John O’Donohue’s Beautiful Landscape of Language

I came across John O’Donohue’s work through this brilliant interview with Krista Tippett for On Being. It’s a beautiful conversation, one I’ve listened to three different times—at 1x by the way. If you know me you know how rare that is; I usually save 1x speed on podcasts for poetry, like Poetry Unbound, but hearing John O’Donohue and Krista Tippett speak was itself poetic.

Because of that episode I got two books, a book of blessings called To Bless the Space Between Us, and his classic book of Celtic wisdom, Anam Cara. I was going to include thoughts from both books in this article, but time won’t allow. If you want to see some quick ideas from the book of blessings, head over to my Instagram highlights.

Getting both of these in physical form was itself a miracle. Within the last year a whole world of international shipping has opened up to Peru, so I bought the blessing book along with some deodorant and coffee filters for my Kalita Wave on an obscure website (Amazon, I think it’s called?) and, after some issues with customs and having to create an official identity with Peru’s IRS equivalent, the book was brought to my door. Anam Cara I just ordered to my dear friends’ home, Greg and Megan McKinzie, and in their recent visit to Arequipa they brought it to me.

Anam Cara

Anam Cara is interesting, because though brilliant it’s a bit disjointed. Or maybe my brain is a bit disjointed right now—that’s a possibility. Regardless, I recommend it without hesitation. Each chapter is somewhat disconnected from what precedes it, so it takes me a few pages to get into the rhythm of each new section. Once I’m in it, though, the beauty and depth of the language and insight captures me. And each chapter ends with a beautifully written poetic blessing. I find myself anticipating the concluding poem a third of the way through these 35-page chapters. I read it over the course of a week, though perhaps it’s best read just a copule pages at a time. He does, after all, write about in successive chapters: friendship, light, a spirituality of the senses, solitude, work, aging, and death.

O’Donohue writes like a poet, which lends itself to underlining something on every page. His language is beautiful, bathed in metaphor. It flows. And there are ideas that he alludes to in passing that could be an entire day in my humanities class. I’ll share a number of those here, often without comment, to keep them in one place. At this point I just don’t have time for a full review, but documenting these snippets is worth it for my own retention.

The book starts off with this line:

It is strange to be here.

So good. For a book that touches on so many important themes that flow out of wisdom for what it means to be human, it’s perfect.

Near the end, he expounds on that opening line:

It is a strange and magical fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here. Rilke said, “Being here is so much.” It is uncanny how social reality can deaden and numb us so that the mystical wonder of our lives goes totally unnoticed. We are here. We are wildly and dangerously free. (197)

An opening prayer on the Eternal Community of Divine Love:

The Sacred Three My fortress be
Encircling me
Come and be round
My hearth and my home.

Consequently, love is anything but sentimental. In fact, it is the most real and creative form of human presence. Love is the threshold where divine and human presence ebb and flow into each other (13).

Presence, and so, awareness thereof:

All presence depends on consciousness. Where there is a depth of awareness, there is a reverence for presence. Where consciousness is dulled, distant, or blind, the presence grows faint and vanishes.

Consequently, awareness is one of the greatest gifts you can bring to your friendship. Many people have an anam cara of whom they are not truly aware. Their lack of awareness cloaks the friend’s presence and causes feelings of distance and absence. Sadly, it is often loss that awakens presence, by then it is too late. It is wise to pray for the grace of recognition. Inspired by awareness, you may then discover beside you the anam cara of whom your longing has always dreamed (14).

“It is wise to pray for the grace of recognition.” That is, recognition, being aware of the depth of life and something significant going on all around us is a grace, a gift. And it’s one of the greatest gifts you can bring to your relationships.

On the material world being infused with the presence of God:

The body has had such a low and negative profile in the world of spirituality because spirit has been understood more in terms of the air element than the earth element. The air is the region of the invisible; it is the region of breath and thought. When you confine spirit to this region alone, the physical becomes immediately diminished. This is a great mistake, for there is nothing in the universe as sensuous as God. The wildness of God is the sensuousness of God. Nature is the direct expression of the divine imagination. It is the most intimate reflection of God’s sense of beauty. Nature is the mirror of the divine imagination (44).

One of his chapters is about the human senses. I love the idea of marrying sight with spiritual sight.

