“The Journey—for John O’Donohue” and “Envoi” copyright © 2015 by John Quinn
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Convergent Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
CONVERGENT BOOKS is a registered trademark and its C colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Originally published in hardcover and in slightly different form in Ireland by Veritas Publications, Dublin, in 2015.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: O’Donohue, John, 1956–2008. author. | Quinn, John, 1941– author.
Title: Walking in wonder: eternal wisdom for a modern world / John O’Donohue and John Quinn.
Description: New York: Penguin Random House, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018012916 (print) | LCCN 2018038223 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525575290 (e-book) | ISBN 9780525575283 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Spirituality. | Mysticism.
Classification: LCC B105.S64 (ebook) | LCC B105.S64 O358 2018 (print) | DDC 242—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018012916
ISBN 9780525575283
Ebook ISBN 9780525575290
Cover design by Sarah Horgan
Cover and chapter opener illustration by Mikhail Zyablov/Shutterstock
Cover photograph by mammuth/E+/Getty Images
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword
INTRODUCTION
WONDER
MEISTER ECKHART
LANDSCAPE
ABSENCE
DAWN MASS
BALANCE
AGING
DEATH
POSTSCRIPT
AFTERWORD
IN MEMORIAM
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
FOREWORD By Krista Tippett
In the fall of 2007, I spent three hours in conversation with John O’Donohue in my studio in St. Paul. It was an incomparably intense, pleasurable and vast experience. I would say to friends later that it was as though this man had five answers for every question—five layers of thinking for each of his geologic layers of personality: the poet in him, the philosopher, the theologian, the Irish bard and the splendid, searching, openly ragged-around-the-edges human being. He was not easy to edit for the radio hour.
After the turn of that year, just as we prepared to put his voice on the air, word came that John had died. I found his death hard to comprehend. He was one of the most alive beings I had encountered. I could not imagine his absence from the world. And now the conversation I had with him became intertwined with his passing. It was how many learned he had died. It aired in Los Angeles just as a group of John’s close friends were en route to a gathering to remember him. The timing was uncanny, they said, and yet somehow perfectly in character: as though John had invited himself to his own memorial service and made sure it was lit by his passion and poetry and joy.
This book you now hold in your hands is a treasure. Since I discovered its original Ireland edition, it has rarely left my side. It is John’s voice with us anew and as always and again, as I encountered him, in the sacramental acts he made of thinking and conversing. It is beautifully woven of John ruminating with his dear friend John Quinn. It is sprinkled with his blessings and his poetry and even wise reflections he made on the aging he never really got to. Page after page illustrates John’s insistence that “all thinking that is imbued with wonder is graceful and gracious thinking.”
This book appears to us, though, in a transfigured moment in the life of the world. John’s diagnosis of our estrangement from the loved ones and strangers with whom we share our lives and our lands directly addresses our unfolding century. “The media,” he writes, “is essentially like Plato’s Cave—a parade of shadows that we take for the real world. It is a huge abstraction from what is real.” This was as true in his lifetime as it is in ours, but most of us were not yet ready to grapple as openly as we now must with its consequences.
Likewise, we are perhaps more ready now to take in John’s wisdom that life together is an existential and spiritual calling more than it is a political one. Fear, he reminds us in a fearful season, derives its power from the fragility of the human heart. It is “negative wonder”—“the point at which wonder begins to consume itself and scrape off the essence of things.”
I hear all the time how John’s voice in many forms continues to walk with far-flung humans through despair and illness and healing and renewal—helping us, in his gorgeous way with words, cross those thresholds more worthily. In death, John O’Donohue has made real the mysterious, vital interplay he taught in his life, between the material and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible worlds. This book deepens the miracle of his presence that is only becoming more vivid and more necessary.
INTRODUCTION
When John O’Donohue died suddenly in January 2008, he left a deep void in the hearts and minds of many people. For more than a decade prior to his death, his writings, talks and broadcasts had done much to feed the “unprecedented spiritual hunger” that he had observed in modern society. His books on Celtic spirituality were bestsellers; his broadcasts and talks tapped into the needs of the sizable audiences that tuned into them.
Over a period of five years I was privileged to work with John on a variety of radio programs. We climbed Máméan mountain in Connemara for “This Place Speaks to Me.” We discussed Meister Eckhart as his choice of “Millennium Minds.” We explored aging and death for the series “L Plus.” We spoke about wonder for “The Open Mind,” and John delivered the 1997 Open Mind Guest Lecture on the theme of absence. Our loss of John is tempered by the legacy of these broadcasts and I am indebted to Veritas for making them available in print and to RTÉ for originally broadcasting them, as well as to John’s family. I have interspersed between the sections some of John’s “Blessings” from his book To Bless the Space Between Us.
Wonder, imagination and possibility were John’s great concerns, and he articulated them in his own inimitable lyrical style. The rich flow of his language—cadences, rhythms, colloquial flavoring—were a large part of John’s attraction to his radio audience. This poses a dilemma, however, when translating radio programs into print. Do you edit transcripts heavily—almost rewrite them—to accommodate the print medium? Or do you leave them relatively intact, faithful to the original? We have opted for the latter, in the belief that John’s words still sing off the page. We hope that you, the reader, will concur.
Whatever the medium, there are great riches here—the product of a brilliant mind, a mind that never stopped striving to advance the frontiers of possibility.
John Quinn
WONDER
“So many people are frightened by the wonder of their own presence.”
In 1997, I devised a summer series for RTÉ Radio—“Webs of Wonder.” Each program would comprise moments of wonder—archive pieces, poetry, music—but I also needed some philosophical pieces to act as the threads that held the web together. So I went to John O’Donohue. We met in the bar of a hotel in Kinvara, Co. Galway, and talked for an hour about many aspects of wonder—imagination, transience, landscape. In the course of the conversation, John came up with the lovely phrase that gave me the title for this book—“the pastures of wonder.” It was a quiet evening in the bar. Nobody disturbed the recording. Just two fellows chatting in the corner of a bar. It was wonderful. Wonder-ful.