“Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace” by John O’Donohue

I want to talk this morning about an amazing topic, which is beauty.

I want to start off by locating it in this kind of rythym. I think each of has
another life, that we rarely pay attention to. Most of the grind of endurance
and energy and anxiety happens at a certain public, superficial level, and
that’s what goes on; we do our work, we try to acheive our objectives and we
try to survive. But all the while, behind this surface, each of us has a subtle
life, a life where the secret things happen to us, unknown mostly to others.
And that subtle life, in a way, is where you really live. And that’s one of the
amazing things about us. Even though we are public bodies, we are
physical bodies and we’re always in space somewhere and our faces are
incredibly public (I always think that once you’ve got a human face you can
never successfully hide anywhere, because what has happened to you is
somehow engraved in and has become visible in your face) but despite that,
who you really are is secretly hidden from all others, except those that you
choose to tell about it...
But there are times in each life, in your subtle life, when amazing
things happen, moments of what the Greeks used to call epiphany, when
the veil is pulled back, or some opening happens, and something becomes
available to you that you had never anticipated. Sometimes it’s really
touching and beautiful, like when you’re wondering, the person you’re with,
if something has gone dead between you and you’re wondering if it’s still
alive, and suddenly you just catch them out in a split second as they look at
you with such tenderness, and you know that you’re still love and cared for
and meshed and sheltered. I remember when I was in university in my
seventh year, I came home and I came into the kitchen and my father was
sitting down facing the fire and he stood up and turned around to welcome
me home. And as soon as he turned around and I saw his face I knew that
there was a difference, and I knew that somehwere around the house or on
the farm or out on the mountanins that he had seen some door opening
towards him. This all took about a tenth of a second, and I knew that death
had chosen his name. Within three weeks he was dead and buried. But it
was all in that little first glimpse of his face
I’ve often thought there could be a beautiful psychology and
spirituality written of thses inbetween moments when the truth of what is
becomes available. For all our talk and chatter and noise the real changes
happen usually in silence and stillness and solitude. And that’s one of the
amazing things about beauty. The presence of beauty is one of the most
neglected presences in our contemporary world. And i believe that, in part,
a lot of what we call the global crisis has to doactualy witht he neglect and
repression of beauty. The interesting and incredibly erudite Hans Urs von
Balthasar said that beauty was the word without which the ancient world
refused to know itself. In other words, beauty was at the heart of everything
they considered. In our times beauty is reduced to glamour, which it’s not.
And you have the glamour people - you see them on television - for instance,
in the L’oreal ads. “Because I’m worth it,” they say. Almost as if they are the
secret children of Jean-Paul Sartre who have managed to beaurtify the
whole thing and say, “We’re really undercover existentialists; we just can’t
help looking so utterly glamourous.” And you see, this outer world of
glamour is a multi-million, multi-billion pound industry and it caters for the

