Anam Cara: 2011

Friday, April 1, 2011

Back Cover

John O' Donohue was awarded a Ph.D. In philosophical theology from the University of Tübingen in 1990. His book on the philosophy of Hegel, Person als Vermittlung, was published in Germany in 1993 and his book of poems, Echoes of Memory, was published in 1994. His new book, Eternal Echoes: Exploring Our Hunger To Belong, is now available in hardcover. He lectures and holds workshops in Europe and America and is currently researching a book on the mysticism of Meister Eckhart. He lives in Ireland.

When St Patrick came to Ireland in the

fifth century AD, he encountered the Celtic

people and a flourishing spiritual tradition

that had already existed for thosands of

years. He discovered that where the Christians

worshipped one God, the Celts had many and

found divinity all around them: in the rivers,

hills sea and sky. The ancient Celtic reverence

for the spirit in all things survives today -

a vibrant legacy of mystical wisdom that is

unique in the Western world.

Now, in this exquisite book, Irish poet

and scholar John O'Donohue shares with

us the secrets of this ancient world. Using

authentic Irish prayers and blessings, he

reveals the treasures that lie hidden within

your own soul and the 'secret divinity' in

your relationships. As he traces the cycles of

life and nature, he draws from the holy waters

of Ireland's spiritual heritage to lead you to

a place where your heart can be healed and

nourished. It is a place where you will discover

your own anam cara, your true 'soul friend'.

'A rare synthesis of philosophy, poetry

and spirituality... a powerful and life-

transforming experience for those who

read it' Deepak Chopra, author of

The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success

A BLESSING FOR DEATH

I pray that you will have the blessing

of being consoled and sure about your own death.

May you know in your soul that there is no need to be afraid.

When your time comes, may you be given every

blessing and shelter that you need.

May there be a beautiful welcome for you in the

home that you are going to.

You are not going somewhere strange. You are

going back to the home that you never left.

May you have a wonderful urgency to live your

life to the full.

May you live compassionately and creatively

and transfigure everything that is negative

within you and about you.

When you come to die may it be after a long

life.

May you be peaceful and happy and in the

presence of those who really care for you.

May your going be sheltered and your welcome assured.

May your soul smile in the embrace of your

anam cara.

THE DEAD BLESS US

I feel that our friends amongst the dead really mind us and look out for us. Often there might be a big boulder of misery over your path about to fall on you, but your friends amongst the dead hold it back until you have passed by. One of the exciting developments that may happen in evolutionand in human consciousness in the next several hundred years is a whole new relationship with the invisible, eternal world. We might begin to link up in a very creative way with our friends in the invisible world. We do not need to grieve for the dead. Why should we grieve for them? They are now in a place where there is no more shadow, darkness, loneliness, isolation or pain. They are home. They are with God from whom they came. They have returned to the nest of their identity within the great circle of God. God is the greatest circle of all, the largest embrace in the universe which holds visible and invisible, temporal and eternal as one.

There are lovely stories in the Irish tradition of a person dying and then meeting all their old friends. This is expressed powerfully in a wonderful novel by Mairtin Ó'Cadhain called Cré na Cille. This is about life in a graveyard and all that happens between the people buried there. In the eternal world, all is one. In spiritual space there is no distance. In eternal time there is no segmentation into today, yesterday or tomorrow. In eternal time all is now; time is presence. I believe that this is what eternal life means: it is a life where all that we seek, goodness, unity, beauty, truth and love, are no longer distant from us but are now completely present with us. There is a lovely poem by R. S. Thomas on the notion of eternity. It is deliberately minimal in form but very powerful:

I think that maybe

I will be a little surer

of being a little nearer.

That's all. Eternity

is in the understanding

that that little is more than enough.

Kahlil Gibran articulates how the unity in friendship, that we call the anam cara, overcomes even death: 'You were born together, and together you shall be for evermore. You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days. Aye, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.' I would like to end this chapter with a lovely prayer poem from thirteen-century Persia.

Some nights stay up till dawn as the

moon sometimes does for the sun.

Be a full bucket, pulled up the dark

way of a well then lifted out into light.

Something opens our wings, something makes

boredom and hurt disappear.

Someone fills the cup in front of us, we taste

only sacredness.

(trans. R. Bly)

THE DEAD BLESS US

I think that maybe

I will be a little surer

of being a little nearer.

That's all. Eternity

is in the understanding

that that little is more than enough.

Some nights stay up till dawn as the

moon sometimes does for the sun.

Be a full bucket, pulled up the dark

way of a well then lifted out into light.

Something opens our wings, something makes

boredom and hurt disappear.

Someone fills the cup in front of us, we taste

only sacredness.

(trans. R. Bly)

ARE SPACE AND TIME DIFFERENT IN THE ETERNAL WORLD?

Space and time are the foundation of human identity and perception. We never have a perception that does not have each of these elements in it. The element of space means that we are always in a state of separation. I am here. You are there. Even the person that you are closest to, the one you love, is still a separate world from you. That is the poignancy of love. Two people become so close that they really want to become one; but their separate spaces keep the distances between them. In space we are always separated. The other component of perception and identity is time. Time always separates us too. Time is primarily linear, disjointed and fragmented. All of your past days have disappeared; they have vanished. The future has not come to you yet. All you have is the little stepping-stone of the present moment.

