Tippett: When you say “symmetry,” I don’t think you mean that there’s an equality, but that they are intimately connected and that when we are putting our energy outward, it’s taking something from inside us.
O’Donohue: It’s taking something; exactly. That’s exactly what I mean, that it’s taking something from inside, and we’re secretly debilitating ourselves. And it’s understandable, too, because if you look at the educational system and you look at most of the public fora in our culture, there is very little time or attention given to what you could almost call learning the art of inwardness; or a pedagogy of interiority. That’s why I find the aesthetic things, like poetry, fiction, good film, theater, drama, dance, and music, actually awaken that inside you and remind you that there is a huge interiority within you.
Like, for instance, when I came into New York last Thursday evening and checked into the hotel, I found out that there was a Tchaikovsky concert on in the Lincoln Center. And I went over there, and I got a ticket, one of the last tickets, which was two rows from the front, and I’ve never been so near an orchestra, and I said, my God, I’m too near, and then I watched them, and all the rest of it. But I knew why I was given the ticket, then, at the end, because it was Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D, and Lorin Maazel came out to conduct it. And then this beautiful violinist, Janine Jansen, a Dutch violinist, it was her debut in New York, and she played this. It was just unbelievable. I cried. After the first movement, people spontaneously stood up and wanted to give her a standing ovation, and she just held it, and we all went back again into our seats. And then at the end, people were just blown away, because an event, an aesthetic event had happened.
This is a complicated piece of music. Everywhere — she was playing a Stradivarius from 1727 — everywhere she went on this violin, she got exactly what she was looking for. She held it; and Maazel was so sovereign and so — like a huge patriarch. And three or four times — I was up close enough to see them — he looked at her with the wistful, proud gentleness of a grandfather. And there was this young woman, this beautiful, slim body, and you could almost see the music hurting her, even when she wasn’t playing.
So it was a huge — everybody, and there were hardened New York critics there, but everybody was so touched. And I think that that’s the magnificence of beauty, is that even in landscapes of control, corrugated categories, that you can be swept off your feet by just beauty.
[music: “Danse Russe” from Swan Lake, by Peter Illych Tchaikovsky, performed by Janine Jansen]
Tippett: The late Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue. This is the Dutch violinist he just mentioned, Janine Jansen, playing another piece by Tchaikovsky, Swan Lake.
[music: “Danse Russe” from Swan Lake by Peter Illych Tchaikovsky, performed by Janine Jansen]
I’m Krista Tippett. On Being continues in a moment
[music: “Jig and Reel: The Pipe On the Hob/The Colliers’ Reel” by Dennis Cahill]
I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today, we’re exploring the inner landscape of beauty, a notion of the late Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue. I interviewed him just before his death in 2008.
John O’Donohue often wrote about beauty. He believed that the human soul does not merely hunger for beauty, but that we feel most alive in the presence of what is beautiful. “It returns us, often in fleeting but sustaining moments,” he said, “to our highest selves.”
You also suggest, in your book about beauty, that beauty can be a kind of antidote, even to our most pressing global crises. How do you think of beauty as relevant in that sense?
O’Donohue: I think it’s not just relevant, like, but I think it’s actually necessary, because I think that beauty is not a luxury, but I think it ennobles the heart and reminds us of the infinity that is within us. I always love what Mandela said when he came out — and I was actually in his cell in Robben Island one time, when I was in South Africa. After 27 years in confinement for a wrong you never committed, he turned himself into a huge priest and came out of this sentence, where he said that “[w]hat we are afraid of is not so much our limitations, but the infinite within us.” And I think that that is in everybody.
And I suppose the question that’s at the heart of all we’ve been discussing, really, which is a beautiful question, is the question of God. And I think that one of the reasons that so many people turn away from religion in our times is that the God question has died for them, because the question has been framed in such repetitive, dead language. And I think it’s the exciting question, once you awaken to the presence of God.
Tippett: Well, you have said — you write, “God is beauty.”
O’Donohue: Yeah, I have, yeah.
Tippett: Did you always feel this? Is that a sense that has grown in you, or something that you name now?
O’Donohue: It’s a sense that has grown in me, I suppose, that I’ve always kind of had the intuition about it, because I feel that there are two ways that you must always keep together in approaching the God thing. One is — and this is what I like about the Christian tradition, and this is where I diverge a little from the Buddhist tradition, even though I love Buddhism as a methodology to clean up the mind and get you into purity of presence. What I love is that at the heart of Christianity you have this idea of intimacy, which is true belonging, being seen, the ultimate home of individuation, the ultimate source of it, and the homecoming; that that’s what I’d call spirituality, is the art of homecoming. So it’s St. Augustine’s phrase, “Deus intimior intimo meo” — “God is more intimate to me than I am to myself.”
