My wife and son are traveling, leaving me time to indulge in my newest favorite author of the moment, John O'Donohue, a wonderful Celtic philosopher and spiritual poet and sage-- Anam Cara; To Bless the Space Between Us; and Conamara Blues. Though I am a practicing progressive Christian, the spiritual language of my soul and my biography could best be described as "naturalistic theism," (with a philosophical and psychological disposition greatly influenced by Mahayana Buddhism) having grown up on a farm with many hours of delight and reflection, quite literally, in the fields of God. John O'Donohue probably comes closer to that than anyone else I have yet read.
"To be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our vulnerable complexity. In order to keep our balance, we need to hold the interior and exterior, visible and invisible, known and unknown, temporal and eternal, ancient and new, together. No one can undertake this task for you. You are the one and only threshold of an inner world. This wholesomeness is holiness. To be holy is to be natural, to befriend the worlds that come to balance in you. Behind the facade of image and distraction, each person is an artist in this primal and inescapable sense. Each one of us is doomed and privileged to be an inner artist who carries and shapes a unique world."
"Friendship is a creative and subversive force. It claims that intimacy is the secret law of life and the universe... If approached in friendship, the unknown, the anonymous, the negative, and the threatening gradually yield their secret affinity with us... The Celtic imagination articulates the inner friendship that embraces Nature, divinity, the underworld, and human world as one."
[John O'Donohue, xvi & xvii, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom (Anam Cara means "soul friend")]
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