When the soul leaves the body, it is no longer under the burden and control of space and time. The soul is free; distance and separation hinder it no more. The dead are our nearest neightbours; they are all around us. Meister Eckhart was once asked, where does the soul of a person go when the person dies? He said, no place. Where else would the soul be going? Where else is the eternal world? It can be nowhere other than here. We have falsely spatialized the eternal world. We have driven the eternal out into some kind of distant galaxy. Yet the eternal world does not seem to be a place but rather a different state of being. The soul of the person goes no place because there is no place else to go. This suggests that the dead are here with us, in the air that we are moving through all the time. The only difference between us and the dead is that they are now in an invisible form. You cannot see them with the human eye. But you can sense the presence of those you love who have died. With the refinement of your soul, you can sense them. You feel that they are near.

My father used to tell us a story about a neighbour who was very friendly with the local priest. There is a whole mythology in Ireland about Druids and priests having special power. But this man and the priest used to go for long walks. One day the man said to the priest, where are the dead? The priest told him not to ask him questions like that. But the man persisted and finally, the priest said, 'I will show you; but you are never to tell anyone.' Needless to say, the man did not keep his word. The priest raised his right hand; the man looked out under the raised right hand, and saw the souls of the departed everywhere all around as thick as the dew on blades of grass. Often our loneliness and isolantion is due to a failure of spiritual imagination. We forget that there is no such thing as empty space. All space is full of presence, particularly the presence of those who are now in eternal, invisible form.

For those who have died, the world of time is also different. Here we are caught in linear time. We have forgotten the past; it is lost to us. We cannot know the future. Time must be totally different for the dead because they live now within a circle of eternity. Eariler we talked about landscape and how the Irish landscape resisted linearity. How the Celtic mind never liked the line but always loved the shape of the circle. Within the circle, beginning and ending are sisters and they belong within the shelter of the unity of the year and the earth, which the eternal offers. I imagine that in the eternal world time has become the circle of eternity. Maybe, when a person goes into that world, he can look back at what we call past time here. He may also see all of future time. For the dead present time is total presence. This suggests that our friends amongst the dead know us better than they can ever have known us in life. They know everything about us, even things that may disappoint them. But since they are now transfigureed their understanding and compassion is proportionate to everything they come to know about us.

DEATH TRANSFIGURES OUR SEPARATION

In Connemara the Graveyards are near the ocean, where there is a lot of sandy soil. To open the grave the sod is cut on three sides. It is rolled back very carefully from the surface of the field, but it is not broken off. Then the coffin is put down. The prayers are said and the grave is blessed and filled. Then the sod is rolled out over the grave so that it fits exactly over the opening. A friend of mine calls it a 'Caesarean section in reverse'. It is as if the womb of the earth, without being broken, is receiving back the individual who once left as a clay shape to live in separation above in the world. It is an image of homecoming, of being taken back completely again.

It is a strange and magical fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here. Rilke said: 'Being here is so much.' It is uncanny how social reality can deaden and numb us so that the mystical wonder of our lives goes totally unnoticed. We are here. We are wildly and dangerously free. The more lonely side of being here is our separation in the world. When you live in a body, you are separate from every other object and person. Many of our attempts to pray, to love and to create are secret attempts at transfiguring that separation in order to build bridges outwards so that others can reach us and we can reach them. At death this physical separation is broken. The soul is released from its particular and exclusive location in this body. The soul then comes into a free and fluent universe of spiritual belonging.

BIRTH AS DEATH

Imagine if you could talk to a baby in the womb and explain its unity with the mother. How this cord of belonging gives it life. If you could then tell the baby that this was about to end. It was going to be expelled from the womb, pushed through a very narrow passage finally to be dropped out into vacant, open light. The cord which held it to this mother-womb was going to be cut and that it was going to be on its own for ever more. If the baby could talk back, it would fear that it was going to die. For the baby within the womb being born would seem like death. Our difficulty with these great questions is that we are only able to see them from one side. In other words, we can only see death from one side. No-one has had the experience. Those who have died stay away; they do not return. Therefore, we cannot actually see the other half of the circle which death opens. Wittgenstein summed it up very nicely with the idea that death is not an experience in one's life. It cannot be an experience because it is the end of the life in which and through which all experience came to you.

I like to imagine that death is about rebirth. The soul is now free in a new world where there is no more separation or shadow or tears. A friend of mine lost a son of twenty-six years of age. I was at the funeral. Her other children were all there as the coffin was lowered into the grave. A terrible wail of sadness rose up from the brothers and sisters. She put her arms around them and said: 'Ná bigí ag caoineadh, níl tada dhó thios ansin ach amháin an clúdach a bhí air,' which translates as, let ye not be crying because there is nothing of him down there, only the covering that was on him in this life. It is a lovely thought, a recognition that the body was merely a covering and the soul is now freed for the eternal.

WAITING AND ABSENCE

A friend of mine was telling me a story about a neighbour. The local school was going into town to see Waiting for Godot. This man took a ride on their bus. He intended to meet some of his drinking colleagues in town. He travelled in with the school to the theatre and went immediately to the two or three pubs where he thought his friends would be, but they were not there. Since he had no money, he ended up having to watch Waiting for Godot. He was describing the experience to my friend: 'It was the strangest play I ever saw in my life; seemingly the fellow who was to play the main part never turned up, and the actors were forced to improvise all night.'

