Anam Cara

Thought-Work

Off course from the frail music sought by words

And the path that always claims the journey,

In the pursuit of a more oblique rhythm,

Creating mostly its own geography,

The mind is an old crow

Who knows only to gather dead twigs,

Then take them back to the vacancy

Between the branches of the parent tree

And entwine them around the emptiness

With silence and unfailing patience

Until what was fallen, withered and lost

Is now set to fill with dreams as a nest.

From Conamara Blues

AN EXPLORATION OF BALANCE The Concept of Balance in a Theory of Creation

One of my favorite sentences in the Western philosophical tradition is from Leibniz; it was subsequently used by Schelling and Heidegger: “The real mystery is not that things are the way they are, but that there is something rather than nothing.” I think this is a great sentence, because it alerts one immediately to the mystery of the presence of things, which we so often tend to forget. In post-modern culture, we live increasingly in a virtual world and seem to have lost visceral and vital contact with the actual world.

Another way of looking at this statement is: the real mystery is that there is so much. Everywhere the human eye looks, everywhere the human mind turns, there is a huge panorama of diversity; the difference that lives in everything and between everything, the fact that no two stones, no two fields, no two faces or no two biographies are the same. The range and intensity of this difference is quite staggering. This is not an abstract thing. People who live in small farms in country areas could spend hours telling you about all the differences they experience between two places in the same field. Patrick Kavanagh spoke of the “undying difference in the corner of a field.”

The difference that inhabits experience and the world is not raw chaos; it has a certain structure. It is quite amazing to consider the hidden, implicit structures that exist in all the natural things. For instance, the way water falls so elegantly, always with structure. Even the water from the tires of a car as it goes down a highway or street can have a beautiful structure. There is huge differentiation in the world, and its structure often seems to be one of duality; in other words, two sides of the one object or reality.

If you reflect on your own experience, you will see that you are already familiar with duality. There is light and darkness, beginning and ending, inside and outside, above and below, masculine and feminine, divine and human, time and eternity, soul and sense, word and silence. The really fascinating thing is not that these dualities are there, but the threshold where they actually meet each other. I believe that any notion of balance that is really authentic has to work with the notion of threshold. Otherwise, balance is just a functional strategy without any ontological depth or grounding. In the Western tradition, that line, that threshold between light and darkness, between soul and body, God and human, between ourselves and nature has often been atrophied. When the threshold freezes, the two sides get cut off from each other and the result is dualism. That kind of separation has really blighted and damaged the Western tradition. You can see this in very simple ways. For instance, in Catholic Ireland there was a division between the soul and the senses. The senses were supposed to be bad, and the body pulled you down, whereas the soul wanted to bring you up. That split caused untold guilt and pain for people.

Duality, then, is informed by the oppositions that meet at this threshold. I would argue that an authentic life is a life that is aware of and willing to engage its own oppositions, and honorably inhabits that threshold where the light and darkness, the masculine and feminine and all the beginnings and endings of one’s life engage. Sometimes, people who are very vociferous and moralistic are people who have erased the tug of opposition from their lives. They have little sense of the otherness that suffuses and surrounds them. Thus, they can allow themselves all kinds of moral platitudes and even moral judgments of others. It is lonely sometimes to hear them talk because, in their certainty, you can hear the hollow echo of a life only half-lived.

All creativity comes out of that spark of opposition where two different things meet. It is where each one of us was conceived. Masculine and masculine, feminine and feminine on their own cannot procreate. It is the two sides, the two sister oppositions, that create the unity. It is the same rhythm within subjectivity: there is a whole outer side to you, your name, face, role and identity, and there is the hidden world you carry within you. I think that real balance is, in some sense, about action, where the living reality of your life balances what is within you with what you are meeting outside. One of the greatest duties of post-modern culture at the end of this millennium is to try to bring the personal and the communal, the individual and the universal, together.

Experience is working all the time with duality, with that energy of opposition within you. You have no experience that does not have two sides to it. In a certain sense, all of your experience is a kind of narrative or story, with this deep underside that you never see, yet out of which all your possibilities come. Even though it is opaque, it constantly guides you and brings you to places you never expected. That is the surprise and the unpredictability of life. In relation to the notion of balance, we have to begin to strive towards a concept of person or self that is sufficiently complex and substantial to do justice to our huge metaphysical needs at the end of this millennium.

