS, IS IN GOD. THERE IS NOTHING OUTSIDE GOD. In some haunted yet tender way, God is also the most intimate dimension of every human mind and, in a sense, the most natural thing in the world is God. There is no distance or barrier between us and God. When there are barriers creating distance between us, they are our barriers, not God’s. God is like a light within the heart that nothing can extinguish. We can never lose God because God is twinned eternally to the soul. Once we awaken to the beauty which is God, there is a great sense of homecoming. The mercy of God is subversive affection that sees through our weakness until it illuminates again the reflection of beauty which is our essence. Regardless of who we are or what we have done, we never lose our dignity before God’s eyes. When the gaze of God falls on us, the light of our neglected beauty shines through the mirror of soul.

The beauty of God is the warmth of the divine affection. You did not invent yourself or bring yourself here. In terms of human time, the mystery of your individuality was dreamed for millions of years. Your strange and restless uniqueness is an intimate expression of God and who you are says something of who God is. You cannot divest yourself of your immortal clothing. The two longings deepest in your heart – the longing to love and to be loved – are not merely psychological needs; at a more profound level, they are the stirring of God within you. Your capacity to care is God; it is your beauty. Therefore, divine closeness is the secret of human vulnerability. We are not vulnerable simply because we are childlike adults in an imperfect world. We are vulnerable because we carry in us a deep strain of God’s caring. Our love for our friends and family, our concern for the world and for the earth, our compassion for the pain and desperation of others are not simply the product of an ‘unselfish gene’ within us, they issue from that strain of God in us that prizes above everything the kindness, the compassion and the beauty that love brings. Anywhere: in prayer, family, front line, hospital, brothel or prison, anywhere care comes alive, God is present.

LREADY AT THE

EAST

For his bounty,

There was no winter in ’t, an autumn ’twas

That grew the more by reaping.

SHAKESPEARE, Antony and Cleopatra

TO PARTICIPATE IN BEAUTY IS TO COME INTO THE PRESENCE OF the Holy. It is we who exile ourselves from God. Everything we feel, think and do is already happening within the divine shelter. To know this is to know one’s real beauty.

Though the human mind is intense with difference and variety it is shadowed by divisions and imbalance. God is pure verb, a permanent event, an eternal surge, a total quickening. Beauty’s diversity only deepens the flow of God’s presence; nothing is held back. This sense of lyrical presence is expressed vividly by the sixteenth-century mystical poet Angelus Silesius. He put many of Meister Eckhart’s insights into poetic form. His little poem ‘The Rose’ captures the grace and simplicity of pure presence and integrity:

The Rose is without why

She blooms because she blooms

She does not care for herself

Asks not if she is seen.

The poem is also a huge vindication of identity, the freedom and clarity of simply being yourself. Nothing else is needed. It is a poem of profound trust in the act of being. This makes for a pure clearance. There is no outside intrusion, no pressure to measure up to outside expectations. Nor is there any sense of inner division. The rose is content to be a rose: she is what she is. At another level the poem can be read as a hymn to the freedom of nature, how it avoids the oppressive clutter of intentionality and concept. And the rose is flourishing; she is at one with herself in the grace of growth. Nature as a whole performs for no man. How vastly different this is to the way we live our lives.

Sometimes the urgency of our hunger blinds us to the fact that we are already at the feast. To accept this can change everything: we are always home, never exiled. Although our minds constantly insist on seeing walls of separation, in reality most of the walls are mere veils. In every moment, everywhere, we are not even inches away from the divine presence.

Spirituality has to do with the transfiguration of distance, to come near to ourselves, to beauty and to God. At the heart of spirituality is the awakening of real presence. You cannot produce or force presence. When you are truly present, you are there as you are: image and pretension are left aside. Real presence is natural. Perhaps the secret of spiritual integrity has to do with an act of acceptance, namely, a recognition that you are always already within the divine embrace.

Rather than trying to set out like some isolated cosmonaut in search of God, maybe the secret is to let God find you. Instead of endeavouring to reach out in order to first find God, you realize you are now within the matrix and the adventure is the discovering of utterly new and unspoken dimensions of the inexhaustible divine; this brings with it a new sense of ease with your self and your solitude. John Keats wrote rapturously about this: ‘Though the most beautiful Creature were waiting for me at the end of a Journey or a Walk, though the carpet were of Silk, the Curtains of the morning clouds; the chairs and Sofa stuffed with Cygnet’s down, I should not feel – or rather Happiness would not be so fine as my Solitude is sublime. Then instead of what I have described, there is sublimity to welcome me home’ (Letter to G. and G. Keats, Oct. 1818).

