Anam Cara: A Reflection for International Day of Friendship

 “There is one kind of love that is indissoluble, what no interval of time or space can sever or destroy, and what even death itself cannot part; For with God the union of character, not of place, joins friends together in a common dwelling.” John Cassian, Conferences 

In the Christian tradition, the concept of soul friendship can be traced back to the Desert Fathers and Mothers of the third to fifth centuries, who wandered into the deserts of Egypt and Palestine, and began to live a contemplative life, some completely alone and some with companions, founding the first hermitages and monasteries, where they offered both spiritual guidance to visitors and to each other. 

Soul friendship is a strong thread running through the monastic tradition, up to the present day. These are close-knit spiritual communities, where members share a common vision, and value both solitude and friendship on their spiritual journey. Abba Theodore said, "Let us each give his heart to the other.”

Soul friendship flourished in the Celtic monastic tradition, especially in Ireland (where the phrase anam cara comes from) and in Wales, where a soul-friend was known as a “periglour.” It is thought that the practice of soul friendship may have been inherited by Celtic Christians from the pre-Christian druids.  Celtic Christians were also inspired by John Cassian's writings. Cassian had left Egypt to found a monastery near Marseilles in what was then known as Gaul, in the year 415. 

The Western church eventually made the ministry of spiritual guidance the preserve of the male priest, through the sacrament of reconciliation or confession, as it is known in the Roman Catholic tradition. In the early days of Celtic Christianity such mentoring relationships were open to lay people as well as ordained, men and women. 

In a 9th century manuscript there is a story about St Brigid of Kildare. A foster-son of Brigid comes to eat with her in the refectory. After they have finished their meal, Brigid says, "Well, young cleric there, do you have a soul friend?". "I have", replied the young man. "Let us sing his requiem", says Brigid. "Why so?" asks the young cleric. "For he has died", says Brigid. "When you had finished half your ration I saw that he was dead". "How did you know that?" "Easy to say,” Brigid replies, “from the time that your soul friend was dead, I saw that your food was put (directly) in the trunk of your body, since you were without any head. Go forth and eat nothing until you get a soul friend, for anyone without a soul friend is like a body without a head.”

The lives of the Celtic saints are full of stories of their relationships with their anam cara, and how transformative these relationships were. Soul friendships were characterised by affection and intimacy, mutuality and respect for each other's wisdom, sharing a common vision, and the ability to both affirm and challenge each other. I believe that this is the sort of relationship enjoyed by Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and by Saint Paul and Thecla, who was written out of the New Testament canon because she was a preacher, and whose story can be found in the second century Acts of Paul and Thecla.

In the twentieth century, spiritual direction experienced a resurgence across the boundaries of denominations, and has now become a feature of interfaith spiritual training, as well as within Christian seminaries.

In the late twentieth century, the theme of soul friendship was explored by the Irish writer and priest, John O'Donohue, in his book, Anam Cara, in which he wrote,

"In everyone’s life, there is a great need for an Anam cara, a soul friend. In this love, you are understood as you are without mask or pretension. The superficial and functional lies and half-truths of acquaintance fall away. You can be as you really are. Love allows understanding to dawn, and understanding is precious. Where you are understood, you are at home. Understanding nourishes belonging. When you feel really understood, you feel free to release your self into the trust and shelter of the other person’s soul. This art of love discloses the special and sacred identity of the other person. Love is the most real and creative form of human presence. Love is the threshold where divine and human presence ebb and flow into each other."

In the nineteenth century, another writer dear to Unitarians, and a former Unitarian minister, Ralph Waldo Emerson, published an essay on friendship in 1841. In it he wrote, 

“The sweet sincerity of joy and peace, which I draw from this alliance with my brother’s soul, is the nut itself whereof all nature and all thought is but the husk and shell... A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal that I may drop even those under-most garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness, with which one chemical atom meets another.” 

Soul friendship is how we are called to minister to each other, here in our liberal religious community – to act as spiritual guides and companions to one another, seeking to connect deeply, on a soul level, to be honest, sincere, and understanding, and to encourage each other to spiritual growth. May it be so.

