Some lovely poems by Kathleen Raine link the images of angel, birth, and renewal.
Dear angel of my birth,
All my life’s loss,
Gold of fallen flowers,
Shells after ebbing wave
Gathered on lonely shores
With secret toil of love,
Deathless in memory save
The treasures of my grave.
Your angel is the spirit of renewal and transfiguration. Celtic mythology had a wonderful sense of novelty. There was no such thing as a prison in the Celtic mind. You could see that so powerfully in the way that things continued to change shape and take on other different forms. There was no fixed boundary between the visible and the invisible. Without warning or preparation, things could appear suddenly out of the invisible air. This happens often in the Irish epic The Táin. A presence coagulates itself, comes out, and is standing there giving advice or warning or prophesy. The Celts inhabited a rich imaginative landscape. At the heart of Celtic spirituality is the fire, force, and tenderness of the Celtic imagination. All spirituality derives from the quality and power of the imagination. The beauty of Celtic spirituality is the imagination behind it, which had no boundaries. The essence of a thing or person was never confined in any prison of definition or image. Celtic spirituality is an invitation to a wonderful freedom. The recovery and awakening of the invisible world is as wild and free as the immeasurable riches of the earth.
W. H. Auden in his poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” has the following beautiful verse:
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
In prayer, your angel can help you to praise and sing the song of freedom from your heart. Your angelic presence can convert a dead world into a new world of mystery, potential, and promise. The British poet Philip Larkin wrote a poem called “First Sight,” about lambs born in the snow. On a farm it is exciting to see new lambs finding the world during their first few hours here. Larkin’s poem describes the snow-covered landscapes into which these new lambs arrive. They see and know nothing except snow. They have landed in a white world; before them every hill and bush is white. Larkin then suggests the absolute novelty that is still concealed. Waiting for them is
Earth’s immeasurable surprise,
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.
This poem marks and articulates an unnoticed and surprising threshold of recognition. Similarly, outside the walls of the inner prison in which you are now locked, there is the gift of the earth’s immeasurable surprise awaiting to bless and enlarge your Spirit. You were born for life, you were born for eternal life. No fear or false conviction should confine you in any crippled emotional or thought-space that is unworthy of the springtime that sleeps so lightly in the clay of your heart. Winter always precedes spring and is often a time of suffering. In the prisons we build for ourselves, our belonging becomes crippled and our longing haunted. When we suffer, our sense of belonging is broken.
A BLESSING
May you listen to your longing to be free.
May the frames of your belonging be large enough for the dreams of your soul.
May you arise each day with a voice of blessing whispering in your heart that something good is going to happen to you.
May you find a harmony between your soul and your life.
May the mansion of your soul never become a haunted place.
May you know the eternal longing which lives at the heart of time.
May there be kindness in your gaze when you look within.
May you never place walls between the light and yourself.
May your angel free you from the prisons of guilt, fear, disappointment, and despair.
May you allow the wild beauty of the invisible world to gather you, mind you, and embrace you in belonging.
4 Suffering as the Dark Valley of Broken Belonging
Our Secret Kinship with the Darkness
Regardless of how lucky, blessed, or privileged one might be, there is no person that is not called at some time to walk through the bleak valley of suffering. This is a path without hope, without shelter, and without light. When suffering comes into your life, it brings great loneliness and isolation. Your life becomes haunted; your belonging breaks. Suffering and pain can assail us with such ferocity, because darkness is so near us; within this darkness, our longing is numbed and calls out for release and healing.
Though you live and work in the light, you were conceived and shaped in darkness. Darkness is one of our closest companions. It can never really surprise us; something within us knows the darkness more deeply than it knows the light. The dark is older than the light. In the beginning was the darkness. The first light was born out of the dark. All through evolution the light grew and refined itself, until, finally, a new lamp was lit with the human mind. Before electricity came to rural areas, the candle and the lamp brightened the home at night. There was one special lamp with a mirror fitted behind it to magnify the light. If you looked into the light at an angle, you could catch a heart-shaped light reflected in the mirror. It was as if the light wished to see itself. Of all previous brightness in creation, this was the new secret of the light of the mind: it was a light that could see itself. The mind brought a new quality of light, which could acknowledge and unveil mystery and create mysteries of its own.
Its eternity of patience rewarded, infinity discovered at last its true mirror in the human soul. For the first time, there was someone who could see the depths and reflect the glimpses. In a certain sense, all human action, thought, and creativity make mirrors for life to behold itself. Yet the closer our acquaintance with the mystery, the more the mystery deepens. Brightness only reinforces the opaque soul of the darkness. We forget so easily that all our feelings, thoughts, and brightness of mind are born in darkness. Thoughts are sparks of illumination within the dark silence and stillness of our bodies. We have an inner kinship with darkness that nothing can dissolve. This protects us from allowing too much outside light into the secret centre of our minds. The immensity and slow beauty of the inner life need the shelter of the dark in order to grow and find their appropriate forms.
Light Has Many Faces—the Dark Has One
There is a touching innocence in the mystery of the human self. Even after thousands of years of experience and reflection, we still remain a mystery to ourselves. In the so-called ordinary person, there is something deeply unpredictable and unfathomable. We have never been able to definitively decipher the secret of our nature. Of course, every secret delights in the dark and fears the light. Regardless of how you might force the neon light of analysis on your self, it can never penetrate. It remains on the surface and creates tantalizing but ultimately empty images. Even when you approach your self tenderly with the candle of receptive and reverential seeing, all you achieve is a glimpse. There is something in the sacred darkness of the mind that does not trust the facility and quickness of light. Darkness resists the name. Darkness knows the regions which the name can never reach or hold or dream. The dark must smile at the proud pretence of words to hold networks of identity and meaning, but the dark knows only too well the fragile surface on which words stand. Darkness keeps its secrets. Light is diverse and pluraclass="underline" sunlight, moonlight, dusk, dawn, and twilight. The dark has only one name. There is something deep in us which implicitly recognizes the primacy and wonder of the dark. Perhaps this is why we instinctively insist on avoiding and ignoring its mysteries.