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| To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings | 
 enlarge | Author: John O'donohue
Publisher: Doubleday
Category: Book
List Price: $22.95
Buy New: $13.47
You Save: $9.48 (41%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (27 reviews)
Sales Rank: 1204
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
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
Release Date: March 4, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
A gem of a book April 7, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
This book is a treasure. Since it arrived in the mail I have read from it every day. It has the most beautifully written Blessings that sound like lovely music when read aloud. There are Blessings for all occasions. This book is a must have for anyone who loves to inspire others through public speaking especially those who work with people in the helping professions. Makes a great gift too! I havent been so excited 'bout a book in a long time. Go ahead buy it... you wont be sorry, and then read it to others and watch their reaction.
Classical Music Spoken April 3, 2008
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
After getting used to the sweet but very strong Irish English of John O'Donohue you feel the warmth in your heart that you were always looking for. All his blessings transcend to that place your soul longs for; it's classical music spoken.
Hope and Blessings April 3, 2008
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
This book of blessings is a great gift to us all. I bought the book and the audio CDs and I have used both almost daily since I received them. It is a CD/book you will use, because the occasions for the different blessings will arise in your life. The author's lovely Irish brogue as he reads the blessings and the music of Irish harpist Aine Minogue allow for a deeper understanding of the written word.
The Irish poet and philosopher John O'Donohue did not shy away from topics that will make us cringe. He wrote a blessing "For love in the time of conflict", a "Blessing for the Parents of one who has committed crime", and - possibly one of the hardest tragedies of all - a "Blessing for the family and friends of a suicide".
John O'Donohue was a priest for 19 years (before he committed all his time to writing and speaking) and he knows about death from his work with the sick and the dying. But at the same time he is intimately familiar with the opposite of impermanence, he knows about the living presence of the light in our lives.
He talks about the luminous light in the mystical landscape of the Burren in the West of Ireland (his home), that reaches us when we become still to listen and witness. If we are mindful, nature and landscape can alert us to the eternal and we might be allowed to see a light that will speak to our human fears.
The blessings in this collection address crucial thresholds: A New Year blessing, a Morning Offering, the birth of a child, starting a new job, the breakup of a relationship, the experience of failure and the joy of friendship to name just a few. The invocations provide the structure of rituals that will protect, encourage and guide us on our life journey. Rituals have been neglected and become lost in post-modern secular society, but parallel to their disappearance awoke an incredible hunger for some kind of spiritual observance of the milestones in our lives.
John O' Donohue reaches way back into the Celtic tradition of blessing your loved ones, and he makes this tradition accessible to us in a simple, refreshing and non-dogmatic way.
It seems auspicious that John O'Donohue was able to finish this book and the recording of the CD before he was called home unexpectedly - in his sleep- at the age of 53 in January 2008.
Visit www.johnodonohue.com for more information.
A Blessing from John March 18, 2008
13 out of 13 found this review helpful
It's painful to think on what we've all lost in John's passing, but this book is a tremendous gift that he has left behind for us. The blessings are beautiful in themselves, but what I most appreciated about the book is the way he explains "blessing", both in the introduction and in the essay at the end of the book. Even without the particular words of blessing, these explanations open a powerful view of the world and our relation to one another.
This is definitely a book to read, re-read, and to treasure always. I guarantee it will be something you'll refer to many times through-out your life.
When you find yourself in times of trouble..... March 4, 2008
165 out of 170 found this review helpful
"Endings seem to lie in wait," John O'Donohue wrote. His certainly did. He died in his sleep, January 3, 2008, on vacation near Avignon. He was just 53.
I met John O'Donohue only once. I had read Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom, the 1997 book that made him deservedly famous. "Read" is wrong. At 100 words a minute, I had, over weeks, absorbed enough of this deceptively simple exploration of "soul friendship" to grasp that here was an original thinker, a gifted poet and, most astonishing of all, a philosopher who had forged a way of looking at the world that was painfully aware of human frailty but insistent on the triumphal power of divine love. And he wrote beautifully.
A book this exciting, you have to talk about it. I mentioned O'Donohue to Sarah Ban Breathnach, the author of the Oprah-annointed Simple Abundance and Moving On. As luck would have it, she and O'Donohue were friends. And when he came through New York, Sarah generously arranged a dinner.
