COMMENTARY: Celtic wisdom alive and well in John O’Donohue

c. 1997 Religion News Service (Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com, or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.) UNDATED _ As a regular consumer of the genre, I am dismayed by the […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com, or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

UNDATED _ As a regular consumer of the genre, I am dismayed by the lack of solid spiritual reading with which to begin my day.


Despite the current”spirituality”fads and the masses of books about allegedly spiritual matters, there is little challenging reading to orient one toward the problems and possibilities of the day. One must choose among pop psychology, occult mumbo-jumbo, shallow liturgical reflections, vacuous purple prose, and simplistic fundamentalist responses to the vagaries of the human condition.

I usually limit my morning reading to the Scriptures (can’t go wrong there!) and poets who tend to have rich insight into the human condition.

Recently, however, I have discovered a spiritual writer whose wisdom and depth of insight suggest that he is well on his way to becoming one of the master practitioners of the trade.

John O’Donohue is a Roman Catholic scholar from County Galway in Ireland and the author of”Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom”(HarperCollins). This book is required reading for those needing a re-articulation of traditional spiritual wisdom in terms suitable for the current state of the human condition.

I began to read”Anam Cara”one chapter each day. Then I slowed to a section, then a couple of pages. Now I read one paragraph a day. I read slowly not because O’Donohue’s writing is opaque but because it is luminous. Solidly grounded in psychology and in theology (his work focuses on the medieval theologian Meister Eckhart), O’Donohue also brings the talents of a poet to his task.

Sample:”Time is eternity living dangerously.””Is there a soul inside the body?”he asks. Not at all. The body is within the soul. Through the soul the body extends itself through time and space in knowledge and love. The soul is the body reaching out to others and to eternity.

Paradoxical writing? Or just Celtic wisdom?

Celtic wisdom is essentially a wisdom that respects the rhythms of nature as well as those of the human organism. One will find in”Anam Cara”none of the self-hatred and abnegation that posed as spirituality when many of us were younger. There is not a trace of the”I am a worm and no man”stuff that we never really believed but still had a subtle and pernicious effect on our self-respect and attitudes toward the human condition.


In the Celtic worldview, we must treat ourselves gently, tenderly, sympathetically. The Spirit speaks to our spirit through the whole human person.

Celticism is big these days: There is something wonderful and romantic about those remnants of another era who live along the fringes of Europe (and in a few scattered places all over the world, such as Queens County, N.Y., and Cook County, Ill.).

In fact, genetic research on European populations has shown that beneath the overlay of later invaders there is a solid base of Celtic genes. Northern Italians are, for example, fundamentally Celtic (a finding that greatly amused the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin).

But a clear memory of the past has survived and, especially in Ireland, there is also an eagerness to retrieve it. The new generation of Irish spiritual teachers (including such gifted musicians as Father Liam Lawton) examine their creative imaginations and find Celtic antiquity still there. Then they engage in formal study of that cultural memory to strengthen and understand it better.

For us Celts in diaspora, Celtic wisdom is alive and well and even advertised in The New York Times Book Review, a hint of the richness of John O’Donohue’s work.

This is the paragraph I read today:”The ocean is one of the delights for the human eye. The seashore is a theater of fluency. When the mind is entangled, it is soothing to walk by the seashore, to let the rhythm of the ocean inside you. The ocean disentangles the netted mind. Everything loosens and comes back to itself. The false divisions are relieved, released, and healed. Yet the ocean never actually sees itself. Even light, which enables us to see everything, cannot see itself; light is blind. In Haydn’s Creation it is the vocation of man and woman to celebrate and complete creation.”


MJP END GREELEY

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