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surface and for the external image. It’s reminiscent of what the wonderful
Irish literary critic Dennis Donohue once wrote in a book on the imagination
called The Sovereign Ghost, when he talked about two lines of poetry that
were an illustration of what he called fancy and not imagination. And he
said, “the first effect these two lines will have are the only effect they will
ever have; no amount of pondering will make them glow.” And it’s the exact
same way with glamour. Once you’ve got the upfront hit from it, you’ll
usually find little or nothing behind it, whereas beauty is a far more
sophisticated, and subtle and really substantial kind of presence.
As I was writing the book - it took me three or four years, I suppose,
to write it - when I was putting the bibliography together at the end, I
realized I had gone through about ninety-something books trying to find out
about this beauty thing...What I realized actually, is, you know when you’re
tuned into an idea, the way that a field of associations and resonance builds
up around it, and when I began to take notice of beauty and the beautiful in
an explicit way, I was really amazed at how frequently we use the word
“beauty” in our conversations. And then it struck me gradually that it’s one
of these presences to which we rarely advert, but without beauty, life would
be unbearable. We need the beautiful as much as we need love. And that
beauty and the beautiful is not the preserve of luxus or the elite privileged,
but that everyone actually needs it. There are people now, as we are here
this morning, who are holding out on the rawest edges of what’s humane, in
refugee camps, in prisons, in hospitals, in places of starvation, who are only
able to endure because they have got some glimpse of the beautiful. There’s
a man I know in America who is one of the old prophets and mystics of
America, he’s a Jesuit priest called Daniel Berrigan. And he and his
brothers went to jail in the 1960s over Vietnam and then later on over the
nuclear stuff, and he has a poem called “Tulips in the Prison Yard,” which is
an amazing poem. It describes the khaki-grey underworld of prison life.
And one day, in the corner of the prison yard, he sees a tulip. And the
horror of the surroundings in which they are, renders the color and the
presence of the tulip completely miraculous. And sometimes beauty is like
that: it turns up as a miniscule moment in a dark landscape, and recalls us
to possibility and inspiration and encouragement.
And my claim would be that we can hold out in very bleak places if we
are in touch with the presence of beauty, and that beauty really is a
presence, and that beauty has certain qualities. One of the things I love
about beauty is that it’s not in the preserve of the subject or the individual;
you can’t call up Beauty and say, “Hey, Beauty, come on, show yourself!” It
doesn’t go like that. Rilke, the great German poet, was going through a
period of great difficulty and he couldn’t write, and he came to Paris just to
watch the sculptor Rodin at work. And he wrote two famous essays on
Rodin. And he said that Rodin did not concern himself with the beautiful;
his art was meticulous and careful and skilled and slow, and he
concentrated on that, because he believed that the beautiful comes only in
its own terms. And the phrase that he used was that “Like in the forest,
when the forest is free of strangers in the evening, the shy animals turn up
at the river to drink.” And that that’s the way that the beautiful actually
comes.

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And my contention would be that in every life, there is a zone of

beauty, and that there’s huge beauty about humans. It’s just amazing, the
places that you find it. We’ve all heard the old adage, that beauty is in the
eye of the beholder. People always took that to mean that you could be
looking at something totally ugly and I could come along and say, “How
devastatingly beautiful that is!” So it’s totally subjective. I think there’s
another meaning to that phrase, which goes like this: if the beholding eye is
gracious and has beautified itself, then it will pick up the beautiful. So an
awful lot of the times when we can’t notice the beautiful, it’s not that it’s
absent, it’s just that our vision and our gaze has become coarsened.
One of the qualities of the beautiful and one of the reasons that we get
so taken with it and that it’s so nascent and natural to us is that it has to
do with symmetry. And the human eye likes the harmony of what’s
symmetrical. And it seems that the place that we picked it up in the
beginning is actually looking into the first human face that we saw, which is
the face of the mother. And I found this very poignant when I was thinking
about it and writing about it, to think that your sense of symmetry and your
first sense of the beautiful was actually set in the silent days and weeks and
months when you had no words and you were brand new here, new
stranger, and you were gazing up in silence into the face of your mother.
That so much was being secretly formed in your mind at that point, without
you knowing it at all. So what has form is beautiful. So always, in terms of
the beautiful, it has to have some sense of elegance or some sense of form.
And the human face is one of the most amazing acheivements of creation. I
mean, whether you find them boring, whether they drive you crazy,
whatever you say about humanoids, they’re really incredible creations.
They’re just unbelievable. I watched yesterday evening on the little
transparent box that’s in the room where I’m staying, a program on the
smile of “Mona Lisa.” And it was absolutely incredible. But the human face
is amazing, because it’s your intimate showing of yourself in a public kind of
space. And they say, of course, that the more the symmetry of the bone
structure, the more beautiful the face is. There’s a famous book of
photographs of beautiful hmans, and there’s an introductory essay by
Antony Burgess, and he said, “I have sat for evenings with Sophia Loren and
tried in vain to find a fault in her face.” Like sitting with some of us, he
wouldn’t have to wait that long. But that doesn’t mean that we aren’t
beautiful. As a matter of fact, it’s interesting that at a party sometimes you
would see a beautiful creature and say, “She could not be of this earth.”
And then as the party goes on you might find yourself beside her, and you
begin to implicate her in what’s known as human conversation, and you
might find that she’s singularly unburdened by the presence of thought. It’s
amazing then when you discover that and you run into that kind of freedom
that you would have from any kind of cellular activity up yonder, that how
that somehow diminishes the face a little. And then you would see humans
with what you would consider an ordinary face, and yet when they’d smile,
or when the light of their mind becomes active, the face is absolutely
transformed. There are some people I know, and as they say, I can never
get a straight line on their faces, because it’s like the weather - there’s such
a variety of mood and atmosphere possible within the face. So there is a

