1.
John O'Donohue
Former Catholic priest turned visionary bestselling author
Martin Wroe
The Guardian, Tuesday 15 April 2008

The philosopher and poet John O'Donohue believed that it is within our power to transform our fear of death so that we need fear little else this life brings. That he has died, unexpectedly in his sleep at 52, robs the world of a genuinely original religious mind who, almost accidentally, became a bestselling writer and public speaker.

For a priest and academic who spent most of his time living in solitude in a remote spot on the west of Ireland, O'Donohue was as startled as anyone else by his success. Not long after he had decided to leave the priesthood - he found himself having "less and less in common with the hierarchy" - his 1997 book on Celtic spirituality, Anam Cara: Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World (1997), became a word-of-mouth hit, racing up the bestseller lists.

For a student of Hegel who had written his PhD in German, O'Donohue found it amusing that pop stars and presidents had his book at their bedside, that Hollywood directors and household name actors sought his counsel. It confirmed his view that there is an intersection between philosophy, poetry and theology which can host an audience increasingly exiled by what he called "the frightened functionaries of institutional religion". As an accomplished poet, he had the literary tools and dazzling vocabulary to speak a language that persuaded you he was right.

His books, emerging every three or four years, were written in a kind of long-form, prayer style which was impossible to read quickly and did not work for everyone. They were the distinct product of a life often spent in meditation and solitude. Not that he was not a gregarious, fun-loving companion, and mesmerising storyteller in the bar, but that his public presence grew from private silence. One of his great influences, the German mystic Meister Eckhart, believed that nothing resembles God like silence and O'Donohue suggested that the highly strung character of western life was explained by the absence of silence. "When you acknowledge the integrity of your solitude, and settle into its mystery, your relationships with others take on a new warmth, adventure and wonder."

Born in a limestone valley, Caherbeanna, near Blackhead, County Clare, he was the son of a stonemason who, John used to say, "was in that realm of the mystically sacred". Father evidently passed on the mystical baton to son, who, after ordination to the priesthood, pursued his philosophical studies at Tübingen University, Germany. He returned to mix lecturing in philosophy with parish life. His ecclesiastical superiors were suspicious as much of his personal charisma as of his inclusive theology. In turn he was sceptical of religious leaders who ignored the essential mystical flame of faith in favour of what he called "manufactured coherence".

In retrospect, it is surprising he remained in the church as long as he did, but those who met him testified that he grew into a kind of spiritual bard, a priestly troubador speaking one day at an Oxford college, the next at a rock festival. His book Eternal Echoes (1998) referencing Augustine and Baudrillard, Dostoevsky and Sartre, explored postmodern isolation and "our yearning to belong". It so impressed the film composer John Barry that he wrote and named an album after it.

A 2005 study on Beauty: the Invisible Embrace took classical, medieval, and Celtic traditions to argue that we might be alive for reasons other than productivity or consumption. "When we hear some beautiful piece of Mozart or admire a wonderful building we suddenly become present in ourselves," he said. "That's unusual nowadays because dishevelment and distraction have become an art form."

Two poetry collections captured his love for his native landscape, and he was central to a successful environmental action against development on the Burren. Benedictus, a collection of "blessings" composed for defining moments in a post-ritual world, has peculiar poignancy with its carefully crafted lines to help those living with loss. O'Donohue's lasting epitaph may be the discovery of his writings at a growing number of funerals, offering people of all faith stories and none a means to express their feelings in a new kind of language.

He is survived by his partner Kristine Fleck, his mother Josie, brothers PJ and Pat, and sister Mary.

John Joseph O'Donohue, priest, philosopher and writer, born January 1 1956; died January 4 2008

Back to top

2.

The Times
February 6, 2008
John O'Donohue
Irish priest turned poet whose writing merged Celtic spirit and a love of the natural world

John O’Donohue was a former Catholic priest who turned wide reading imbued with a Celtic spirit into volumes of poetry and philosophy, resonating far beyond the “mind body and spirit” shelves. After Conamara Blues (2000) and Eternal Echoes (1998), the latter subtitled Exploring Our Hunger to Belong, his international audience continued with the masterly exploration of human creativity in Divine Beauty (2003).

