“I no longer call you disciples, but friends.”  Jesus

“A bosom friend—an intimate friend, you know—a really kindred spirit to whom I can confide my inmost soul.”  Anne of Green Gables

What’s one of your favorite activities?

Mine is spending time with my daughters.  I have been blessed with four of the best! 

Last weekend my daughter Meghan and I hung out together.  She is an avid thrift store shopper—I think they’re called “Thrifters”—so after our morning coffee and a bagel we invested ourselves in visiting a few.  While Meghan was doing her thing, I was wandering around, watching the people, who I find incredibly fascinating and at times entertaining, and perusing the kitsch and odd commodities adorning the aisles.  I also took time to browse the book section.  And wouldn’t you know that while I was scanning the shelves I met an old friend, John.  I hadn’t heard from John for years, but I recognized him immediately.  You might know him—his last name is O’Donahue. 

John O’Donahue is an Irish author who has written some of my favorite books, which conducted me beyond information and into the realm of faith formation and transformation.  His writing style reflects the lyrical style of the Celts.  His prose are poetic and reach deeply into the heart.  It was a pleasant surprise to be reunited with him, the cause of which can be attributed to his book entitled “Anam Cara.”  I recognized the cover immediately, as the title is overlaid on Celtic knots and art designs. It was incredibly inexpensive, especially since Saturday was a half price sale, so of course I snatch up this treasure.

Upon returning home I gazed upon the book, embracing it lovingly in my hands like I would a close friend, and then opening it tenderly, gently turning the pages.  And then, as I began to read, I listened—and heard the voice of my friend speaking to me about what it means to be a true friend—an Anam Cara.  I’d like to share part of that with you.

Friendship is a creative and subversive force.  It claims that intimacy is the secret law of life and universe.  The human journey is a continuous act of transfiguration.  If approached in friendship, the unknown, the anonymous, the negative, and the threatening gradually yield their secret affinity with us.  As an artist, the human person is permanently active in that revelation.  The imagination is the great friend of the unknown.  Endlessly, it invokes and releases the power of possibility. Friendship, then, is not to be reduced to an exclusive or sentimental relationship. It is a far more extensive and intensive force.

The Celtic mind was neither discursive nor systematic.  Yet in their lyrical speculation the Celts brought the sublime unity of life and experience to expression.  The Celtic mind was not burdened by dualism.  It did not separate what belongs together.  The Celtic imagination articulates the inner friendship that embraces Nature, divinity, underworld, and human world as one.  The dualism that separates the visible from the invisible, time from eternity, the human from the divine, was totally alien to them.  Their sense of ontological friendship yielded a world of experience imbued with a rich texture of otherness, ambivalence, symbolism and imagination.  For our sore and tormented separation, the possibility of this imaginative and unifying friendship is the Celtic gift.

The Celtic understanding of friendship finds its inspiration and culmination in the sublime notion of the anam cara.  Anam is a Gaelic word for soul; Cara is the word for friend.  So anam cara means soul friend.  The anam cara was a person to whom you could reveal the hidden intimacies of your life.  This friendship was an act of recognition and belonging.  When you had an anam cara, your friendship cut across all convention and category.  You were joined in an ancient and eternal way with the friend of your soul.

That made me think a lot—about friendship, dualism, being human, light and dark, and a different way of seeing the world, God, and others.

I didn’t read a lot—too much verbiage spoils the effect of simply being in the presence of a friend.  As I placed the book on the coffee table, I was filled with many thoughts, the foremost being a sense of incredulousness that I had forgotten my friend, and in fact much of what I have come to value in Celtic Spirituality.  It prompted me to be more deliberate and intentional about sharing with you in these blogs what my friend John has shared with me.  So, in the weeks, and hopefully months, to come I will be echoing the Eternal Echoes of my friend John O’Donahue, and the Celtic Wisdom which he shares.  I hope you enjoy it, and perhaps in the process discover—or re-discover—the gift of Anam Cara.