One of the victims of media culture is the depth and interiority of the self. People are treated like images, like instances of general principles, but rarely are individuals taken and illuminated for their own unique depth. The history, narrative and possibilities they carry within themselves are usually sidelined in any description or presentation of them. It is frightening how our collusion with technology has damaged so much our sense of individuality and our sense of the secret and sacred world that every individual inhabits.

Imagination

The imagination is the faculty that gives the duality within us expression and allows its forms of opposition to engage with each other. In the Western Christian tradition we gave a huge role to intellect and to will. The intellect was used to find out what the goal or object was and then the will drove it along the linear track towards it. This model of human sensibility brought us much beauty, but its neglect of the imagination has also cost us dearly. A human life can have everything—beauty, status, reputation, achievement, all kinds of possessions, but if the imagination is not awakened, all these lack presence and depth.

There are poor people who have absolutely nothing, but who have a depth of creative imagination that allows them, even in bleak circumstances, to inhabit a gracious, challenging and exciting world. The heart of it all is that there is an indissoluble, radical, subversive connection between mind and reality. The structures of your mind, the way your mind works, the way your consciousness moves, its patterns, actually determine the world you inhabit. You cannot separate the two of them. The awakened imagination brings us great riches. The imagination is not one-sided; it is passionately interested in wholesomeness and wholeness. The imagination is never tempted or attracted to the flat surface or to whatever is safe and perfect. Sometimes when you hear people talking about the human self you would think that it is made out of stainless steel and is meant to have perfection and purity. But we are clay creatures, striving desperately towards the light.

The idea of the threshold is significant because the human body itself is actually a threshold. Each human individual is a threshold in many different ways. You are a threshold in that you are made out of clay. What keeps you alive is in the invisible air. Yet you belong neither to the earth out of which you have come, nor to the heavens towards which you strain. So, you are always in this oscillation, on this moving threshold. Within your own family you are also on a threshold—the threshold between all of the ancestral lines that meet in you, and the line that will go out from you. In many different ways the imagination tries to awaken, articulate and integrate all the presences that meet in us.

At the beginning of his book The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel says, Das wahre ist das ganze, the truth is whole. Most of the time when we are talking about things, we seem so sure that we are right, yet all we are giving are little minuscule, half-truth glimpses. To become wholesome, we need living connection with the whole. Our access is always limited and partial; yet through the imagination, we can enter more elegantly into its field of creative tensions.

There are two great sentences in the Greek tradition: “Know thyself” and “Everything flows.” The human self is surrounded by change and is itself continually changing. Your body is constantly changing. In a philosophy class I once had, our professor told us that over a seven-year period all the cells in our body will have changed. There was at the time someone in England who had been in prison for seven years and he appealed his sentence. His claim was that he was not the person now whom they had sentenced seven years before! So, there is this constant changing. In the West of Ireland, visually we are very aware of this, because the weather and the light change all the time.

If everything was, as the Germans say, in Stillstand, or deadlocked in the same position, we would not need to worry about balance. We would all be totally fixated and atrophied in the one position. It is because there is so much movement and change that the notion of balance takes on such depth and urgency. The argument for change is put most memorably by Heraclitus, a philosopher in fifth-century B.C. Greece. He said that you can never step into the same river twice because if you step in at four o’clock and again at five past four, the river has completely changed, and you have changed as well. There is constant change all the time, and imagination is the most faithful force in helping change and continuity maintain a dialogue with each other.

Part of the reason we are so confused at the end of this millennium is that so much change has occurred, at such an acute and relentless pace, that we are not able to decipher and activate the lines of continuity into our own tradition. There is an intense isolation there, a haunting lonesomeness, especially in young people. They are uprooted and dislocated. Even adults a generation or two ahead of them are not able to speak their language. The isolation is intensified in that they are the relentless targets of marketing. Huge multinational marketing systems are targeting teenagers, and what they are achieving is incredible. Parents or teachers could never get teenagers into uniforms and yet multinational corporations have done it. Teenagers are all wearing designer gear. The label is more important than the garment. At the most subversive times of their lives, they are indoctrinated with this peer virus. Again, it is money and greed that have turned teenagers into targets for commodities.

