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 enlarge | Author: John O'donohue
Publisher: Doubleday
Category: Book
List Price: $22.95
Buy New: $15.61
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Rating:  27 reviews
Sales Rank: 1136
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 240
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.3 x 1
ISBN: 0385522274
Dewey Decimal Number: 242.8
EAN: 9780385522274
ASIN: 0385522274
Publication Date: March 4, 2008
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 26-27 of 27 | | « PREV | | |
A blessing is a reminder of who we are March 4, 2008
175 out of 175 found this review helpful
John O'Donohue died peacefully in his sleep on January 8 of this year. He was working on a book on the late medieval mystic Meister Eckhart. Hopefully, enough of it was completed to warrant a posthumous publication. In the meantime, his To Bless the Space Between Us is O'Donohue's parting gift.
The book is a collection of blessings. That doesn't necessarily sound too exciting until one recognizes the deep-down meaning of a blessing, and O'Donohue's introduction provides some guidance. In our overly busy culture, he writes, we frequently race over the "crucial thresholds in our life" without pausing to take note of their significance. We no longer have "rituals to protect, encourage, and guide us as we cross over into the unknown" (p. xiv). A blessing is precisely one of those protecting, encouraging, and guiding rituals. It memorializes our transitions, connects us with a wider community (since none of us really ever travels alone), and strives to "present a minimal psychic portrait of the geography of change it names" (ibid).
Blessings, then, are all-important. They serve to orient us in our life's journey, establish fellowship with fellow travelers, and remind us of what we too often forget: that we are pilgrims, not haphazard wanderers.
Because there are all kinds of thresholds that lead to new stages of the journey, O'Donohue has written all kinds of blessings: for obvious thresholds such as birthdays, parenthood, adulthood, old age, and death; for interior thresholds such as courage, grief, addiction, suffering, loneliness; for the thresholds of callings to the priesthood, marriage, farming; and for the thresholds that our yearnings for love, peace, and friendship can nudge us towards. Some of the blessings O'Donohue gives us are breath-takingly beautiful; others, not so much. As he himself confesses, blessings are difficult things to write. They're not poems, because they're not oblique, but rather are direct addresses "driven by immediacy and care." Yet they're not utterly unpoetic, either, because in their immediacy they must also be evocative.
Given O'Donohue's passing, it's not amiss to quote a bit of one of his most beautiful and haunting blessings (p. 72): "For Death."
From the moment you were born,
Your death has walked beside you.
Though it seldom shows its face,
You still feel its empty touch
When fear invades your life,
Or what you love is lost
Or inner damage is incurred...
That the silent presence of your death
Would call your life to attention,
Wake you up to how scarce your time is
And to the urgency to become free
And equal to the call of your destiny.
That you would gather yourself
And decide carefully
How you now can live
The life you would love
To look back on
From your deathbed.
To Bless the Space Between Us March 2, 2008
55 out of 57 found this review helpful
The Mystery works in powerful ways through John O'Donohue but never more so eloquently than in this exquisite collection of blessings, even for aspects of life for which we typically don't seek support or can't find words. As he speaks of these transitions, I find it remarkable that this was his last work, published after his sudden death. Those of us who love John will find solace in his acceptance of the sacredness of every aspect of life. He has left a work that will continue to bless and reach us in both celebration and the darkest of hours. To hear his voice adds to the poignancy of these blessings.
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