RACE

Treat Things Poetically.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

GRACE IS ONE OF THE MOST MAJESTIC WORDS IN THEOLOGY. IT suggests the sublime spontaneity of the divine which no theory or category could ever capture. Grace has its own elegance. It is above the mechanics of agenda or operation. No-one can set limits to the flow of grace. Its presence and force remain unmeasurable and unpredictable. Grace also suggests how fluent and seamless the divine presence is. There are no compartments, corners or breakages imaginable in the flow of grace. Grace is the permanent climate of divine kindness. It suggests a compassion and understanding for all the ambivalent and contradictory dimensions of the human experience and pain. This climate of kindness nurtures the sore landscape of the human heart and urges torn ground to heal and become fecund. Grace is the perennial infusion of springtime into the winter of bleakness.

Divine grace works without a programme; it does not labour under the leaden intention of a pre-existent, fixed plan. Meister Eckhart states: ‘God has no why, but is the why of everything and to everything’: deus non habet quare sed ipsum est quare omnium et omnibus. This is a subversive and liberating statement. It liberates God from entanglement in the mesh of our needs, speculations and moralistic agenda. This quality of the divine presence should be highlighted especially in a digital culture dominated by the mechanics of function. The claim ‘God has no why’ makes a wonderful clearance in a culture where most objects and modes of presence are either expression or functions of something else. In our times it is quite exceptional for a thing simply to be itself. The same is true of people. A slick politics of presentation and deliberateness now dominates most forms of presence and it is actually quite disarming to hear someone speak from their heart with no eye to the best camera angle. Such direct immediacy seems almost innocent and unsophisticated, yet it is so refreshing and real.

A God without a why is a God who is lyrical and full of grace, a God who has no other intention than simply ‘to be’. To learn that art of being is to become free of the burden of strategy, purpose and self-consciousness. God dwells totally in fluency of presence.

A large amount of human seriousness constructs itself around the question why? Answering this question often brings us into the labyrinth of psychological motivation, judgement, adulation or blame. A God without a ‘why’ sounds delightfully light and light-hearted, a God of humour without all the mental armour of deliberateness, caginess or expectation. There is that famous phrase in Exodus in response to the query of who God might be. God replies: ‘I am who am.’ The ‘I-am-ness’ of God is everything in God. Without a why God is never a self-target of Descartes’s ultra-self-conscious: ‘I think, therefore, I am’. The ‘I-am-ness’ is its own witness and vindication.

NCONCEIVABLE

ADE

NTIMATE

God created us for the limitless alone.

MARSILIO FICINO

EACH HEART HOLDS A DIFFERENT WORLD AND OFTEN ITS NET OF desires is entangled and confused. At other times, things clarify and the God of beauty makes everything luminous. Most of the time, however, God remains a question. And within its private silence, each heart follows the question across landscapes no-one else sees.

From the earliest religions onwards the divine has been imaged in terms of mythic or ancestral stories. It is interesting here that the divine is never seen as a purely abstract force, like energy for instance. The divine is always portrayed with human qualities naturally writ large on an epic scale. Greek mythology is a wonder-world of epic portraits. The Gods combine power and personality as they stretch within the chains of necessity. The transition then to philosophical reflection considers God as abstract. As Christianity awakens out of Judaism, it emerges into a vibrant world of imaginative thought that inherits both traditions and somehow manages to think them together. Indeed, this concept of God is one of the finest achievements of Christian thought. Over centuries, in conversation with the greatest minds of medieval and classical antiquity, Christian thought developed a notion of God as person and stayed faithful to both mythological and philosophical thinking. God is not an invisible, anonymous abstract force. Poetry and philosophy are one here.

‘W

HAT

EAUTY

?’

BUT

‘W

EAUTY

?’