I thought that it was a good analysis of Waiting for Godot. I think it was the kind of review with which Samuel Beckett himself would have been very pleased. In a certain sense, we are always waiting for the next moment of gathering or belonging and it always evades us. We are haunted with a deep sense of absence. There is something missing from our lives. We always expect it to be filled by a definite person, object, or project. We are desperate to fill this emptiness, but the soul tells us, if we listen to it, that this absence can never be filled.

Death is the great wound in the universe and the great wound in each life. Yet, ironically, this is the very wound that can lead to new spiritual growth. Thinking of your death can help you to radically alter your fixed and habitual perception. Instead of living merely according to the visible or possessible within the material realm of life, you begin to refine your sensibility and become aware of the treasures that are hidden in the invisible side of your life. A person who is really spiritual has developed a sense of the depth of his own invisible nature. Your invisible nature holds qualities and treasures that time can never damage. They belong absolutely to you. You do not need to grasp them, earn them or protect them. These treasures are yours; no-one else can ever take them from you.

NOTHINGNESS: A FACE OF DEATH

Everything that we do in the world is bordered on by nothingness. This nothingness is one of the ways that death appears to us; it is one of the faces of death. The life of the soul is about the transfiguration of nothingness. In a certain sense, nothing new can emerge if there is not a space for it. That empty space is the space that we called nothingness. R. D. Laing, the wonderful Scottish psychiatrist, used to say, 'There is nothing to be afraid of.' This means that there is no need to be afraid of anything but also that there is nothing there to be afraid of, namely, that the nothingness is everywhere, all around us. Because we shrink from this terrain, emptiness and nothingness are undervalued. From a spiritual perspective, they can be recognized as modes of presence of the eternal. The eternal comes to us mainly in terms of nothingness and emptiness. Where there is no space, the eternal cannot visit. Where there is no space, the soul cannot awaken. This is summed up beautifully in a wonderful poem by the Scottish poet Norman MacCaig:

PRESENTS

I give you an emptiness,

I give you a plenitude,

unwrap them carefully -

one's as fragile as the other -

and when you thank me

I'll pretend not to notice the doubt in your voice

when you say they're just what you wanted.

Put them on the table by your bed.

When you wake in the morning

they'll have gone through the door of sleep

into your head. Wherever you go

they'll go with you and

wherever you are you'll wonder,

smiling about the fullness

you can't add to and the emptiness

that you can fill.

This beautiful poem suggests the dual rhythm of emptiness and plentitude at the heart of the life of the soul. Nothingness is the sister of possibility. It makes an urgent space for that which is new, surprising and unexpected. When you feel nothingness and emptiness gnawing at your life, there is no need to despair. This is a call from your soul, awakening your life to new possibilities. It is also a sign that your soul longs to transfigure the nothingness of your death into the fullness of a life eternal, which no death can ever touch.

Death is not the end; it is rebirth. Our presence in the world is so poignant. The little band of brightness that we call our lifre is poised between the darkness of two unknowns. There is the darkness of the unknown at our origin. We suddenly emerged from this unknown, and the band of brightness called life began. Űthen, there is the darkness at the end when we disappear again back into the unknown. Samuel Beckett is a wonderful writer who meditated deeply on the mystery of death. His little play Breath is only a few minutes long. First there is the birth cry, then a little breathing and finally the sigh of death. This drama synopsizes what happens in our lives. All of Beckett's work, especially Waiting for Godot, is about death. In other words, because death exists, time is radicaly relativized. All we do here is invent games to pass the time.

DEATH AS AN INVITATION TO FREEDOM

When you think about it, you should not let yourself be pressurized by life. You should never give away your power to a system or to other people. You should hold the poise, balance and power of your soul within yourself. If no-one can keep death away from you then no-one has ultimate power. All power is pretension. No-one avoids death. Therefore, the world should never persuade you of its power over you, since it has no power whatever to keep death away from you. Yet it is within you own power to transfigure your fear of death. If you learn not to be afraid of your death, then you realize you do not need to fear anything else either.

A glimpse at the face of your death can bring immense freedom to your life. It can make you aware of the urgency of the time you have here. The waste of time is one of the greatest areas of loss in life. So many people are, as Patrick Kavanagh put it, preparing for life rather than living it. You only get one chance. You have one journey through life; you cannot repeat even one moment or retrace one footstep. It seems that we are meant to inhabit and live everything that comes towards us. In the underside of life there is the presence of our death. If you really live your life to the full, death will never have power over you. It will never seem like a destructive, negative event. It can become, for you, the moment of release into the deepest treasures of your own nature, your full entry into the temple of your soul. If you are able to let go of things, you learn to die spiritually in little ways during your life. When you learn to let go of things, a greater generosity, openness and breath comes into your life. Imagine that multiplied a thousand times at the moment of your death. That release can bring you to a completely new divine belonging.

THE EGO AND THE SOUL

In our struggle with the silent and secret companion, death, the crucial battle is the one between the ego and the soul. The ego is the defensive shell we pull around our lives. It is afraid; it is threatened and grasping. It acts in an overly protective way and is very competitive. The soul, on the other hand, has no barriers. As Heraclitus, the great Greek philosopher said 'The soul has no limits.' The soul is a pilgrim journeying towards endless horizons. There are no exclusion areas; the soul is in touch with the eternal dimension of time and is never afraid of what is yet to come. In a certain sense, the meeting with your own death in the daily forms of failure, pathos, negativity, fear or destructiveness are actual opportunities to transfigure your ego. These are invitations to move out of that protective, controlling way of being towards an art of being which allows openness and hospitality. To practise this art of being is to come into your soul rhythm. If you come into your soul rhythm, then the final meeting with your physical death need not be threatening or destructive. That final meeting will be the encounter with your own deepest identity, namely, your soul.

