Anam Cara

IN MEMORIAM

The story is silent until the word is spoken and witnessed, and becomes flesh so that it can be touched, felt and lived. The word germinates in the seductiveness of the dark until conversation tempts it towards the dawn where the sun illuminates and gives witness and seeing. Then, we, the human participants in the ongoing act of creation, can enable it to become flesh and live amongst us. As this journey escalates, the arms of the outstretching Word embrace the entire world.

John O’Donohue’s life cannot be encompassed within the one act of birth, life and death. He was not a finite act that existed and is now lost for evermore. He is a story that is written and spoken and lives amongst us. Just as we are and continue to be.

His themes of echo as the response of continuity, imagination as the ability to still see the mountain behind the mist, and absence as the transformed presence of the vanished awaken our thinking and provide food for our spiritual journey in an increasingly hungry world.

One of the questions that John loved to pose was: “When was your last great conversation with someone?” Good conversation is the enemy of falsity, facade and shallowness. It chases the truth of things, it demolishes the flimsy foundation of facade and it penetrates the depths so as to soar into unfolding possibility. When things stay separate and isolated they stiffen into the act of surviving, whereas when they have a conversation with each other they begin to live as the artists of their own destiny.

The moment that two questioning minds and hearts meet in really great conversation, a portal opens into immensely exciting possibility.

So it is with this beautiful presentation by John Quinn: he tempts the reader to join him in a really great conversation with John O’Donohue. He introduces the conversation with a wonderful memory and weaves together some of John’s favorite themes into a beautiful flow of mystical unfolding. The two Johns shared a wonderful thirst to sup from the chalice of imagination, which allows a different lens with which we can view all that is given. Whether in a bar, a radio station or an office or up a mountain, all these places were made sacred because of their meeting; “For where two or three meet in my name, I shall be there with them” (Matthew 18:20).

There is a wonderful freshness of spontaneity and chance about these encounters, yet John Quinn skillfully interlaces these conversations into a beautiful pattern.

On a personal note I must say that when not up a mountain, if you could sit my brother in a dimly lit pub with a pint and a cigar and inadvertently present the well-sculpted question, then you would be carried into the surprise of the unfolding, unstemmable flow.

John used to always advise me to write down or record all the wonderful statements made by my children when they were discovering language as a means of expression. He would explain how they had come from the other world into our dimension and how their memory of that world had not yet faded, so the color of their statements was an echo of memory of the place from which they were given to us!

Because I am here,

Where is it that I am absent from?

—John O’Donohue

Not alone should I have recorded them, I should also have recorded him!

As I look at my desk I see that I have the dictionary, the Bible and Benedictus open for help, yet my eye is drawn out the window to the landscape, which was such a profound inspiration for John. It led him to the wonderful recognition of the “inner landscape,” and so the magic began.

This wonderful book by John Quinn contains a lot of unpublished material and two beautiful poems by his own hand, which celebrate my brother and mourn his passing. The section on “Dawn Mass” was an impromptu recording and just happened by chance—if there is such a thing! I think that if you can be present to the wonder of the heart, it always knows the secret and can lead us to the “where” and “when,” and then we introduce the “why” and call it “chance.” Thanks to John Quinn just being there, we have become witnesses to something magical.

The Eucharist was so special for John O’Donohue, and he had such a tremendous reverence and attraction towards Corcomroe Abbey in Clare. Here he led the most amazing “conversation in God” involving humans, nature and the dawn, in the presence of “the spirits of those who lived and prayed here for centuries.” It is a Eucharist of almost tangible healing and light. Then towards the end of his homily is that sentence that put everything in perspective:

We were sent here to search for the light of Easter in our hearts, and when we find it we are meant to give it away generously.

As you travel this Burren valley of John’s birth, the road meanders parallel to the river, guiding you out into the world as the river carries its blessing to the sea. Of course, just as the river enables the salmon to swim back up at their time, so too does the road take you back up away from it all, or as John used to say, “You can get in out of it.”

Either way, as you travel this path and you look up at the sides of the valley as they climb to the horizon, all you can see is barren limestone speckled with green. The mind wonders how life could be sustained here, but if you could be guided by the wonder of the heart and you took a chance to cross the wall (without knocking it!) and climb, you could be starting a pilgrimage. Hidden in the fissured face of the mountain are surprising shelves of green showing to the sky, which sustain and nourish the animals over the bleak winter. Here you can gaze and graze in these wondrous pastures and the conversation begins. In this awakening you realize that, having tasted the mountains, nibbling at the sides of the path will satisfy you no longer.

May we learn to return

And rest in the beauty

Of animal being,

Learn to lean low,

Leave our locked minds,

And with freed senses

Feel the earth

Breathing with us.

From “To Learn from Animal Being,” To Bless the Space Between Us

Pat O’Donohue

(John’s brother)