A friend from the former East Germany spent a lot of time in jail there. The Communist regime saw him as a subversive who kept raising awkward questions about the system. He says that one of the first things he had to learn in jail was not to resent the prison guards. If he had, he could not have endured the jail. He was friendly with them, insofar as that was possible, and never allowed his mind to focus destructively on them. Walking this emotional tightrope, he managed to keep his balance and freedom during his years of imprisonment. Years afterwards, when he was out of jail, he happened to meet one of his former fellow prisoners. They talked of their years in jail. This man began to tell him of the hatred he still harboured for the prison guards, and told my friend what he would do to them if he ever met any of them. My friend said to him, “The sad thing about what you are saying is that it shows that you are still in prison.” If you cannot forgive you are still in jail. When you forgive those who have wronged you, you free yourself from prison. You take from your own heart the hook that has dragged you along behind those people across fields of years.
Why are we so reluctant to leave our inner prisons? There is the security of the confinement and limitation that we know. We are often willing to endure the searing sense of forsakenness and distance which limitation brings rather than risking the step out into the field of the unknown. It used to be common that longtime prisoners when released often gravitated back towards the jail; the daylight hurt their eyes, and it was so long since they had had to live in the outside world. This reluctance is captured powerfully in Pär Lagerkvist’s novel
If the human person were alone, it would be exceptionally difficult to liberate oneself from such inner prisons. In the Celtic tradition, there was a strong sense that each of us has an invisible companion who walks the road of life with us. I imagine that our secret companions in the invisible world are the angels. One of the poverties of modern life is the loss of belief in such presences. The Christian tradition says that when you were sent here to the earth, a special angel was chosen to accompany your every step, breath, thought, and feeling. This is your guardian angel who is right beside you, as near as your skin. The Irish poet Denis Devlin says, “It is inside our life the angel happens.” The imagination of the tradition understands that your angel has a special responsibility for your life, to watch over you and to keep a circle of light around you, lest any negativity damage you in any way. When we reflect on this, we can imagine the depth of presence the angel is. Your angel is as ancient as eternity itself and has memory that is older than the earth. Your angel was there when the eternal artist began to dream you. Your angel is wedded to the dream and possibility of your life, and wishes to keep your life from becoming fixated in any inner prison.
Your angel is aware of the secret life that sleeps in your soul. Without you even knowing it, your angel is always at work for you. It is possible to sense this if you consider for a moment the key thresholds in your life. You may feel that you should contact an old friend or someone you had not seen for a while. You set out to do this, and you discover that the friend really needs you. The visit could never have been more opportune. There are also the times when someone comes into your mind, and the next thing they are at your door or on the phone. This is the secret world of association and inspiration which can never be explained. Artists could never create without the inspiration the angel brings. It is the gift of the angel to watch over that threshold where your invisible world comes to visible form. Any art, belief, or spirituality that lacks inspiration is ultimately dry and mechanical. Something inspired has the surprise, vitality, and warmth of the eternal in it. The Irish word for angel is “aingeal.” This was also the word for a burnt-out cinder taken from the fire. It was often given to children going out in the night to protect them. It was said to represent an angel. The word “aingeal” shows how our Celtic tradition fused a spirituality of the elements with that of the angels.