"May you treasure your friends. May you be good to them, and may you be there for them; may they bring you all the blessings, challenges, truth and light that you need for your journey. May you never be isolated; but may you always be in the gentle nest of belonging with your Anam cara." John O'Donohue

'Joy and Woe are Woven Fine' - Reflections on Love, Grief, and Cycles of Healing and Transformation

"Joy and woe are woven fine / A clothing for the soul divine / Under every grief and pine / Runs a joy with silken twine / It is right it should be so / We were made for joy and woe / And when this we rightly know / Through the world we safely go." William Blake

These reflections are inspired by two one-line quotes, from mystics from the same part of the world, Austria and Germany, but separated by six centuries. The first is from the medieval Dominican theologian Meister Eckhart, born in around the year 1260, who wrote, “Love is the root of all joy and sorrow.” The second is from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, born in 1875, who wrote, “Walk your walk of lament on a path of praise.” Over the last few weeks, these two lines have been calling me to contemplate how they manifest in my life and in the life of the world. 

When I was twelve years old, a teacher found me crying alone in the school cloakroom. She asked me what was the matter and I lied – I said it was because I had a cold and felt ill, not wanting to trust her with the real reason, which was that I was worried about my Mum, who was going through a period of depression. The teacher told me, “stop wallowing in misery, pull your socks up and get on with it.” 

Thankfully, it is becoming more and more acceptable in our society to acknowledge, attend to, and express all our feelings, but the attitude of my teacher, which reflects a desire to push away the pain and the darkness, and only face the light, is still prevalent. I realise that I too have internalised it. I learned to keep from expressing my sadness in front of other people, to hide my so-called negative feelings inside. I have often told myself to “get a grip and pull yourself together.” I have spent most of my life emphasizing the positives and glossing over the negatives. I have found a positive attitude to life largely helpful, but a tendency to rush past lament and into rejoicing can lead us to repress grief, which can manifest as anger, or we may become stuck and shut down, closing ourselves off. 

“Love is the root of all joy and sorrow,” wrote Meister Eckhart. How true.  We only feel joy and sorrow for what we care about, what we love. Joy and sorrow are often about the welfare of those we love – when they are well and happy, we rejoice, when they are ill or lost to us, we lament. It is love that lies at the heart of grief, sorrow and regret; and it is love that lies at the heart of joy, delight, and happiness. When we lose someone we love, we feel joy at the memories of the good times we shared and we feel sorrow that they are parted from us. As Khalil Gibran reminds us in The Prophet, “When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.”

My Nana died when I was seventeen. It was the first big loss I had experienced. My Nana had been like a second mother. She had cared for me and my sister during the times when our Mum was hospitalised with depression. I loved my Nana deeply and I felt her loss keenly, but I did not know how to be with my grief. I was not able to express it freely. It manifested in an eating disorder. I broke off a relationship. I became withdrawn and depressed. Eventually I came to understand that I could best honour my Nana and her love by opening my heart again and embracing life. Love was at the root of my sorrow and joy, love that called me back to life again. 

I am very fortunate to have known always that I am loved unconditionally. My childhood was in some ways quite difficult, but it was also full of love. I always felt loved. I was loved by my family and, although I perhaps wouldn't have known then how to articulate it, I also felt loved by the land we lived on, loved by the nature I was part of, by the interconnected web of being that I eventually learned to call God.

This faith in being loved unconditionally by life itself has only deepened as my spiritual path has deepened. But there have been times in my life when my faith has felt weak, when I have struggled to hold on to that deep knowing of unconditional love, when I have cried, with the psalmist, "How long must I bear the anguish of my soul, And have sorrow in my heart through all of my days?”

In 2010 I had a breakdown, largely due to being bullied at work. I was signed off work for six weeks with depression and anxiety. Again, it was love that called me back to life, to begin healing – the love of family and friends, and the love of nature, which I rediscovered in my time off work by taking long daily walks by the river.

