Anam Cara

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.

INTRODUCTION

When John O’Donohue died suddenly in January 2008, he left a deep void in the hearts and minds of many people. For more than a decade prior to his death, his writings, talks and broadcasts had done much to feed the “unprecedented spiritual hunger” that he had observed in modern society. His books on Celtic spirituality were bestsellers; his broadcasts and talks tapped into the needs of the sizable audiences that tuned into them.

Over a period of five years I was privileged to work with John on a variety of radio programs. We climbed Máméan mountain in Connemara for “This Place Speaks to Me.” We discussed Meister Eckhart as his choice of “Millennium Minds.” We explored aging and death for the series “L Plus.” We spoke about wonder for “The Open Mind,” and John delivered the 1997 Open Mind Guest Lecture on the theme of absence. Our loss of John is tempered by the legacy of these broadcasts and I am indebted to Veritas for making them available in print and to RTÉ for originally broadcasting them, as well as to John’s family. I have interspersed between the sections some of John’s “Blessings” from his book To Bless the Space Between Us.

Wonder, imagination and possibility were John’s great concerns, and he articulated them in his own inimitable lyrical style. The rich flow of his language—cadences, rhythms, colloquial flavoring—were a large part of John’s attraction to his radio audience. This poses a dilemma, however, when translating radio programs into print. Do you edit transcripts heavily—almost rewrite them—to accommodate the print medium? Or do you leave them relatively intact, faithful to the original? We have opted for the latter, in the belief that John’s words still sing off the page. We hope that you, the reader, will concur.

Whatever the medium, there are great riches here—the product of a brilliant mind, a mind that never stopped striving to advance the frontiers of possibility.

John Quinn

WONDER

“So many people are frightened by the wonder of their own presence.”

In 1997, I devised a summer series for RTÉ Radio—“Webs of Wonder.” Each program would comprise moments of wonder—archive pieces, poetry, music—but I also needed some philosophical pieces to act as the threads that held the web together. So I went to John O’Donohue. We met in the bar of a hotel in Kinvara, Co. Galway, and talked for an hour about many aspects of wonder—imagination, transience, landscape. In the course of the conversation, John came up with the lovely phrase that gave me the title for this book—“the pastures of wonder.” It was a quiet evening in the bar. Nobody disturbed the recording. Just two fellows chatting in the corner of a bar. It was wonderful. Wonder-ful.

GATEWAYS TO WONDER