‘Of John O’Donohue’s Life and Work’ – The Making of a Reflection
John O’Donohue International Symposium, Ennistymon, Co. Clare, 5 July 2018
I was very pleased to receive an invitation to an event, that I knew being a tribute to a dear friend of so many in Ireland and beyond, John O’Donohue, being as it would be, a reflection on his work and life, would draw on attendance that would be eclectic in terms of both their backgrounds and in the themes that interested them. That is as it should be.
It is so appropriate too that this gathering, or maybe flocking is a more appropriate term, will draw on memories, conversations, imaginings, music and song. I am sure he approves, and would offer a blessing on the endeavours over three days.
So many people were influenced by John and in so many different ways. I was present at the launch of nearly all of his books and indeed I may have spoken at a few of those launches. It was a privilege and it was always a great pleasure to do so and indeed as I read the dedications he wrote to Sabina and I. For example, at the launch of Benedictus, his use of the word ‘friendship’, its importance to him. In my mind, I can encounter again his marvellous presence as he leaned over to write these words of dedication and the energy it generated between us, an energy of friendship. I recall the warmth of such occasions, the level of thought to which people were invited, and John’s generosity of himself in the presentation.
Friendship is the theme upon which I wish to reflect; friendship that, in its knowing no calculation, Aristotle put it in his advice to his son Nicomachus, must know no bounds, makes a demand, greater than justice, whose demands can be measured.
There are few days I don’t think of him. I can understand this, as it is one of the principles of Celtic life and spirituality that he so regularly invoked that we continue to communicate within a community that includes those who are in a bodily sense, living with us, and those whose spirits with whom we may relate.
The image of the spiral and the circle are what surrounds the Burren, linearity and its errors are stuff of a later hubris in both spirituality and science.
To enjoy John’s friendship was a great gift. I recall his visits to me, particularly during a period when I was in hospital. I knew he was in the room even if I had drifted off. His was a presence that did not need the introduction of words.
As I was putting my words together for this evening, and being at a distance from some of John’s books, but having to hand others, and in a splendid sense of serendipity, as Thomas Merton might have put it, out of Benidictus fell Bernie Ní Fhlatharta’s – she was a journalist of a West of Ireland generation that allowed themselves to quote from a speech if they felt it was justified. In my tribute in Galway Cathedral at what was a magnificent send-off for John, I said:
“John O’Donohue’s presence filled one with hope. His books moistened the spiritual ground that had dried for many in Ireland, Europe, the United States, indeed all over the world, offering as he did, a compassion based on understanding, and a recognition of the creative in every living being.
His two collections of poetry, and his Echoes of Memory and Connemara Blues delivered their spiritual and luminous wisdom in shorelines that made a form of music, or offered condensed suggestions for reflection in the style of Meister Eckhart.
In Anam Cara, Eternal Echoes, Divine Beauty and Benidictus, John created a legacy that will pass on to future generations.
Most important of all, these books, during his all-too-short life shared with us, found - and will continue to find - their way to those most in need of their affirming message.
These books had as threads running through them an evocation and a sensitive tracing of the human condition following the themes of longing and belonging. His contribution as a prophet will continue. His work as a writer, poet will endure.
His spirit will always be with those he loved, his family, his partner, but with all of us too, for he has been lodged in all of us in a way that can never be erased, connected to us all in our common stardust.”
Bernie quotes me as saying that I had had the benefit of John’s friendship, which I considered special and that I already missed him every day. However, I said that what John had left was rich and that his life should be celebrated.
Ten years later, I am so pleased that such a comprehensive celebration of John’s life is being undertaken so close to the Burren, which he loved. In fact, Prince Charles who had invited John to visit him on more than one occasion, reflected after his visit to the Burren, that he kept thinking of his conversations with John, and he asked me that if I knew any ‘John O’Donohues’ to please let him know. But if we are all unique John O’Donohue was not only unique but special.
I am delighted that Walking on the Pastures of Wonder - John O’Donohue in conversation with John Quinn - is being launched at our gathering. It is described in the Foreword by Pat O’Donohue as a book that is an invitation to a conversation with John. It achieves that beautifully and the book contains two beautiful poems by John Quinn – The Journey and Envoi.
The longest discussion I had with John was during a period in which he was preparing to give an address to Prof. John Dillon’s Plato Seminar at Trinity College, Dublin. It was on the topic of ‘Possibilities’. I had the great pleasure of hearing the earliest versions, the amended versions and later to receive a copy, which has been borrowed from me, of the final lecture as delivered. It tells one so much of John and his intellectual pursuits.