THE SENSE OF GOD AS A PERSON HAS DIMINISHED CONSIDERABLY IN the Western Christian tradition. New Age spirituality, fundamentalism and mainstream religions all speak of God as a force; either a soft benevolent force, a hard force or a moral force. And yet, perhaps, the sense of divine intimacy and warmth, the sense of divine imagination and the suggestion of the numinous depths of God then become empty. God could become a nameless, bland energy. The beauty of the notion of person is the way it gathers the horizontal and the vertical into one form or centre. This is the way we picture the infinite. It ranges from the deepest depths to the highest summit and it extends on every side, endlessly. When we imagine God as person, it gives all this infinity personality, warmth and intimacy. The cosmos seems no longer anonymous or echoless. The Christian tradition has been very careful to nuance the concept of person in relation to God. When we acknowledge God as person, we sense an actual someone to whom we can relate. Given that one of the most beautiful things about being human is the ability to encounter another person, it is natural that we should want that experience with the deepest source of everything also to be intimate and personal. The notion of an infinite person who is pure love means we are using the term ‘person’ in a transfigured sense; there is no control or despotic power here, rather a sublime quickening of our every potential for passion, creativity, compassion and freedom.

Our exploration of beauty has considered many of the forms in which beauty appears. These forms included places, things, events and experiences. However, when we speak of God as beauty, we are speaking of the beauty of who-ness. The who question is the most numinous and mysterious of questions. The self is unlike any other thing in the world: though it appears in time and space, it is beyond them. The who-ness of someone can never be finally named, known, claimed, controlled or predicted. The who is beyond all frames and frontiers and dwells in the mystery of its own reflexivity and infinity. Who has no map. When we claim that God is beauty, we are claiming for beauty all the adventure, mystery, infinity and autonomy of divine who-ness. Beauty is the inconceivable made so intimate that it illuminates our hearts.

PACE

ETWEEN

PIRIT

THE NOTION OF THE DIVINE PERSON ALSO GROUNDS THE DEPTH and intimacy of human affection. If you listen to your affection or attraction to someone, you can sense that there is more than the two of you there. There is also present a third force – the affection itself as a threshold where your two lives meet and engage each other. This finds primal expression in the notion of the Trinity. The affection between Son and Father is so utterly alive as to be not merely a bond but an other person, the Holy Spirit. That constant, passionate spill-over of pure affection is the Spirit. This is the Spirit of affection in which we live and move in each moment and it is at the heart of the Christian notion of God. The Holy Spirit holds the tension of God, and is both the abyss and summit of the knowing between Father and Son. The Son is the first Other in the universe. The Spirit is that secret path of affinity that holds the kinship warm even in the coldest, most negative spaces between Self and Other. What is utterly alien to you can eventually yield a glimpse of affinity with you. Between every separate thing, beneath the slow time-film that rolls forth each day and night, in the cold unknown between strangers, in the limbo land of numbed indifference and even in the vast distance between centuries and their lost memory, there exists another world, an invisible world where all this separation and distance is embraced. The Holy Spirit presides there, holding together that vast terrain of the ‘between’. It can be somewhat misleading to overemphasize the Holy Spirit. Perhaps the meaning might emerge more clearly if we occasionally referred to all that space between simply as holy Spirit. The space between seems empty to the eye; yet to the imagination it is vibrant with pathways towards beauty. Divine space has a latent grandeur. The Holy Spirit is the spirit of primal Eros, the between that is forever quickening, the source of all the gifts that turn up in our lives.

ROVIDENCE

ORE

BRIGHTENS

ATH

Our love is

a sister of the light;

deftly, she unwinds

our shadowed nets.

THE GIFT COMES FROM THIS IN-BETWEEN WORLD THAT KNOWS and holds much of the geography of our destiny, a secret climate of profound kindness that sends us bouquets of light and colour when we experience forlorn times. The attentive wisdom of this in-between world is what we call providence. It is a foreknowing that is always at work, watching out for us. Providence is the power of latent blessing that fore-brightens our pathway. The providence that shelters and guides us knows infinitely more than we can about who we are, where we are going and what we require in order to become who we were dreamed to become. It is only when we look back that we can discern how we were being secretly minded; we discern the meaning in something that was opaque and difficult and we begin to see how it deepened our sensibility and refined our spirit. Providence shelters our hearts and blesses our lives with beauty.

Providence is another name for the kindness of God. If we could realize how wise the providence around us is, it would give us immense confidence on our journey. The irony is that we don’t need to worry. We can take a lot more risks than we realize. It is interesting to ask: what are the limits you have set for your life? Where are the lines of these limits? Why do you think you cannot go beyond them? How real are they? Did you construct these limits out of anxiety and fear? If you were to go beyond your most solidly set limits, what difference would it make to your life? What are you missing by remaining confined?

The awakening to the beauty of your creativity can totally change the way you view limits. When you see the limit not as a confining barrier but as a threshold, you are already beyond. The beauty of imagination helps you to see the limit as an invitation to venture forth and view the world and your role in it as full of beautiful possibilities. You become aware of new possibilities in how you feel, think and act. The interim, the in-between world is brisk with possibility. And possibility is the gift of creativity.