Physical death, then, is not about the approach of a dark destructive monster that cuts off your life and drags you away to an unknown place. Masquerading behind the face of your physical death is the image and presence of your deepest self, waiting to meet and embrace you. Deep down, you hunger to meet your soul. All during the course of our lives we struggle to catch up with ourselves. We are so taken up, so busy and distracted, that we cannot dedicate enough time or recognition to the depths within us. We endeavour to see ourselves and meet ourselves; yet there is such complexity in us and so many layers to the human heart that we rarely ever encounter ourselves. The philosopher Husserl is very good on this subject. He talks about the Ur-Prasenz, the primal presence of a thing, an object or a person. In our day-to-day experience, we can only glimpse the fullness of presence that is in us; we can never meet our own presence face to face. At our death, all the defensive barriers that separate and exclude us from our presence fall away; the full embrace of the soul gathers around us. For that reason, death can be a wonderfully creative event opening you up to embrace the divine that always lived secretly inside you.

THE DEAD ARE OUR NEAREST NEIGHBOURS

The dead are not far away, they are very, very near us. Each one of us some day will have to face our own appointment with death. I like to think of this as an encounter with your deepest nature and most hidden self. It is a journey towards a new horizon.

As a child when I looked up at the mountain, I used to dream of the day that I would be old enough to go with my uncle to the summit. I thought that I would be able to see the whole world from the horizon. I remember that I was very excited when the day finally came. My uncle was bringing sheep over the mountain, and he told me that I could come with him. As we climbed up the mountain and came to where I thought the horizon would be, it had disappeared. Not only was I not able to see everything when I got there, but another horizon was waiting, further on. I was disappointed, but also excited in an unfamiliar way. Each new level revealed a new world. Hans-Georg Gadamer, a wonderful German philosopher, has a lovely concept of the horizon as something towards we journey, but also something that journeys along with us. This is an illuminating metaphor for understanding the different horizons of your own growth. If you are striving to be equal to your destiny and worthy of the possibilities that sleep in the clay of your heart, then you should be regularly reaching new horizons. Against this perspective, death can be understood as the final horizon. Beyond there, the deepest well of your identity awaits you. In that well, you will behold the beauty and light of your eternal face.

A BEAUTIFUL DEATH

I was once present at the deathbed of a friend. She was a lovely young woman, a mother of two children. The priest who helped her to die was also a friend. He knew her soul and spirit. As it became apparent that she would die that night, she became frightened. He took her hand and prayed hard into his own heart, asking to receive the words to make a little bridge for her journey. He knew her life very deeply so he began to unfold her memories. He told her of her goodness, beauty and kindness. She was a woman who had never harmed anyone. She always helped everyone. He recalled the key events of her life. He told her there was no need for her to be afraid. She was going home and there would be a welcome for her there. God, who had sent her here, would welcome her and embrace her and take her so gently and lovingly home. Of this she could be completely assured. Gradually, an incredible serenity and calmness came over her. All of her panic was transfigured into a serenity that I have rarely met in this world. All her anxiousness, worry and fear had completely vanished. Now she was totally in rhythm with herself, attuned and completely tranquil. He told her that she had to do the most difficult thing in her life. She had to say farewell to each member of her family. This was extremely lonely and difficult.

He went out and gathered her family. He told them that each of them could go in for five or ten minutes. They were to go in and talk to her, tell her how much they loved her and to tell her what she meant to them. They were not to cry or burden her. They could cry afterwards, but now they were to concentrate completely on making her journey easy. Each one of them went in and talked to her, consoled her and blessed her. Each of them came out shattered, but they had brought her the gifts of acknowledgement, recognition and love; beautiful gifts to help her on her journey. She herself was wonderful. Then he went to her, he anointed her with the holy oil and we all said the prayers together. Smiling and serene, she went absolutely happily and beautifully on the journey that she had to make alone. It was a great privilege for me to be there. For the first time my own fear of death was transfigured. It showed me that if you live in this world with kindness, if you do not add to other people's burdens, but if you try to serve love, when the time comes for you to make the journey, you will receive a serenity, peace and a welcoming freedom that wioll enable you to go to the other world with great elegance, grace and acceptance.

It is an incredible privilege to be with someone who is making this journey into the eternal world. When you are present at the sacrament of someone's death, you should be very mindful of their situation. In other words, you should not concentrate so much on your own grief. You should rather strive to be fully present to, with and for the person who is going on the journey. Everything should be done to completely facilitate the dying person, and to make the transition as easy and as comfortable as possible.

I love the Irish tradition of the wake. Its ritual affords the soul plenty of time to take its leave. The soul does not leave the body abruptly; this is a slow leave-taking. You will notice how the body changes in its first stages of death. The person does not really leave life for a while. It is very important not to leave the dead person on his own. Funeral homes are cold, clinical places. If at all possible, when the person dies, they should be left in their familiar surroundings so that they can make this deeper transition in a comfortable, easy and secure way. The first few weeks after a person dies, that person's soul and memory should be minded and protected. One should say many prayers for him or her to help on the journey home. Death is a threshold into the unknown and a person needs much shelter as he or she goes on that journey.

Death is pushed to the margins in modern life. There is much drama about the funeral, but this often remains external and superficial. Our consumerist society has lost the sense of ritual and wisdom necessary to acknowledge this rite of passage. The person who has entered the voyage of death needs more in-depth care.

