"You are as young as you feel.
If you begin to feel the warmth of your soul,
there will be a youthfulness in you
that no one will be able to take away from you."
– John O’Donohue, Ph.D.

The Power of "Soul Friendship"
Maireid Sullivan
Melbourne, Australia
16 May 2008

Irish poet, former priest, Hegelian philosopher, and advocate for social justice, John O'Donohue sought 'intimations' and manifestations of beauty, finding it in music and movement, as well as in imperfection and death. His post-doctoral dissertation on the German mystic and Dominican theologian, Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) led to his explorations on the history of the melding of ancient Irish spiritual traditions with pre-Augustinian Christian precepts in Celtic Christianity and his discovery of the traditional concept of Anam Chara, "Soul Friend" in the Gaelic branch of Proto-Celtic languages (Nora Chadwick, The Celts, 1970); the traditional role of spiritual companionship, where we enable each other to recover from past relationship disappointments by resolving to strengthen our spiritual insight through truthfulness. His first book "Anam Cara" (1997), became an international Best Seller:

"When you cease to fear your solitude, a new creativity awakens in you. Your forgotten or neglected wealth begins to reveal itself. You come home to yourself and learn to rest within. Thoughts are our inner senses. Infused with silence and solitude, they bring out the mystery of inner landscape."
– John O'Donohue, Anam Cara, 1997, p. 17

John O'Donohue shared the source of his insight in his recorded lecture series, Anam Cara: Wisdom from the Celtic World,

"According to Celtic tradition, the soul shines all around the body like a luminous cloud. When you are very open - appreciative and trusting - with another person, your two souls flow together. This deeply felt bond with another person means you have found an Anam Cara, or "soul friend." Your Anam Cara always beholds your light and beauty, and accepts you for who you truly are. In Celtic spirituality, the Anam Cara friendship awakens the fullness and mystery of your life. You are joined in an ancient and eternal union with humanity that cuts across all barriers of time, convention, philosophy and definition. When you are blessed with an Anam Cara you have arrived at the most sacred place: home."

One of several memorial services around the world, the Melbourne gathering, on 16 April, 2008, featured music and a visual presentation of readings and recitations by John O’donahue, followed by recitations and testaments from the gathering of friends.

With gratitude to the Brigidine Sisters, and the Kildare Centre, Malvern, for welcoming our celebration of 'reverent alliances' and, especially, in reminding us of the legendary testaments on Brigid of Kildare’s own life which celebrate her sense of traditional Irish hospitality: interacting with the stranger, to change and be changed - something very much in keeping with John O'Donohue’s interpretation of 'soul friendship' as so touchingly expressed in all of his writings.

The Call to Beauty
– John O'Donohue, (2005), Beauty: The Invisible Embrace
Chapter1
. . . In Greek the word for ‘the beautiful’ is to kalon.
It is related to the word kalein which includes the notion of ‘call’. When we experience beauty, we feel called. The Beautiful stirs passion and urgency in us and calls us forth from aloneness into the warmth and wonder of an eternal embrace. It unites us again with the neglected and forgotten grandeur of life. The call of beauty is not a cold call into the dark or the unknown; in some instinctive way we know that beauty is no stranger. We respond with joy to the call of beauty because in an instant it can awaken under the layers of the heart a forgotten brightness. Plato said: ‘Beauty was ours in all its brightness… Whole were we who celebrated that festival (Phaedrus).' - page 23

P. 24
Even amidst chaos and disorder, something in the human mind continues still to seek beauty. From our very first moments in the world we seem to be on a quest for beauty. The first thing the new infant sees is the human face. That sighting affects us deeply; for instinctively we seek shelter, confirmation and belonging in the face of the mother. We cannot remember that time; but most of us spent endless hours of our early time simply gazing up into the face of the mother. No other subsequent image in the world will ever rival the significance of the face. The lives of those we know, need and love all dwell behind faces.

pp.26-27
There are times when life seems little more than a matter of struggle and endurance, when difficulty and disappointment form a crust around the heart. Because it can be deeply hurt, the heart hardens. There are corners in every heart which are utterly devoid of illusion, places where we know and remember the nature of devastation. Yet though the music of the heart may grow faint, there is in each of us an unprotected place that beauty can always reach out and touch. It was Blaise Pascal who said: In difficult times you should always carry something beautiful in your mind.
Rilke said that during such times we should endeavour to stay close to one simple thing in nature. When the mind is festering with trouble or the heart torn, we can find healing among the silence of mountains or fields, or listen to the simple, steadying rhythm of waves. The slowness and stillness gradually takes us over. Our breathing deepens and our hearts calm and our hungers relent. When serenity is restored, new perspectives open to us and difficulty can begin to seem like an invitation to new growth. … Rather than taking us out of ourselves, nature coaxes us deeper inwards, teaches us to rest in the serenity of our elemental nature. When we go out among nature, clay is returning to clay. We are returning to participate in the stillness of the earth which first dreamed us. This stillness is rich and fecund. One might think that an invitation to enter into the stillness of nature is merely naive romanticism that likes to indulge itself and escape from the cut and thrust of life into some narcissistic cocoon. This invitation to friendship with nature does of course entail a willingness to be alone out there. Yet this aloneness is anything but lonely. Solitude gradually clarifies the heart until a true tranquility is reached. The irony is that at the heart of that aloneness you feel intimately connected with the world. Indeed, the beauty of nature is often the wisest balm for it gently relieves and releases the caged mind. Calmness flows in to wash away anxiety and worry.

