A friend sent this link today.

I am doubly blessed by it, first by hearing O’Donohue read this lovely blessing, and second, by being intruduced to a writer and theologian I didn’t know. And I’m also sad to discover that O’Donohue died just a few weeks back, on January 3.

Looking around for information about him, I found this review, by Jesse Kornbluth whose blog, Head Butler, I am now discovering too. Kornbluth describes the evening he met O”Donohue as the night he “learned to drink single malt.”

I don’t recall what we talked about, and neither can my wife, who does not drink; 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.

Kornbluth has substantive praise for O’Donohue’s life and work as well. Here are a few selections:

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.

. . .

In fact, 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.”

. . .

His bedrocks were his faith and “the Celtic imagination,” which, he said, “represents a vision of the divine where no one or nothing is excluded.” The blend he created was pure joy: “I think the divine is like a huge smile that breaks somewhere in the sea within you, and gradually comes up again.”

. . .

O’Donohue was no Pollyanna. He was deeply troubled by bad things happening to good people. . . . He offers fresh blessings, and on topics the Church might overlook — not just for a new home, marriage and child, but for the parents of a criminal, for parents who have lost a child, for those experiencing exile, solitude and failure.

An earlier book of poems, entitled Conamara Blues, intrigues me. O’Donohue’s last book was published in Britain as Benedictus: A Book of Blessings. The US version, to be published soon, will be entitled To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Invocations and Blessings. The former title is fine, but I like the new one very much indeed.