THE BEAN SI

In the Irish tradition, there is also a very interesting figure called the 'Bean Si'. Si is another word for fairies and Bean Si is the word for fairy woman. This is a spirit who cries for someone who is about to die. My father heard her crying one evening. Two days later a neighbour from a family for whom the Bean Si always cried died. In this, the Celtic Irish tradition recognizes that the eternal and the transient world are woven in and through each other. Very often at death, the inhabitants of the eternal world come out towards the visible world. It can take a person days or hours to die and then often preceding the moment of death that person might see their deceased mother, grandmother, grandfather or some relation, husband, wife or friend. When a person is close to death, the veil between this world and the eternal world is very thin. In some cases, the veil is actually removed for a moment, so that you can indeed be given a glimpse into the eternal world. Your friends, who now live in the eternal world, come to meet you, to bring you home. Usually, for people who are dying, to see their own friends gives them great strength, support and encouragement. This elevated perception shows the incredible energy that surrounds the moment of death. The Irish tradition shows great hospitality to the possibilities of this moment. When a person dies, holy water is sprinkled in a circle around the person. This helps to keep dark forces away and to keep the presence of light with the newly dead as they go on their final journey.

Sometimes people are very worried about dying. There is no need to be afraid. When the moment of your dying comes, you will be given everything that you need to make that journey in a graceful, elegant and trusting way.

THE SOUL THAT KISSED THE BODY

It takes a good while to really die. For some people it can be quick, yet the way the soul leaves the body is different for each individual. For some people it may take a couple of days before the final withdrawal of the soul is completed. There is a lovely anecdote from the Munster region, about a man who had died. As the soul left the body, it went to the door of the house to begin its journey back to the eternal place. But the soul looked back at the now empty body and lingered at the door. Then, it went back and kissed the body and talked to it. The soul thanked the body for being such a hospitable place for its life journey and remembered the kindness the body had shown it during life.

In the Celtic tradition there is a great sense that the dead do not live far away. In Ireland there are always places, fields and old ruins where the ghosts of people were seen. That kind of folk memory recognizes that people who have lived in a place, even when they move to invisible form, somehow still remain attached to that place. There is also the tradition known as the 'coiste bodhar' or the deaf coach. Living in a little village on the side of the mountain, my aount as a young woman heard that coach late one night. This was a small village of houses all close together. She was at home on her own, and she heard what sounded like barrels crashing against each other. This fairy coach came right down along the street beside her house and continued along a mountain path. All the dogs in the village heard the noise and followed the coach. The story suggests that the invisible world has secret pathways where funerals travel.

THE CAOINEADH: THE IRISH MOURNING TRADITION

One of the lovely things about the Irish tradition is its great hospitality to death. When someone in the village dies, everyone goes to the funeral. First everyone comes to the house to sympathize. All the neighbours gather around to support the family and to help them. It is a lovely gift. When you are really desperate and lonely, you need neighbours to help you, support you and bring you through that broken time. In Ireland there was a tradition known as the 'caoineadh'. These were people, women mainly, who came in and keened the deceased. It was a kind of high-pitched wailing cry full of incredible loneliness. The narrative of the caoineadh was actually the history of the person's life as these women had known him. A sad liturgy, beautifully woven of narrative was gradually put into the place of the person's new absence from the world. The caoineadh gathered all the key events of his life. It was certainly heartbreakingly lonely, but it made a hospitable, ritual space for the mourning and sadness of the bereaved family. The caoineadh helped people to let the emotion of loneliness and grief flow in a natural way.

We have a tradition in Ireland known as the wake. This ensures that the person who has died is not left on their own the night after death. Neighbours, family members and friends accompany the body through the early hours of its eternal change. Some drinks and tobacco are usually provided. Again, the conversation of the friends weaves a narrative of remembrance from the different elements of that person's life.

WHEN DEATH VISITS...

Death is a lonely visitor. After it visits your home, nothing is ever the same again. There is an empty place at the table; there is an absence in the house. When someone close to you dies, it is an incredibly strange and desolate experience. Something breaks within you then, which will never come together again. Gone is the person whom you loved, whose face and hands and body you knew so well. This body, for the first time, is completely empty. This is very frightening and strange. After the death many questions come into your mind concerning where the person has gone, what they see and feel now. The death of a loved one is bitterly lonely. When you really love someone, you would be willing to die in their place. Yet no-one can take another's place when that time comes. Each one of us has to go alone. It is so strange that when someone dies, they literally disappear.

Human experience includes all kinds of continuity and discontinuity, closeness and distance. In death, experience reaches the ultimate frontier. The deceased literally falls out of the visible world of form and presence. At birth you appear out of nowhere, at death you disappear to nowhere. If you have a row with someone you love and she goes away, if you desperately need to meet again, regardless of the distance, you can travel to where she is to find her. The terrible moment of loneliness in grief comes when you realize that you will never see the deceased again. The absence of their life, the absence of their voice, face and presence become something that, as Sylvia Plath says, begins to grow beside you like a tree.

DEATH IN THE CELTIC TRADITION

The Celtic tradition had a refined sense of the miracle of death. There are some beautiful prayers about death in Celtic spirituality. For the Celts, the eternal world was so close to the natural world that death was not seen as a terrible destructive or threatening event. When you enter the eternal world, you are going home to where no shadow, pain or darkness can ever touch you again. There is a lovely Celtic prayer on this theme:

I am going home with thee, to thy home, to thy home,

I am going home with thee, to thy home of winter.

