{"id":100,"date":"2008-02-29T14:49:04","date_gmt":"2008-02-29T20:49:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/?p=100"},"modified":"2008-02-29T15:03:26","modified_gmt":"2008-02-29T21:03:26","slug":"john-odonohue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/john-odonohue\/","title":{"rendered":"John O’Donohue"},"content":{"rendered":"

A friend sent this link<\/a> today.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> just a few weeks back, on January 3.<\/p>\n

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

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Kornbluth has substantive praise for O’Donohue’s life and work as well. Here are a few selections:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

. . .<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

. . .<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

. . .<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

An earlier book of poems, entitled Conamara Blues,<\/i> intrigues me. O’Donohue’s last book<\/a> was published in Britain as Benedictus: A Book of Blessings.<\/i> The US version, to be published soon, will be entitled To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Invocations and Blessings.<\/i> The former title is fine, but I like the new one very much indeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-church","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/julianlong.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}