The imagination tries to take change and inhabit it in a way that allows it to be transfigurative rather than destructive. The lovely thing about the imagination is that, whereas the mind often sees change and thinks everything is lost, the imagination can always go deeper than the actual experience of the loss and find something else in it. There is an amazing difference between the way the mind sees something and the way the imagination sees something.

Imagination and the Balance with Otherness

Another lovely quality of the imagination is its passion for otherness. “Otherness” is a technical term, but it means, essentially, everything that is other than you. The easiest way to register the notion of otherness is to think of somebody you dislike intensely. The experience of otherness registers most firmly in what we find strange or totally different from ourselves. One of the huge spiritual, psychological, philosophical and theological problems of post-modern culture is the question of otherness.

The world of media and corporate marketing has actually homogenized things completely and wants to make everything the same. The advertisement you see for Levi’s over the Midtown Tunnel as you come into Manhattan is the same as the ad you’ll see in Limerick or Dublin or even in the desert or the Middle East. There is an incredible difficulty for individual places and individual experiences to assert their own uniqueness and individuality. It is very difficult in mass culture to argue for a unique space—for what is individual and different. Yet one of the most important conversations in any life remains the conversation with what is other than you. When people get into trouble psychologically, it is often because something comes upon them that frightens them, or paralyzes them, so that they cannot move, work or function. It is something they would never have anticipated in themselves. This sudden confrontation with unexpected otherness becomes crippling. For instance, some people who are perfectionists may find an otherness awakening in or around them that renders them helpless. One of the most threatening forms of otherness in any life is illness. It is a frightening thing that you can be going on with your life, thinking you have troubles, and then you run headlong into serious illness and your life and your world are absolutely altered.

The oppositions that are in us often constellate themselves in other ways, in terms of contradiction. It is interesting to see how the media handles contradiction. The media focuses on an image, but an image is always just one view of a thing, it is never the full view. If you want the full view, you meet with a person face-to-face, or you read good literature or listen to good music or look at a good painting or a good landscape. Then the multi-dimensionality of a thing comes through. The media is essentially like Plato’s Cave—a parade of shadows that we take for the real world. It is a huge subtraction from what is real. To believe in the media as the actual vehicle of truth or the way to “what truly is” can be very misleading. It is necessary to have the kind of exploration that the media does, but on its own as sole authority it is totally insufficient. Its presentations grow ever more syncopated into sound bites.

It is interesting that when the media notices a contradiction in someone, the reportage turns merciless. Usually, it has to do with a fall from a principle, because the media will inevitably have structured the image in the first place in such a way that a certain principle has been embodied. When a contradiction emerges, there is a sensational story. The media “outs” people and, in certain instances where it has a public interest dimension, this can be warranted. More often, however, I believe it is a massive intrusion into the private lives of individuals. While it may make a story today, the media light moves quickly elsewhere, and the exposed individual is left with years of struggle to put his or her life back together again.

What is interesting about contradictions is that each person is a bundle of contradictions. Normally we are not aware of our contradictory nature because there is so much of ourselves that we keep completely hidden. Perhaps one of the reasons we are on this planet is to try to become acquainted with all that is in us. When you meet someone who is not afraid of themselves it is a lovely experience. They might be a mass of contradictions but at least they have patience with their own otherness. I think that, in many ways, the images of self that we see reflected in political life, religious life and media life are totally inadequate to carry the depth that is in us.

In a contradiction, the two sides are meeting. An opposition is happening; it has come alive with great tension and energy. It can be a frightening time in a person’s life, but also a very interesting time. Usually, the way we settle and compromise with ourselves is by choosing one side over the other side, and we settle for that reductionism until something awakens the other side, and then the two of them are engaged. I was talking to somebody who was going through a huge conflict trying to decide if he should do A or if he should do B. A wise friend of his said to him, “If it’s either/or, it’s neither.” The idea is that at the heart of the opposition there is something else coming through. That is where I think the notion of balance is really very powerful, because balance is a providential thing that allows something new to emerge from the depths of crisis and contradiction. This suggests faith in a third force that often endeavors to emerge through the oppositions that are coming alive in us.