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great kind of old beauty within us if we let ourselves alone. But the trouble
is with us that so often we become our own private professional expert
tormentors. And whatever kind of beauty is in us, we try to drive it out.
I kind of believe, really, I suppose, in a kind of spirituality of
non-interference. I think we should give ourselves a break and let us alone.
I often think that the mystical and the spiritual are like sex. When they’re
going well, and things are going grand, you don’t need to be concentrating
on them at all. And there’s also that fact that I believe they are that deeply
intimate. I think one of the most intimate things in a person’s life is their
relationship to the Divine. And that’s why it is so important that you never
let anybody come between you and your secret taste of the Divine Presence.
And that you also don’t let anybody take it away from you, but that you
know that you are marked in that way and that you have that. The best
person to read on this is Meister Eckhart - just absolutely magic. Once you
read the old Meister Eckhart person, 13th-century mystic, you begin to see
that every breath and whisper and gesture that you’re all doing them in the
presence of the Great Old Spirit. The magic question of theology that always
fascinated me is, “Is there anything outside God?” The answer has to be,
“There isn’t.” So if there isn’t anything outside of God, then everything has
to be inside God. So the actual, radical thing is that we’re living on Divine
ground, and there’s no place to go to flip yourself off the cliff of this divinity
and land in a cool place that is extra divine - you can’t do it. And that’s why
there is, in all of us, this eternal pulse that won’t stop beating. Or to put it
in more colloquial terms, I think that everyone is haunted by God, and you’ll
never have peace of heart until you tangle with it.
I used to have a friend at home that was kind of an undercover
mystic, he was an outsider in his own way, and he used to often lament the
epic ability of humans to sleep, and he’d say to me, “Give them enough food
in their stomachs and give them a comfortable pillow, and most of them will
sleep their ways through their lives.” It hink there’s some truth in that, but
I also think that in some strange way, that each of us, sooner or later, is
called to tangle with the Divine. I think it can be a moment of incredible
disturbance, but I think the possiblities that it secretly contains are
absolutely incredible. I think mystics are actually people who completely get
over their fear of the Divine. It’s really tricky to handle it, because it’s all in
the invisible realm. And humans have a notorious impatience with the
invisible. Do you remember how they used to hound the Carpenter and say,
“Give us a sign! Come on! Come on! Just one little sign! Give me a small,
little sign and then I’m grand.” And he never fell for it, because he knew
they were like the family (the mob), and it wouldn’t stop.
That was the thing about the whole Jesus thing, was that he recalled
people, again and again, to the beauty of their infinite possiblity. And there
was such normality and balance in the guy. And the thing about it is, that
he took this huge, huge strain of the Divine presence, and still was the most
natural person in the world. What’s subversive about him, actually, is that
in any given situation, he always goes for the natural, humane moment of
compassion, which is always subversive because groups get so structured
and institutionalized so fast, and he keeps breaking it all the time, all the
time. There’s a friend of mine who used to say that “there’s no institution