Pages 121 and 123 through 126.
To transfigure the ego - to liberate the soul

Behind the facade of our normal lives eternal destiny is shaping our days and our ways. The awakening of the human spirit is a homecoming. When we are familiar with something, we lose the energy, edge and excitement of it. Hegel said, "Das Bekannte über haupt ist darum, weil es bekannt ist, night errant," i.e. generally, the familiar, is not known. This is a powerful sentence. Behind the facade of the familiar, strange things await us. This is true of our homes, the place where we live and, indeed, of those with whom we live.

Friendships and relationships suffer immense numbing through the mechanism of familiarisation. We reduce the wildness and mystery of person and landscape to the eternal, familiar image. Yet the familiar is merely a facade. Familiarity enebles us to tame, control and ultimately forget the mystery. We make our peace with the surface as image and we stay away from the otherness and fecund turbulence of the unknown which it masks. Familiarity is one of the most subtle and pervasive forms of human alienation.

The body is your only home

It is mysterious that the human body is clay. The individual is the meeting place of the four elements. The person is a clay shape, living in the medium of air. Yet the fire of blood, thought and soul moves through the body. Its whole life and energy flows in the subtle circle of the water element. We have come up out of the depths of the earth. Consider the millions of continents of clay that will never have the opportunity to leave this underworld. This clay will never find a form to ascend and express itself in the world of light, but will live for ever in that unknown shadow world.

In this regard, the Celtic idea is very beautiful; it claims that the underworld is not a dark world but a world of spirit. There is an old belief in Ireland that the Tuatha dé Dannan, the tribe of Celts banished from the surface of Ireland, now inhabits the underworld beneath the land. From there they controlled the fecundity of the land above. Consequently, when the king was being crowned, he entered a symbolic marriage with the goddess. His reign mediated between the visible landscape with its grass, crops and trees and the hidden subterranean world in which all is rooted. This balance was vital since the Celts were a rural, farming people. This mythological and spiritual perspective has had an immense subconscious effect on how landscape is viewed in Ireland. Landscape is not matter nor merely nature, rather it enjoys a luminosity. Landscape is numinous. Each field has a different name and in each place something different happened. Landscape has a secret and silent memory, a narrative of presence where nothing is ever lost of forgotten. In Tom Murphy’s play The Gigli Concert, the unnamed man loses this sense of landscape and loses the ability to connect with himself simultaneously.

The mystery of the Irish landscape is mirrored in all the stories and legends of different places. There are endless stories and legends of different places. Near my home, a magic cat minds ancient gold in a big field. One finds an enthralling weave of stories about the independence and structure of the spiritual world. The human body has come out of this underworld. Consequently, in your body, clay is finding a form and shape which it never found before. Just as it is an immense privilege for your clay to come up onto the light, it is also a great responsibility.

The human body has come out of this underworld. Consequently, in your body, clay is finding a form and shape which it never found before. Just as it is an immense privilege for your clay to come up onto the light, it is also a great responsibility.

In your clay body things are coming to expression and to light that were never known before, presences that never came to light or shape in any other individual. To paraphrase Heidegger, man is a shepherd of being, we could say: man is a shepherd of clay. You represent an unknown world that begs you to bring it to voice. Often the joy you feel does not belong to your individual biography but to the clay out of which you are formed. At other times, you will find sorrow moving through you, like a dark mist over a landscape. This sorrow is dark enough to paralyze you. It is a mistake to interfere with this movement of feeling. It is more appropriate to recognize that this emotion belongs more to your clay than to your mind. It is wise to let this weather of feeling pass; it is on its way elsewhere. We so easily forget that our clay has a memory that preceded our minds, a life of its own before it took our present form. Regardless of how modern we seem, we still remain ancient, sisters and brothers of the same clay. In each of us a different part of the mystery becomes luminous. To truly be and become yourself, you need the ancient radiance of others.

Essentially, we belong beautifully to nature. The body knows this belonging and desires it. It does not exile us either spiritually or emotionally. The human body is at home on the earth. It is probably some splinter in the mind which is the sore root of so much of our exile. This tension between clay and mind is the source of all creativity. It is the tension in us between the ancient and the new, the known and the unknown. Only the imagination is native to this rhythm. It alone can navigate in the sublime interim where the lineaments of these differing inner forces touch. The imagination is committed to the justice of wholeness. It will not choose one side in an inner conflict and repress or banish the other; it will endeavour to initiate a profound conversation between them in order that something original can be born.

Page 244

There is a gravity within that continually weighs on us and pulls us away from the light. Negativity is an addiction to the bleak shadow that lingers around every human form. Within a poetics of growth or spiritual life, the transfiguration of this negativity is one of our continuing tasks. This negativity is the force and face of your own death gnawing at your belonging to the world. It wants to make you a stranger in your own life. This negativity holds you outside in exile from your own love and warmth. You can transfigure negativity by turning it toward the light of your soul. This soul light gradually takes the gravity, weight and hurt out of negativity. Eventually, what you call the negative side of your self can become the greatest force for renewal, creativity and growth within you. Each one of us has this task. It is a wise person who knows where their negativity lies and yet does not become addicted to it. There is a greater and more generous person behind your negativity. In its transfiguration, you move into the light which is hidden in this larger presence. To continually transfigure the faces of your own death ensures that at the end of your life your physical death will be no stranger, robbing you against your will of the life that you have had; you will know its face intimately. Since you have overcome your fear, your death will be a meeting with a lifelong friend from the deepest side of your own nature.