Julian of Norwich wrote, “ in those moments when we sense the presence of God, we surrender to him, truly willing to be with him, with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our strength. This holy assent is all that matters. It eclipses all the wicked inclinations inside us – physical and spiritual – that might lead us to miss the mark. Sometimes, however, that sacred sweetness lies deeply buried, and we fall again into blindness, which leads to all kinds of sorrow and tribulation.”

In that dark time in my life, through the sorrow and tribulation, deep inside, I trusted that, even though I could not feel it, that loving presence, the presence that lives inside each of us, that birthed and sustains the universe, is always with us. And when at last I felt again the sweetness of that presence, I was filled with gratitude, and I continue to be filled with gratitude, for life and love, every day.

I love Julian's description of life as “a wondrous mixture of well and woe” and her recognition that “the diversity of feelings can be overwhelming.” I have been contemplating what can guide us and help us work through this overwhelming diversity of feelings. For me, one answer lies in Rainer Maria Rilke's invitation to walk our walk of lament on a path of praise.

Recently, I have been drawn to reading the Psalms, or rather, modern rewritings of the Psalms – particularly those by Christine Robinson and Nan Merrill. The Psalms are songs or poems in the Hebrew scriptures (or Old Testament to Christians). They record the whole range of human emotions. Many of them are laments – expressions of grief, sorrow, and regret. Laments are among the oldest forms of writing and exist across cultures. The Lament for Sumer and Ur dates back at least 4,000 years. 

The laments written in the Psalms often include “enemy smiting,” which can be off-putting. They were written around 2,500 years ago, at a time when the Israelites were often in conflict with their neighbouring countries, and they reflect a patriarchal society in which inner conflict is often projected onto external enemies. The two collections of Psalms rewritten by Christine Robinson and by Nan Merrill, while sticking mostly to the original words, tend to translate “foes” as “fears”, which makes them more accessible to me. 

The contemporary writer and Baptist pastor, Mark Vroegop, wrote, “Lament is a divinely-given liturgy for processing our pain so that we can rejoice – a prayer in pain that leads to trust – a pathway to praise when life gets hard.. There is a pattern that can be observed – the elements of lament are 1) turning to God in prayer, 2) bringing our complaints, 3) asking boldly, and 4) choosing to trust (or praise).”

Even expressed in non-religious language, we see that this dance of the interweaving of joy and sorrow, rejoicing and lamentation, is the cycle of healing and transformation. Joanna Macy wrote of this cycle as “the work that reconnects” - a spiral that begins with gratitude, and moves us through honouring our pain for the world, then seeing with new eyes, to going forth, returning to gratitude. 

The cycle of healing and transformation begins with facing our pain, grief, and sorrow – acknowledging their existence within us. We then move into speaking our pain – naming how we are hurting, attending to our grief, feeling solidarity with others in pain, and sharing our sorrow with others. We ask ourselves what we need to begin healing. We ask for help – from God, from other people, from our higher selves. We reach out to others and know that we are not alone. Hopefully at this stage we feel seen and heard, and this allows us to begin moving forward in gratitude and trust into joy – hoping for the future, trusting in the goodness of life, practising gratitude in love.

We walk our walk of lament on a path of praise – the path that is under our feet is  what grounds us in love and gratitude – we count our blessings and remember not to take the little things for granted. We accept the whole of life, all its joys and sorrows, with thanks.

Justin Coutts, who convenes the In Search of a New Eden online community inspired by Celtic Christianity, wrote, “Once we find peace with our sorrow and with our joy then we can move into the realm of the Eternal – and our spiritual journey will have found the sacred well from which our soul longs to drink.”

The realm of the Eternal, the sacred well, is Love, the Love that is the root of all joy and sorrow, the Love in which we we walk our walk of lament on a path of praise.

To return to our opening words by William Blake, “We were made for joy and woe, And when this we rightly know, Through the world we safely go. ” 

Go safely through the world in joy and woe, my friends, go safely. Amen.