EAUTY

S A

IFT

The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting.

SHAKESPEARE, Sonnet 87

MANY OF THE MOST LUMINOUS GIFTS OF OUR LIVES ARRIVE AS complete surprises. A gift is the most beautiful of intrusions. It arrives undeserved and unexpected. It comes ashore in our hearts carefully formed to fit exactly the shape of a hunger we might not even know we had. The gift comes with no price tag, no demand that puts us under an obligation. Every gift has an inner lamp that casts a new brightness over an undiscovered field of the heart. In this light we discover and bring to birth something new within us. Regardless of how carefully we examine the path of its arrival, the eyes of our mind can never unveil the true source of the gift. The gift keeps its reason secret. Some unexpected path opened in the interim world and the gift was already on its way towards us.

Sometimes it is difficult to know when you are getting a gift. Its arrival is often a shock; at the beginning it might seem to be the furthest thing from a gift that you could imagine. Looking from now, we cannot glimpse the shape of our destiny; its subtle weave only comes to light in retrospect. There is so much about ourselves that we do not know. After Freud’s descriptions of the subconscious, we tend to imagine that the subconscious holds all kinds of misshapen forms. We forget that the darkness of the unknown within us is also a fecund soil urgent with seeds of new possibility. The beauty of the gift is the secret way it awakens us to growth. Without alerting our anxiety or forcing confrontation, the gift has placed us on the path of change almost before we realize it. And much of the change in our lives happens through struggle and pain. We are confronted with an unattractive direction that we have to take. For weeks or months we have to travel through limbo; the comfort and security of our familiar belonging lies far behind us. Where we will belong next has not yet become clear. The days become a struggle of endurance. Yet when the light and the ease return, we recognize the change that has been achieved. The gift bequeaths change in a completely different way. Quietly it undoes the knots of false netting that had us entangled and before we have time to realize what has happened, we find ourselves released into a new fluency. Like a parent to the soul, the gift carries us carefully over torn ground until our feet stand free in a serene place where we can recognize that we have been blessed.

Every life is blessed with a different sequence of gifts. Often the gift arrives secretly and you only find it later. Or perhaps you are looking back over time as you would look through an old drawer and you come upon something that you had put away ages ago. You rediscover the gift and enter again into its wonder. This is one of the lovely capacities of memory: the reawakening of new blessing through the rediscovery of old gifts in forgotten corners. It is this prospect that animates faith.

AITH

: T

TTRACTION TO

IVINE

EAUTY

Fornocht do chonac thú

a áille na háille

Naked have I seen thee

O Beauty of Beauty

PATRICK PEARSE

FAITH IS ATTRACTION TO THE DIVINE. FOR TOO LONG FAITH HAS been presented as a weak form of knowledge. Yet whilst faith seems feeble in the realm of evidence and proof, beauty always attracts us. It strikes our sensibility in a way that makes us respond. Our response to beauty is unlaboured. Even in unknown ways, our lives are charged with attraction towards divine beauty. The infinity of the beauty which is God is a feast for the soul. The beauty of God increases and deepens our own beauty. We enter the secret symmetry of the Divine Imagination.

When we consider faith as a response to Divine Beauty, we begin to glimpse its creativity and passion. Faith is no blind piety but a primal attraction, the deepest resonance of the self drawn to the elegance of its ancient origin. Faith has its own aesthetic of dignity, light and proportion. Something in us senses and knows how perfectly the contours of the soul fit the divine embrace. It is the deepest dream of the soul to be in the intimacy of Divine Beauty. At that depth an atmosphere of elegance presides. Such a profound attraction turns the body into a force-field of divine quickening. The whole self is taken up in the embrace of the divine tenderness. The classic image for this encounter of God and the soul is that of the Lover and the Beloved. It is majestically expressed in the Canticle of St John of the Cross:

Upon a gloomy night

With all my cares to loving ardours flushed,

O venture of delight!

With nobody in sight

I went abroad when all my house was hushed.

In safety, in disguise,

In darkness up the secret stair I crept,

O happy enterprise!

Concealed from my eyes

When all my house at length in silence slept.

Upon that lucky night

In secrecy, inscrutable to sight,

I went without discerning

And with no other light

Except for that which in my heart was burning.

It lit and led me through

More certain than the light of noonday clear

To where One waited near

Whose presence well I knew,

There where no other presence might appear.

