To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings

I have this item in book and CD formats. What a gift to our spirits! His brilliance and depth of understanding of the heart and spirit are incomparable! For those who are ministers, there's a lot of inspiration for sermons/homilies in this book. There are blessings that can be incorporated into various rites of passage, as well. He brings to light how little we bless each other and the positive difference it would make if we would. He is the soul friend of everyone who's read his works. I highly recommend this book. I'll be buying several more copies of this book as well as Anam Cara (also by John O'Donohue).

After getting used to the sweet but very strong Irish English of John O'Donohue you feel the warmth in your heart that you were always looking for. All his blessings transcend to that place your soul longs for; it's classical music spoken.

John O'Donohue died peacefully in his sleep on January 8 of this year. He was working on a book on the late medieval mystic Meister Eckhart. Hopefully, enough of it was completed to warrant a posthumous publication. In the meantime, his To Bless the Space Between Us is O'Donohue's parting gift. The book is a collection of blessings. That doesn't necessarily sound too exciting until one recognizes the deep-down meaning of a blessing, and O'Donohue's introduction provides some guidance. In our overly busy culture, he writes, we frequently race over the "crucial thresholds in our life" without pausing to take note of their significance. We no longer have "rituals to protect, encourage, and guide us as we cross over into the unknown" (p. xiv). A blessing is precisely one of those protecting, encouraging, and guiding rituals. It memorializes our transitions, connects us with a wider community (since none of us really ever travels alone), and strives to "present a minimal psychic portrait of the geography of change it names" (ibid). Blessings, then, are all-important. They serve to orient us in our life's journey, establish fellowship with fellow travelers, and remind us of what we too often forget: that we are pilgrims, not haphazard wanderers. Because there are all kinds of thresholds that lead to new stages of the journey, O'Donohue has written all kinds of blessings: for obvious thresholds such as birthdays, parenthood, adulthood, old age, and death; for interior thresholds such as courage, grief, addiction, suffering, loneliness; for the thresholds of callings to the priesthood, marriage, farming; and for the thresholds that our yearnings for love, peace, and friendship can nudge us towards. Some of the blessings O'Donohue gives us are breath-takingly beautiful; others, not so much. As he himself confesses, blessings are difficult things to write. They're not poems, because they're not oblique, but rather are direct addresses "driven by immediacy and care." Yet they're not utterly unpoetic, either, because in their immediacy they must also be evocative. Given O'Donohue's passing, it's not amiss to quote a bit of one of his most beautiful and haunting blessings (p. 72): "For Death." From the moment you were born, Your death has walked beside you. Though it seldom shows its face, You still feel its empty touch When fear invades your life, Or what you love is lost Or inner damage is incurred... That the silent presence of your death Would call your life to attention, Wake you up to how scarce your time is And to the urgency to become free And equal to the call of your destiny. That you would gather yourself And decide carefully How you now can live The life you would love To look back on From your deathbed.

"Endings seem to lie in wait," John O'Donohue wrote. His certainly did. He died in his sleep, January 3, 2008, on vacation near Avignon. He was just 53. I met John O'Donohue only once. I had read Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom, the 1997 book that made him deservedly famous. "Read" is wrong. At 100 words a minute, I had, over weeks, absorbed enough of this deceptively simple exploration of "soul friendship" to grasp that here was an original thinker, a gifted poet and, most astonishing of all, a philosopher who had forged a way of looking at the world that was painfully aware of human frailty but insistent 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 to Sarah Ban Breathnach, the author of the Oprah-annointed Simple Abundance and Moving On. As luck would have it, she and O'Donohue were friends. And when he came through New York, Sarah generously arranged a dinner. That was the night I learned to drink single malt. And was there ever a better teacher in the art of sipping than an Irish philosopher and mystic who had worn the collar for 19 years? I don't recall what we talked about, and neither can my wife, who does not drink; all I remember is the cascades of laughter, the unbuckled happiness of people who are thrilled to be alive, and together, and sharing good fellowship with sympathetic souls in a nice restaurant on a rainy New York night. An evening like that is so rare I think of it as a religious experience. John O'Donohue, a holy man if ever there was one, had a lot of nights like that. A recent interviewer wrote, in memoriam, about a morning when O'Donohue came to breakfast with a hangover, having polished off an entire bottle of single malt with friends the night before. "The bottle didn't die," he announced, "without spiritual necessity." That offhand remark was quintessential O'Donohue. He never failed to connect the worldly with the sacred --- and see it all as holy. As a writer and a man, he reminded me of the priest who was a friend of Proust's. Yes, he believed there was a Hell. But he didn't believe anyone went there. Where do our deepest beliefs come from? Generally from childhood, and then not from what our parents and teachers say, but from what they do and who they are. In John O'Donohue's case, his mother was the family's loving center. His father was a stonemason and farmer --- and, O'Donohue thought, the "holiest man I ever met, priests included." Sometimes the boy would bring tea to his father as he worked the fields. Often, young John heard him --- praying --- before he saw him. O'Donohue had a superlative education, earned a Ph.D. in philosophical theology from the University of Tubingen, became known as an expert on Hegel and, later, Meister Eckhart. As a priest, he loved the Church's sacramental structure and its mystical and intellectual traditions. He also loved writing. Eventually, an officious bishop made him choose.

The Mystery works in powerful ways through John O'Donohue but never more so eloquently than in this exquisite collection of blessings, even for aspects of life for which we typically don't seek support or can't find words. As 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 John will find solace in his acceptance of the sacredness of every aspect of life. He has left a work that will continue to bless and reach us in both celebration and the darkest of hours. To hear his voice adds to the poignancy of these blessings.