Anam Ċara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
- Jul 1, 2024
- 5 min read
★★★★★
When I was in elementary school in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I played on a baseball team. I played third base until one year, maybe when I was in third or fourth grade, our catcher moved away and left the position vacant. I had no desire to be a catcher, but nobody volunteered so I did. I don’t know if I was better or worse at catcher than I was at third base. I know that I was relieved when we got a new catcher the following season, and I returned to my usual position. Little did I know that that one selfless act would, in many ways, become the blueprint for my life. That is, I have often raised my hand to do or step into something when nobody else would. It is part of my peacemaking role, a trait that is, no doubt, a result of two factors: 1) having divorced parents at a very young age who were generally uncivil to each other and frequently used me to demonstrate one’s power over the other, and 2) having a stepfather who was capable of goodness but who always carried an air of menace under the surface and was, as often as not, a tyrant, petty and raging from some slight done to him. Being a peacemaker hasn’t always been a good thing. While my actions when assuming the role—usually at no one’s request—are intended to diffuse tense situations for others, the unintended result has often served me rather than the conflicting parties: I feel better not because I mediated a peace but because I artificially smoothed things over. I raised my metaphorical hand because no one else did—even when, in such cases, no one was looking for volunteers.
Forty years later, I’m still raising my hand, often to my chagrin. Only now when I do, though the stakes, in a relative sense to that grade-schooler who became a baseball catcher for a season, aren’t necessarily higher, nor are the asks always more demanding exactly, but the toll they take—on me and sometimes on those I love—is greater. To be clear, I am talking about a terrific range, from one-off tasks that might briefly burden to life-changing choices that have radically altered the course of my life and, by extension, my family’s. The former, if classified on a pain spectrum, is often a mild discomfort: I’ve taken on something I don’t have time for or that falls outside of my core competencies and is, in the scheme of things, no big deal. The latter were typically excruciating at the time, not least of which because of their duration, but without them, I most certainly would not be where I am right now. And I’ve always believed that where I am is always better than where I’ve been. For that reason, I regret nothing, except the grief I’ve caused my dear wife who, for better or worse, has hitched her car to this train. Why do I do it? Why do I keep raising my hand when no one else does? Sometimes it’s out of generosity: wanting to be helpful if I can, when I can. Sometimes it’s out of love: wanting to lend support to someone in a time of need. Occasionally, it’s out of selfishness, as in instances of misguided intervention. And sometimes: Sometimes it’s a mystery—a gut instinct, the unconscious mind, an invisible force in the cosmos. This, at long last, brings me to John O’Donohue and Anam Ċara and my own journey that brought me to this place in my life and this book and how the two feel like reflections of one another.
But first, one more introductory train of thought. My core identity, how I’ve seen myself over the past thirty-plus years of my life, has been defined as much by what I was as much as what I wasn’t. At the dawn of the ’90s, I was introduced to hardcore and punk music and became straight-edge, became vegan, self-identified as an atheist, and it was the first time my mother asked me if I planned to have kids, to which I answered with an unequivocal “No.” In surroundings where conformity was prized and individuality mocked, it was impossible not to see myself in opposition to others rather than in accord with myself. Decades later, some things have stuck: I remain vegan, having just celebrated 33 years; and we have no kids, though we are now caretakers of my brother, Adam, who is 42 going on eight (his body will age but his mind will remain perpetually, delightfully, childlike). Others have not: I stopped being straight-edge right before I turned 22 (I had a coffee with Jameson at a restaurant in New Orleans), and sometime around 2009 I dropped “atheism” as a religious label in favor of “karmic veganism,” a self-fabricated and possibly nonsensical descriptor that nonetheless felt suitably accurate. It is impossible, decades later, not to either blame or thank my parents for all of it. At the time, I saw little of myself in who they were, what they did, how they lived, what they valued, or the god they believed in. Or, perhaps more accurately, and more harshly: I did not want to become my parents, and my parents, repeatedly, gave me no reason to want anything else.
In these feelings, there is anger and pain but there is also gratitude. John O’Donohue, who for his Catholic scholar bona fides I once would have avoided like the plague, has, through Anam Ċara, invited, if not revelry exactly, an utter embracing of the duality of such feelings—that we must hold together the interior and exterior, visible and invisible, known and unknown, temporal and eternal, ancient and new, in order to keep our balance. While the oppositional me still bristles, if guiltily, at the invocation of so much theological vocabulary as O’Donohue has committed to paper, and though I remain areligious, accordant me, in ascendancy but not yet fully in control, can evoke my own relationship with the divine, with my own broadening and deepening animism which has come to fuller life and expression since our move to the tallgrass prairie four years ago.
Though not explicitly stated as such, Anam Ċara can be seen as a roadmap for living life: A life that has come into peace and harmony with the world because, and necessarily because, it has come into peace and harmony with itself—through friendships, through the body, through work, through aging, through death. Seeing that these things can manifest themselves in a new light, through new ways of seeing and thinking, through new levels of comfort with and care of the self, by letting go of rigidity and fear, by embracing that which we cannot fully know or understand, by living with grace and an open heart rather than unkindness and a closed fist, and that the wisdom to do so is nothing new, is, in fact, thousands of years old, is both illuminating and encouraging. In a world that is more complex and further adrift, with new levels of loneliness, anxiety, strife, and conflict, than it was upon its publication more than 25 years ago, O'Donohue's now-classic text remains timeless and more necessary than ever.
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