But finding a voice-let's be clear-is a political act. It defines a moment of presence, of being awake; and it involves not only self-understanding, but the ability to transmit that selfunderstanding to others...To experience yourself as "voiceless" is a definition of depression, subjugation, and being counted out. .
Finding voice is a socially responsible political act. We don't just do it for ourselves. And helping someone to find voice demands a spiritual partnership with that seeker. It's an exercise of compassion.
If you have a big splash of ecstasy in your life every day you are going to teach students something finer than "buy low/sell high". Maybe you'll teach them, not by what you say but by who you are, to live their lives as a standing affront to the ravaging mercantile mentality.
What if we were to take seriously the possibility that our students have a rich and authoritative inner life and tried to nourish it rather than negate it?
When I speak in Christian terms or Buddhist terms I'm simply selecting for the moment a dialect. Christian words for me represent the comforting vocabulary of the place I came from hometown voices saying more than the language itself can convey about how welcome and safe I am what the expectations are and where to find food. Buddhist words come from another dialect from the people over the mountain. I've become pretty fluent in Buddhist it helps me to see my home country differently but it will never be speech I can feel completely at home in.
Whatever your eye falls on. For it will fall on what you love - will lead you to the questions of your life, the questions that are incumbent upon you to answer, because that is how the mind works in concert with the eye. The things of this world draw us where we need to go.
I would not say I am looking for God. Or, I am not looking for God precisely. I am not seeking the God I learned about as a Catholic child, as an 18-year-old novice in a religious community, as an agnostic graduate student, as - but who cares about my disguises? Or God's.
My music teacher offered twittering madrigals and something about how, in Italy, in Italy, the oranges hang on the tree. He treated me - the humiliation of it - as a soprano.These, by contrast, are the six elements of a Sacred Harp alto: rage, darkness, motherhood, earth, malice, and sex. Once you feel it, you can always do it. You know where to go for it, though it will cost you.
I would not have majored in English and gone on to teach literature had I not been able to construct a counterargument about the truthfulness of fiction; still, as writers turn away from the industrious villages of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, I learn less and less from them that helps me to ponder my life. In time, I found myself agreeing with the course evaluations written by my testier freshman students:'All the literature we read this term was depressing.' How naive. How sane.
Cultural wisdom says 'Don't quit your day job.' Yet I think these desires represent our psyche's stretch toward wholeness. And to be whole, as many religious tranditions teach, is to make manifest a unique face of God in the world. We don't want to be irresponsible, yet for every accountant who deserts his family and sails for Tahiti, ten American men have heart attacks at their desks, after hours.
"Whatever your eye falls on -- for it will fall on what you love -- will lead you to the questions of your life, the questions that are incumbent upon you to answer, because that is how the mind works in concert with the eye. The things of this world draw us where we need to go." (02/25/2022)
John O'Donohue (1 January 1956 – 4 January 2008) was an Irish poet, author, priest, and Hegelian philosopher. He was a native Irish speaker,[1] and as an author is best known for popularising Celtic spirituality.[2][3]
Early life and education
Eldest of four siblings, O'Donohue was reared in west Ireland in the area of Connemara and County Clare, where his father Patrick O'Donohue was a stonemason, while his mother Josie O'Donohue was a housewife.[4]
O'Donohue's first published work of prose, Anam cara (1997), catapulted him into a more public life as an author, speaker and teacher, particularly in the United States. O'Donohue left the priesthood in 2000. O'Donohue also devoted his energies to environmental activism, and is credited with helping spearhead the Burren Action Group, which opposed government development plans and ultimately preserved the area of Mullaghmore and the Burren, a karst landscape in County Clare.[7]
Later in life, O’Donohue became a prominent speaker on creativity in the workplace. He consulted executives in the corporate sector "on integrating a sense of soul and of beauty into their leadership and their imagination about the people with whom they work."[8]
Just two days after his 52nd birthday and two months after the publication of his final complete work, Benedictus: A Book of Blessings, O'Donohue died suddenly in his sleep on 4 January 2008 while on holiday near Avignon, France. The exact cause of death has not been released by his family, leaving writers of non-fiction to speculation regarding the cause. Articles and posts have listed an aneurysm, heart problem, and aspiration as possible causes.[9][failed verification] He was survived by his partner Kristine Fleck, his mother Josephine (Josie) O'Donohue, his brothers, Patrick (Pat) and Peter (PJ) O'Donohue, and his sister, Mary O'Donohue.[5][10]
Posthumous publications include a reprinting of The Four Elements, a book of essays, in 2010[11] and Echoes of Memory (2011), an early work of poetry originally collected in 1994.[12] In March 2015, a series of radio conversations he had recorded with close friend and former RTÉ broadcaster John Quinn was collated and published as Walking on the Pastures of Wonder.[13]
Litigation regarding his will
O'Donohue's last will was held to be invalid by the High Court in December 2011, Justice Gilligan holding that "As a piece of English, the Will is unclear on its face" and that the will was void for uncertainty.[5] The will did not leave anything to his partner Kristine Fleck. In the absence of a valid will his estate devolved on his mother, Josie O'Donohue.[5]
Quotations
"When you cease to fear your solitude, a new creativity awakens in you. Your forgotten or neglected wealth begins to reveal itself. You come home to yourself and learn to rest within. Thoughts are our inner senses. Infused with silence and solitude, they bring out the mystery of inner landscape."