Oh night that was my guide!

Oh darkness dearer than the morning’s pride,

Oh night that joined the lover

To the beloved bride

Transfiguring them each into the other.

Within my flowering breast

Which only for himself entire I save

He sank into his rest

And all my gifts I gave

Lulled by the airs with which the cedars wave.

Over the ramparts fanned

While the fresh wind was fluttering his tresses,

With his serenest hand

My neck he wounded, and

Suspended every sense with its caresses.

Lost to myself I stayed

My face upon my lover having laid

From all endeavour ceasing:

And all my cares releasing

Threw them amongst the lilies there to fade.

(translated by Roy Campbell)

This canticle expresses the divine Eros of mystical love. It has all the elements of the private world of tenderness, belonging, excitement, waiting and union which a great love poem would wish to have. It is a poem about ultimate freedom, an absolute leavetaking of limited identity, an arrival at a field beyond care and worry. This is beautifully caught in the utter surprise of the image of the lilies in the last line, which echoes of course that passage where Jesus enjoins us not to worry: ‘Behold the lilies of the field; they neither spin nor weave, yet I say unto you that Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.’ Once you taste of the divine, you can never fully return to anything else. For to find and love God is an extraordinary adventure. God is the true love of the soul; in the divine embrace all Eros is transfigured.

ENSUOUSNESS OF

THE SENSUOUS IS SACRED. FOR TOO LONG IN THE CHRISTIAN tradition we have demonized the sensuous and pitted the ‘dim senses’ against the ‘majestic soul’. This turned God into an abstract ghost, aloof and untouchable; and it made the senses the gateways to sin. But the world is the body of God. Hopkins is the great poet of God’s beauty. He writes:

Glory be to God for dappled things . . .

All things counter, original, spare, strange; . . .

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

Everything can be an occasion of God. The elemental presence of the divine is everywhere: wind, water, earth and fire witness to the urgency, passion and tactility of God. From these elements God fashioned the universe. It is not that God is reduced to a force of nature or that aspects of nature become mere images of God. Nature is divine raiment; the touch and flow and force of God touches us here but the divine presence is not exhausted by this. Both sensuousness of nature and our senses make the divine presence visible in the world. Nature was the first scripture, and at the heart of Celtic spirituality is this intuition: to be out in nature is to be near God. When we begin to awaken to the beauty which is the Sensuous God, we discover the holiness of our bodies and our earth.

ILD

LEGANCE

The rose which here on earth is now perceived by me,

Has blossomed thus in God from all eternity.

ANGELUS SILESIUS

BEAUTY INVITES US TOWARDS PROFOUND ELEGANCE OF SOUL. IT reminds us that we are heirs to elegance and nobility of spirit and encourages us to awaken the divinity within us. We are no longer trapped in mental frames of self-reduction or self-denunciation. Instead, we feel the desire to celebrate, to give ourselves over to the dance of joy and delight. The overwhelming beauty which is God pervades the texture of our soul, transforming all smallness, limitation and self-division. The mystics speak of the excitement of such unity. This is how Marguerite Porete describes it: ‘Such a Soul, says Love, swims in the sea of joy, that is in the sea of delights, flowing and running out of the Divinity. And so she feels no joy, for she is joy itself. She swims and flows in Joy . . . for she dwells in Joy and Joy dwells in her.’ Because the nature of the heart is desire for beauty, to discover that it is so ardently desired by the one it desires brings overpowering joy.

The Christian tradition, loaded down with heavy institutional and moralistic accretions, has forgotten and neglected the Beautiful Dance that God is. The Sufi tradition has remained faithful to the wild elegance of the divine through its dancing dervishes. In the Hindu tradition, the Gods also dance.

When we acknowledge the wild beauty of God, we begin to glimpse the potential holiness of our neglected wildness. As humans, citizens and believers, we have become domesticated beyond belief. We have fallen out of rhythm with our natural wildness. What we now call ‘being wild’ is often misshapen, destructive and violent. The natural wildness as the fluency of the soul at one with beauty is foreign to us. The call of the wild is a call to the elemental levels of the soul, the places of intuition, kinship, swiftness, fluency and the consolation of the lonesome that is not lonely. Our fear of our own wildness derives in part from our fear of the formless; but the wild is not the formless – it holds immense refinement and, indeed, clarity. The wild has a profound simplicity that carries none of the false burdens of brokenness or self-conflict; it flows naturally as one, elegant and seamless.