Our conversation began with his suggesting the importance of imagination and one of its tools, memory. While memory is our great assistant in recovering a sense of our earlier life it has, imagination has within its range, sedimented as it were, not only that which we can recall but all of what we had felt was possible from past times of dream and hope and fleeting beauty; that memory could not rely on what was recalled through the visual sense alone, for there has been a tendency to privilege the visual at the cost of the contribution to wonder of the other senses. Along the way of full living the place of beauty, its sources and composition, its ephemeral nature, we fitted that too into the conversation. This evening it makes me think again of that famous remark attributed to Josie, his mother, when asked about how John was doing, she said “Beauty has him killed”.
Respecting all of the senses, achieving not just a balance but a releasing awareness, clearing away all of the blockages encountered by the misuse of the rational John was inclined to stress the importance of learning from Animal Being.
“May we learn to return
and rest in the beauty
of animal being,
learn to lean low,
Leave our locked minds,
and with the freed senses
feel the earth
breathing with us”
In my own poem Of Possibility in memory of John O’Donohue I had this image of John in mind:
“From that wider space
that is imagination,
is made possible
a visual beauty
that dazzles and ensnares.Deep in that space lies too,
in unreleased expectancy,
versions of a world unborn,
sending shards of life and colour
that make an invitation
to something truly human.They lodge in memory,
making an inheritance
of possibility not always realised.And in that site yielded up by memory
to spirit at the end,
it is these shafts
and unrealised suggestions
that endure,
at the end,
making a rich legacy
of possibility.
When all of the work is taken together it is easy to see how easily that essential project for the future of humanity – the reconnection of ecology, economy, society and culture – flows from John O’Donohue’s work, how relevant it is today when we are challenged to turn the documented agreed words of states on responding to climate change and sustainability into real efforts and achievements
There was a point in science and the history of science with which I disagreed with John, it was in relation to the philosopher David Hume. John, I felt, had been too kind in simply acknowledging David Hume’s vindication of the insights that science had to offer. The scientific contribution of what has been called ‘the European Enlightenment’ was indeed very important. It vindicated the power of human curiosity and imagination. Today, science remains as a source of great benefit to humanity but sadly such a contribution has been overshadowed by its utilisation as an instrument of war.
I felt that John’s admiration for David Hume’s 'Power of the Imagination' perhaps was too forgiving of the frame in which Hume developed his views and the manner in which they were delivered in the second half of what was called ‘the Enlightenment’ by then it was one deeply poisoned by notions of empire of the inferiority of some cultures in comparison to others. After all, Hume had written in his History of Great Britain (1767):
“The Irish, from the beginning of time, have been buried in the most profound barbarism and ignorance and as they were never conquered, even invaded by the Romans from whom all the Western world derives its civility, they continued still in the most rude state of society and were distinguished only by those voices which human nature, not tamed by education, nor restrained by laws, is forever subject.”
The European Enlightenment was one of many Enlightenments in human history. Its promise was real even if the version of industrial conquest of nature would in its 250th year of economic justifications bring a 4.5-billion-year planet to put point of near destruction.
You will be discussing, over the next two days, not only the contribution of science, but ground shared between a science that respects serendipity and a spirituality or theology that values the possibility and life of the new question, that eschews a battle of certainties, but I am sure you will also be discussing the consequences of its abuse. Science has seduced many, not least those who have replaced wonder with what they envisaged as the marvels of technology, perhaps Herbert Marcuse is among those who was invited to romanticise the impact of technology, only in later life to see its ravages as it was delivered as an instrument of war abroad and a numbing source of alienation, buttress to authoritarianism at home.
It is in the space of wonder, wisdom and often in the silences contributed by nature that we are gifted with the capacity of recovering such a healing, wholeness as we have lost in a civilisation that has insisted on the utility of meaningless dualism. Knowledge does not require a dismissal of all that is not easily quantifiable.
Believing as I do in the heavy price we have paid to the Cartesian fallacy, what I sense in John O’Donohue’s work is both a longing, and a belief that a recovery from this damaging dualism is achievable, of a recovered sense of symmetry – a symmetry that is available to us by being able to respect the renewing capacity of nature.
While there are many who will have gained such personal solace from John’s books, I believe that there is not a suggestion in them that one should be satisfied with a pursuit solely of what is of value in the remaking of the self, in a personal sense.
I believe that all of the books, taken together, are making the case for a world that is available to be born - one in which all experiences are valid but those that are shared and woven from the threads of experience and nature into the tapestry that is community is what is most valuable.
John was adamant that the offering of a blessing should never be confined to a priestly order, that it was a practice deep in the best of tradition so, may I end by wishing your good selves every blessing - Beir Beannacht.