The first sense we will consider is the sense of sight or vision. The human eye is one place where the intensity of human presence becomes uniquely focused and available. The universe finds its deepest reflection and belonging in the human eye, I imagine the mountains dreaming of the coming of vision. The eye, when it opens, is like the dawn breaking in the night. When it opens, a new world is there. The eye is also the mother of distance. When the eye opens, it shows that others and the world are outside us, distant from us… In a wonderful way, the eye as mother of distance makes us wonder at the mystery and otherness of everything outside us (53).

If you love to travel, and believe in the potential of travel and interacting with diversity to teach us something about God, the world, and ourselves, it is because of sense of sight. The eye creates the possibility of travel.

It is a startling truth that how you see and what you see determine how and who you will be. An interesting way of beginning to do some interior work is to explore your particular style of seeing. Ask yourself, What way do I behold the world (55)?

And so, O’Donohue gifts his readers with “A Blessing for the Senses”:

May your body be blessed.
May you realize that your body is a faithful and beautiful friend of your soul.
And may you be peaceful and joyful and recognize that your senses are sacred thresholds.
May you realize that holiness is mindful, gazing, feeling, hearing, and touching.
May your senses gather you and bring you home.
May your senses always enable you to celebrate the universe and the mystery and possibilities in your presence here.
May the love of the Earth bless you (68).

I really liked this description of nature:

The silence of landscape conceals vast presence. Place is not simply location. A place is a profound individuality. Its surface texture of grass and stone is blessed by rain, wind, and light. With complete attention, landscape celebrates the liturgy of the seasons, giving itself unreservedly to the passion of the goddess. The shape of a landscape is an ancient and silent form of consciousness. Mountains are huge contemplatives. Rivers and streams offer voice; they are the tears of the earth’s joy and despair. The earth is full of soul. Plotinus in the Enneads speaks of the soul’s care for the universe: “…this all in one universally comprehensive living being, encircling all the living beings within it, and having a soul, one soul which extends to all its members in the degree of participant membership held by each (75).”

Blessing is there, the only barrier is our readiness:

When a well awakens in the mind, new possibilities begin to flow, and you find within yourself a depth and excitement that you never knew you had. This art of awakening is suggested by the Irish writer James Stephens, who said, “The only barrier is our readiness.” We often remain exiles, left outside the rich world of the soul, simply because we are not ready. Our task is to refine our hearts and minds. There is so much blessing and beauty near us that is destined for us, and yet it cannot enter our lives because we are not ready to receive it. The handle is on the inside of the door; only we can open it. Our lack of readiness is often caused by blindness, fear, and lack of self-appreciation. When we are ready, we will be blessed. At that moment the door of the heart becomes the gate of heaven (76).

On the eternality of music:

One of the most beautiful gifts that humans have brought to the earth is music. In great music, the ancient longing of the earth finds a voice. The wonderful conductor Sergiu Celibidache said, “We do not create music; we only create the conditions so that she can appear.” Music ministers to the silence and solitude of nature; it is one of the most powerful, immediate, and intimate of sensuous experiences. Music is, perhaps, the art form that brings us closest to the eternal because it changes immediately and irreversibly the way we experience time. When we are listening to beautiful music, we enter into the eternal dimension of time. Transitory, broken linear time fades away, and we come into the circle of belonging within the eternal (64).

Music remains to me a fascinating mystery.

On silence as an avenue for solitude for the interior life:

Ascetic solitude involves silence. And silence is one of the great victims of modern culture…There is a sinister eviction taking place; peoples' lives are being dragged outward all the time. The inner world of the soul is suffering a great eviction by the landlord forces of advertising and external social reality. This outer exile really impoverishes us. One of the reasons so many people are suffering from stress is not that they are doing stressful things but that they allow so little time for silence. A fruitful solitude without silence and space is inconceivable (95-6).

Silence is one of the major thresholds in the world.

Fundamentally, there is the great silence that meets language; all words come out of silence. Words that have a depth, resonance, healing, and challenge to them are words loaded with ascetic silence…Language that does not recognize its kinship with reality is banal, denotative, and purely discursive (96-97).

To grow is to change:

In a poetics of growth it is important to explore how possibility and change remain so faithful to us. They open us to new depths within.

John Henry Newsman summed this up beautifully when he said “To grow is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often.” (113)

This goes well with the adage, “strong opinions, loosely held.” The only way to be right 100% of the time is to do your best to get things right, and when you’re wrong, admit it right away.

Each new day is a sacred place, wherein waking up itself is a gift. A Celtic prayer:

God bless to me the new day
never vouchsafed to me before
it is to bless thy own presence thou has given triumph God
Bless thou to me mine eye
may mine eye bless all it sees
I will bless my neighbor
may my neighbor bless me (115)

What about a new day makes it a cage? What barriers to the newness and sacred are there, whether they be metaphorical or real?