IGNITY AND

IVINE

OURTESY

COURTESY IS THE UNACKNOWLEDGED HEART OF CIVILITY; IT IS A disposition towards others which is graceful, polite, kind and considerate. Courtesy also includes some sense of old-world formality; it is the opposite of coarseness and self-presuming familiarity. Courtesy invites dignity. Dignity is one of the most beautiful qualities in presence. The true style of the soul is dignity. Where dignity prevails, there is an atmosphere of confidence, poise and sureness. A person of dignity is aligned with the beauty within; this is why dignity is unassailable from without. Dignity does not intrude or force itself. God gives us life and the world in each moment; he gave us these gifts with the other precious gift, the gift of freedom. Divine courtesy gives graciously and never intrudes on the dignity of our freedom. The most precious and personal gifts of our lives arrive with no divine signature or code of instructions. In that sublime space where God holds us, a space of infinite graciousness where we are cherished and loved, there the soul comes to bathe in the stream of mercy! This is at the heart of George Herbert’s poem ‘Love’:

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,

Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack

From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,

If I lack’d any thing.

Gracious love absolves the guest of all feelings of unworthiness and unease. There is so much to be learned of Divine Beauty from the silence of God.

NTO

EAUTIFUL

ANGER

WHILE BEAUTY USUALLY QUICKENS OUR SENSES, AWAKENS OUR delight and invites wonder, there are occasions when the force of beauty is disturbing and even frightening. Beauty can arrive in such a clear and absolute sweep that it throws the heart sideways. It takes over completely and we are overwhelmed, unsure what to do or how to be in the presence of this radiance. The authority of such beauty unnerves us for a while. This is of course an exceptional experience of beauty, yet it befalls everyone at some time. It could be the beauty of a person, the beauty of nature, music, painting, poetry or the unseen beauty of kindness, compassion, love or revelation. For a while we are caught up in the majestic otherness of beauty. It is an experience in which the sheer eternal force of the soul strains the mortal frame; the natural gravity of the body no longer grounds one. This causes unease and yet the unease is still somehow delightful. Perhaps this is what Rilke was thinking of in the first Duino Elegy:

And if I cried, who’d listen to me in those angelic

Orders? Even if one of them suddenly held me

To his heart, I’d vanish in his overwhelming

Presence. ‘Because beauty’s nothing

But the start of terror we can hardly bear,

And we adore it because of the serene scorn

It could kill us with. Every angel’s terrifying.’

In the face of such beauty our bodies feel paper thin; this beauty could undo us. Eventually, time comes to our rescue and its pedestrian sequence calms us again.

Beauty manifests God. However, beyond what becomes manifest is the realm of God which is primal beauty. This is the splendour of divine Otherness which the human mind cannot even begin to imagine. We would dissolve in the light of that beauty. The sublime loveliness of the divine form would unravel every texture, every cell of our being. Out of this unknown, unknowable source flow the forms of everything that is. This primal beauty is suggested by the image of the beatific vision where the soul and God become the one gaze. To enter this pure presence is the dream and desire of the contemplative heart.

ONTEMPLATIVE

IFE

REATING A

PACE TO

ECEIVE

IVINE

EAUTY

THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE IS TOO DANGEROUS AND SEVERE TO remain a gratifying project of the ego. It would be the utmost psychic recklessness to venture where, indeed, angels fear to tread. Only the secret grace of destiny brings one through such a life. It is easy and even delightful to speak about God from a safe distance, and in fact most public and social discourse about God is little more than loose talk. It may be well intentioned, but it is a language dictated by the grammar of surface or spiritual correctness. The contemplative speaks from a different place. The words taste of fire. They are pilgrim words. Of all journeys this is the ultimate journey. There is nothing else but God and there is no cheap consolation or easy entry to the banquet. The doorway is narrow and often located in the most unattractive setting. The texts of the contemplatives are alive with danger and possibility. They are not theories but a visceral straining to suggest what the touch of God is like. There is intense fire in the contemplative imagination. This is where fresh revelation is forged. In the play St Joan, by George Bernard Shaw, Joan tells her inquisitor that she hears voices that come from God. The inquisitor says, ‘They come from your imagination.’ Joan answers, ‘Of course, that is how the messages of God come to us.’