The Myth of Balance

I want to explore the myth of balance. I am using the word “myth” in two senses. First, in its colloquial sense, the sense that myth is something that is not factually true—it is fantasy. Second, in its more profound sense, which is the idea of the mythical. The great myths are universal stories about dimensions of the gods, of ourselves and of nature. Usually they are stories in which the origin of a thing can be perceived. They are stories of what cannot actually be told. A myth is a narrative. For instance, you have the myth of Genesis, with Adam and Eve in the garden, or the story of Odysseus who got lost and was on his way home for thirty years. Myths and fairy tales are profound communicators of wisdom in very subtle ways. All the folk cultures, even the most ancient ones, always had stories about the way everything began, and these stories in some way were the first attempts to balance people’s precarious presence in a strange world. This ties in with the notion of cosmos, which is the idea of order. The Oxford English Dictionary includes these two aspects in its definition of “balance.” First, balance is “an apparatus for weighing consisting of a beam poised so as to move freely on a central pivot with a scale pan at each end,” or second, balance is “the stability due to the equilibrium of forces within a system.”

I believe that balance also includes passion, movement, rhythm, urgency and harmony. Balance is not a dead notion. Balance as a monolithic thing would not be balance at all; it would be total imbalance, because there is something in balance that, in order to be what it is, requires the loyal weight of the opposite and opposing force. When you talk about balance, you are talking about the discovery or the unveiling of things, of a secret rhythm of order. I believe that balance can never be merely subjective or monological.

I want to sketch briefly in philosophical terms a cognitive theory of balance. Most theories of balance are non-cognitive and inevitably end up as either strategies or platitudes. There are two main ways of looking at balance—the conservative and liberal views, or the empiricist and the idealist views. The first one is that balance is a strategy. You hear people saying that you must have balance in your life. If you do not have balance, everything will turn chaotic. Balance, then, is an external frame imposed on experience from the outside. It controls things and keeps the chaos away.

Such strategies of balance are often no more than veiled repression. For instance, you may feel a deep complexity of feeling, but you pretend that you do not feel. You bury everything in the basement of your mind. Jung used to call this “the return of the repressed.” No sooner have you expelled something that you cannot accept about yourself out the front door than it has made its way in the back door and is waiting there to confront you again. It is a strange thing about consciousness that if you try deliberately to get rid of something or to stop thinking about something, you only end up reinforcing it.

This idea finds humorous expression in a story I heard somewhere. A man went to see a guru as he was finding it difficult to meditate because his mind was scattered. The guru said to him, “I want you to go home and not think about monkeys.” Surprised at the advice, because monkeys never figured in his mind, the man nevertheless returned home intending to carry out the advice. Once at home, he started to try not to think about monkeys. First there was one monkey and then there were two monkeys, then there were ten monkeys. Within two hours he was back to the guru as his mind had become an exclusive monkey jungle. Thus, there is a strange thing in consciousness, in the mind, that if you make an issue of something it can expand and possess you. This seems to be what happens with bitterness. A bitter person cannot decide to be bitter between 7:00 and 7:30 on Saturday evenings, because if you are bitter, it is within you everywhere. Resentment is exactly the same kind of thing. Resentment, bitterness, defeat, despair, even depression—all of these share this pervasive quality. When I sit in front of somebody who is clinically, chronically depressed, the feeling that I have sometimes is that the person is not actually there. The fascinating question is, where are they? So repression is often the outcome when balance is approached as a functional, imposed strategy.

Another dimension of balance as a functional strategy is fear. If you are afraid of things, you will stay in line; this often has to do with authority. On German television, in the last six or seven weeks, on the tenth anniversary of the fall of East Germany, they have been replaying old news excerpts. It is unbelievable viewing. Two days before the whole thing started, there was Honecker, leader of East Germany, with all the leaders of the Communist world, and they were all paying tribute to one another. Ceausescu was in the middle of them. And the whole facade was within inches of collapsing, never to return. Flexibility is balance and balance is flexibility. When a thing hardens it cannot bend. It can only break. When a thing or system becomes totally atrophied, the smallest incision can cause the whole thing to vanish as if it were a false garment.

