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In the spirit of our philosophy of co-creating community and our awareness that the Spirit speaks through each of us, we invite you to share your meditations with us as well. We truly believe that in God’s economy of abundance, when we share our blessings, our thoughts, our feelings, we are all made richer.

Today's Meditation is excerpts from an interview of John O'Donohue conducted by Krista Tippett, which we have entitled "Beauty is Our Calling. God is Beauty" The interview showcases John O'Donohue's philosophy/theology of life and deals with beauty, stress, time, God. It is long and exquisite. We have excerpted parts of the interview here. If you would like to read the whole interview, you might google Krista Tippett interview of John O'Donohue. May this meditation nourish our contemplative-active hearts and fortify all of us in action.

We hope and pray that you and your loved ones experience genuine peace of mind and heart, and remain in good health during this challenging time.

In this "Season of Ordinary Time" in the Church Year, may this be a time of peace, of healing and hope, of the infusion of joy in your life!

With our love and care,

Ron & Jean

Meditation Seventy-three: Beauty is Our Calling. God is Beauty (interview with John O'Donohue)

...John O’Donohue:Beauty isn’t all about just nice loveliness, like. Beauty is about more rounded, substantial becoming. So I think beauty, in that sense, is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life.

Krista Tippett, host:No conversation I’ve ever had has been more beloved than this one with the Irish poet and philosopher, John O’Donohue. He insisted on beauty as a human calling. He had a very Celtic, lifelong fascination with the inner human landscape and what he called “the invisible world,” constantly intertwining with what we can know and see.

John O’Donohue: I mean I think that — and it’s the question of beauty, I mean you’re asking, essentially — as we are speaking, that there are individuals holding out on frontlines, holding the humane tissue alive in areas of ultimate barbarity, where things are visible that the human eye should never see. And they’re able to sustain it, because there is, in them, some kind of sense of beauty that knows the horizon that we are really called to in some way. I love Pascal’s phrase, that you should always keep something beautiful in your mind. And I have often — like in times when it’s been really difficult for me, if you can keep some kind of little contour that you can glimpse sideways at, now and again, you can endure great bleakness.

Ms. Tippett: What do you mean when you write that everyone is an artist?

Mr. O’Donohue:I mean that everyone is involved, whether they like it or not, in the construction of their world. So it’s never as given as it actually looks. You are always shaping it and building it. And I feel that from that perspective, that each of us is an artist.

Secondly, I believe that everyone has imagination, that no matter how mature and adult and sophisticated a person might seem, that person is still essentially an ex-baby. And as children, we all lived in an imaginal world — you know, when you’d be told, “Don’t cross that wall, because there’s monsters over there,” my God, the world you would create on the other side of the wall. And when you’d ask questions like “Why is the sky blue?” or “Where does God live?” or all this kind of stuff — like one of the first times I was coming to America, I said to my little niece, who was seven, I said, “What will I bring you from America?” She said, “Uh…” and her father said, “No, ask him, or you won’t get anything.” And Katy turned to me and said, “What’s in it?” — [laughs] — which I thought was a great question about America.

So that childlike thing, and secondly, that every night when we sleep, we dream. And a dream is a sophisticated, imaginative text full of figures and drama that we send to ourselves. So I believe that deep in the heart of each of us, there is this imagining, imaginal capacity that we have, so that we are all doing it....

Ms. Tippett: Time is a bully. We are captive to it.

Mr. O’Donohue: Totally, and I’d say seven out of every ten people who turn up in a doctor’s surgery are suffering from something stress-related. Now there are big psychological tomes written on stress, but for me, philosophically, stress is a perverted relationship to time, so that rather than being a subject of your own time, you have become its target and victim, and time has become routine. So at the end of the day, you probably haven’t had a true moment for yourself to relax in and to just be.

Meister Eckhart, whom I love, said, “So many people come to me asking how I should pray, how I should think, what I should do. And the whole time, they neglect the most important question, which is, how should I be?” And I think when you slow it down, then you find your rhythm. And when you come into rhythm, then you come into a different kind of time. Because you know the way, in this country, there’s all the different zones — I think there are these zones within us, as well. There’s surface time, which is really a rapid-fire Ferrari time.

