Anam Cara

FOREWORD By Krista Tippett

In the fall of 2007, I spent three hours in conversation with John O’Donohue in my studio in St. Paul. It was an incomparably intense, pleasurable and vast experience. I would say to friends later that it was as though this man had five answers for every question—five layers of thinking for each of his geologic layers of personality: the poet in him, the philosopher, the theologian, the Irish bard and the splendid, searching, openly ragged-around-the-edges human being. He was not easy to edit for the radio hour.

After the turn of that year, just as we prepared to put his voice on the air, word came that John had died. I found his death hard to comprehend. He was one of the most alive beings I had encountered. I could not imagine his absence from the world. And now the conversation I had with him became intertwined with his passing. It was how many learned he had died. It aired in Los Angeles just as a group of John’s close friends were en route to a gathering to remember him. The timing was uncanny, they said, and yet somehow perfectly in character: as though John had invited himself to his own memorial service and made sure it was lit by his passion and poetry and joy.

This book you now hold in your hands is a treasure. Since I discovered its original Ireland edition, it has rarely left my side. It is John’s voice with us anew and as always and again, as I encountered him, in the sacramental acts he made of thinking and conversing. It is beautifully woven of John ruminating with his dear friend John Quinn. It is sprinkled with his blessings and his poetry and even wise reflections he made on the aging he never really got to. Page after page illustrates John’s insistence that “all thinking that is imbued with wonder is graceful and gracious thinking.”

This book appears to us, though, in a transfigured moment in the life of the world. John’s diagnosis of our estrangement from the loved ones and strangers with whom we share our lives and our lands directly addresses our unfolding century. “The media,” he writes, “is essentially like Plato’s Cave—a parade of shadows that we take for the real world. It is a huge abstraction from what is real.” This was as true in his lifetime as it is in ours, but most of us were not yet ready to grapple as openly as we now must with its consequences.

Likewise, we are perhaps more ready now to take in John’s wisdom that life together is an existential and spiritual calling more than it is a political one. Fear, he reminds us in a fearful season, derives its power from the fragility of the human heart. It is “negative wonder”—“the point at which wonder begins to consume itself and scrape off the essence of things.”

I hear all the time how John’s voice in many forms continues to walk with far-flung humans through despair and illness and healing and renewal—helping us, in his gorgeous way with words, cross those thresholds more worthily. In death, John O’Donohue has made real the mysterious, vital interplay he taught in his life, between the material and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible worlds. This book deepens the miracle of his presence that is only becoming more vivid and more necessary.