When God’s voice whispers tenderness into that inner desert of thirst, the effect is ecstasy. The heart has been cleansed of everything that might distract from preparation for the guest; its longings have been woven into one strand. The truly contemplative heart has a passion and wildness that can celebrate the magic of God. Yet it knows that this is but a passing visitation and it has learned to distinguish emotion and presence. The contemplative heart also learns to love emptiness and absence because it believes that the beauty of God can only be glimpsed through the most severe lens of truth. The aesthetic of the contemplative heart insists on the ultimate conversation between beauty and truth. Only at the extremity of barest truth will the radical beauty of God become audible and visible. The ascetical life dreams of awakening beauty. When you are in the presence of a contemplative person, you can sense this. An atmosphere of stillness and a sense of clarity remind you who you are and recall your heart to the gentle wonder of the divine. There is subtle and refined beauty bequeathed by a life of prayer.

The contemplative is one who is drawn into the subversive gentleness of the divine presence. She knows that gentleness can be a greater force for transfiguration than any political, economic or media power; indeed, as we have seen, this gentleness can even transfigure death. And yet contemplative knowing is neither naïve nor strategic. In silence and solitude the contemplative has learned the mysteries of the heart’s fragility, smallness and darkness. Yet the contemplative is not content to engage her life with the tools and explanations of psychology. She has come to sense that the inner world goes deep, indeed deeper than the wounds and breakages that others inflict. The contemplative has broken through to that sanctuary in the soul where love dwells. Crucial to this contemplative journey is the trust and imagination to realize that regardless of how you have been damaged, there is within you a sanctuary of deep love, trust and belonging. This is the ancient dream, the masterpiece of divine creativity: the creation of the human heart. Before time – back in the winter of Nothingness and then all through the infinite springtime of evolution – the dream was the birth of an intimate well of kindness, care and love in the world, dwelling in the tabernacle of the human heart.

HERE

ERPETUAL

IGHT

WAITS THE

AZE OF THE

OUL

NO-ONE WAS SENT INTO THE WORLD WITHOUT BEING GIVEN THE infinite possibilities of the heart. It is sad that so many of us go through our lives without ever seeming to discover the depth and beauty of the heart. Most of us have only an inkling of who we are. We believe so easily the negativities we have been told and think that our lives are merely endurance tests or holding places for wounds that will weep for ever. Then there are always the wonderful surprises. For instance, we meet someone who has never had a chance in life and hard luck and brutality seem to have been their constant companions, yet in some way they secretly broke through to that inner sanctuary. Though awful suffering came to them, it never touched their essence. We sense in them a profound tranquillity and gentleness. It is as if the imagination has opened that inner door to the eternal treasures. Once we begin to glimpse who we really are, many lonesome burdens and false images fall away; our feet find new freedom on the pastures of possibility.

The contemplative uses experience as a theatre of divine nearness and companionship. It is ironic sometimes how naïvely we tend to write off the contemplative life as a domain of self-protected cosiness and uncritical belief when in truth the contemplative life is a calling to the most vulnerable and critical openness. There are times of huge aridity, sheer emotional endurance and a sense of the loss of God that is equal to the emptiness experienced in the most thorough atheism. When we look at religious people we often find the image over-predictable and imagine their minds to be tame and domesticated. Yet often behind that façade there dwells critical sensibility of the most refined rigour which endeavours to be completely vigilant and allow neither fear nor illusion to blur the mirror of Being. As Ibn Arabi says, ‘His appearance in his light is so intense that it overpowers our perception, so that we call his manifestation a veil.’ The contemplative is one who risks the eyes of her mind for the moment when the veil slips aside and the perpetual light shines through.

EYOND

MAGES

: T

NRIPPLED

RESENCE

THE CONTEMPLATIVE SENSIBILITY WANTS TO REACH BEYOND images and forms to dwell in the pure, unrippled presence of God. The tools of the contemplative are the finesse and rigour of stillness and silence. This is also the language of death: stillness and silence. In the midst of life, the contemplative chooses to dwell with death, to dare this primal companionship. The contemplative is the artist of the eternal: the one who listens patiently in the abyss of Nothingness for the whisper of beauty.

It would be naïve to restrict the domain of the contemplative exclusively to those who live in cloisters. To a greater or lesser degree every human heart is contemplative. In a small town near us there was a lovely writer and musician who lived a rather bohemian life; he was given sometimes to the drink but he had a beautiful, awakened mind. He was a kind of ‘undercover mystic’ and many people, especially young people, came to talk to him when they felt their minds troubling them. He was well aware of how lonesome and disturbing this could be. I once asked him how he had managed to live alone on that edge. He said: ‘I was a very young man when I first felt the burn of that old mystical flame within me. I realized immediately what an adventure and danger it would be and that there was no going back. On that day I made a bargain with myself, the bargain was: no matter what came I would always remain best friends with myself. I am old now but I never broke that bargain.’