Ms. Tippett:So I’m assuming you would suggest that more people need to create more space and stillness, but I think what you’re also saying is that simply by thinking differently about time, by approaching it differently, by putting on a new imagination, we can have a different sense of it. Is that right?

Mr. O’Donohue:That’s absolutely right, because I think that if you take time not as calendar product, but as actually the parent or mother of presence, then you see that in the world of spirit, time behaves differently, actually. I mean when I used to be a priest, it was an amazing thing — you’d see somebody who would be dying over a week, maybe, and had lived, maybe, a hard life where they were knuckled into themselves, where they were hard and tight and unyielding, and everything had to err in its way to their center. And suddenly, then, you’d see that within three or four days you’d see them loosen. And you’d see a kind of buried beauty that they’d never allowed themselves to enjoy about themselves surface and bring a radiance to their face and spirit.

Ms. Tippett: John O’Donohue often wrote about beauty. He believed that the human soul does not merely hunger for beauty, but that we feel most alive in the presence of what is beautiful. “It returns us, often in fleeting but sustaining moments,” he said, “to our highest selves.”

Ms. Tippett:You also suggest, in your book about beauty, that beauty can be a kind of antidote, even to our most pressing global crises. How do you think of beauty as relevant in that sense?

Mr. O’Donohue:Yeah, I think it’s not just relevant, like, but I think it’s actually necessary, because I think that beauty is not a luxury, but I think that it ennobles the heart and reminds us of the infinity that is within us. I always love what Mandela said when he came out, and I was actually in his cell in Robben Island one time, when I was in South Africa. And after 27 years in confinement for a wrong you never committed, he turned himself into a huge priest and came out with this sentence where he said that “What we are afraid of is not so much our limitations, but the infinite within us.” And I think that that is in everybody.

And I suppose the question that’s at the heart of all we’ve been discussing, really, which is a beautiful question, is the question of God. And I think that one of the reasons that so many people turn away from religion in our times is that the God question has died for them, because the question has been framed in such repetitive, dead language. And I think it’s the exciting question, once you awaken to the presence of God.

Ms. Tippett:Well, you have said — you write, “God is beauty.”

Mr. O’Donohue:Yeah, I have, yeah.

Ms. Tippett:Did you always feel this? Is that something — is that a sense that has grown in you, or something that you name now?

Mr. O’Donohue:It’s a sense that has grown in me, I suppose, that I’ve always kind of had the intuition about it, because I feel that there are two ways that you must always keep together in approaching the God thing. One is — and this is what I like about the Christian tradition, and this is where I diverge a little from the Buddhist tradition, even though I love Buddhism as a methodology to clean up the mind and get you into purity of presence. What I love is that at the heart of Christianity, you have this idea of intimacy, which is true belonging, being seen, the ultimate home of individuation, the ultimate source of it and the homecoming — that that’s what I would call spirituality, is the art of homecoming. So it’s St. Augustine’s phrase, “Deus intimior intimo meo” — “God is more intimate to me than I am to myself.”

Then you go to Meister Eckhart, and you get the other side of it, which you must always keep together with it, where in Middle High German, he says, “Gott wirt und Gott entwirt.” That means, “God becomes and God un-becomes,” or translated, it means that “God” is only our name for it, and the closer we get to it, the more it ceases to be God. So then you are on a real safari with the wildness and danger and otherness of God. And I think when you begin to get a sense of the depth that is there, then your whole heart wakens up. I mean I love Irenaeus’s thing from the second century, which said, “The glory of God is the human being fully alive.”

And I think in our culture that one of the things that we are missing is that these thresholds where we can encounter this and where we move into new change in our lives, there are no rituals to help us to recognize them or to cross them worthily.

Mr. O’Donohue:When I think of the word “beauty,” some of the faces of those that I love come into my mind. When I think of beauty, I also think of beautiful landscapes that I know. Then I think of acts of such lovely kindness that have been done to me by people that cared for me in bleak, unsheltered times or when I needed to be loved and minded. I also think of those unknown people who are the real heroes for me, who you never hear about, who hold out on lines, on frontiers of awful want and awful situations and manage, somehow, to go beyond the given impoverishments and offer gifts of possibility and imagination and seeing.