As he said, "in this post-modern world the hunger to belong has rarely been more intense, more urgent. With many of the ancient, traditional shelters now in ruins, it is as if society has lost the art of fostering community. Consumerism propels us towards an ever-more lonely and isolated existence - although technology pretends to unite us, more often than not all it delivers are simulated images that distance us from our lives”.

O’Donohue was born in 1956. He was rooted in the limestone of County Clare, where his father, a stonemason, gave him to understand that “a human life should be a continual pilgrimage of discovery”. As Divine Beauty notes, “limestone is a living stone. Everywhere light conspires to invest these stone shapes with nuance. When rain comes, the whole stonescape turns blue-black. Rain has artistic permissions here that it could enjoy in no other landscape”. Inside, as he later wrote in a poem for his mother, Josie, about goose feathers : “Often during sweeping, / A ray of light / Through the window / Would reveal / How empty air / Could hold a wall / Of drunken dust.”

By his teens, untruculent thoughts about man’s place in the landscape evolved into a priestly calling. After boarding school (there also contemplating medicine), he entered Maynooth seminary, a place which fostered the relish of learning which would pervade his books. This passion co-existed with the quotidian demands upon a parish priest in the northern Burren soon after he had returned home: “when I walked into the kitchen my father looked up at me and I saw something in his gaze that I had never seen before. Some finality had entered his looking. . . His countenance had become more luminous and his natural gentleness was being claimed by a new silence. As we held each other for a moment in that gaze I knew death had picked his name out.”

That moment, a “strange beauty of sadness” haunted him, fuelling a hunger for study: come 1986, at Tübingen University, he learnt German for a PhD about Hegel (published as Person Als Vermittlung). Back home in 1990 he joined the Burren Action Group whose decade-long campaign, which risked prison, stopped the government from wrecking treasured Mullach Mór with an “interpretation centre”.

O’Donohue came into conflict with the Church. Uneasy with its decrees on Eros, it also left him insufficient time for writing. He resigned, wrote, and in the late Nineties came the bestselling Anam Cara, Gaelic for “Soul Friend”, a study of the Celtic tradition. That was followed by the longer Eternal Echoes. Again, the reader feels in easy, vigorous conversation with a man whose synthesis of the Celtic and Catholic draws upon much else — with passing reference to “the radical novelty” of David Hume — for a series of meditations which, within a few pages, can allude to Raymond Carver, Robert Frost and Leibniz.

Ever pragmatic, his eye as much on the landscape as the bookshelves, O’Donohue notes, “we are forever being stoned by dead sounds. It is interesting in terms of architecture that one of the key bulding materials now is mass concrete. When you strike mass concrete with a hammer, the sound is muffled and dead and swallows itself. When you strike a stone an echo leaps from it; the stone is like an anvil; the music of the stone leaps out.” This is echoed in Divine Beauty, where “the blindness of property development creates rooms, buildings and suburbs which lack grace and mystery. Socially, this influences the atmosphere in the workplace, the schoolroom, the boardroom and the community.”

No ascetic, he enjoyed cinema and whisky, while his poems could as readily link the Conamara landscape with Roland Kirk’s saxophone as they could chronicle Christ’s life in a sequence which includes His very birth (“a face deciphers itself from water”). Equal in range is Divine Beauty’s study of the human imagination: from the nature of colour to human attraction, O'Donohue’s easy style never shirks hard thought, drawing out the best in readers.

Although based in an Irish cottage, he travelled in China, South Africa, America (holding an annual retreat in Oregon) and died in France soon after publishing Benedictus: A Book of Blessings while writing upon the mystic Meister Eckhart.

He is survived by his mother, two brothers and a sister.

John O’Donohue, Irish poet and philosopher, was born on January 1, 1956. He died in his sleep on January 3, 2008, aged 52