Tag Archive for: Celtic Spirituality

ANAM CARA

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We all like to hear stories about how two people met.  We listen around the dinner table or watch on the big screen movies like “How Harry met Sally” and it makes us feel good, comforted in the way that only something life affirming can do.  We are reminded too of our own stories of “coincidence”, chance encounters when we met our love of 50 years, or our oldest and dearest friends, or those whose time with us was short but whose impact on our lives was great.  These are our own anam cara, our soul friends. 

In the Celtic tradition, this is the beautiful notion of divinely bestowed love and friendship.  It is the idea of soul-love.  An old Gaelic term, anam is the Gaelic word for soul and cara is the word for friend.  In the early Celtic church, it originally referred to someone who you revealed the hidden intimacies of your life.  With the anam cara, you could share your innermost self, your mind and your heart.  

Celtic wisdom deems that you cannot manufacture or achieve this kind of love or friendship by a sheer act of the will or even by intention. It is simply the act of recognition. 

Whether it be a meeting on the street or a banal introduction, there is a flash of recognition and the embers of kinship glow.  There is an awakening between you, a sense of ancient belonging.  The Celts believe this to be an eternal connection. 

Ancient Irish lore metaphorically speaks of anam caras rising from the same pre-historic clay.  The clay shapes, once part of a whole were separated, lost in the creation of the world, and are searching for their related pieces. The allegory pointing to a larger reality, a conscious break from the overly-analytical nature prevalent in today’s world and an entering into the realm of mystery.     

The recent resurgence of Celtic spirituality reflects this growing ache for more sublime, more Real (with a capital R) notions of intimacy and relationship than our current neon culture provides.  Everybody, it seems, is always talking incessantly about relationships.  Even Yahoo has a category for relationships on its home page, as if you could get your fix alongside the weather report and the latest entertainment news.  All this overcooked verbage that ladens the media gives an illusion that even love is a consumer item, something that can be acquired.  

The temptation is to be more concerned with what you have and who you should be and who you should be with. It often overshadows the more important how you should be.  The stance of open-hearted faith and gentleness that opens the door to real intimacy which at its best is a sacred experience.  You must be ready to receive it.

In everyone’s life, there is  a great need for an anam cara.  In this love, you are understood as you are without mask or pretension.  A precious understanding dawns so that you feel really understood. You feel free to release yourself into the trust and shelter of the other person’s soul.  As Pablo Neruda perfectly describes, “You are like nobody since I love you”.  

John O’Donohue asserts the grace of an anam cara: “The greatest gift new love brings into your life is the awakening to the hidden love within.  This make you independent.  You are now able to come close to the other, not out of need or with the wearying apparatus of projection, but out of genuine intimacy, affinity, and belonging.  It is a freedom.  Love should make you free.  You become free of the hungry, blistering need with which you continually reach out to scrape affirmation, respect, and significance for yourself from things and people outside yourself.  To be holy is to come home, to be able to rest in the house of belonging that we call the soul“.

You do not have to DO anything.  You just have to BE ready.

OIL ILLS HAVE NOT BEEN FOR THE PELICAN BRIEF

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This past week I was listening to a woman being interviewed on NPR.  She has been volunteering for some weeks now cleaning the thick oil off the pelicans in Louisiana.   Her voice faltered several times as she described the heartache of watching several of them die or struggle with wings to laden to lift.  I hear the weary gratitude when her scrubbing efforts with simple dish soap and water restore a number of these birds towards health.

The photos of oil slicked birds display in Technicolor detail what havoc we humans can wreak on the rest of the animal kingdom in our insatiable need for more. Even if you are the unusual “bird” who doesn’t get too emotional about animals or feel a kinship with nature, amongst the gazillion other lessons we can glean from this disaster, one is the absolute necessity to put our environment before the profits and desires of big business.

We are discovering the hard way that this paradigm of short term gain is actually putting the “people on Main Street” out of their small businesses and livelihoods that have been a family’s source of pride for generations.  We all have become accustomed to being an active consumer in a consumer society (myself included).  So, to a degree, we are all complicit in the continuing crisis.       

One of the sources of healing, that can change our thinking and shift the collective perspective is the wisdom of Celtic spirituality.  Theirs is a language that can guide us to a new or remembered perspective about the creatures (on land and sea) and the landscape we inhabit. As John O’Donohue relates in his book Anam Cara- A Book of Celtic Wisdom, we are the newcomers here: 

“The animals are more ancient than us.  They were here for millenia before humans surfaced on the earth…Animals live outside in the wind, in the waters, in the mountains, and in the clay… (They) know nothing of Freud, Jesus, Buddha, Wall Street, the Pentagon, or the Vatican.  They live the politics of human intention…The Celtic mind recognized the ancient belonging and knowing of the animal world.  The dignity, beauty, and wisdom of the animal world by any false hierarchy or human arrogance.”

Instead, Celtic spirituality was a reservoir of stories that told of the union between animals and humans.  These tales fastened us to the wild landscape, grounding ourselves as a part of the circle of life, not as apart.  

My friend Kim has a saying she often uses for when her deepest intuition guides her to make a difficult decision or leads her to a clear perspective.  She says, “I know it in my knowings.”  That’s what Celtic spirituality calls us to.  Not to heed the heated and divisive mob mentality, but to listen in stillness to a saner, less selfish approach. 

Instead of “drill baby drill”, what we have gotten is “spill baby spill”.  This too shall pass (with a heavy toll for years to come), but LET’S LEARN THE LESSON IT IS TRYING TO TEACH US.