I also think — always, when I think of beauty, because it’s so beautiful for me — is, I think of music. I love music. I think music is just it. I mean I think that’s — I love poetry, as well, of course, and I think of beauty in poetry. But I always think that music is what language would love to be if it could.

Ms. Tippett:It was actually in your book that I first realized, and I had never thought about this, that the root — the Greek root for the word “beauty” is related to the word for “calling,” to “kalon” and “kalein.”

Mr. O’Donohue:That’s right. That’s it exactly.

Ms. Tippett:That’s fascinating.

Mr. O’Donohue:It is, actually. And it means that actually, in the presence of beauty, it’s not a neutral thing, but it’s actually calling you. And I feel that one could write a wonderful psychology just based on the notion of being called — being called to be yourself and called to transfigure what has hardened or got wounded within you. And it’s also, of course, the heart of creativity, this calling forth all the time, because — like in the work that I do, trying to write a few poems, you never write the same poem twice. You’re always at a new place, and then you’re suddenly surprised by where you get taken to.

Ms. Tippett:But if we think, as you’ve suggested, as beauty as relevant to some of the most troubling problems in our world and in ourselves, how do we pursue that calling, given the limitations, given that a lot of what is around us is not visibly, objectively beautiful and may not be?

Mr. O’Donohue:Absolutely, and that’s a very fair question. And it’s like — in old notions of growth and development, there was always this idea — as Noel Hanlon, a poet friend of mine says in a poem about her daughter, “Like me, you needed something to push against” — that somehow we needed something to push against in order to grow. Now there’s almost a feeling like as though growth should be delivered to us. And I think that from the way you state it, that it’s a recognition, that there is this dialectic there, that around us the forces are not kind, in terms of either recognizing, awakening, or encouraging beauty, but that actually, they should be the impetus and the spur to do it.

Now how do we do it? One way, and I think this is a really lovely way, and I think it’s an interesting question to ask oneself too, and the question is, when is the last time that you had a great conversation, a conversation which wasn’t just two intersecting monologues, which is what passes for conversation a lot in this culture? But when had you last a great conversation in which you overheard yourself saying things that you never knew you knew, that you heard yourself receiving from somebody words that absolutely found places within you that you thought you had lost and a sense of an event of a conversation that brought the two of you onto a different plane, and then, fourthly, a conversation that continued to sing in your mind for weeks afterwards? And I’ve had some of them recently, and it’s just absolutely amazing. They’re like, as we would say at home, they are food and drink for the soul.

Second thing, I think, a question to always ask oneself — who are you reading? Who are you reading? And where are you stretching your own boundaries? Are you repetitive in that? And one of the first books I read as a child — we had no books at home, but a neighbor of ours had all these books, and he brought loads of books. That’s how I ruined my eyes, like, and I have to wear glasses. [laughs] But one of the first books I read was a book by Willie Sutton, the bank robber, who was doing 30 years for robbing banks. And in the book somebody asked Willie, and they said, “Willie, why do you rob banks?” And Willie said, “Because that’s where the money is.” And why do we read books? Because that’s where the wisdom is....

Ms. Tippett:John O’Donohue died in his sleep on January 3, 2008, at the age of 52. This was one of the last interviews he gave. His books include Anam Ċara and Beauty. His final work was To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings. More recently, a wonderful new book of conversation with him has been published in the U.K., called Walking on the Pastures of Wonder. And here, in closing, is one of his well-known poems of blessing, which he wrote for his mother at the time of his father’s death. He read it aloud to me when we sat together.

Mr. O’Donohue:This is a poem I wrote several years ago, and it’s called “Beannacht,” which is the Gaelic word for “blessing.” “On the day when / The weight deadens / On your shoulders / And you stumble, / May the clay dance / To balance you. // And when your eyes / Freeze behind / The gray window / And the ghost of loss / Gets in to you, / May a / flock of colors, / Indigo, red, green, / And azure blue, / Come to awaken in you / A meadow of delight. // When the canvas frays / In the curragh of thought / And a stain of ocean / Blackens beneath you, / May there come across the waters / A path of yellow moonlight / To bring you safely home. // May the nourishment of the earth be yours, / May the clarity of light be yours, / May the fluency of the ocean be yours, / May the protection of the ancestors be yours. // And so may a slow / Wind work these words / Of love around you, / An invisible cloak / To mind your life.”