I am just back from leading a gathering of friends into what we call our annual ‘wilderness retreat’. These events have played a central part in my life now for… a long time. Decades. I could go back through the archive on this blog and chart each and every trip, remembering each one for a moment, or moments, but I would rather remember them in the form of friendship.

This year, 12 of us went back to an island called Garbh Eileach, exactly ten years after we were last there. It is part of an island chain called The Garvellachs, two islands down from the famous Eileach an Naoimh, with its monastery founded by St Brendan himself. Garbh Eileach is a different beast entirely, wild and wooded, exploding with life. While we were there, we saw deer, slow worms, white tailed eagles, golden eagles, a whale, some dolphins, seals, and innumerable other creatures, feathered, furred, scaled, crawling or swimming.

The island is also crawling with ticks. This caused a collective panic when we first landed. It would be possible to write a whole blog piece on this panic alone- on the ‘leadership’ nature of resolving it (which I carefully avoided as much as I could) and on the way that vulnerability in wild places might be psycologically and spiritualy significant – but this is for another time.

After all, no paradise is perfect.

Every year I spend a long time thinking about what we will ‘do’ as part of these retreat events. This usually comes down to a few ideas, a few scribbled words, along with a subdivision of time into ‘silence’ and ‘togetherness’ (although these are not mutually exclusive). The chat can be blue and profane, then will come a moment of deepest beauty and profundity. It is my experience that not only are these not mutually exclusive either, rather one can enable the other. The raw, earthy business of camping in wild places tends to be rather destructive to ‘nice’ facades, although some find this more true than others.

Unsuprisingly, given the recent output on this blog, this year my head was full of celtic spirituality, with the god who hides inside every living thing- even in us – discoverable not through addition but through subtraction, not by hiding our woundedness from the divine out of shame or condemnation, but by looking beneath it and through it, to that most foundational part of our being, which is god.

The mix of people who attend usually sorts out over the months and weeks- friends, and friends of friends. People have to drop out for all the usual reasons, but the boat usually stays full with others who take up empty slots. I hate to turn people who want to come away, but the limiting factor is always the transport – it is the only ‘cost’ – the boat charter being costly and tends to be in multiples of 12.

I confess to feeling slightly uncomfortable with the mix prior to this trip. Several of my dear friends could not come, so there were a number of new faces. Whilst I love to share these trips with new people, there is always a ‘getting to know the ropes’ phase. Not to mention missing my long term companions, because that is what these trips are for- to linger in wild places with people I love, and to dream of God, whatever of her remains within us.

It turns out that there is plenty.

One of the things we talked about on our trip was the old Celtic idea of an ‘Anam Cara’. Some of you will know the late John O’Donohue’s book of the same name, or even have heard the term used at weddings. It might have become mixed in with a lot of other celtic words and ideas that become so portable that they lose their meaning and power. So let’s reclaim it.

Anam Cara is not just a good friend, it is that friend who knows you. The one whom, when you are with them, you defend the least and share the most. More than that, Anam Cara is that friend who makes you a better person, just because of their friendship.

Not because they necessarily are better, more knowledgable, more spiritual, more mature.

Not because they are your elder, or your ‘mentor’ – at least of the one-directional kind. Top-down relationships are different. They can feel unequal. One big, the other small.

Anam Cara relationships are a soul deep connection that is somehow ‘enough.’

A connection that makes you more complete.

A connection to someone else which somehow intensified your own individuality, whilst simultaneously making us belong to something bigger.

Anam Cara is biased towards you – they are on your side – but they are not bind to your faults and limitations. In fact, because they know you, they know the faults better too – they may even call you out on them. You might do the same for them.

Anam Cara is something I have longed for most of my life.

Somehow, through these annual trips to make retreats to the wilderness, I have made connection with not one, but several people who have become to me, my own Anam Cara.

I have wondered how I came to be so blessed, and this made me realise that there was another ‘personhood’ in this Anam Cara relationship, and it is this.

The island.

If this sounds mystical and fanciful, perhaps it is, but allow we to explain myself.

For some time now, I have thought of god in a very different way to the God I was brought up with. Rather than God, the distant disciplinarian, who pre-judged me even before I was born, who made no allowances for my broken beginnings, whose favour seemed to rest only on my compliance with a narrow set of judgemental rules and commands (having said a single prayer that got me through the door), I instead began to catch glimpses of a god who loves things indiscriminately, wildly, with no thought of propriety or decorum. This god loved us so much that he unleashed herself on the world in the form of the Christ, who wears a coat of a million colours and in these parts of the world, many of them are green.

Then, through immersion in the Celtic wisdom tradition, it occurs to me that people have thought this way about god for thousands of years. Here is the god who animates blades of grass, who is in the weave of sinews that flex in the leg of a deer. Here is the god who lifts the arms of trees and is to be seen in snakes and crack addicts alike.

Remarkably, this is the god who lives in me. More than this, this is the god who IS me- not because I am god, but because through god, I am, and within me, is god. Because of my woundedness, the baggage I carry, the things I do to distract myself, the things I do that I should not and the things I should do but do not, then god is often obscured, deep inside, but she waits still, because like my Anam Cara, she is biased. She is after all, love.

As I seek to move in and to further understand this wisdom tradition, it seems unsurprising that when we linger in quietness in these wild places – particularly in the contained space of small verdant islands – our awareness of god who loves things by becoming them is closer. It enters into our relationships even, broken and imperfect as they surely are.

I feel a deep love for my friends, for those I share these islands spaces with. Sometimes this bursts out of me in unregulated and embarrassing ways. This is in part because I know them to be good, to be loyal, to be true, even to be slightly biased towards me and I towards them.

In part also, I blame the island, which embraces us all.

It cups us all in a place of one-ness.

It includes us in its own am-ness.