The beauty that emerges from woundedness is a beauty infused with feeling; a beauty different from the beauty of landscape and the cold beauty of perfect form. This is a beauty that has suffered its way through the ache of desolation until the words or music emerged to equal the hunger and desperation at its heart. It must also be said that not all woundedness succeeds in finding its way through to beauty of form. Most woundedness remains hidden, lost inside forgotten silence. Indeed, in every life there is some wound that continues to weep secretly, even after years of attempted healing. Where woundedness can be refined into beauty a wonderful transfiguration takes place. For instance, compassion is one of the most beautiful presences a person can bring to the world and most compassion is born from one’s own woundedness. When you have felt deep emotional pain and hurt, you are able to imagine what the pain of the other is like; their suffering touches you. This is the most decisive and vital threshold in human experience and behaviour. The greatest evil and destruction arises when people are unable to feel compassion. The beauty of compassion continues to shelter and save our world. If that beauty were quenched, there would be nothing between us and the end-darkness which would pour in torrents over us.
H
IDDEN
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HERE
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O - ONE
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OULD
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IND
Y
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: T
HE
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ONASTIC
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ELL IN THE
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EART
Give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning,
the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.
ISAIAH 61:3
EACH SHAPE OF VULNERABILITY HAS A DIFFERENT ORIGIN. WHEN I was in priestly ministry I once came to know a woman who had just got news that she was soon going to die of cancer. We worked together for about a month. She was a woman in late middle age. She had a very caring husband and four grown-up children who adored her. It is a privilege to be invited to inhabit such a threshold with a person in the last weeks of their life. Time takes on a huge urgency. Superficial façades drop aside. There is nothing left to lose or protect. Some of my friends often say they would love to die quickly. They would fear the loneliness of a long, lingering departure: so much better to die without knowing it. Yet this can be such a precious time. The blur of distraction and defensive pretension can give way to real conversation and true encounter. It can become a time for the essence of a person to shine through. As illness wears out the covering of the body, the soul shines forth. As this woman came to trust me, I discovered that she had not really talked to anyone for over thirty years. Early on in her marriage, something had broken down irreparably between herself and her husband. She simply lost what she had with him and could not get it back. There she was inside this home, the mother and the heart of it. She learned to go through all the external motions and she became an utterly convincing domestic actress. But inside she was lost. Gradually she began to accept that there was no path outwards. Then she made a decision to live her intimate life inwardly. She undertook the journey. She went inwards as far as she could and over the years she managed to build some kind of hermit cell within her own heart. And that was where she really dwelt. When she began to talk about herself, it was clear that she spoke from a refined interiority. In a sense, she was not a mother living in a suburban house with husband and children. She was someone who had long since departed to an interior monastery that nobody had discovered. And when death began to focus more clearly around her, she was not afraid. Death was no stranger to her. Having had to build a sanctuary where no-one ever visited, she had come to know the mind of death. She was not thrown by the cold clarity of death’s stare or the unravelling force of its singular eye. Nor was there any bitterness in her. She had allowed as much transfiguration as she could. Against the hidden pathos of her life’s distance, she had no resistance. She had garnered a fragile beauty from isolation.
‘N
ÍL
S
AOI
G
AN
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OCHT’
WHILE VULNERABILITY MAY BE THE SOURCE FROM WHICH THE beauty of a work of art emerges, the work of art itself inevitably has some vulnerability in its form. There is an old Irish proverb, ‘Níl saoi gan locht’ – there is no craftsman without a flaw. Though every work of art dreams of being perfect, there is always some flaw and one rarely meets an artist who is happy with her work. This restless and divine dissatisfaction is imagined by the novelist Hermann Broch, who portrays Virgil’s dissatisfaction with his Aeneid; he wants to destroy it. I once had the unexpected privilege of spending an afternoon with one of the greatest poets writing in English, R.S. Thomas. During our conversation he was talking about his life as a priest among his people and of his love of being outside in the landscape. At one point he said that if he had been able to stay inside more and remain at his desk, he might have become a great poet. As he was a very serious man, there was no trace of irony or space to counter the claim. But I was amazed that such bleak self-critique could dwell alongside such magnificent and accomplished work. In the end every artist is haunted by a few central themes. Again and again, they return to the threshold of that disturbance and endeavour to excavate something new. This is the magnetic draw at the heart of the wound, the secret force of a silent hunger whose infinite longing is to find its unique voice. When the heart of that force finds its true form, a masterpiece emerges. Elaine Scarry says, ‘The beautiful thing seems – is – incomparable, unprecedented; and that sense of being without precedent conveys a sense of the “newness” or “newbornness” of the entire world.’
T
HE
S
LOW
W
ORK OF
I
NTEGRATING THE
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LAW
I am everything you lost. You can’t forgive me.
AGHA SHAHID ALI, ‘Farewell’
BEAUTY’S LIGHT COMES UP SLOWLY AND SHYLY ALONG THE EDGES of limitation, confusion, anxiety and helplessness. In such a terrain one would expect anger, resentment, bitterness or destructive negativity. Yet a spirit and atmosphere of graciousness often emerges when the human heart reaches into its own nobility and allows the destructive reaction to disappointment and hurt to open into something more healing and creative. Regardless of outer circumstances and even inner turbulence, we always have the freedom to choose differently. This is a difficult freedom. In many instances, it may be beyond our reach. However, the freedom to choose graciousness is a freedom no-one can take from us. We will always dwell on the frontier of our own limitations and weakness. Each of us is deeply flawed somewhere. We are made of clay and our clay is haunted by gravity. Frequently the flaw can be a point of pure negativity and destructiveness. When the flaw is that severe, it needs to be decisively engaged. Nevertheless, life can take a wonderfully creative turning when we choose to integrate the flaw. It need no longer be a force that diminishes or damages. We can discover the freedom every so often of abandoning the speed and stress of the linear route. The flaw will take us down boreens and pathways we would otherwise never have travelled. We begin to discover new landscapes. Although the journey becomes slow and frequently arduous, through the fractured lens of more vulnerable vision we learn to see neglected corners of the heart that have long awaited the affections of our eyes. We come to remember again that we were not sent here for worldly achievement alone. We find that we are being gently rescued from the illusion of progress, and fragile dimensions of the exiled soul begin to return. In a similar vein Rilke wrote: ‘Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows; by being defeated decisively by constantly greater things.’