Another dimension of balance as a functional strategy, one that also keeps people in line, is the whole world of religious edict and theology. Many people in Ireland held their lives in a certain kind of balance because they were theologically terrified. We are coming out of that now. This theory of balance, which is a frame from outside, usually works with an unexamined belief in the given facts. It is very empiricist, it is one-dimensional, and it is usually ideological. It is non-cognitive in the sense that it is never worked out nor its deeper grounding ever questioned. It is given, and because it is given, it is always in the service of some elite group or some vested interest that wants the balance to hold for some ideological reason.

The opposite view of balance is that balance is a purely subjective invention—I can invent, sustain and implement my own order. This, of course, is equally false. Literary tragedy, for instance, unmasks this as illusion. Tragedy presents great passionate individuals who attempt to establish their own order and their action brings them into total conflict with the hidden order, which uncoils on top of them and completely changes the world they inhabit. Therefore, balance is neither a fixed empirical thing nor an invented, subjective thing. Rather, balance is an implicit equilibrium that emerges in the fair play of opposing forces—opposing sister forces.

Balance yields itself in the dialogue and dialectic of passionate forces. It is not monological. Much of what passes for conversation in post-modern culture is merely intercepting monologues. If you watch television programs or listen to the radio, you hear little true conversation. When you yourself are involved in a really genuine conversation with another person, you will remember it for weeks because something unexpected shifts or happens in the dynamic of conversation. It is no accident that at the infancy of Western culture we have the great models of conversation in Plato’s dialogues. In true dialogue something truly other and unexpected emerges. What I am talking about here is a theory of growth; not economic growth, but the growth of life and experience that works in this shifting balance between dialogue on the one hand and dialectic on the other hand.

It is interesting to consider balance in terms of the physical human body, in terms of anatomy. The French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty has wonderful things to say about the human body. The body is not an object to think about. Rather, it is a grouping of lived-through meanings, which move towards equilibrium. Your body is not just an object, it is actually all the meanings that people have towards your body. It is moving towards equilibrium. The place where your balance is regulated is also the place where your hearing and listening are activated. This is in the fluid of the semicircular canals of the inner ear. The eighth nerve goes through this liquid in the inner ear. It gives the impulses to the brain and tells the brain where you are. For instance, in cases of vertigo, where there is irritation or some damage, you have the feeling that the room has actually moved, but of course it has not. People also have that experience “the morning after the night before,” when you suddenly think that the laws of causality have changed and that the room is shifting around.

Therefore, true balance in the body is linked to listening, but also metaphorically, true balance is linked to an attentiveness that allows you to engage fully with a situation, a person or your culture or memory so that the hidden balance within can emerge. Listening can actually be a force that elicits the balance and allows it to emerge. Balance is not subjective. Neither is balance to be simply achieved or reached by human beings. True balance is a grace. It is something that is given to you. When you watch somebody walking the high wire, you know that they could tumble any second. That is the way we all are. Though we prefer to forget and repress it, we live every moment in the condition of contingency. There are people who got up this morning, prepared for another normal day, but something happened, some event, news, disappointment or something wonderful, and their lives will never be the same after this day in the world. This is a day they will never forget. Very often our actual balance in the world as we go is totally precarious, without our realizing it. Balance invites us not to take ourselves too seriously.

I spent five years in Germany and I loved German culture, music, thinking and philosophy. But the Germans would not be known as post-graduates in the whole area of humor or spontaneity! There is in the Irish psyche, I think, a kind of flexibility and a grounding humor that actually levels things and balances things out. I have talked to people who worked with Irish people in all kinds of areas in the Third World where there was poverty and war. They often said that the Irish brought a certain humor into the situation that allowed others to forget for a while the awfulness that was around them. This, of course, is a direct derivative of our history. We have had a history of incredible pain, misery, poverty and suffering in this country, which is often forgotten now. In these politically correct and tiger economic times, it is embarrassing to remember what has happened to us. The truth is that terrible things happened to us. And the only way we were able to come through it was to win some distance from it. Often, Irish humor has this subtext of knowing the complete horror, but yet deciding not to bend to its ravages. That is why Beckett is a sublime Irish writer, because he can bring the bleakness and the humor to such incredible balance and harmony.

Balance can be beautifully achieved in the human body, especially in dance. I remember, one night in Lisdoonvarna, watching, in a small little corner of the pub, about thirty-five human bodies starting to dance. There was a band playing and I saw these people and I thought to myself that they could never dance in such a small space. Yet, when the music started and brought rhythm, they were wheeling in and out and nobody crashed into anyone else. So sometimes when another rhythm is present, balance becomes possible in the most unpredictable situations.

