ETERNAL TIME
This story also shows that there is a different rhythm of life in eternal time. One night, a man from our village was coming back home along a road where there were no houses. Cycling along, he heard beautiful music. The music was coming from inside the wall by the sea. He crossed over the wall to find that he was entering a village in this forsaken place. The people there seemed to have expected him. They seemed to know him; and he received a great welcome. He was given drink and delicious food. Their music was more beautiful than he had ever heard before. He spent a few hours of great happiness there. Then he remembered that if he did not return home, they would be out searching for him. He bade farewell to the villagers. When he arrived home, he discovered that he had been missing for a fortnight even though it had seemed like half an hour in the eternal, fairy world.
My father used to tell another such story about a monk named Phoenix, who one day in the monastery was reading his breviary. A bird began to sing, and the monk listened so purely to the song of the bird that he was aware of nothing else. Then the song stopped, and he took up his breviary and went back into the monastery to discover that he no longer recognized anyone there. And they did not recognize him either. He named all his fellow monks with whom he had lived up to what seemed half an hour before, but they had all disappeared. The new monks looked up their annals, and sure enough, years and years before, a monk Phoenix had mysteriously disappeared. At the metaphorical level, this story claims that through real presence the monk Phoenix had actually broken into eternal time. Eternal time moves in a different rhythm from normal, broken human time. Oscar Wilde said, “We think in eternity but we move slowly through time.” This beautiful phrase echoes powerfully because it comes from “De Profundis,” Wilde’s letter of love and forgiveness to one who betrayed and destroyed him.
These Celtic fairy stories suggest a region of the soul that inhabits the eternal. There is an eternal region within us where we are not vulnerable to the ravages of normal time. Shakespeare expressed the ravages of calendar time beautifully in Sonnet 60:
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
so do our minutes hasten to their end
each changing place with that which goes before
in sequent toil all forwards do contend.
THE SOUL AS TEMPLE OF MEMORY
The Celtic stories suggest that time as the rhythm of soul has an eternal dimension where everything is gathered and minded. Here nothing is lost. This is a great consolation: The happenings in your life do not disappear. Nothing is ever lost or forgotten. Everything is stored within your soul in the temple of memory. Therefore, as an old person, you can happily go back and attend to your past time; you can return through the rooms of that temple, visit the days that you enjoyed and the times of difficulty where you grew and refined yourself. Old age, as the harvest of life, is a time when your times and their fragments gather. In this way, you unify yourself and achieve a new strength, poise, and belonging that was never available to you when you were distractedly rushing through your days. Old age is a time of coming home to your deeper nature, of entering fully into the temple of your memory where all your vanished days are secretly gathered and awaiting you.
The idea of memory was very important in Celtic spirituality. There are lovely prayers for different occasions. There are prayers for the hearth, for kindling the fire, and for smooring the hearth. At night, the ashes were smoored over the burning coals, sealing off the air. The next morning the coals would still be alive and burning. There is also a lovely prayer for the hearth keepers that evokes St. Bridget, who was both a pagan Celtic goddess and a Christian saint. In herself, Bridget focuses the two worlds easily and naturally. The pagan world and the Christian world have no row with each other in the Irish psyche, rather they come close to each other in a lovely way. This is a nice prayer for the hearth that also recognizes memory:
Brighid of the mantle encompass us,
Lady of the Lambs protect us,
Keeper of the Hearth, kindle us,
Beneath your mantle, gather us
And restore us to memory
Mothers of our mother,
Foremothers strong,
Guide our hands in yours
Remind us how
To kindle the hearth,
To keep it bright
To preserve the flame,
Your hands upon ours,
Our hands within yours,
To kindle the light,
Both day and night
The mantle of Brighid about us,
The memory of Brighid within us,
The protection of Brighid keeping us
From harm, from ignorance, from heartlessness,
This day and night,
From dawn till dark
From dark to dawn.
(BY CAITLÍN MATTHEWS)
This is a fine recognition of the circle of memory holding everything together in a hospitable unity.
In a positive sense, aging becomes a time for visiting the temple of your memory and integrating your life. Integration is a vital part of coming home to yourself. What is not integrated remains fragmented; sometimes it can come to great conflict within you. The presence and process of integration brings you more fully home to yourself. There is so much that needs to be integrated within each person. Camus said aptly that after one day in the world you could spend the rest of your life in solitary confinement and you would still have dimensions of that day’s experience left to decipher. So much happens to us of which we are unaware even within the simple circle of a day. To visit the temple of memory is not merely to journey back to the past; it is rather to awaken and integrate everything that happens to you. It is part of the process of reflection that gives depth to experience. We all have experiences, but as T. S. Eliot said, we had the experience but missed the meaning. Every human heart seeks meaning; for it is in meaning that our deepest shelter lies. Meaning is the sister of experience, and to discern the meaning of what has happened to you is one of the essential ways of finding your inner belonging and discovering the sheltering presence of your soul. There is an amazing line in the Bible from the prophet Haggai: “You have sown so much but harvested so little.” Everything that happens to you is an act of sowing a seed of experience. It is equally important to be able to harvest that experience.
SELF-COMPASSION AND THE ART OF INNER HARVESTING