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big enough, could ever be big enough, to hold Jesus,” and I think that’s
absolutely true.
I think one of the beauties of him is the beauty of his imagination.
And it’s very interesting, you know. If you think of it, if Jesus had had no
imagination, we would know nothing about the incarnation or the Trinity.
That’s a fact. And I want to talk for a few minutes now about the
imagination, because it happened inside him. He didn’t have people outside
of him saying, “Wow, Jesus, you’re really special. You might be the second
person of the Trinity”...People were saying, “What is he at? What’s he
talking about? Do you know who he was with last week in Cana?
Prostitutes.” “You’re not serious! Does the mother know?” And there he
was out on the edge, sowing, plowing and sowing the Eternal Garden. Just
doing it. But he was doing it with such subversive gentleness. And I always
think that was one of the nicest things he said, is that the gentle shall
inherit the earth. This gentleness that was in him was absolutely subversive
and was totally in tune with his spirit. And his imagination was incredible.
Imagine within yourself, to hold that knowing, and to keep it balanced, and
to see what he saw.
The book I’d love to read is a book that’s never been written, which
would be the autobiography of Jesus. You know, for those 27 years that he
was on his own, what was on his mind? And how did that whole incredible
knowing and vision form itself? What did he dream about? What was he
afraid of? What kind of seeing had he? It’s absolutely amazing to think
about. And his imagination helped him to see who he was and where he
was actually from. And I’ll always think that one of the most neglected
things in the Western spiritual tradition is the imagination. We’ve gone
majorly for the will of God, and for people battering their lives into the shape
of what they think the will of God is for them; usually, alot to do with the
idea of power, idea of vocation, idea of service. But we’ve forgotten
completely what the imagination of God might be like. And that’s where all
the action started, do you know? One of the things that we forget is, our
primary image of God is God as creator. And I love that old medieval thing
of creatio ex nihilo, the creation of everything out of nothing. So God is the
supreme imaginer and the supreme artist. To put it another way, we are
made in the image and likeness of the divine imagination. So every time you
engage and awaken your imagination, you are in the place of holy
possibility, and the imagination is the great friend of possibilities.
When I was learning German in Germany, I was staying in a house
with a wonderful philosopher from India, Gary H., who’s written great books
about the growth of scientific knowledge. But I remember one day we went
to Spandau prison and sat down outside it for a while, thinking of Rudolph
Hess in there, being minded by four world powers. And I was saying to him,
“Aren’t facts incredible things?” And he said, “Facts are interesting, but
possibilities are infinitely more interesting.” And I often thought about it
afterwards, and of course he was absolutely right. When you think of who
you are this morning, you are who you are at this time in your life because
of certain choices that you made. Say, when you were twelve, you stood in
front of, maybe, five possibilities, and you chose the first one. Then things
went on until you were eighteen, and suddenly it opened up and became ten

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again. This time, you chose number seven. Then it went on again and then
when you were 28, maybe you were down to three; this time you took two.
When you were 40, it was up to five; this time you took four. And so you
chose, always, one choice. But the interesting question to ask is, what has
happened to the lives that you didn’t choose. Where are they? Where do
your unlived lives dwell? It’s a very interesting question, if you want to do a
bit of spiritual work yourself, is to go back to these threshold moments
when you chose, and to see what you didn’t choose, and what might have
happened to it. My suspicion is, you see, is that our unchosen, unlived lives
continue to live themselves out secretly in accompaniment with us, and that
that’s the way God sees us. Do you know that line, I think it’s in one of
John’s letters, which says, “One day you will see, as you are now seen,” or
“you will know as you are now known”? The way that we are viewed is
infinitely more subtle and sophisticated and complex than the one-hit view
of the human eye. And the only way that you can come in touch with your
other lives, your accompanying present lives, is through the power of the
imagination, because your imagination is always interested in what’s left
out; it’s interested in the other side of the question. And it’s interested in
depth and roundness. And the most important question for any human
being is, “How do you see yourself? Who do you think you are, and what do
you think is going on in you?” And you can’t read that with your superficial
mind. You can only sense that with your imagination. One of the things
which has always haunted me is the question of, “Why do we die when we
die?” And I think we die when we’re ready, mainly. And that maybe you die
when you have no more to live or to know, and when your lives are realized,
and then you’re ready to be re-born, again.
But all what I am saying about the beauty of that eternal life that is
now in us happens in the invisible realms. And that’s why anyone who
believes has to have an eye for the invisible, even though that sounds like a
contradiction. I think all the magic happens in the invisible world. But
we’re very impatient with the invisible. Years ago in Ireland - 15 years ago
or more - we had an outbreak, an epidemic, our own lovely little Irish
epidemic of moving statues - statues that started actually to move. And
there was one notorious one down in Cork, and she was really kind of
moving. The statue was of Mary, the Mother of God. And I was priesting at
that time in Canammara, and people were going from all over Ireland to see
this statue. We had a statue at the church that I was in at the end of an
avenue, covered with briars, that nobody ever paid the slightest attention to.
But when the one in Cork began to stir, suspicion awakened that ours might
be up to a little movement as well. So, people would come and look at her, it
was unbelievable. I remember coming out one morning at seven, there was
this group of kids, of teenagers outside, and they were waiting to catch her.
The point that I’m making is that in actual fact, we don’t need vulgar
signs. As a matter of fact, all you need to do is to close your eyes and think
of the majestic surprise that your own life is. If someone said to me, “What’s
the one thing you’ve never got over?” I’d say, “It’s being in the world.” It’s
just the most incredible trip you could ever imagine. And the loneliness of it
is, that we squander it; we waste our time, and then we attack ourselves.
Like Nietzsche said, “In a time of peace, the war-like person attacks