I am going home with thee, to thy home, to thy home,

I am going home with thee, to thy home of autumn of spring and of summer.

I am going home with thee, thy child of my love to thy eternal bed to thy perpetual sleep.

(trans. A. Carmichael)

In that prayer the whole world of nature and the seasons are linked up beautifully with the presence of the eternal life.

In Connemara the people say: 'Ní thuigfidh tú an bás go dtiocfaidh sé ag do dhorás féin,' i.e. You will never understand death until it comes to your own door. Other phrases they have are: 'Is fear direach é an bás, ní chuireann sé scéal ar bith roimhe,' i.e. Death is a very direct individual who sends no story before him. Another phrase is, 'Ní féidir dul i bhfolach ar an mbás,' i.e. There is no place to hide from death. This means that when death is searching for you, it will always know where to find you.

DEATH AS THE ROOT OF FEAR

Other people are afraid of being themselves. They play a continual game, fashioning a careful persona which they think the world will accept or admire. Even when they are in their solitude they remain afraid of meeting themselves. One of the most sacred duties of one's destiny is the duty to be yourself. When you come to accept yourself and like yourself, you learn not to be afraid of your own nature. At that moment you come into rhythm with your soul and then you are on your own ground. You are sure and poised. You are balanced. It is so futile to weary your life with the politics of fashioning a persona in order to meet the expectations of other people. Life is very short and we have a special destiny waiting to unfold for us. Sometimes through our fear of being ourselves, we sidestep that destiny and end up hungry and impoverished in a famine of our own making.

The best story I know about the presence of fear is an old story from India about a man condemned to spend the night in a cell with a poisonous snake. If he made the slightest movement, the snake would kill him. All night the man stood petrified in the corner of the cell, afraid even to breathe for fear of alerting the snake. As the first light of dawn reached into the cell, he could make out the shape of the snake in the other corner. He was deeply relieved not to have alerted it. Then, as the light of dawn increased further and it became really bright, he saw that it was not a snake but an old rope lying in the corner of the cell. The moral of the story suggests that if there are harmless things, like that old rope, lying around in many of the rooms of our minds, then our anxiousness works on them until we convert them into monsters which hold us imprisoned and petrified in small rooms in our lives.

One of the ways of transfiguring the power and presence of your death is to transfigure your fear. I find it very helpful when I am anxious or afraid to ask myself of what am I really afraid? This is a liberating quesion. Fear is like fog; it spreads everywhere and falsifies the shape of everything. When you pin it down to that one question, it shrinks back to a proportion that you are able to engage. When you know what is frightening you, you take back the power you had invested in fear. This also separates your fear from the night of the unknown, out of which every fear lives. Fear multiplies in anonymity, it shuns the name. When you can name your fear, your fear begins to shrink.

All fear is rooted in the fear of death. There is a time or phase in every life when you are really terrified of dying. We live in time and time is notoriously contingent. No-one can say with certainty what is going to happen to us tonight, tomorrow or next week. Time can bring anything to the door of your life. One of the terrifying aspects fo life is this unpredictability. Anything can happen to you. Now, as you are reading this, there are people all over the world who are being savagely visited by the unexpected. Things are now happening to them which will utterly disturb their lives for ever. Their nest of belonging is broken, their lives will never be the same again. Someone in a doctor's surgery is receiving bad news; someone in a road accident will never walk again; someone's lover is leaving, never to return. When we lok into the future of our lives, we cannot predict what will happen. We can be sure of nothing. Yet there is one fact that is certain, namely, that a time will come, a morning, an evening or a night, when you will be called to make the journey out of this world, when you will have to die. Though that fact is certain, the nature of the fact remains completely contingent. In other words you do not know where you will die, how you will die, when you will die or who will be there or how will you feel. These facts about the nature of your death, the most decisive event in your life, remain completely opaque.

Though death is the most powerful and ultimate experience in one's life, our culture goes to great pains to deny its presence. In a certain sense, the whole world of media, image and advertising are trying to cultivate a cult of immortality; consequently, the rhythm of death in life is rarely acknowledged. As Emmanuel Levinas puts it, 'My death comes from an instant upon which I can in no way exercise my power. I do not run up against an obstacle which at last I touch in that collision, which, in surmounting or in enduring it, I integrate into my life, suspending its otherness. Death is a menace that approaches me as mystery; its secrecy determines it – it approaches without being able to be assumed, such that the time that separates me from any death dwindles and dwindles without end, involves a sort of last interval which my consciousness cannot traverse, and where a leap will somehow be produced from death to me. The last part of the route will be crossed without me; the time of death flows upstream...'

THE FACES OF DEATH IN EVERYDAY LIFE

There is a gravity within that continually weighs on us and pulls us away from the light. Negativity is an addiction to the bleak shadow that lingers around every human form. Within a poetics of growth or spiritual life, the transfiguration of this negativity is one of our continuing task. This negativity is the force and face of your own death gnawing at your belonging in the world. It wants to make you a stranger in your own life. This negativity holds you outside in exile from your own love and warmth. You can transfigure negativity by turning it towards the light of your soul. This soul light gradually takes the gravity, weight and hurt out of negativity. Eventually, what you call the negative side of your self can become the greatest force for renewal, creativity and growth within you. Each one of us has this task. It is a wise person who knows where their negativity lies and yet does not become addicted to it. There is a greater and more generous presence behind you negativity. In its transfiguration, you move into the light which is hidden in this larger presence. To continually transfigure the faces of your own death ensures that at the end of your life your physical death will be no stranger, robbing you against your will of the life that you have had; you will know its face intimately. Since you have overcome your fear, your death will be a meeting with a lifelong friend from the deepest side of your own nature.

