The visitor is one who belongs somewhere else, but is now here in the world of your belonging. The visit is a powerful and ancient theme. Regardless of the frequency of visits, the visitor remains essentially an outsider, an intruder from another area of belonging. We are made somewhat aware of our different identity by the visit. In earlier cultures when communities were more local and separate, the visitor brought news of a different world. Through the stories told of things seen and heard beyond the horizon, the prospect of other worlds became vicariously tangible. In the time of the oral tradition, the visit would have had an effect that would continue to ripple for a long time after. We who are native also become visitors elsewhere: the courtesies of giving and receiving are essential.
In the broad sense, because each of us lives in a body with so much clear space around us, a large portion of our life is awakened and altered by visitations we have. Most of what happens to us in the world comes up along the empty path to the house of belonging called the body. Great thoughts are not simply manufactured by the mind. They occur; they seem to come from elsewhere. Sublime, illuminating, and original thought seems to be inspired; in classical tradition, the visitation of the muse brings the original gift. Our origin in and affinity with the eternal is confirmed by the fact that what seems to come from the distance of Elsewhere turns out to be the most profound expression of our inner nature. The beyond holds the deepest secrets of here. Angels have always been received and understood as eternal visitors. The Christian story begins with such a visit. When the visitation comes from the eternal world, it disrupts the daily order; such a visitation breaks the predictable frame of experience and opens life up to new and more disturbing directions. This visitation can be dark and frightening. It can bring all the hidden vulnerability to the surface and expose a person to a future of loss and emptiness; this is explored in a sparse and penetrating way in Raymond Carver’s precise and harrowing short story “A Small Good Thing.”
Though the visit is always limited by time, it has a purpose. The visitor comes to see us for a reason. In society, this is often the way a prophet appears. The vision and actions of a prophet visit a great unease on our comfort and complacency. It disturbs us in such a manner that we never regain the ease and amnesia of our old complacency. The prophetic voice disrupts our unreflective belonging and forces us to awaken the awkward questions. When these questions come alive, they retrieve the more humane longings of our nature and force us to disavow our strategies of false satisfaction. For the prophetic spirit, the longing for truth and justice puts every kind of belonging in question.
The visitor and the visitation are ancient motifs. They derive their power from the simple fact that what is most precious to us in the world, namely, our life and presence here, is in the end but a mere visit. Each of us is a temporary visitor to the earth. We spend most of our lives deciphering the purpose and meaning of our visit here. Our time here will end in the embrace of the bleak and irreversible visitor called Death. Meanwhile we live out our longings in the small world of belonging we call our neighbourhood.
The neighbour is an interesting presence in one’s life. No great significance is ever ascribed to the neighbour. They are the people who happen to live adjacent to you. Yet in contrast to others outside the neighbourhood, we feel we somehow have a claim on the courtesy and friendliness of our neighbours. In former times, when people were not such targets of pressure and impression, people were closer to their neighbours. People were poorer, too, and more dependent on each other. In Conamara, there is the phrase “Is fearr comharsa maith ná mailín airgid,” i.e., A good neighbour is better than a bag of money. Often, when we need something or someone urgently, our friends and family may be far away. The only ones we have near us are our neighbours. They are the individuals with whom we belong in a local place. In the fragmentation of contemporary life, people live in greater isolation and distance from each other. The old image of the neighbourhood as a group of local individuals who knew each other and met with each other has vanished. A neighbour can be dead for weeks next door and we do not notice now. Our post-modern society is like the world of Leibniz’s monadology. Each individual, each home, is an isolated monad with no bridge to the neighbour.