Balance and the Millennium

In the concluding section, I want to reflect on balance at the millennium threshold. A millennium threshold is said to be a time of imbalance and disturbance. To be honest, I believe that much of the excitement about the millennium is a result of manipulation. For a few cultures, this is not the millennium. If you could talk to stones and rivers and oceans or even sheep, they would be asking why these humans are getting worked up about the millennium. The earth and the ocean and the rain and the wind and the trees and the cows and the calves have no idea that we are entering a new millennium. But, because we are all fixated on the millennium, there is a lot happening and it is a huge threshold; and in a way we are coming into it vulnerable and very exposed.

There are several agents of imbalance. One is the whole consumerist trend of post-modern culture. In philosophical terms what is going on here is a reduction of the “who” question about presence and person, to the “what” question and the “how” question. It’s an obsession, almost a regression to what Freud called the “oral stage.” The key tenet here is that consumption creates identity. I was over in Atlanta, Georgia, on a book tour early on in the year. I saw a weed there called kudzu; it grows a foot in a day. This weed is set to take over, and if it’s not cut back it will take over completely. It struck me as a profound image for consumerism. Most of us are moving through such an undergrowth of excess that we cannot sense the shape of ourselves anymore. Sometimes you meet a writer who gives you a little instrumentation to make a clearance here. For me, such a writer is William Stafford, the wonderful American poet. In the latest book from his estate on the nature of poetry, Crossing Unmarked Snow, here are four sentences:

The things you do not have to say make you rich.

Saying the things you do not have to say

weakens your talk.

Hearing the things you do not need to hear

dulls your hearing.

The things you know before you hear them,

those are you and

this is reason that you are in the world.

There is a massive functionalism at the heart of our times, a huge imbalance in post-modernity, primarily because certain key conversations are not taking place. One conversation that is not taking place is a conversation between the privileged and the poor. We are an immensely privileged minority. We think the Western world is the whole world. Yet, in fact, we are just a tiny minority. The majority of the world is living in the most awful circumstances. A friend of mind in London who has done research on this told me that 80 percent of the people in the world have never used a telephone. It is a sobering statistic. What disturbs me morally is the fact that we are here now in a comfortable setting talking about things we love. At the moment, there is a woman, a young mother, going through a dustbin in some barrio in South America for the tenth time today, for crumbs for her starving children whom she loves just as much as we love our children. The disturbing question is why is that person out there carrying that and why can we be here in comfort? I do not know the answer, but I do know that we are privileged and that the duty of privilege is absolute integrity. That is a huge part of balance, the question of integrity and integration. Without integrity, there can be no true integration.

Another conversation that is not happening, which is a terrifying non-event, is the conversation between the Western culture and Islam. Certain people are making attempts to do it, such as Edward Said, the cultural and literary critic, the NPR reporter Jacki Lyden, the theologian Michael Sells. Yet it is a conversation that is not happening essentially at a cultural level. We have a caricature of what Islam is. They have the same caricature of us. In caricature and false imagery and projection, so much violence, destruction and wars are already seeded. It is bleakly ironic in a culture that is obsessed with communication technology that the actual art and vital content of communication is shrinking all the time. In relation to the Irish context, there is an urgent need for greater dialogue between the forces of city culture and the rural domain. The city has become the power center in Western culture. It is where the most significant powers of media, finance, politics and religion are located. Naturally, then, the media, in reflecting these activities, inevitably does so through an urban filter of language, thought and style. Were one to watch the television every night for a week to see what images from rural life emerge on television, one would find few real references to the life on the land. Also the public language describing rural life is a language determined by the city and it is usually not an understanding language. People who live in the country know that you have to live in the country to know what the country is actually like. The country is not so much a community, it is a network. It has deep, intricate thickets of connection that cannot be seen from outside. Folk-life has depth and shadow that the media never comes near. The language used by the media about the country often reveals its distance from the cut and thrust of the rural sensibility. Even the word “rural” is diminutive. If one looks around for words about farming, to show the beauty and profound dignity of what it is, it is difficult to find any words in the public forum. I think farming is one of the great life callings. It has become very difficult now, but it is a great artistic, creative calling.