- Anam Cara, p. 17
"Part of understanding the notion of Justice is to recognize the disproportions among which we live...it takes an awful lot of living with the powerless to really understand what it is like to be powerless, to have your voice, thoughts, ideas and concerns count for very little. We, who have been given much, whose voices can be heard, have a great duty and responsibility to make our voices heard with absolute integrity for those who are powerless."
"Music is what language would love to be if it could."[14]
Works
Anam Cara (1996)
Eternal Echoes (1998)
Conamara Blues: Poems (2000)
Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace (2003)
Published in the US as Beauty: The Invisible Embrace (2003)
Benedictus: A Book of Blessings (2007)
Published in the US as To Bless the Space Between Us (2008)
Anam Cara is a phrase that refers to the Celtic concept of the "soul friend" in religion and spirituality. The phrase is an anglicization of the Irish word anamchara, anam meaning "soul" and cara meaning "friend". The term was popularized by Irish authorJohn O'Donohue in his 1997 book Anam Ċara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom about Celtic spirituality. In the Celtic tradition "soul friends" are considered an essential and integral part of spiritual development.[1] The Martyrology of Óengus recounts an incident where Brigid of Kildare counselled a young cleric that "...anyone without a soul friend is like a body without a head."[2] A similar concept is found in the Welshperiglour.[3]
The Anam Cara involves a friendship that psychotherapist William P. Ryan describes as "compassionate presence".[4] According to O'Donohue, the word anamchara originates in Irish monasticism, where it was applied to a monk's teacher, companion, or spiritual guide.[5] However, Edward C. Sellner traces its origin to the early Desert Fathers and Desert Mothers: "This capacity for friendship and ability to read other people's hearts became the basis of the desert elders' effectiveness as spiritual guides."[3] Their teachings were preserved and passed on by the Christian monk John Cassian, who explained that the soul friend could be clerical or lay, male or female.[3]
“The heart of the matter: You should never belong fully to something that is outside yourself. It is very important to find a balance in your belonging.”
“All through your life your soul takes care of you...your soul is alive and awakened, gathering, sheltering and guiding your ways and days in the world. In effect, your soul is your secret shelter.”
“May you recognize in your life the presence, power, and light of your soul. May you realize that you are never alone, that your soul in its brightness and belonging connects you intimately with the rhythm of the universe. May you have respect for your own individuality and difference. ”
“The secret and the sacred are sisters. When the secret is not respected, the sacred vanishes. Consequently, reflection should not shine too severe or aggressive a light on the world of the soul.”
“A person should always offer a prayer of graciousness for the love that has awakened in them. When you feel love for your beloved and the beloved’s love for you, now and again you should offer the warmth of your love as a blessing for those who are damaged and unloved.”
“Many of us have made our world so familiar that we do not see it anymore. An interesting question to ask yourself at night is, What did I really see this day?”
“May you realize that the shape of your soul is unique, that you have a special destiny here, that behind the facade of your life there is something beautiful, good, and eternal happening. May you learn to see yourself with the same delight, pride, and expectation with which God sees you in every moment.”
“Perhaps this is also true of places. When you are in a certain place, great love or kindness happens; it imprints itself on the ether of the place. When we pass there, hungry and needy in spirit, that loving imprint shines on us like an icon.”
“Maybe this is one of the secrets of death: that you die only when your invisible, unchosen lives have also fulfilled themselves, so that you bring into the eternal world not only your one known life but also the unknown, unchosen lives as well.”
“Our grounding in the soul means that regardless of how badly we think of ourselves, there is a wholesomeness in us that no one has ever been able to damage.”
“The spirituality of the rural mind does not see time as routine or treadmill; time is a far more precious space where crevices open into the infinite, and where the rhythm of the eternal is felt to preside.”
“The world can be harsh and negative, but if we remain generous and patient, kindness inevitably reveals itself. Something deep in the human soul seems to depend on the presence of kindness;”
"Often it takes a huge crisis or trauma to crack the dead shell that has grown ever more solid around us. Painful as that can be, it does resurrect the longing of the neglected soul. It makes a clearance. Again we can see the horizons and feel their attraction. Though we may wince with vulnerability as we taste the exhilaration of freedom, we feel alive!" (08/08/2022)