Then you go to Meister Eckhart and you get the other side of it, which you must always keep together with it, where in Middle High German he says, “Gott wirt und Gott entwirt.” That means, “God becomes and God un-becomes.” Or, translated, it means that “God” is only our name for it, and the closer we get to it, the more it ceases to be God. So then you’re on a real safari with the wildness and danger and otherness of God. And I think when you begin to get a sense of the depth that is there, then your whole heart wakens up.
I mean, I love Irenaeus’s thing from the second century, which said that “[t]he glory of God is the human being fully alive.” And I think in our culture that one of the things that we are missing is that these thresholds where we can encounter this and where we move into new change in our lives, there are no rituals to help us to recognize them or to cross them worthily.
Tippett: And “threshold” is a word you use a great deal in your book on beauty, as well.
O’Donohue: ’Tis, yeah.
Tippett: And what is that relationship between beauty and thresholds?
O’Donohue: Well, I think that the threshold, if you go back to the etymology of the word “threshold,” it comes from “threshing,” which is to separate the grain from the husk. So the threshold, in a way, is a place where you move into more critical and challenging and worthy fullness.
And I think there are huge thresholds in every life. I mean, I think that, for instance — to give a very simple example of it is that if you are in the middle of your life in a busy evening, 50 things to do, and you get a phone call that somebody that you love is suddenly dying, it takes 10 seconds to communicate that information. But when you put the phone down, you are already standing in a different world, because suddenly, everything that seemed so important before is all gone, and now you are thinking of this. So the given world that we think is there, and the solid ground we are on, is so tentative, and I think a threshold is a line which separates two territories of spirit. And I think that, very often, how we cross is the key thing.
Tippett: And where is beauty in that?
O’Donohue: Where beauty is, I think, is — beauty isn’t all about just nice loveliness, like. Beauty is about more rounded, substantial becoming. And I think when we cross a new threshold, that if we cross worthily, what we do is we heal the patterns of repetition that were in us that had us caught somewhere. And in our crossing, then, we cross onto new ground where we just don’t repeat what we’ve been through in the last place we were. So I think beauty in that sense is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life.
Tippett: I want to ask you — I think right when we began to talk about beauty, you rightly said that in this culture we tend to associate beauty with glamour. And I think if you just mentioned the word, if you just threw it into a commonplace conversation, someone might just think of a beautiful face, of a famous, beautiful face. And I wanted to ask you, when you think of the word “beauty,” what pictures come into your mind?
O’Donohue: When I think of the word “beauty,” some of the faces of those that I love come into my mind. When I think of beauty, I also think of beautiful landscapes that I know. Then I think of acts of such lovely kindness that have been done to me by people that cared for me in bleak, unsheltered times or when I needed to be loved and minded. I also think of those unknown people who are the real heroes for me, who you never hear about, who hold out on lines, on frontiers of awful want and awful situations and manage, somehow, to go beyond the given impoverishments and offer gifts of possibility and imagination and seeing.
I also think — always, when I think of beauty, because it’s so beautiful, for me — is I think of music. I love music. I think music is just it. I mean, I think that’s — I love poetry, as well, of course, and I think of beauty in poetry. But I always think that music is what language would love to be, if it could.
Tippett: [laughs] I have to say that I discovered Celtic music after going to that part of the world, Scotland especially. And Celtic music, for me, has this completely — you could say this about Beethoven, as well, but, in a very particular way, it seems to express the greatest joy and also the deepest sorrow, almost indistinguishable from each other, and yet both with a kind of healing force. I can’t even put words around what I —
O’Donohue: That’s beautiful, what you’ve said, though, because I think there is that. One of the things I’m always amazed about Irish music, for instance, is how in some way the lines of the landscape find their way into the music, the memory of the landscape, almost; the memory of the people too, and that in some sense, despite the sorrow that we’ve endured — and I mean, Ireland, it’s not fashionable to say it now — Ireland has hundreds of years of an awful history of suffering.
Tippett: And I feel that you hear that in the music of Ireland.
O’Donohue: You hear it in the music, you do. Even in the fast music and the light, gay music.
Tippett: Even in the celebratory — yes. Yes.
O’Donohue: Yeah, you do. Yeah, you do. You hear it there. You hear the undertones and the quiet spaces where the echo of this hauntedness comes through.
Tippett: And yet, it is absolutely linked with — see, “joy” doesn’t even do it either — with this exuberance.