Another face of death, another way it expresses itself in our daily experience, is through fear. There is no soul without the shadow of fear. It is a courageous person who is able to identify his fears and work with them as forces for creativity and growth. There are different levels of fear within each of us. One of the most powerful aspects of fear is its uncanny ability to falsify what is real in your life. There is no force I know that can so quickly destroy the happiness and tranquility of life.

There are different levels of fear. Many people are terrified of letting go and use control as a mechanism to order and structure their lives. They like to be in control of what is happening around them and to them. But too much control is destructive. You become trapped in the protective programme that you weave around your life. This can put you outside many of the blessings destined for you. Control must always remain partial and temporary. At times of pain, and particularly at the time of your death, you may not be able to maintain this control. The mystical life has always recognized that to come deeper into the divine presence within, you need to practice detachment. When you begin to let go, it is amazing how enriched your life becomes. False things, which you have desperately held on to, move away very quickly from you. Then what is real, what you love deeply, and what really belongs to you, comes deeper into you. Now no-one can ever take them away from you.

THE UNKNOWN COMPANION

CHAPTER 6

DEATH: THE HORIZON IS IN THE WELL

THE UNKNOWN COMPANION

There is a presence who walks the road of life with you. This presence accompanies your every moment. It shadows your every thought and feeling. On your own, or with others, it is always there with you. When you were born, it came out of the womb with you; with the excitement at your arrival, nobody noticed it. Though this presence surrounds you, you may still be blind to its companionship. The name of this presence is death.

We are wrong to think that death comes only at the end of life. Your physical death is but the completion of a process on which your secret companion has been working since your birth. Your life is the life of your body and soul, but the presence of your death enfolds both. How does deatzh manifest itself to us in our day-to-day experienc? Death meets us in and through different guises in the areas of our life where we are vulnerable, frail, hurting or negative. One of the faces of death is negativity. In every person there is some wound of negativity; this is like a blister on your life. You can be quite destructive towards yourself, even when times are good. Some people are having wonderful lives right now, but they do not actually realize it. Maybe, later on, when things become really difficult or desperate, a person will look back on these times and say, 'You know I was really happy then but sadly I never realized it.'

A BLESSING FOR OLD AGE

May the light of your soul mind you,

May all of your worry and anxious-

ness about becoming old be transfigured,

May you be given wisdom for the eye of your soul,

to see this beautiful time of harvesting.

May you have the commitment to harvest your life,

to heal what has hurt you, to allow it to come

closer to you and become one with you.

May you have great dignity, may you have av

sense of how free you are,

and above all may you be given the wonderful

gift of meeting the eternal light

and beauty that is within you.

May you be blessed, and may you find a

wonderful love in your self for your self.

OLD AGE AND FREEDOM

Old age can also be a time of clearance. All perception requires clearance. If things are too close to you, you cannot see them. Frequently, that is the reason we value so little the people who are really close to us. We are unable to step back and behold them with the sense of wonder, critique and appreciation they deserve. Nor do we behold ourselves either because we are too close to the rush of our lives. In old age, as your life calms, you will be able to make many clearances in order to see who you are, what life has done to you and what you have made of you life. Old age can be a time of releasing the many false burdens that you have dragged behind you through stony fields of years. Sometimes the greatest burdens humas carry are the burdens they make for themselves. People who put years into constructing a heavy burden for themselves often say, 'Sure it is my cross in life, God help me, I hope God will reward me for carrying it.' This is nonsense. God looks down and sees people carrying burdens they have invented and created themselves. God must think: 'How foolish they are to think that it has anything to do with my destiny for them. It has more to do with their own negative use of the freedom and possibility that I give them.' False burdens can fall away in old age. One possible way to begin would be to ask yourself: what are the lonely burdens that you have carried? Some of them would definitely belong to you, but more of them you have just picked up and made for yourself. To begin to let them go is to lighten the pressure and weight on your life. You will then experience a lightness and a great inner freedom. Freedom can be one of the wonderful fruits of old age. You can undo the damage that you did to yourself early on in your life. This whole complex of possibility is summed up magnificently by the wonderful Mexican poet Octavio in Eagle or Sun:

With great difficulty advancing by millimetres each

year, I carve a road out of the rock. For

milleniums my teeth have wasted and my nails

broken to get there, to the other side, to the light

and the open air. And now that my hands bleed

and my teeth tremble, unsure in a cavity cracked by

thirst and dust, I pause and contemplate my work.

OLD AGE AND THE TWILIGHT TREASURES

Old age is also the twilight of life. On the west coast of Ireland the light is really magical. Many artists come to work in this light. Twilight in the west of Ireland is a time of beautiful colours. It is as if the latent colours of the day which were lost unde the whiteness of the light now have the courage to emerge; every coulour has a great depth. The day bids us adieu in such a dignified and beautiful way. The day's farewel is expressed in twilight, in the magic of colour and beauty. The twilight makes the night welcome. It is as if the beautiful colours of twilight slip into the night and make the night habitable and bearable, a place where there is hidden light. Similarly in old age, the twilight time of life, many of the unnoticed treasures in your life can now become available and visible to you. Often it is only with the twilight perception that youi can really glimpse the mysteries of your soul. When the neon light of analysis grasps at the soul, the soul rushes to conceal and hide itself. Twilight perception can be a threshold to invite the shy soul to come closer to you in order to glimpse its beautiful lineaments of longing and possibility.