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himself.” I often look at it like, you sometimes need to take a little holiday
away from your self-negativity, and call off the Rottweilers of analysis and
accusation, and give yourself a free space, and say, “For the next week, I’ll
give myself every break and do nothing against myself until my old sense of
myself builds up.” And this has nothing to do with egoism, and all this kind
of psychological stroking and all that kind of stuff. Nothing to do with it. It
has to do, actually, with a very ancient thing - courtesy; to learn to be
courteous to yourself and to be courteous about your own presence, to learn
to respect yourself. Because you don’t belong to yourself; you belong,
ultimately, to the Divine. And if you attend gently to yourself, you will
discover that. Because sometimes the beautiful is there, but all you need to
do is to become aware of it.
There’s a friend of mine who has a very famous art gallery in Galway
in the west of Ireland, and one time he had an exhibition hanging there of
fairly abstract work. And a poet of no small renown came in to look at the
exhibition, and spent an hour looking at it. And just when he was about to
leave, a farmer came into the gallery. Now the farmer lived on the shores of
Loch Carah, the biggest lake in the west of Ireland, and about once a year
he made a trip into see an exhibition at the gallery and it just so happened
that he came in. And he was a friend of the owner, so the gallery owner
introduced him to the poet of no small renown. And the poet of no small
renown took this simple farmer with him and brought him through the
exhibition again, explaining things to him, showing him aspects of
paintings, and it was a fascinating hour for the farmer. Then eventually
they came to the door. And the farmer thanked the poet of no small renown,
and said, “You have an amazing eye, and I envy you that gift. Because you
were able to see things in them paintings that I wouldn’t have glimpsed in a
thousand years. You have an amazing gift. I don’t have the gift of an eye
like that, but I have tanaloch.” The poet said that he’d never heard the
word, and what is tanaloch? And the small farmer said, “I live on the shores
of a huge lake. You often hear the wind rushing and the water lapping on
the stones. Everyone hears that. But on certain summer days, when the
lake is like a mirror, and there is absolute stillness, I am able to hear the
secret music that the mountains make on the surface of the lake.” And it
stayed like that; the poet of no small renown left, the farmer left. Three
weeks later the local teacher from that area was in the gallery, and the
gallery owner told him the story, and he said, “What does the tanaloch
mean?” And the teacher said, “Oh, yes, they do have that word up there
where that man lives. I’ve never seen it written down. I suppose it means
awareness, but in truth, it’s about seven layers deeper than that.” When I
was writing the book on beauty, I was looking at that word tanaloch, and it’s
obviously an Irish word, and I thought, it might mean The Ancient Lake, like
the way the Buddhists say, “The Mountain Behind the Mountain,” this could
be the lake beneath the lake. It could also be The Tongue of the Lake.
And I like that story so much, because here is a story of someone so
unostentasious, with no pretension to anything, who has a secret opening
into the eternal and the aesthetic outside their own door, and are tuned
enough at a deep level to enter that world. And it’s interesting to ask
yourself, how open you are to the mystery of your own beauty and the