O’Donohue: It doesn’t. Yeah, there’s an exuberance or a vitality. There’s some kind of vitality. And I know friends of mine who play, and when they play, they’re unreachable. You can’t find them. They’re serving the music. They’re just in another place.
[music: “Samhradh, Samhradh” by The Chieftains ]
Tippett: I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being, today revisiting my conversation with the late Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue.
[music: “Samhradh, Samhradh” by The Chieftains ]
I would like to hear about the work you do in corporations and workplaces. It seems to me, in a strange way, some of the greatest intimacy and community we have, or fail to have, is with our colleagues at work. And because we spend so much time at work and it so defines us, our souls — the light and darkness of our souls is on display at work. And yet there’s a real question about how do we honor that in ourselves and in others and remain professional? I don’t know if that’s what you get at in your work with corporations, but that’s kind of on my mind.
O’Donohue: I think you’re right. I mean, we spend over one-third of our lives, actually, in the workplace. And one of the loneliest things you can find is somebody who is in the wrong kind of work; who shouldn’t be doing what they are doing but should be doing something else, and haven’t the courage to get up and leave it and make a new possibility for themselves.
But it’s lovely when you find someone at work who’s doing exactly what they dreamed they should be doing and whose work is an expression of their inner gift. And in witnessing to that gift and bringing it out, they actually provide an incredible service to us all. And I think you see that the gifts that are given to us as individuals are not for us alone, or for our own self-improvement, but they’re actually for the community and to be offered. And I think that this is where leadership comes in, in work. And that’s why I think good, wise leadership will be attuned to the vitality of a true ethos and helping to establish it.
Tippett: And are you finding that there is great interest and curiosity and willingness to have this new kind of imagination in workplaces?
O’Donohue: I really think there is, because I think in most workplaces there is huge imagination anyway, but it’s usually practical imagination that’s dedicated to productivity and looking at the bottom line. And I think, then, when they stand back a little and see that the spirit and soul dimensions are not luxury items, but are actually the very origins and sources which will enable everything to flow and unfold in a new way, that then they realize that the invisible world is a secret, hidden resource that can be released and excavated for the huge resources of spirit, guidance, for areas of ourselves that we’ve forgotten.
Tippett: In many cultures in the West, in Europe and in the United States, there are controversies about where are the boundaries between religion and politics, and that’s a complicated discussion that is quite stress-filled. But what I sense and what I’m talking about on my program, many weeks in different forms, is that there is this parallel discussion happening, that there is a spiritual aspect to human life and that that is essential.
I wonder how you would speak, to address some of the fear that arises, because I think in the American imagination, for example, those things get confused. And someone might listen to you talking about being in a board room and talking about the soul — why is that not something that we should be afraid of, or that even really has anything to do with our rules about church and state or about the line between politics and religion?
O’Donohue: I think your question is absolutely, perfectly poised, because first of all, to respond directly, I do think that there should be a fear of mixing up religion and politics and money. I love that Greek phrase, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” Now, the second thing is that, of course, it’s a huge naïveté for any organization or any group or for a culture to — and it’s actually unscholarly — to believe that a religion as the locus of the wisdom and the lived spirit experience of a people is a naïve, empty mass. It’s a huge resource. And the best minds and the most critical minds know that.
The word “soul” comes from the religious tradition and the philosophic tradition. And one of the sad things here, often, is that it’s used as a bland receptacle now, for the tired energies of psychology. But if you go back at “soul” and you look at the depth and the fire that’s in it, it’s a dangerous thing to have a soul. And I think that for parenting, for relationships, and for all the domains of our endeavor and work, to have access to a religious tradition is a huge, strengthening, critical resource, which keeps you wide awake and makes you ask yourself the hard questions. Like I’ve always thought that tradition is to the community what memory is to the individual. And if you lose your memory, and you wake up in the morning, you don’t know where you are, who you are, what ground you’re standing on. And if you lose your tradition, it’s the same thing.
Tippett: And tradition, like memory, has dark passages in it.
O’Donohue: Oh, it has huge dark passages, and I mean, I would say that within the Christian tradition there are dark zones of complete horror.
Tippett: But the weight of it is …
O’Donohue: But the weight of it. And there are also zones of great light, and immense wells of refreshment and healing. And I think it’s a critical question, always, for somebody who wants to have a mature, adult, open-ended, good-hearted, critical faith, to conduct the most vigorous and relentless conversation that you can with your own tradition.
Tippett: It was actually in your book that I first realized, and I had never thought about this, that the root — the Greek root for the word “beauty” is related to the word for “calling”; to “kalon” and “kalein.”