Thursday, March 31, 2011

WISDOM AS POISE AND GRACE

Wisdom is another quality of old age. In former societies the old people were called elders because it was recognized that having lived so long, they had harvested wisdom. Our culture is absolutely obsessed with information. There is more information now available in the world than ever before. We have so much knowledge about every possible thing. Yet there is a great difference between knowledge and wisdom. You can know many things, you can know a lot of facts about things, even facts about your self, yet it is the things that you realize that move deeply into you. Wisdom is the art of living in rhythm with your soul, your life and the divine. Wisdom is the way that you learn to decipher the unknown; and the unknown is our closest companion. So wisdom is the art of being courageous and generous with the unknown, of being able to decipher and recognize its treasures. In Celtic culture, and in the old Irish Celtic world, there was immense respect for wisdom. Since the Celtic world was primarily a matriarchal society very many of these wise people were women. The Celts had a wonderful tradition of wisdom which subsequently continued into Irish monasticism. When Europe was going through the Dark Ages it was the monks from Ireland who had preserved the memory of learning. They set up centres of learning all over Europe. The Irish monks recivilized Europe. That learning became the basis of the wonderful medieval scholasticism and its rich culture.

Traditionally in Ireland each region had its own wise person. In County Clare there was a wise woman called Biddy Early. In Galway there was a woman called Cailleach an Clochain, or the old woman of Clifden, who also had this wisdom. When people were confused in their lives, or worried about the future, they would often visit these wise figures. Through their counsel, people learned to engage their destiny anew; they learned to live more deeply and enjoy protection from imminent danger and destruction. Wisdom is often associated with the harvest time of life. That which is scattered has no unity, whereas that which is gathered comes home to unity and belonging. Wisdom, then, is the art of balancing the known with the unknown, the suffering with the joy; it is a way of linking the whole of life together in a new and deeper unity. Our society would be very well advised to attend to the wisdom of old people, to integrate them into the processes of decision making. The wisdom of the aged could be invaluable in helping us to articulate a vision for our future. Ultimately, wisdom and vision are sisters; the creativity, critique and prophecy of vision issues from the fount of wisdom. Older people are great treasure houses of wisdom.

LONELINESS: THE KEY TO COURAGE

When you are too familiar with who you are, you have become in fact a real stranger to your self. As you age, you will have more space to become acquainted with your self. This solitude can take the form of loneliness and as you age you can become very lonely. Loneliness is exceptionally difficult. A friend, who was living in Germany, told me of his battle with homesickness. He found the temperament, the order, the structures and the externality of Germany very difficult. He had flu during the winter and the loneliness he had repressed came out to haunt him. He got desperately lonely; instead of avoiding it, he decided to allow the loneliness to have its way. He sat down in the armchair and gave hinmself permission to feel as lonely as he wanted. As soon as he gave that invitation to his soul, the loneliness just poured through him. He felt like the most abandoned orphan in the cosmos. He cried and cried. In a way, he was crying for all the loneliness in his life that he had kept hidden. Though this was painful, it was a wonderful experience for him. When he let the loneliness flow, let the dam burst within, something shifted in his relation to his own loneliness. He was never again lonely in Germany. He became free, once he had engaged and befriended the depth of his own loneliness. It became a natural part of his life. An old friend of mine in Connemara said one evening as we were talking about loneliness: 'Is pol dubh dóite é an t-uaigneas, ach má dhúnann tú súas é, dúnfaidh tú amach go leor eile atá go h-álainn chomh maith,' i.e. Loneliness is a black burnt hole, but if you close it up, you close out so much that can be so beautiful for you as well. There is no need for us to be afraid of that loneliness. If we engage it, it can bring us new freedom.

AGEING: AN INVITATION TO NEW SOLITUDE

The new solitude in your life can make the prospect of ageing frightening. A new quietness settles on the outer frame of your active life, on the work that you have done, the family that you have raised and the role that you have played. Your life takes on a greater stillness and solitude. These facts need not be frightening. If you view them creatively, your new stillness and solitude can be wonderful gifts and great resources for you. Time and again we miss out on the great treasures in our lives because we are so restless. In our minds we are always elsewhere. We are seldom in the place where we stand and in the time that is now. Many people are haunted by the past, things that they have not done, things that they should have done that they regret not doing. They are prisoners of their past. Other people are haunted by the future; they are anxious and worried about what is coming.

Few people are actually able to inhabit their present time because they are too stressed and rushed. One of the joys of ageing is that you have more time to be still. Pascal said that many of our major problems derive from our inability to sit still in a room. Stillness is vital to the world of the soul. If, as you age you become more still, you will discover that stillness can be a great companion. The fragments of your life will have time to unify, the places where your soul shelter is wounded or broken will have time to knit and heal. You will be able to return to your self. In this stillness, you will engage your soul. Many people miss out on themselves completely as they journey through life. They know others, they know places, they know skills, they know their work, but tragically, they do no know themselves at all. Ageing can be a lovely time of ripening where you actually meet yourself, indeed maybe for the first time. There are beautiful lines by T. S. Eliot which say: 'And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And to know the place for the first time.'