N THE

RONTIER OF

EAUTY

EFINE

OUR

ONTEMPLATIVE

EART

For beauty is the cause of harmony, of sympathy, of community.

Beauty unites all things and is the source of all things. It is the

great creating cause which bestirs the world and holds all

things in existence by the longing inside them to have beauty.

And there it is ahead of all as . . . the Beloved . . . toward which

all things move, since it is the longing for beauty which actually

brings them into being.

PSEUDO – DIONYSIUS, The Divine Names

PLACED WITHIN THE FRAME OF A UNIQUE AND DIFFERENT DESTINY each one of us is troubled by the ultimate questions. No-one else’s answer can satisfy the hunger in your heart. The beauty of the great questions is how they dwell differently in each mind. How they root deeper than all the surface chatter and image, how they continually disturb. Your deep questions grow quickly restless in the artificial clay of received opinion or stagnant thought. If you avoid that disturbance and try to quell these questions, it will cost you peace of mind. Sooner or later each one of us must succumb to our contemplative longing and gain either the courage or recklessness to begin our contemplative journey. The explicit religious contemplatives offer us inestimable shelter and guidance on this path. They have garnered the wisdom from a long tradition committed to nothing else but the pursuit of these questions. From some of their adventures they have brought back reports of those numinous territories and attempted to bring their kinetic geographies to word. The tradition has always cautioned against undertaking that journey alone. As on a climb in the Himalayas a guide or sherpa is recommended, when one is setting out, there is a lot to be learned from those who have gone before us. Those who publicly and committedly undertake the journey provide some signposts for those of us who are implicitly or secretly drawn in these directions.

In general, in a society there is an encouraging and creative tension between the explicit and the implicit. Those who are willing to stand out and take the risk of following their gift place a mirror to our unawakened gifts. To know they are there, day in day out, at the frontiers of their own limitation and vision, probing further into new possibility, enduring at lonely thresholds in the hope of discovery, to know they are willing to risk everything is both disturbing and comforting. The presence of the contemplative and the artist in a culture is ultimately an invitation to awaken and engage one’s neglected gifts, to enter more fully into the dream of the eternal that has brought us here to earth.

If we could but turn aside from the glare of the world and enter our native stillness, we would find ourselves quickening to new life in the eternal embrace. This is the subversive consolation of God, that sweet mercy that sees beyond our blunders and falsities. There we need feel no shame or guilt or anxiety. No storm can touch us there. In the presence of the God of Beauty our own beauty shines. God is the atmosphere where our essence clarifies, where all falsity and pretension vanish. Here we are utterly enfolded. No words are needed; no actions required; for everything is here. God is the time-circle where all our possibilities unite. In God the ultimate portraiture of the soul fills out. All our different selves unite: the selves we are and were and could have been and could be, the unchosen selves, all our nights and all our days, our visible and invisible lives. It is impossible for language to express this nearness for in the end every thought is an act of distance. Even words like ‘nearness’, ‘intimacy’ or ‘love’ still indicate separation. Only the strained language of paradox can suggest the breathtaking surprise of such divine closeness. God is breath-near, skin-touch, mind-home, heart-nest, thought-forest, otherness-river, night-well, time-salt, moon-wings, soul-fold.

God is that field beyond more and less, near and far, self and other, past and future, elsewhere and otherwise, before and after. God is that beautiful danger wherein the earth no longer needs to behave, where the levels are no longer separate. As Eckhart says: ‘Height is Depth’. Perhaps this was the field that Eckhart glimpsed and that glimpse burns through the Everest of his thought. One of his followers said: ‘The master spoke to ye from eternity but ye have understood him according to time.’ The subversive beauty of God holds the secret design of everything that happens outside, in time. Yet to enter that beauty is not a dissolution but a transfiguration where the signature of your essence glows in the mountain of Being. Created in beauty and secretly sustained all the while by beauty, you surrender now to ultimate awakening. Home at last – as Eckhart says: ‘Back in the house you never left’.

A B

EAUTY

LESSING

As stillness in stone to silence is wed

May your heart be somewhere a God might dwell.

As a river flows in ideal sequence

May your soul discover time is presence.

As the moon absolves the dark of distance

May thought-light console your mind with brightness.

As the breath of light awakens colour

May the dawn anoint your eyes with wonder.

As spring rain softens the earth with surprise