Product Title:
To Bless the Space Between Us: A Collection of Invocations & Blessings
- ISBN13: 9781591796312
- Condition: New
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Description:
When we stand before crucial thresholds in our lives, “asks a poet & philosopher John O’Donohue,” where can we turn for guidance & protection? “On To Bless the Space Between Us, he shares words of wisdom & encouragement for us traverse such crossings help. Universal for seven levels – Beginnings, requirements, thresholds, Homecomings, States of the Heart, appeals, & Beyond Endings – O ‘ Donohue delivers with uncommon clarity & lyrical beauty of a series of invocations & blessings for daily grace & contemplation. To illuminate “means the presence of the geography of new worlds,” he calls the ever-present help of God, which will lead us beyond our borders . For it is true, if we are on the demand of the experience, “O’Donohue assured that” we are faithful into God. “bless In the tradition of his classic Anam Cara (Harper, 1998), the Space Between Us is an earthy eloquence & resonance of this incomparable master of the Celtic consciousness offered – features listeners an atmospheric & thought-provoking collection, ignited a passionate heart. Music by the renowned Irish harpist Áine Minogue.
John O’Donohue died peacefully in his sleep on 8 January this year. He was working on a book about the late medieval mystic Meister Eckhart. Hopefully it was ready enough to justify a posthumous publication. In the meantime, his To Bless the Space Between Us O’Donohue’s farewell gift.
The book is a collection of blessings. This does not necessarily sound too exciting, until one realizes the deep-down sense, a blessing, and O’Donohue’s introduction provides some clues. In our overly busy culture, he writes, we often pause to consider race over the “critical thresholds in our lives” without the game, take on their meaning. We no longer have “rituals to protect, promote, and guide us as we cross into the unknown XIV” (S.). A blessing is just one of those protection, promotion and maintenance of rituals. It memorialize our transitions, connecting us with a larger community (as none of us really ever travels alone), and is committed to “a minimal psychological portrait of the geography change name” (ibid.).
Blessings, all are important. They serve to orient ourselves in our life, create community with fellow travelers, and remember what we too often forget: that we are pilgrims, not random walker.
There are It all kind of threshold that leads to new stages of the journey, O’Donohue has all kinds of blessings: Thresholds for the obvious such as birthdays, parenthood, adulthood, old age and death, written for the internal thresholds of courage, pain, addiction , suffering, loneliness, because the thresholds of vocations to the priesthood, marriage, agriculture, and for the thresholds that can meet our longing for love, peace and friendship to us. Some of us are the blessings O’Donohue are breathtakingly beautiful, others not so much. As he himself admits, blessings are difficult things to write. You are not poems, because they are not slanted, but are direct addresses “driven by immediacy and care.” But they are not completely unpoetic, either, because in their immediacy, they must also evocative.
O’Donohue’s passing, since it is not bad, a bit of a quote of his best and haunting blessings (p. 72): “For death.”
From the moment you were born in,
Her death has walked beside you.
Although it rarely shows its face,
You still feel his touch empty
When fear invades your life,
or what you love is
lost or internal damage is incurred. . .
The silent presence of death
would make your life carefully,
wake you how your time is short and
the urgency to
And immediately the call is exempt from your fate.
that you would gather to decide
And, carefully
; How do you now live
The life that you look like
To return to
From his deathbed.
Rating: 5.5
“Endings seem to lie in wait,” wrote John O’Donohue. His say. He died in his sleep, 3rd January 2008, on vacation near Avignon. He was just 53rd
I met John O’Donohue only once. I had read Anam Cara: The Book of Celtic Wisdom, the book in 1997, which made him famous and rightly so. “Read” is wrong. At 100 words per minute I had to grasp for weeks, enough of this deceptively simple exploration of “soul friendship” that here was an original thinker, a talented poet and most amazing of all, a philosopher, a way had forged absorbs view of the world that was painfully aware of human weakness, but persistently on the triumphal power of divine love. And he wrote beautifully.
A book this exciting, you have to talk about it. I mentioned O’Donohue Sarah Ban Breathnach, author of the Oprah-anointed Simple Moving On and frequency. As luck would have it, they were friends and O’Donohue. And when he came through New York, Sarah generously arranged a dinner.
That night I learned to drink single malt was. And was it ever had a better teacher in the art of sipping worn as an Irish philosopher and mystic, the collar for 19 years? I do not remember what we talked about it, and neither can my wife do not drink, I remember only the cascades of laughter, the unbuckled happiness of people who are excited to be alive and together, and sharing good community with sympathetic souls in a nice restaurant on a rainy night in New York.
An evening like so rare that I think it is a religious experience. John O’Donohue, a holy man if ever there was one, had a lot of nights Sun A recent interviewer wrote, in memoriam, about one morning when O’Donohue came to breakfast with a hangover after a whole bottle of single malt polished with friends the night before. “The bottle is not dead,” he announced, “without spiritual necessity.”
The impromptu remark was quintessential O’Donohue. He has never missed the secular with the sacred — and see everything as sacred to connect. As a writer and a man, he remembered the priest, who was a friend of Proust’s. Yes, he thought it was hell. But he did not believe no one went.