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incredible depth that’s in your life. Because, you see, we’re all earthen
vessels, and in our times we’re all taken up with what kind of earth and
what shape we have and everything, but we forget that we’re earthen vessels
that hold the old treasure, and that there’s no life, but that there’s
something amazing going on in it. I always think that behind every face,
there is something eternal going on. And that’s the magic. And no one has
seen the script for anyone else’s life. And the fascinating thing is “Why do
things happen to you that happen to you? Why do you respond to them the
way you do?” And it’s very interesting to ask yourself, “What kind of artistic
shape is being made from the life that you are living?” Not alone that, but
“What are you actually doing to the life that you have?” In a certain sense,
you see, it was a great risk for the Divine to leave you alone with yourself.
When you think of it, like creating a beautiful creature like you and then
handing you over to yourself, and that no one could get in between you and
yourself again. So you have sacred duties to yourself. Or to put it another
way, you are the custodian of sacred thresholds on which you alone stand.
You have a kind of eternal imperative and a divine calling, that it is your
business to look after, to become aware of, to inhabit and to actualize.
Regardless of what you think of yourself, you’re here not for yourself
alone, but for all the rest of us as well. You see, we’re secretly connected
with each other. That’s what I think the old Holy Spirit stuff means. A lot of
stuff is talked about the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is a lot more dangerous
that people realize. But that’s what I think the Holy Spirit stuff is at. When
I was writing the book on beauty, I had this idea, but I had to stop it,
because the publisher said, “Don’t do that, please.” And it was, at the end
of every chapter, I put in what I called “A page of lost questions.” And some
of the questions were cool. I think they were cool, anyway. They were
questions like this, kind of off-the-wall-questions:
Is there someone this evening walking home through the streets of
Leningrad that you have never met and never will meet, but someone who
has had a profound effect on your life?
Why do certain words never come near you?
Where do your unlived, unchosen lives dwell?
At the angel bar, what stories does your angel tell about you?
There were some other questions I had about your heart, about looking after
yourself:
When was the last time that you really listened to your heart?
If you could take your heart away for a few days with you on your own, what
would your heart whisper to you?
When do you allow yourself to really feel things?
If you were to actually decide to change from a life of struggle, endurance
and function to a life that celebrates, where would your heart start?
If you were to clearly explain to your heart how brief your time in the world
is, what are the things your heart would make you stop doing right now?
That happens to people all the time, you know - people who are inside,
controlling their lives, pushing forward and around them and in themselves.
Suddenly, illness shows up, and the whole thing has to be rethought again.
So one of the things that I think we need to do is to attend to the
subtle life we have and look after it and come into touch with it. And one of

