Books

Go to the archives

John O’Donohue: Our Friend Among the Dead

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Mar 24, 2024
Category: Spirituality

“Endings seem to lie in wait,” John O’Donohue wrote. His certainly did. He died in his sleep, January 4, 2008, on vacation near Avignon. He was just 53.

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. [To buy the paperback of “Anam Cara” from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]

A book this exciting, you have to talk about it. I mentioned O’Donohue to my friend Sarah Ban Breathnach, the author of the Oprah-annointed Simple Abundance. 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; 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. An 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 best decision I ever made was to become a priest,” O’Donohue would say, years later, “and I think the second best decision was to resign from public priestly ministry.”

So, yes, he was learned, but even more, he was human. Please watch the first three minutes of this.

He had his issues with Catholicism, especially its views on sex and women. The Church, he said, “is not trustable in the area of Eros at all.” And it “has a pathological fear of the feminine — it would sooner allow priests to marry than it would allow women to become priests.” He was just as hard on other denominations. Religious fundamentalists “only want to lead you back, driven by nostalgia for a past that never existed, to manipulate and control you…. [Their] God tends to be a monolith and an emperor of the blandest singularity.” New Age spirituality, he felt, was a smorgasbord, and undisciplined. Not that he found any comfort in secular life. He scorned the mall, feared for the spiritual health of the young, and had a special dislike for media folk, “non-elected custodians of sensationalism.”

You get the idea: a man of great learning who didn’t get caught in the web of the the mind. His real wisdom came from the heart. Like this…

It is strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you alone. Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits. A world lives within you. No one else can bring you news of this inner world. Through the opening of the mouth, we bring out sounds from the mountain beneath the soul. These sounds are words. The world is full of words. There are so many talking all the time, loudly, in rooms, on streets, on television, on radio, in the paper, in books. The noise of words keeps what we call the world there for us. We take each other’s sounds and make patterns, predictions, benedictions, and blasphemies. Each day, our tribe of language holds what we call the world together. Yet the uttering of the word reveals how each of us relentlessly creates. Everyone is an artist. Each person brings sound out of silence and coaxes the invisible to become visible.

I cherish O’Donohue because he was completely fixated on Important Things. Forget his dazzling metaphors (if you can). Look only at what he has to say. And there, if you’re like me, you’ll find yourself underlining sentence after sentence, nodding and thinking “Yes, yes, I’ve thought this — I didn’t believe anyone else did.”

What’s the O’Donohue message?

As I get it, it’s that the world is magical and that we are the expressions of its magic. We’re part heaven, part clay. And the first thing we need to do is integrate our duality by going inside and listening to ourselves. That means turning away from the world. It means listening carefully to our inner voices. He quotes Pasternak: “When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it.”

O’Donohue suggests that the way to sharpen your spiritual senses is through “Anam Cara,” or soul friendship. That means forging affinities with those who are open to deep soul sharing. It’s friendship without boundaries: “The Celtic understanding did not set limitations of space or time on the soul. The soul is a divine light that flows into you and into your Other.” You need a friend who can handle a friendship that intimate, O’Donohue says. And, of course, you need to have that friendship with yourself. In his words:

In the Celtic tradition, there is a beautiful understanding of love and friendship. One of the fascinating ideas here is the idea of soul-love; the old Gaelic term for this is anam cara. Anam is the Gaelic word for soul and cara is the word for friend. So anam cara in the Celtic world was the “soul friend.” In the early Celtic church, a person who acted as a teacher, companion, or spiritual guide was called an anam cara. It originally referred to someone to whom you confessed, revealing the hidden intimacies of your life. With the anam cara you could share your inner-most self, your mind and your heart. This friendship was an act of recognition and belonging. When you had an anam cara, your friendship cut across all convention, morality, and category. You were joined in an ancient and eternal way with the “friend of your soul.” The Celtic understanding did not set limitations of space or time on the soul. There is no cage for the soul. The soul is a divine light that flows into you and into your Other. This art of belonging awakened and fostered a deep and special companionship.

Death was nothing to John O’Donohue — a silent friend who walks beside us all our days. And on the other side? “I believe that our friends among the dead really mind us and look out for us,” he wrote. “Often there might be a big boulder of misery over your path about to fall on you, but your friends among the dead hold it back until you have passed by.”

“Your friends among the dead….” What a phrase!  what an idea!