O’Donohue: That’s right. That’s it exactly.
Tippett: That’s fascinating.
O’Donohue: It is, actually, and it means that, actually, in the presence of beauty, it’s not a neutral thing, but it’s actually calling you. And I feel that one could write a wonderful psychology just based on the notion of being called — being called to be yourself and called to transfigure what has hardened or got wounded within you. And it’s also, of course, the heart of creativity, this calling forth all the time, because, like in the work that I do, trying to write a few poems, you never write the same poem twice. You’re always at a new place, and then you’re suddenly surprised by where you get taken to.
Tippett: But if we think, as you’ve suggested, as beauty as relevant to some of the most troubling problems in our world and in ourselves, how do we pursue that calling, given the limitations, given that a lot of what is around us is not visibly, objectively beautiful and may not be?
O’Donohue: Absolutely, and that’s a very fair question. And it’s like, in old notions of growth and development, there was always this idea — as Noel Hanlon, a poet friend of mine says in a poem about her daughter: “Like me, you needed something to push against” — that somehow we needed something to push against in order to grow. Now there’s almost a feeling like as though growth should be delivered to us. And I think that from the way you state it is that it’s a recognition that there is this dialectic there; that around us the forces are not kind, in terms of either recognizing, awakening, or encouraging beauty, but that actually, they should be the impetus and the spur to do it.
Now, how do we do it? One way — and I think this is a really lovely way, and I think it’s an interesting question to ask oneself, too. And the question is, when is the last time that you had a great conversation, a conversation which wasn’t just two intersecting monologues, which is what passes for conversation a lot in this culture? But when had you last a great conversation, in which you overheard yourself saying things that you never knew you knew, that you heard yourself receiving from somebody words that absolutely found places within you that you’d thought you had lost, and a sense of an event of a conversation that brought the two of you onto a different plane, and then, fourthly, a conversation that continued to sing in your mind for weeks afterwards? And I’ve had some of them recently, and it’s just absolutely amazing. They’re like, as we would say at home, they’re food and drink for the soul.
Second thing, I think, a question to always ask oneself, is who are you reading? Who are you reading? And where are you stretching your own boundaries? Are you repetitive in that? And one of the first books I read as a child — we had no books at home, but a neighbor of ours had all these books, and he brought loads of books; that’s how I ruined my eyes, like, and I have to wear glasses. [laughs] But one of the first books I read was a book by Willie Sutton, the bank robber, who was doing 30 years for robbing banks. And in the book somebody asked Willie, and they said, Willie, why do you rob banks? And Willie said, Because that’s where the money is. And why do we read books? Because that’s where the wisdom is.
So my professors in colleges always used to say, if you were doing an essay or doing a thesis, the first thing you have to do is read the primary sources and trust your own encounter with them, before you go to the secondary literature. And I’d say to anybody who is listening to us, who is interested in spirituality and who is maybe being coaxed a little away from believing it’s all a naïve, doomed, illusion-ridden thing — pick up something like Meister Eckhart or some one of the mystics and just have a look at it, and you could be surprised what an exciting adventure and homecoming it could become.
[music: “David’s Guitar” by Daithi Sproule]
Tippett: John O’Donohue died in his sleep on January 3, 2008, at the age of 52. This was one of the last interviews he gave. Here, in closing, is one of his well-known poems of blessing, which he wrote for his mother at the time of his father’s death and read aloud to me when we sat together.
O’Donohue: This is a poem I wrote several years ago, and it’s called “Beannacht,” which is the Gaelic word for “blessing.”
[Note: text unavailable due to rights restrictions]
[music: “Cam Ye By Athoil” by Celtic Fiddle Festival]
[music: “King of the Pipers” by Altan]
Tippett: This blessing by John O’Donohue, “Beannacht,” is in his final book, which was published posthumously: To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings. More recently, there is a wonderful new book of conversations with John O’Donohue, called Walking on the Pastures of Wonder, in the UK, and in the U.S. it has the title Walking in Wonder. I wrote the foreword for that one. Of the works John wrote in his lifetime, Anam Cara is a classic. [music: “King of the Pipers” by Altan]
The man sings, not talks.
Another beautiful Irish soul to check out for anyone who hasn't is writer, philosopher John Moriarty
O'Donohue said in an interview, "It was a difficult decision, and it did take years to make. I suppose the oxygen had become too scarce. I also found myself diverging from quite a few of the teachings. The final straw was acquiring a new bishop who exhibited and exercised a strong chemical hesitancy to my theological viewpoint. Once made, the decision brought me great peace of heart."
Perhaps, like many, he grew out of his container.
