The body is also very truthful. You know from your own life that your body rarely lies. Your mind can deceive you and put all kinds of barriers between you and your nature; but your body does not lie. Your body tells you, if you attend to it, how your life is and whether you are living from your soul or from the labyrinths of your negativity. The body also has a wonderful intelligence. All of our movements, indeed everything we do, demands the most refined and detailed cooperation of each of our senses. The human body is the most complex, refined, and harmonious totality.
The body is your only home in the universe. It is your house of belonging here in the world. It is a very sacred temple. To spend time in silence before the mystery of your body brings you toward wisdom and holiness. It is unfortunate that often only when we are ill do we realize how tender, fragile, and precious is the house of belonging called the body. When you visit people who are ill or who are awaiting surgery, you can encourage them to have a conversation with the body area that is unwell. Suggest that they talk to it as a partner, thank it for all it has done, for what it has suffered, and ask forgiveness of it for whatever pressure it may have had to endure. Each part of the body holds the memory of its own experience.
Your body is, in essence, a crowd of different members who work in harmony to make your belonging in the world possible. We should avoid the false dualism that separates the soul from the body. The soul is not simply within the body, hidden somewhere within its recesses. The truth is rather the converse. Your body is in the soul, and the soul suffuses you completely. Therefore, all around you there is a secret and beautiful soul-light. This recognition suggests a new art of prayer: Close your eyes and relax into your body. Imagine a light all around you, the light of your soul. Then with your breath, draw that light into your body and bring it with your breath through every area of your body.
This is a lovely way to pray, because you are bringing the soul-light, the shadowed shelter that surrounds you, right into the physical earth and clay of your presence. One of the oldest meditations is to imagine the light coming into you, and then on your outward breath to imagine you are exhaling the darkness or an inner charcoal residue. People who are ill can be encouraged to pray physically in this way. When you bring cleansing, healing soul-light into your body, you heal the neglected, tormented places. Your body knows you very intimately; it is aware of your whole spirit and soul life. Far sooner than your mind, your body knows how privileged it is to be here. It is also aware of the presence of death. There is a wisdom in your physical, bodily presence that is luminous and profound. Frequently the illnesses that come to us result from our self-neglect and our failure to listen to the voice of the body. The inner voices of the body want to speak to us, to inform us of the truths beneath the fixed surface of our external lives.
FOR THE CELTS, THE VISIBLE AND THE INVISIBLE ARE ONE
The body has had such a low and negative profile in the world of spirituality because spirit has been understood more in terms of the air element than the earth element. The air is the region of the invisible; it is the region of breath and thought. When you confine spirit to this region alone, the physical becomes immediately diminished. This is a great mistake, for there is nothing in the universe as sensuous as God. The wildness of God is the sensuousness of God. Nature is the direct expression of the divine imagination. It is the most intimate reflection of God’s sense of beauty. Nature is the mirror of the divine imagination and the mother of all sensuality; therefore it is unorthodox to understand spirit in terms of the invisible alone. Ironically, divinity and spirit derive their power and energy precisely from this tension between the visible and the invisible. Everything in the world of soul has a deep desire and longing for visible form; this is exactly where the power of the imagination lives.
The imagination is the faculty that bridges, co-presents, and co-articulates the visible and the invisible. In the Celtic world, for instance, there was a wonderful sense of how the visible and the invisible moved in and out of each other. In the West of Ireland, there are many stories about ghosts, spirits, or fairies who had a special association with particular places; to the mind of the local people these legends were as natural as the landscape. For instance, there is a tradition that a lone bush in a field should never be cut down. The implication is that it may be a secret gathering place for spirits. There are many other places that are considered to be fairy forts. The local people would never build there or intrude in any way on that sacred ground.
THE CHILDREN OF LIR
One of the amazing aspects of the Celtic world is the idea of shape shifting. This becomes possible only when the physical is animate and passionate. The essence or soul of a thing is not limited to its particular or present shape. Soul has a fluency and energy that is not to be caged within any fixed form. Consequently, in the Celtic tradition there is a fascinating interflow between soul and matter and between time and eternity. This rhythm also includes and engages the human body. The human body is a mirror and expression of the world of soul. One of the most poignant illustrations of this in the Celtic tradition is the beautiful legend of the children of Lir.
Central to the ancient Irish mind was the mythological world of the Tuatha Dé Dannan, the tribe that lived under the surface of the earth in Ireland; this myth has imbued the whole landscape with a numinous depth and presence. Lir was a chieftain in the world of the Tuatha Dé Dannan, and he had conflict with the king in that region. In order to resolve the conflict, a marriage agreement was made. The king had three daughters, and he offered Lir one of them in marriage. They married and had two children. Shortly thereafter they had two more children, but then unfortunately Lir’s wife died. Lir came again to the king, and the king gave him his second daughter. She watched over him and the children, but she became jealous when she saw that he dedicated most of his attention to the children. She noticed that even her own father, the king, had a very special affection for the children. Over the years, the jealousy grew in her heart until she finally took the children in her chariot and, with a touch of her druidic magic wand, turned them into four swans. They were condemned to spend nine hundred years in exile on the oceans around Ireland. Even though they were in swan form, they still retained their human minds and full human identities. When Christianity came to Ireland, they were finally returned to human form, but as old decrepit people. There is such poignance in the description of their journey in the wilderness as animal shapes imbued with human presence. This is a deeply Celtic story that shows how the world of nature finds a bridge to the animal world. The story also demonstrates that there is a profound confluence of intimacy between the human and the animal world. When they were swans, the song of the children of Lir had the power to heal and console people. The pathos of the story is deepened by the vulnerable openness of the animal world to the human.
The animals are more ancient than us. They were here for millennia before humans surfaced on the earth. Animals are our ancient brothers and sisters. They enjoy a seamless presence—a lyrical unity with the earth. Animals live outside in the wind, in the waters, in the mountains, and in the clay. The knowing of the earth is in them. The Zen-like silence and thereness of the landscape is mirrored in the silence and solitude of animals. Animals know nothing of Freud, Jesus, Buddha, Wall Street, the Pentagon, or the Vatican. They live outside the politics of human intention. Somehow they already inhabit the eternal. The Celtic mind recognized the ancient belonging and knowing of the animal world. The dignity, beauty, and wisdom of the animal world was not diminished by any false hierarchy or human arrogance. Somewhere in the Celtic mind was a grounding perception that humans are the inheritors of this deeper world. This finds playful expression in the following ninth-century poem.