Providence is another name for the kindness of God. If we could realize how wise the providence around us is, it would give us immense confidence on our journey. The irony is that we don’t need to worry. We can take a lot more risks than we realize. It is interesting to ask: what are the limits you have set for your life? Where are the lines of these limits? Why do you think you cannot go beyond them? How real are they? Did you construct these limits out of anxiety and fear? If you were to go beyond your most solidly set limits, what difference would it make to your life? What are you missing by remaining confined?
The awakening to the beauty of your creativity can totally change the way you view limits. When you see the limit not as a confining barrier but as a threshold, you are already beyond. The beauty of imagination helps you to see the limit as an invitation to venture forth and view the world and your role in it as full of beautiful possibilities. You become aware of new possibilities in how you feel, think and act. The interim, the in-between world is brisk with possibility. And possibility is the gift of creativity.
A
LL
B
EAUTY
I
S A
G
IFT
The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting.
SHAKESPEARE, Sonnet 87
MANY OF THE MOST LUMINOUS GIFTS OF OUR LIVES ARRIVE AS complete surprises. A gift is the most beautiful of intrusions. It arrives undeserved and unexpected. It comes ashore in our hearts carefully formed to fit exactly the shape of a hunger we might not even know we had. The gift comes with no price tag, no demand that puts us under an obligation. Every gift has an inner lamp that casts a new brightness over an undiscovered field of the heart. In this light we discover and bring to birth something new within us. Regardless of how carefully we examine the path of its arrival, the eyes of our mind can never unveil the true source of the gift. The gift keeps its reason secret. Some unexpected path opened in the interim world and the gift was already on its way towards us.
Sometimes it is difficult to know when you are getting a gift. Its arrival is often a shock; at the beginning it might seem to be the furthest thing from a gift that you could imagine. Looking from now, we cannot glimpse the shape of our destiny; its subtle weave only comes to light in retrospect. There is so much about ourselves that we do not know. After Freud’s descriptions of the subconscious, we tend to imagine that the subconscious holds all kinds of misshapen forms. We forget that the darkness of the unknown within us is also a fecund soil urgent with seeds of new possibility. The beauty of the gift is the secret way it awakens us to growth. Without alerting our anxiety or forcing confrontation, the gift has placed us on the path of change almost before we realize it. And much of the change in our lives happens through struggle and pain. We are confronted with an unattractive direction that we have to take. For weeks or months we have to travel through limbo; the comfort and security of our familiar belonging lies far behind us. Where we will belong next has not yet become clear. The days become a struggle of endurance. Yet when the light and the ease return, we recognize the change that has been achieved. The gift bequeaths change in a completely different way. Quietly it undoes the knots of false netting that had us entangled and before we have time to realize what has happened, we find ourselves released into a new fluency. Like a parent to the soul, the gift carries us carefully over torn ground until our feet stand free in a serene place where we can recognize that we have been blessed.
Every life is blessed with a different sequence of gifts. Often the gift arrives secretly and you only find it later. Or perhaps you are looking back over time as you would look through an old drawer and you come upon something that you had put away ages ago. You rediscover the gift and enter again into its wonder. This is one of the lovely capacities of memory: the reawakening of new blessing through the rediscovery of old gifts in forgotten corners. It is this prospect that animates faith.
F
AITH
: T
HE
A
TTRACTION TO
D
IVINE
B
EAUTY
Fornocht do chonac thú
a áille na háille
Naked have I seen thee
O Beauty of Beauty
PATRICK PEARSE
FAITH IS ATTRACTION TO THE DIVINE. FOR TOO LONG FAITH HAS been presented as a weak form of knowledge. Yet whilst faith seems feeble in the realm of evidence and proof, beauty always attracts us. It strikes our sensibility in a way that makes us respond. Our response to beauty is unlaboured. Even in unknown ways, our lives are charged with attraction towards divine beauty. The infinity of the beauty which is God is a feast for the soul. The beauty of God increases and deepens our own beauty. We enter the secret symmetry of the Divine Imagination.
When we consider faith as a response to Divine Beauty, we begin to glimpse its creativity and passion. Faith is no blind piety but a primal attraction, the deepest resonance of the self drawn to the elegance of its ancient origin. Faith has its own aesthetic of dignity, light and proportion. Something in us senses and knows how perfectly the contours of the soul fit the divine embrace. It is the deepest dream of the soul to be in the intimacy of Divine Beauty. At that depth an atmosphere of elegance presides. Such a profound attraction turns the body into a force-field of divine quickening. The whole self is taken up in the embrace of the divine tenderness. The classic image for this encounter of God and the soul is that of the Lover and the Beloved. It is majestically expressed in the Canticle of St John of the Cross:
Upon a gloomy night
With all my cares to loving ardours flushed,
O venture of delight!
With nobody in sight
I went abroad when all my house was hushed.
In safety, in disguise,
In darkness up the secret stair I crept,
O happy enterprise!
Concealed from my eyes
When all my house at length in silence slept.
Upon that lucky night
In secrecy, inscrutable to sight,
I went without discerning
And with no other light
Except for that which in my heart was burning.
It lit and led me through
More certain than the light of noonday clear
To where One waited near
Whose presence well I knew,
There where no other presence might appear.
Oh night that was my guide!
Oh darkness dearer than the morning’s pride,
Oh night that joined the lover
To the beloved bride
Transfiguring them each into the other.
Within my flowering breast
Which only for himself entire I save
He sank into his rest
And all my gifts I gave
Lulled by the airs with which the cedars wave.
Over the ramparts fanned
While the fresh wind was fluttering his tresses,
With his serenest hand
My neck he wounded, and
Suspended every sense with its caresses.
Lost to myself I stayed
My face upon my lover having laid
From all endeavour ceasing:
And all my cares releasing
Threw them amongst the lilies there to fade.
(translated by Roy Campbell)
This canticle expresses the divine Eros of mystical love. It has all the elements of the private world of tenderness, belonging, excitement, waiting and union which a great love poem would wish to have. It is a poem about ultimate freedom, an absolute leavetaking of limited identity, an arrival at a field beyond care and worry. This is beautifully caught in the utter surprise of the image of the lilies in the last line, which echoes of course that passage where Jesus enjoins us not to worry: ‘Behold the lilies of the field; they neither spin nor weave, yet I say unto you that Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.’ Once you taste of the divine, you can never fully return to anything else. For to find and love God is an extraordinary adventure. God is the true love of the soul; in the divine embrace all Eros is transfigured.