LIGHT
What is the source of the light that banishes our fear? I read a lovely sentence in a Hindu book years ago which said, consciousness always shines with the light from beyond itself. One of my images of the divine is that it is light in some form, and that the divine light works very tenderly with human freedom. If you don’t believe that the light is there, you will experience the darkness. But if you believe the light is there, and if you call the light towards you, and if you call it into whatever you’re involved in, the light will never fail you. I often think that what the heart of the Christian mystery, the Resurrection, means is that at the heart of darkness—to use Joseph Conrad’s phrase—there isn’t darkness but the eternal candle. In Connemara, the seandaoine used to say when somebody died, Tá a choinneal múchta, his candle is quenched. I asked an old man one day why he would say that, and he said, I often heard as a small lad that when you’re born, there’s a candle lit for you in the eternal world, and the length of your life is the length of the candle! Thought, creative thought particularly, is about quarrying for or liberating light. There is light inside in everything that happens to you.
One of the really sad things is when people get involved in situations in their relationships where it becomes totally destructive, and where they fix on each other on the mutual points of gravity and poverty. It is so hard for them to believe that hidden in the heart of this poverty, there is light. Much of our impoverishment derives precisely and directly from a failure of imagination, because there is some very tenuous and very special linkage between expectation and gift. If you do expect something with reverence and compassion, it will come towards you and be given to you. The proof of that is, people who have been through hell on this earth, and it still somehow hasn’t tarnished or dulled their essence. Within the awfulness that was happening to them, they were somehow given the grace to find the buried light and it minded them. As it is said in the Bible, “Not a hair on your head will be harmed.” I think of that lovely phrase “Do not be afraid”; it is repeated 366 times in the Bible. That is once for every day and, as somebody said, once for no reason at all!
SHELTER
There is a special shelter around every person. One of the things that all children should be taught when they are growing up is that there is a shelter around them, but that they won’t feel the shelter if they don’t expect it and if they don’t know that it is there. That shelter is the shelter of your soul, it is the shelter of your God and it is the shelter of your angel. I know that angels are back in fashion now, and a lot of the thinking about angels is very soft thinking. I feel that there is given to each of us an angel’s spirit to shelter and protect us and mind us. If you don’t think that spirit is beside you, then you may never feel its presence, but if you do begin to tune into it and become aware of it, you will be astounded at the gentleness, the encouragement and the inspiration that your angel will bring you. There is some beautiful work done by an American psychologist called David Miller on the whole idea of angels and inspiration. One of the great places of wonder is inspiration. The lovely thing about the concept of wonder is that it completely escapes the grid of control and predictability. It seems to witness to another sense of sourcing which cannot be programmed, which can be expected and which is always received with surprise. One of the lovely things about Anglo-Saxon linguistic philosophy is that it has made us aware of the fact that we shouldn’t approach the essence of a thing by trying to get a hard definition of it. We should try more to gather the family of concepts or ideas which belong to a reality. If you look at the concept of wonder, you have presences like surprise, expectation, celebration, inspiration, unpredictability, participation, mystery. There is a wonderful German philosopher called Hans-Georg Gadamer who said in his book Truth and Method that a horizon is something towards which we move but it is also something that moves along with us. One nice metaphor of human growth would be that you could be always moving to a new horizon, not abandoning the former ones, but in the graciousness of memory’s loyalty actually bringing them along with you so that you are coming to new places all the time. One of the lovely things about wonder is that it is also the sister of novelty and newness and freshness.
IMAGINATION
Imagination is one of the closest presences in the whole family of wonder. In a way, imagination is a quality of all these different presences, and imagination is the threshold at which they begin to emerge. Imagination never pretends to know it all. It never demands or claims an absolute standpoint, but it always relishes and celebrates the fact it is on the threshold where it cannot see everything. The kind of knowing that is in imagination is knowing through exploration. It is not predetermined concepts or ideas. I think that every person, particularly the child, has incredible imagination. When you think of the way that each of us came into the world, we were actually for the first several years of our lives absolute practitioners—every little girl and little boy was a priestess and priest of the imagination. They completely participated in the world through the power of imagination. Imagination is also very, very compassionate. It will never take one side of a polarity or a contradiction, but it will try to weave both together and to embrace them. When you look at the fact that a human always inhabits a threshold, then you see the power of imagination. Each person is always on the threshold between their inner world and their outer world, between light and darkness, between known and unknown, between question and quest, between fact and possibility. This threshold runs through every experience that we have, and our only real guide to this world is the imagination. One of the lovely things a person can do for another person is to awaken the power and sacrament of their imagination, because when you awaken someone’s imagination, you are giving them a new kingdom, a new world. William Blake said that Christ is the imagination, which I think is one of the most beautiful theological statements I have ever heard. If you look at the place of Christ, the Son of God, and the whole story of the creation, he was the first “other” that ever was, and I believe, therefore, the prism of all difference that is. Imagination in the Blakeian sense is about the awakening to and the recognition of the sacredness of all the difference that is. Where the imagination is alive, wonder is completely alive. Where the imagination is alive, possibility is awake because imagination is the great friend of possibility. Possibilities are always more interesting than facts. We shouldn’t frown on facts, but our world is congested with them. Facts are retarded possibilities, they are possibilities that have already been actualized. But for every fact that becomes a fact, there are seven, eight, maybe five hundred possibilities hanging around in the background that didn’t make it into the place where they could be elected and realized as the actual fact. It is very interesting to look at what you consider real and to think that it is always peopled by a background presence of unrealized possibilities. That is one of the fascinating things in going through the world—you wonder at destiny, at the way that your life actually flows and moves and grows. I have a great suspicion of an awful lot of what is paraded as moral decision and moral rectitude and moral recognition. I think there is a beautiful morality of possibility to be written, because placing all the emphasis on moral choice is very limiting. Choice is always about loss: you choose one thing over the other several things. And maybe the soul doesn’t want to do that. It is a very interesting question: whether in the course of your life, you had to choose one direction, if in actual fact, unknown to you in the invisible area of your life, in the unknown area of your life, your other unchosen lives might not actually travel with you as well. Maybe one of the great surprises we will get in the wonder moment of after-death is that when we wake up and straighten up in that new kingdom, we will find that all our unchosen and unlived lives are there to welcome us as well.