One of the most formative influences on my understanding of the Celtic tradition was the late, great John O’Donohue. He was a man with a word-store as large as Shakespeare’s. As a tribute to John’s memory, I am publishing for the first time one of my most prized possessions: a letter I received from John almost twenty years ago.
Dear John,
Thanks for your lovely letter. My apologies I had meant to write to you and thank you for the wonderful and incisive review you wrote on Anam Cara. You really got it and you got me! Not everyone does!
I am not going to respond to your questions in a systematic way but I hope you will get what you need from these random thoughts. Let us start at the beginning. Beginnings are new horizons that want to be seen.
We need to remember. Memory rescues experience from total disappearance . . . the grooves in the mind hold traces and vestiges of everything that has ever happened to us. Nothing is ever lost or forgotten . . . a ruin is never simply empty. It remains a vivid temple of absence.
The way you look at things is the most powerful force in shaping your life. I was born in a limestone valley in the West of Ireland. The Irish landscape is an ancient landscape; it is full of ruins and traces of ancient civilisation. There is a curvature in the landscape, a colour and a shape that constantly resists that which is too clear or over linear. Every few miles the landscape changes; it always surprises, and offers ever new vistas where light and colour conspire. This landscape seems always to veer away from that which is too direct or flat, and in a sense, this is the nature of the Celtic consciousness.
I used the Celtic vision of life to examine the landscape of the soul. I overturned the contemporary perception of spirituality and argued that instead of seeking to satisfy our spiritual hunger on an everlasting journey of exploration, we should seek an understanding that the soul is the house of our belonging. It is ever-present and is ever-ready to dispense peace and wisdom to enhance our life experience. This presence is nurtured in silence.
The mystery never leaves you alone. Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits. A world lives within you. No one else can bring you news of this inner world. Through our voices, we bring out sounds from the mountain beneath the soul.
Anam Cara, meaning Soul-Friend from the Gaelic word ‘anam’ for soul and ‘cara’ for friend, is the name given in the Celtic tradition to the friend of your soul, your soul mate. The one with whom you share a deep bond of friendship unbroken by space or time. When people love they open their life to an Other and, as the body is in the soul, when they let someone near, they let them become part of their very selves. In the sacred kinship of real love, two souls are twinned. God is always our divine anam cara, but our soul longs to share this gift of love and friendship with another person and in them our own anam cara.
The body is the home of the soul on earth and through our senses we feel the presence of the divine. Our bodies are made of the clay of the earth and so our souls are inextricably bound to the landscape. We are part of nature, but the inner landscape of the soul is a secret world, a territory only to be explored alone.
To be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our vulnerable complexity. In order to keep our balance, we need to hold the interior and exterior, visible and invisible, known and unknown, temporal and eternal, ancient and new, together. No one else can undertake this task for you. You are the one and only threshold of an inner world. This wholesome is holiness. To be holy is to be natural; to befriend the worlds that come to balance in you.
We live in an era where we pay homage to image. In the Celtic tradition each new day is seen as a new beginning, a gift from God. However, in modern life, we are often trapped on a treadmill, exhausted from work which numbs creativity and feeling, investing all our energies in a destructive environment where our souls are never engaged. We must be aware of the spiritual danger of investing our energy and sense of belonging in that which is not worthy of our dignity. If you sell your soul, you ultimately buy a life of misery. The world of possibility is silent, yet dense with the dreams of what could be.
We should have no fear of death, as it has been with us since birth and is only the completion of our life’s cycle. By releasing ourselves from the earth of death, which is the root of all our fears, we free ourselves to live our lives more fully. New possibility, instead of constantly engaging with fixed givenness in order to reveal and release new potency, is now itself offered as the fruit of an assurgent and passionate givenness. The veil of experience is lifted. Everything can become pure source!
This belief is not, of course, confined to the Celts. The Chinese Buddhist poet Wu-Men (1183–1260) wrote:
Ten thousand flowers in the spring.
the moon in autumn,
A cool breeze in summer.
snow in winter.
If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things
This is the best season of your life.
In Connemara, the phrase used to describe popularity and admiration is tá aghaigh an phobail ort – ‘the face of the people is towards you’. This is particularly relevant in Irish society given the evils of sectarianism and the need for an ecumenical approach to the search for truth. The phrase ought to be a presence for reconciliation in a country which has been disfigured by violence and it serves as a constant reminder that we must all intensify and improve still further our efforts for lasting peace. There is a rich ethical fragrance to this phrase, reminding us of our responsibilities to other people. In a sense, it is prophetic – challenging us to create a society where, in the words of the Irish poet John Hewitt, ‘each may grasp his neighbour’s hand as friend’.
At the heart of this theological enterprise will be finding a worthy role for the environment. William Butler Yeats had a keen appreciation of this insight: ‘Everything we look upon is blest.’
Many will see such a root and branch reform of the Church and theology as a threat because of all the problems, real and imagined, that might surface. I often speak of the tale of the man condemned to share a cell for one night with a deadly snake coiled taut in the corner. The man daren’t sleep, move or even breathe deeply for fear of attracting the snake’s attention. As dawn lit the horizon, the man relaxed. In the full light of day, he saw that the snake was but a length of old rope. There are hundreds of lengths of ropes thrown in different corners of our minds. Then our fears begin to work on them. They grow into monsters. Fortune favours the bold.
It is not what you asked for, but I hope this helps. Always remember that a horizon is something towards which we continually move but then discover that it moves with us.
Nearly there! Those lines you mentioned that I finished my talk with from that night in All Hallows you allude to were:
This is where your life has arrived,
After all the years of effort and toil;
Look back with graciousness and thanks on all your great and quiet achievements.
You stand on the shore of new invitation
To open your life to what is left undone;
Let your heart enjoy a different rhythm
When drawn to the wonder of other horizons.
Have the courage for a new approach to time;
Allow it to slow until you find freedom.
To draw alongside the mystery you hold.
And befriend your own beauty of soul.
Now is the time to enjoy your heart’s desire,
To live the dreams you’ve waited for,
To awaken the depths beyond your work
And enter into your infinite source.
Thanks again for your wonderful review.
Keep up your good work.
As the wind loves to call things to dance
May your gravity be lightened by grace . . .
May your prayer of listening deepen enough
To hear, in the depths, the laughter of God.
And so many a slow wind work these words of love around you,
An invisible cloak to mind your life.
John
P.S. I was very taken reading your piece about the Troubles. It is filled with a quiet intensity which makes it even more powerful. I hope you like my prayer which says some of the same things perhaps – albeit in a different way.
We pray for those who suffered violence today
May an unexpected serenity surprise them.
For those who risk their lives each day for peace
May their hearts glimpse providence at the heart of history.
That those who make riches from violence and war
Might hear in their dreams the cries of the lost.
That we might see through our fear of each other
A new vision to heal our fatal attraction to aggression.
That those who enjoy the privilege of peace
Might not forget their tormented brothers and sisters.
BENEDICTUS
A Response to John’s Letter:
Goodbye to you, my trusted friend.