Not zero-sum:

In the world of soul: the more you have, the more everyone has. The rhythm of soul is the surprise of endless enrichment.

So the world of soul is not a zero-sum game.

On awkwardness and difficulty as light:

Perception is crucial to understanding. How you see, and what you see, determine how you will be. Your perception, or your view of reality, is the lens through which you see things. Your perception determines the way things will behave for you and toward you. We tend to perceive difficult as disturbance. Ironically, difficulty can be a great friend of creativity (136). … Sometimes awkward situations, problems, or difficulties are really disguised opportunities for growth. Very often at the heart of the difficulty, there is the light of a great jewel. It is wise to learn to embrace with hospitality that which is awkward and difficult (139).

Just as in Michelangelo’s Prisoners in Stone, captured in marble, what shape is poised to emerge from the stone of your difficulties?

On memory:

One of the great poverties of our modern culture of rapidity, stress, and externality is that there is so little attention to memory…Human memory is…more refined, sacred, and personal.
The beauty and invitation of old age offer a time of silence and solitude for a visit to the house of your inner memory. You can revisit all of your past. Your soul is the place where your memory lives. Since linear time vanishes, everything depends on memory. In other words, our time comes in yesterdays, todays, and tomorrows. Yet there is another place within us that lives in eternal time. That place is called the soul. The soul, therefore, lives mainly in the mode of eternity. This means that as things happen in your yesterdays, todays, and tomorrows and fall away with transience, they fall and are caught and held by the net of the eternal in your soul. There they are gathered, preserved, and minded for you. Levinas says, “Memory as an inversion of historical time is the essence of interiority.” Consequently, as your body ages and gets weaker, your soul is in fact getting richer, deeper, and stronger. With time your soul grows more sure of itself; the natural light within it increases and brightens (151-2).

Harvesting experience with meaning:

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 (158).

Holding onto beauty:

I love Blaise pascal’s idea that in a difficult time, you should always keep something beautiful in your heart. Perhaps, as a poet said, it is beauty that will save us in the end.

This reminds me of my uncle Robbie Shackelford’s mantra of “aggressively seeking beauty in every day.”

This quote from T. S. Eliot captures where I end with my theology of travel:

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And to know the place for the first time. (168)

On wisdom:

There is more information now available in the world than ever before. We have so much knowledge about every possible thing. Yet there is great difference between knowledge and wisdom. You can know many things, you can know a lot of facts about things, even facts about yourself, but it is the truths that you realize yourself that move deeply into you. Wisdom, then, is a deeper way of knowing. Wisdom is the art of living in rhythm with your soul, your life, and the divine. Wisdom is the way that you learn to decipher the unknown; and the unknown is our closest companion. So wisdom is the art of being courageous and generous with the unknown, of being able to decipher and recognize its treasures.

Wisdom, then, is the art of balancing the known with the unknown, the suffering with the joy; it is a way of linking the whole of life together in a new and deeper unity. Our society would be very well advised to attend to the wisdom of old people, to integrate them into the processes of decision making. The wisdom of the aged could be invaluable in helping us to articulate a vision for our future. Ultimately, wisdom and vision are sisters; the creativity, critique, and prophecy of vision issue from the fount of wisdom (170-171).

On the urgency of life:

So many people are, as Patrick Kavanagh put it, “preparing for life rather than living it.” You only get one chance. You have one journey through life; you cannot repeat even one moment or retrace one footstep. It seems that we are meant to inhabit and live everything that comes toward us. In the underside of life there is the presence of our death. If you really live your life to the full, death will never have power over you. It will never seem like a destructive, negative event. It can become, for you, the moment of release into the deepest treasures of your own nature; it can be your full entry into the temple of your soul. If you are able to let go of things, you learn to die spiritually in little ways during your life. When you learn to let go of things, a greater generosity, openness, and breath comes into your life. Imagine this letting go multiplied a thousand times at the moment of your death. That release can bring you to a completely new divine belonging (192).
…
Death is the great wound in the universe and the great wound in each life. Yet, ironically, this is the very found that can lead to new spiritual growth. Thinking of your death can help you to radically alter your fixed and habitual perception. Instead of living according to the merely visible material realm of life, you begin to refine your sensibility and become aware of the treasures that are hidden in the invisible side of your life (195).

True spirituality is the ability to attend to the depth of this invisible nature.

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