To Find Balance in an Ireland of Inner Turbulence

At the threshold of the millennium, Ireland is in some turbulence. Many of the sacred facades have been pulled down in the domains of religion, politics and finance. The unmasking has revealed corruption in all of these domains. These revelations have dulled and damaged our sense of and belief in ideals. They have caused disillusionment and cynicism. The positive side of this is that it relieves us of over-dependence on false crutches; it invites us to depend more on our own courage and critique. But, there is a danger in all of this clearing out that we will throw out many of the values that have sustained, refined and deepened us as a people. I do believe that Ireland has something very special, something very unique in Europe, and we really are at a crossroads with it. Of course, not everything was perfect. With the old kind of lifestyle, there was a lot of poverty, drudgery and slavery of work. There were the valleys of the squinting windows. There was the awful repression of the 1930s and 1940s in Ireland, when so many lovely innocent people were totally sinned against in the most sinister ways. There is that negative shadow in our tradition. But this is not the full story. Our tradition also has huge spiritual, imaginative and wisdom riches. There was a sense of proportion, a sense of belonging, a sense of being in a tradition that we are now in danger of losing completely.

Ireland is predominantly a folk culture. The issue for me at the level of principle is that it seems to take hundreds of years for a folk culture to weave itself, and yet so often, with the infusion of the consumerism virus, such a cultural fabric unravels in a very short time. The question then is: what hidden resources are there within our culture that can help us to stand at this very severing crossroads and still hold what is precious to us from our tradition, to guide us over the threshold into the new millennium? It is a very important question because many people who are spiritually, theologically and philosophically awakened look to Ireland and see something here that we ourselves often do not see. It will demand a great vision and leadership to engage all the tensions of our present turbulence and find a path that still vitally connects with the heart of the Irish tradition and yet engages the modern milieu openly and creatively. A tradition is a living presence. To reacquaint ourselves with the brightness as well as the darkness in our tradition could be an important first step.

The pace and rate of development in contemporary Ireland is quite alarming. Ireland seems to be a huge target for major development. There are people who would sell everything for any kind of development and short-term gain. This is difficult to comprehend, given the terrible history we have had of being exiled from our own land. Now that we have finally got the land, it is almost as if we are not able to be at ease with it and inhabit it and recognize its beauty. I am not saying that there should be no development—of course there should be. People need to live. I am saying that we should have greater openness towards forms of development that do not destroy our environment. It is hugely important because it is not just ours—we are custodians of it for our children, who will inhabit it after us.

A government is elected constitutionally to protect a people against conquest, yet the economic consumerist conquest that is going on in Ireland is just unbelievable. In Connemara, the people say, Tá an nádúr ag imeacht as na daoine, the nature is going out of people. When people have very little, it is natural for them to be close. I am not romanticizing poverty; it is a horrible thing, full of drudgery. Think of all the people who had to emigrate because there was nothing for them. But yet there was some kind of nádúr, or closeness. It seems to be impossible for a culture to develop economically and get really rich and yet maintain the same nádúr and closeness. So the question is: where could we find new places to awaken something in us in order that we do not lose that sense of nádúr and of belonging with each other?

Our heritage, rather than being something that can enable us to stand critically, worthily and courageously on the threshold of this new millennium, is now being converted into almost a fast-food product, that can be read off in ten minutes by a visiting tour bus somewhere. This is a very important issue. There is an ancient memory and a tradition that has huge archaic layers. We should be a lot more confident and a lot more courageous as we go into the new millennium, and we should try to work with an idea of balance that is equal to that complex history and that somehow allows us to stand with a critical sense at the edge of this new millennium and cross over with a certain kind of confidence.

For Equilibrium

Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore,

May the relief of laughter rinse through your

soul.

As the wind loves to call things to dance,

May your gravity be lightened by grace.

Like the dignity of moonlight restoring the

earth,

May your thoughts incline with reverence and

respect.

As water takes whatever shape it is in,

So free may you be about who you become.

As silence smiles on the other side of what’s said,

May your sense of irony bring perspective.

As time remains free of all that it frames,

May your mind stay clear of all it names.

May your prayer of listening deepen enough

To hear in the depths the laughter of God.

From To Bless the Space Between Us