That was the night I learned to drink single malt. And was there ever a better teacher in the art of sipping than an Irish philosopher and mystic who had worn the collar for 19 years? 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.
An evening like that is so rare I think of it as a religious experience. John O'Donohue, a holy man if ever there was one, had a lot of nights like that. A recent interviewer wrote, in memoriam, about a morning when O'Donohue came to breakfast with a hangover, having polished off an entire bottle of single malt with friends the night before. "The bottle didn't die," he announced, "without spiritual necessity."
That offhand remark was quintessential O'Donohue. He never failed to connect the worldly with the sacred --- and see it all as holy. 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.
Where do our deepest beliefs come from? Generally from childhood, and then not from what our parents and teachers say, but from what they do and who they are. In John O'Donohue's case, his mother was the family's loving center. His father was a stonemason and farmer --- and, O'Donohue thought, the "holiest man I ever met, priests included." Sometimes the boy would bring tea to his father as he worked the fields. Often, young John heard him --- praying --- before he saw him.
O'Donohue had a superlative education, earned a Ph.D. in philosophical theology from the University of Tubingen, became known as an expert on Hegel and, later, Meister Eckhart. As a priest, he loved the Church's sacramental structure and its mystical and intellectual traditions. He also loved writing. Eventually, an officious bishop made him choose. "The best decision I ever made was to become a priest," O'Donohue would say, years later, "and I think the second best decision was to resign from public priestly ministry."
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."
He was just as hard on other denominations. Religious fundamentalists, he said, "only want to lead you back, driven by nostalgia for a past that never existed, to manipulate and control you.... [Their] God tends to be a monolith and an emperor of the blandest singularity." New Age spirituality, he felt, was a smorgasbord, and undisciplined. Not that he found any comfort in secular life. He scorned the mall, feared for the spiritual health of the young, and had a special dislike for media folk, "non-elected custodians of sensationalism."
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."
O'Donohue was no Pollyanna. He was deeply troubled by bad things happening to good people. But he also saw that "a lot of suffering is just getting rid of dross in yourself, and lingering and hanging in the darkness is often --- I say this against myself --- a failure of imagination, to imagine the door into the light."
So it makes sense that O'Donohue's last book would be nothing but invocations and blessings --- a simple, how-to guide that, in effect, takes him back to his father praying in the fields. By the fact that we live, we are blessed; by the light that shines in our hearts, we have the power to bless others and be blessed by them. Is there a purer, more elementary form of the divine in action?
He asks: What is a blessing? His first answer is formal, and expected: "A blessing is a circle of light drawn around a person to protect, heal and strengthen." But then the poetry enters: "It is a gracious invocation where the human heart pleads with the divine heart." And then there's the magical factor: "When a blessing is invoked, a window opens in eternal time."
We need to impact one another's lives in this spiritual way, he writes, because the process of living in a post-industrial, media-drenched world moves us further and further from our innate wholeness. Only direct action can breach the distance. Happily, it takes no special training to bless one another. It's just a matter of gathering yourself --- and finding the words.
In "To Bless the Space Between Us," the poet in O'Donohue seeks to break the shackles of dead language. 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.
These blessings look hardship in the face, but only as a challenge. In our souls, and, especially, in our hearts, O'Donohue believed, we are all home. We never left, we never will. How hard it is to hold that thought. And yet, when we take the care of others into our hearts, something happens.....
You may not have a problem with the plainspoken language of O'Donohue's blessings. I do. Maybe it's just a writer's discomfort with another writer's words. But the invocations that dot the book --- my God, could this man write! Just one example:
"Our longing for the eternal kindles our imagination to bless. Regardless of how we configure the eternal, the human heart continues to dream of a state of wholeness, that place where everything comes together, where loss will be made good, where blindness will transform into vision, where damage will be made whole, where the clenched question will open in the house of surprise, where the travails of life's journey will enjoy a homecoming. To invoke a blessing is to call some of that wholeness upon a person now."
Death was nothing to John O'Donohue --- a silent friend who walks beside us all our days. And on the other side? "I believe that our friends among the dead really mind us and look out for us," he wrote. "Often there might be a big boulder of misery over your path about to fall on you, but your friends among the dead hold it back until you have passed by."
Let it be.
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