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the things that you need to do before you do that, is you need to rethink
how you dwell in time. Time is the most amazing thing, and time is the
most incredible resource we have. There are people today finding they have
a week or two months to live. I’ll tell you, every minute of that has become
precious with that knowledge. And we still have time, you know. But when
you look at the way we live our time, for most people, time has been reduced
to routine. And for a lot of people, time has targeted them and turned them
into its object. They’ve allowed their time to be totally malformed on them.
Seventy or eighty percent of people who come into doctors are suffering from
stress, or as they say now, stress-related difficulties. There are tomes
written on the psychology of stress. It’s interesting to view it
philosophically. Philosophically, stress can be considered to be a perverted
relationship to time. If you are stressed, you have let your time get all
tangled up on you, and it’s squeezing you by the neck and by the heart. So
what you need to do is pull back a little bit and let your time come into
rythym again.
There’s a wonderful American writer that I like who restores this kind
of proportion, and his name is William Stafford. And he says these four
sentences:
The things you do not have to say make you rich. Saying the
things you do not have to say weakens your talk. Hearing the
things you do not need to hear dulls your hearing. And the things
you know before you hear them, these are you and this is the
reason you are in the world.
One could live, I believe, a very honorable life around these four sentences,
because they have a respect for the dignity of silence, for its mystery and
depth and fullness. They have a respect for the word and words as the true
bridges between us. They show a respect for the surprise of revelation,
which is recognition, when you know the secret affinity you have with things
and where your real home in the world actually is. But again, beauty can be
all around you and you can still live in the coarsest, vulgar self-appraisal
and self-negativity. Like all through the Good Book, there is one focus that
is never lost, and that focus is the changing of the hardness of the heart, so
that your heart can become a kind sanctuary where you can truly lay your
head. The lovely thing about that is that it’s the one thing you truly need,
and no one else can give it to you, except yourself.
And I’ll finish with two things. The first thing is a story by a great
American and lovely humanoid, Robert Bly, that he translated from the
African, and it’s a wonderful story about all I’ve been saying. There was a
farmer who had cows. And they were great cows, and they gave plenty of
milk. But he noticed that the supply of milk they were giving began to
lessen. So he knew someone was stealing the milk. So one night, he waited
up to see who was stealing the milk. And he was looking up at the stars,
and the next thing, one of the stars seemed to get brighter and come nearer.
And he watched as it became a column of light over him, and it came down
to the ground in a funnel of light, and out of the funnel of light came the
most beautiful woman. And he said, “Have you been stealing the milk from
my cows?” And the woman said, “I have. My sisters and I love the milk
from your cows, and we’ve been coming at night and taking it.” He said to

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 “Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace” by John O’Donohue

her, “You’re very beautiful. Would you stay and marry me? I promise to be
kind to you, never to beat you, and you won’t have to mind the cows all the
time.” She said, “OK, I will. I’ll stay with you and marry you on one
condition. I have with me a basket. You are never, ever, ever to look into
the basket.” He said, “I won’t look into the basket.” She stayed with him
and they were married. And for about six months, everything went great.
They were very happy, she’d mind the cows, he’d mind the cows; it was just
a very happy pair of humans. One day, she was out minding the cows, and
he noticed the basket in the corner, and he said to himself, “I wonder what’s
inside? Well, I promised I wouldn’t look in it, but then again, she is my wife,
and in a way, it could be considered my basket. Because, after all, it is in
my house.” Before he knew it he had gone over to the corner of the kitchen
and had opened the basket. And as soon as he opened the basket, he
started to laugh and to dance and to laugh so loudly, shouting again and
again, “There’s nothing in the basket! Nothing! Nothing! There’s absolutely
nothing in the basket!” She was in the field minding the cows and heard the
noise and came into the kitchen. And she said, “You opened the basket.
And you looked into it.” And he said, “There’s absolutely nothing in the
basket. Nothing, nothing, nothing.” She said, “I have to go now.” He said,
“Please, don’t leave!” She said, “I have to go, and I’m leaving right now.
What I brought with me in the basket was spirit, but it’s so like humans to
think that spirit is nothing.”
And the last thing is a beautiful thing that a friend of mine sent me,
which I think is a great thing to leave with a great crowd of holy humanoids
like yourselves. And it’s called “The Hopi Elders Speak”
You have been telling the people that this is the eleventh
hour. Now you must go back and tell the people that this is the
hour. There are things to be considered: Where are you living?
What are you doing? What are your relationships? Are you in
right relation? Where is your water? Know your garden. It is time
to speak your truth. Create your community, be good to each
other, and do not look outside yourself for the leader. This could
be a good time. There is a river flowing very fast. It is so great and
swift that there are those who will be afraid; they will try to hold
onto the shore, they will feel they are being torn apart, and they
will suffer greatly. Know that the river has its destination. The
elders say that we must let go of the shore, push off into the
middle of the river, keep our eyes open and our heads above the
water, see who is in there with us, and celebrate. At this time in
history, we are to take nothing personally, least of all ourselves.
For the moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey
comes to a halt. The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather
yourselves. Banish the word “struggle” from your attitude and
vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner
and in celebration. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

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