Anam Cara

“This volume is a testament to the timelessness of John O’Donohue’s wisdom. His words are not only inspirational to those of us catalyzing substantive social change but compel us to consider how we nurture, support and thrive amidst chaos.”

—Rev. Diane J. Johnson, PhD, national interfaith and social justice activist, and founder and president of Mmapeu Management Consulting

Copyright © 2015 by The John O’Donohue Legacy Partnership and John Quinn

Foreword copyright © 2018 by Krista Tippett

“Dawn Mass” copyright © 1992 by John O’Donohue

“Balance” copyright © 1992 by John O’Donohue

“The Journey—for John O’Donohue” and “Envoi” copyright © 2015 by John Quinn

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Convergent Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

convergentbooks.com

CONVERGENT BOOKS is a registered trademark and its C colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

Originally published in hardcover and in slightly different form in Ireland by Veritas Publications, Dublin, in 2015.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: O’Donohue, John, 1956–2008. author. | Quinn, John, 1941– author.

Title: Walking in wonder: eternal wisdom for a modern world / John O’Donohue and John Quinn.

Description: New York: Penguin Random House, 2018.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018012916 (print) | LCCN 2018038223 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525575290 (e-book) | ISBN 9780525575283 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Spirituality. | Mysticism.

Classification: LCC B105.S64 (ebook) | LCC B105.S64 O358 2018 (print) | DDC 242—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018012916

ISBN 9780525575283

Ebook ISBN 9780525575290

Cover design by Sarah Horgan

Cover and chapter opener illustration by Mikhail Zyablov/Shutterstock

Cover photograph by mammuth/E+/Getty Images

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword

INTRODUCTION

WONDER

MEISTER ECKHART

LANDSCAPE

ABSENCE

DAWN MASS

BALANCE

AGING

DEATH

POSTSCRIPT

AFTERWORD

IN MEMORIAM

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

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.”