Where do our deepest beliefs come from? Generally from childhood, and then not say what our parents and teachers, but from what they do and who they are. In John O’Donohue’s case, his mother was the family’s loving heart. His father was a stonemason and farmer — and O’Donohue, thought the “holiest man I’ve ever met, priests included.” Sometimes the boy would bring tea to his father as he worked the fields. Often heard him pray the young John — — before he saw him.
O’Donohue had a superlative education, earned a Ph.D. in philosophical theology at the University of Tübingen, was known as an expert on Hegel and later Master Eckhart. As a priest, he loved the church sacramental structure and its mystical and spiritual traditions. He also loved writing. Finally, this unofficial bishop has to choose him. “The best decision I ever made to become a priest,” O’Donohue said would, years later, “and I think the second best decision was eliminated from public priestly ministry.”
In fact, he had his issues with Catholicism, especially his views about sex and women. The church, he said, “is not trustworthy in the field of Eros at all.” And it “has a pathological fear of women — it rather be a priest, as it would allow women to become priests to marry.”
He was just as hard on other denominations. Religious fundamentalists, said he, “will only lead back to you, driven by nostalgia for a past that never existed to manipulate, and control …. [your] God tends to a monolith and an emperor of the Blandest singularity. “New Age spirituality, he felt, was a smorgasbord, and undisciplined. Not that he found any comfort in secular life. He scorned the mall, folk feared for the mental health of young and had a particular aversion to the media, “unelected guardians of sensationalism.”
His rock and his faith were the ” Celtic imagination, “which, he said,” represents a vision of the Divine, where no one or nothing is excluded. ” The blend he created was pure joy: “I think the divine is like a big smile that breaks into the sea somewhere in you, and gradually comes up again.”
O ‘Donohue was no Pollyanna. He was deeply happen through bad things to good people worried. But he also saw that “a lot of pain just getting rid of scabies in himself is himself, and linger and hang in the darkness is often — I say this against myself — a failure of imagination, imagine the door into the Light. “
So it makes sense that O’Donohue’s last book would be nothing more than invocations and blessings — a simple, How-To Guide that brings, in fact, to pray him back to his father in the fields. The fact that we live, we are blessed by the light that shines in our hearts, we have the power to bless others and be blessed by it. Is there a pure, elemental form of the divine in action?
He asks: What is a blessing? His first answer is formal, and expected: “A blessing is a circle of light to protect a person, pull, heal and strengthen.” But then the poetry enters: “It is a gracious invocation where the human heart pleads with the divine heart.” And then there’s the magical factor: “When a blessing is invoked, a window opens, into the eternal time.”
We need the life of the other effects in this spiritual path, he writes, because the process of life in a post-industrial, media flooded the world takes us further from our innate wholeness. Only direct action can be contrary to the distance. Fortunately, it takes no special training to bless each other. It’s just a question of the Assembly itself — and finding words.
In “To Bless the Space Between Us”, the poet in O’Donohue seeks, the bonds of to break dead language. He offers fresh blessings, and overlooked on issues that the church could only — not for a new home, marriage and child, but for the parents, a criminal, for parents who have lost a child, for those whose exile , loneliness and failure.
These blessings look hardship in the face, but only as a challenge. In our souls, and especially in our hearts, O’Donohue believed, we are all home. We have never left, we never will. How hard it is to keep this thought. And yet, if we take care of others in our hearts, something happens. . . . .
You can not be a problem with the language of O’Donohue outright blessing. I do. Perhaps it is only a writer discomfort with another writer words. But the invocations that dot the book — my God, this man could write! Just one example: inflamed
“Our longing for the eternal our imagination to bless. Regardless of how we configure the eternal, is the human heart, from a state of wholeness dream the place where everything comes together, where the loss will be compensated, where blindness is in sight, if the damage is quite done, turn where the clenched question if the effort of the life journey is a return to open the house to enjoy the surprise. This call a blessing, is a part of that whole person on a call now. “
Death was nothing to John O’Donohue — a silent friend who walks beside us all our days. And on the other side? “I believe that our friends among the dead really mind us and look for us,” he wrote. “Often there may be a big boulder of misery will bring over your way on to you, but your friends among the dead hold him back until you have passed through.”
Let it be.
Rating: 5.5
The Mystery works in powerful ways by John O’Donohue but never so eloquently as in this exquisite collection of blessing, even for aspects of life, for which we do not usually want or support can not find words. When he speaks of these transitions, I find it remarkable that this was his last work, published after his sudden death. Those of us who love to find John consolation in his acceptance speech on the sanctity of every aspect of life. He has a job to continue to bless and reach us in both celebration and darkest of hours left. To hear his voice, complements the explosive nature of these blessings.
Rating: 5.5
After you with the sweet, but very strong Irish English by John O’Donohue used to feel the warmth in your heart that you are looking for. to transcend all his blessing to this place at your soul longs for, it is spoken classical music.
Rating: 5.5
I have this book in book and CD formats. What a gift to our spirits! His brilliance and depth of understanding of the heart and mind is incomparable! For those who are ministers, there are a lot of inspiration for sermons / sermons in this book. There are blessings in various rites of passage, as can also be integrated. He brings to light how little we each other and the positive difference it would make, if we would bless. He is the soul of a friend to all that his work is read. I recommend this book. I will be buying more copies of this book, and Anam Cara (John O’Donohue also).
Rating: 5.5