Real presence is the ideal of all true individuation. When we yield to helplessness, we strengthen the hand of those who would destroy. When we choose indifference, we betray our world. Yet the world is not decided by action alone. It is decided more by consciousness and spirit; they are the secret sources of all action and behavior. The spirit of a time is an incredibly subtle, yet hugely powerful force. And it is comprised of the mentality and spirit of all individuals together. Therefore, the way you look at things is not simply a private matter. Your outlook actually and concretely affects what goes on. When you give in to helplessness, you collude with despair and add to it. When you take back your power and choose to see the possibilities for healing and transformation, your creativity awakens and flows to become an active force of renewal and encouragement in the world. In this way, even in your own hidden life, you can become a powerful agent of transformation in a broken, darkened world. There is a huge force field that opens when intention focuses and directs itself toward transformation.
THE INESTIMABLE POWER OF INTENTION
There is incredible power in the mind when it directs its light toward an object. I heard recently of an ongoing experiment in an American university. There is a sealed-off room; in that room there is a coin-flipping machine. All day and all night it flips coins. The results are usually fifty percent heads and fifty percent tails. Nearby there is another room into which people are invited. Each person is asked to make an intention. Which would they prefer? Heads or tails? Having made their choice, they then write it down on a page that is put in a sealed envelope and addressed to the team who conducts the research. The results are astounding. If a person wishes for heads, the machine ends up flipping up to a seventy-five percent majority of heads and vice versa. They found the distance that the power of the intention to affect the outcome held for up to a hundred-and-fifty-mile radius around the experimentation room. Now, if human intention can substantially affect the outcome of something as cold and neutral as the working of a coin-flipping machine, how much more must our human intentions achieve as they relate to one another?
I have also heard of an experiment in meditation. For a certain number of days, some years ago, a group of people made a circle around the city of Washington and meditated continually. Gathered unknown to itself within this circle of loving kindness, Washington changed. The statistics for that period in the city showed a remarkable and unprecedented decrease in violence and crime. The power of intention to bless is not some utopian fantasy; it can be shown factually to effect concrete and transformative action.
We have no idea the effect we actually have on one another. This is where blessing can achieve so much. Blessing as powerful and positive intention can transform situations and people. The force of blessing must be even more powerful when we consider how the intention of blessing corresponds with the deepest desire of reality for creativity, healing, and wholesomeness. Blessing has pure agency because it animates on the deepest threshold between being and becoming; it mines the territories of memory to awaken and draw forth possibilities we cannot even begin to imagine!
THE EYES OF JESUS
I imagine the eyes of Jesus
Were harvest brown,
The light of their gazing
Suffused with the seasons:
The shadow of winter,
The mind of spring,
The blues of summer,
And amber of harvest.
A gaze that is perfect sister
To the kindness that dwells
In his beautiful hands.
The eyes of Jesus gaze on us,
Stirring in the heart’s clay
The confidence of seasons
That never lose their way to harvest.
This gaze knows the signature
Of our heartbeat, the first glimmer
From the dawn that dreamed our minds,
The crevices where thoughts grow
Long before the longing in the bone
Sends them toward the mind’s eye,
The artistry of the emptiness
That knows to slow the hunger
Of outside things until they weave
Into the twilight side of the heart,
A gaze full of all that is still future
Looking out for us to glimpse
The jeweled light in winter stone,
Quickening the eyes that look at us
To see through to where words
Are blind to say what we would love,
Forever falling softly on our faces,
His gaze plies the soul with light,
Laying down a luminous layer
Beneath our brief and brittle days
Until the appointed dawn comes
Assured and harvest deft
To unravel the last black knot
And we are back home in the house
That we have never left.
Acknowledgments
I tender my gratitude to Martin Downey for his friendship and understanding over long years; Sheila O’Sullivan and Ethel Balfe for their care and companionship; Kim Witherspoon, Alexis Hurley, and all at Inkwell Management; my editor, Trace Murphy, at Random House for his belief in the book and for his courtesy and kindness. Heartfelt appreciation to my great friend Lelia Doolan for reading the text at an early stage and delivering a surgical critique tempered with encouragement; Loretta Roome for her care for the text and her impatience for its ideal form; Wendy Dubit for her careful reading, her warmth of heart, and sharpness of eye; Dr. Gareth Higgins for his critique and his dignified capacity for friendship; Colen Fraser Wishart for the shelter of his monastic soul; Swami Nicholas Roosevelt for all the great voyages; the artist Catherine Clancy, whose spirit and passion open new windows and whose conversations continue to sing in the mind; the poet-farmer Noel Hanlon, whose imagination and love make the world warmer; Professor Laurie Johnson, whose friendship is a treasure; Professor Helen Riess, whose wise and kind presence creates pathways to retrieve what was lost; Caroline and Dan Siegel for our discovery of kinship and affinity; Pat O’Brien for his presence and friendship; David Whyte, my brother at these frontiers; Jacki Lyden for her love and all the doors she opens in the mind; Jennifer Vecchi for her elegant gentleness; Ellen Wingard for the affinity and belonging; Anna Maria Haughian for her love and prayer; Pat Moore for his kindness and seeing. And to the circle of my family that shelters, strengthens, and opens the spirit: P. J. Pat, Mary, Dympna, Eilish, Shane, Katie, Triona, and Peter; to my mother, Josie, whose life and love continue to bless us all.
In memory of Gabriel Joyce, whose wild, clear spirit was always a call to true presence. In memory of John Devitt, who often cast his erudite and elegant eye over my writing. I miss his enriching presence, his passion for beauty, intellect, and refinement of spirit. Never expecting death to come so soon, I am lonesome for all the conversations we never had. And finally, in memory of my lovely uncle Pete, our second father, whose heart loved the mountains and whose voice and passion blessed courage and adventure; and my father, Paddy, the holiest man I ever met. His quiet facility for presence altered space, his gentle eyes always in love with the invisible world.