Imagination as the Path of the Spirit John O Donohue

good evening and it's lovely to be here again I'd like to start off my talk with the poem that I wrote several years ago and it's a poem of blessing and I'd like to read it for all of us and for absent friends as well there's one Irish word in the poem which is the word Herick and a couric means a canoe so panicked on the day when the waste dedenne's on your shoulders and you stumble may the clay dance to balance you and twin your eyes freeze behind the grey window and the ghost of laughs gets into you may a flock of colors indigo red green and is your blue come to awaken in you and medal of delight when the canvass phrase in the kharak of thought and a stain of ocean blackens beneath you may there come across the waters a path of yellow moonlight to bring you safely home may the nourishment of the earth be yours made the clarity of life be yours may the fluency of the ocean be yours may the protection of the ancestors be yours and so may a slow wind work these words of love around you an invisible cloak to mind your life I always think that behind every face there is a secret life and that humanoids are the strangest creatures that you'd ever meet because so much is contained inside the human body and I often thought that in the very beginning that the winds went silent and the oceans became still the first time that the human face appeared on earth because I think it's one of the most unusual things in the world is a human face and there aren't such a small canvas such a variety of presence can appear and behind every face there is a secret hidden inner life and the amazing thing is that each of us is known by our face we've often had the experience of being in a supermarket or in a street somewhere and seeing somebody from an angular from behind and st. our selves God that Cynthia our Mary and then going right up to them and suddenly they're turned around and they're wearing the wrong face so our face is that by which we are recognized but this really strange thing is that none of us has ever seen our own face and I was writing this it really struck me how strange it is that none of us have seen our own face I mean we've seen images of it in windows and in mirrors but mirrors are notoriously untrustable some mirrors exorcise a cruelty that is practically unthinkable in the reflection that they throw back to you others are kinder and softer but the end of the day you can't trust them but you've never seen your own face so I always think that that is an incredible incompletion in us and in a certain sense it's actually the opening for friendship and love because if love means anything our friendship means anything it means that in the presence of the other you begin to see who you are in how they reflect you back to yourself and there is this individuality and solitariness and life as well if somebody said to me what's the thing that would amaze me most in the world well the thing that amazed me most is that the whole thing is going on I love live Knox's phrase which said that the real mystery is not that things are the way they are but that there is something rather than nothing and then the second thing that amazes me is individuals that no matter like even in this crowd of humans here that there are no two humans that inhabit the same world we all inhabit the same world physically but internally each world is completely different so no one else sees the world the way you do no one else sees it from the perspective that you do in no one else is the same nourish of building as there is within you and even though similar things have happened to you as with other people the context that they find in your heart and mind and narrative is different from everyone else so actually when you think of it like that and the fact that your mind is hidden like this is the coolest thing of all I think no brain surgeon has ever opened the cranium and discovered a nest of thoughts nesting somewhere because thoughts are not visible so so actually your inner world is completely hidden from all other humans and this is I often think one of the magic things about Samuel Beckett as a playwright that he actually shows us how far away we are from each other and how difficult it is sometimes to find the bridges towards each other and the heart of what I want to say to you this evening is this is that no one else can look out for your inner life but yourself there's a psychologist that I really like - Scottish psychologist called RD Laing he wrote amazing books but in one of his books called the politics of experience he said we never see another person's experience all we see is their behavior but you never see another person's experience so in a certain sense if you don't look out for your inner life nobody else can and one of the great tragedies I always think of life is that people live in this private inner world but they usually take all their furniture forests from outside from other people and like to put this where this is an experiment or a little kind of the suggestion I often make to humans when they come to listen to me and become my victims for an hour is that I often say to them everything you do is guided by Tosh and it's a very interesting question to ask yourself and the question is this washe are the seven thoughts that govern shape and determine my life takes a long time to find them out what are the seven thoughts that you keep secretly coming back to because every day you're using thought all the time have you realize it or not and the world that you inhabit and see is shaped by the way you see us and the way you see is shaped by the way you think so if you really want to change your life the best way to change it is to change the way you think I know people who want to change their lives by changing their work their partner their friends the places that they live what they did all the rest of it and usually what you find is they only end up becoming more the same as they were before where as an actual fact if you change some of the furniture in your inner world in your mind then you really change your life there's a friend of mine in Connemara who was principal of school and the motto he had for the school which is a beautiful motto was the mind-altering altars all the mind-altering altars all so it's an interesting thing if you have some time on your own in the next few weeks or if you're writing a diary to write take out an empty white page it's the best mirror ever and ask yourself what are the seven thoughts that shaped my life you might only get one the first time you chance it then it might take you weeks or days or whatever to get the seven thoughts up but when you get them on the page then you get a secret look or a look into the secret way that you understand things and when you've got the seventh hearts written down leave them alone for a week or two and then take another page some other day in session because I was so faithfully married to these seven thoughts what were the seven other that I didn't even flirt with or have an affair with and then you begin to get a look at what you have excluded and avoided and places that you've never even thought of going in your heart our mind or spirit I used to be a Catholic priest for but Jesus I think was about 19 years and one of the great privileges of being a priest like there was lots of unprivileged things like which were kind of not so oxygen II but there were lovely things and one of the real privileges was to when you'd be at a deathbed and helping humanoids to leave the earth and it was an incredible privilege there's no place like a deathbed except a birth bed and in a certain way the deathbed is a kind of birth bed Henry James the wonderful American novelist said that nothing makes a person feel so alive as to witness another die Elias Canetti the Austrian Jewish writer said the reason we're happy at funerals is because they're not our own which is kinda cool but the thing about about helping someone to die is that usually people are so surprised that that was it and the lone the loneliest place to be is furious if you're helping someone to die who has really lived their life Jesus it's a great place to be one time I was helping a band detour to die a kind of rogue airborne he wasn't a sinister like but he really was wild and he was old and I had done all the magic with him but the sense whistling and I had put on the holy oil and everything in him and then it was time for off so I said to him I've done everything I can do for you now and you're on your way and you've just little while needs a job and I said what would you say about the whole thing now that you're about to leave and this big row smile crossed his visage and he said by Jesus he said I knocked a hell of a squeeze out of it and the next thing in two minutes he was gone and I was sent to myself as the Americans say what a way to go like to say they're an after great embrace and squeeze and hug out of my life and I've seen other people died and I have seen their deathbed been a place of the most tragic lonesome forsaken regression people who never lived the life that they desired post Ponder's allow themselves to be Seche to be beset and contained by other people's expectations and their own anxieties and uncertainties and all was were waiting for a future time to enter their lives and inhabit them and never did and suddenly it was the evening of their death and their sad lonesome eyes looked back on a life that they had squandered while all was meaning to get into it and like an exercise that somebody told me about one time that I thought was a wonderful exercise in terms of just waiting and yourself up a bit was to try to imagine the view from your deathbed and see what you'd like to see think of what you'd like to see that's not yet there and think of what you wouldn't like to see that there now and maybe needs to be transformed because the thing about it is the whole journey is so short friend of mine said to me there about six months ago what is it that haunts you and I said I can tell you exactly what haunts me now it's the sense of my days running through my fingers like the finest sand and I can't stop I remember when I was studying in Germany I came back one time I noticed of a German car and I was outside goldwyn even this fellow's hitching a ride so he sat in and he started talking brought in English to me because he thought I was a German so he said how are you eh you're enjoying Ireland and I said very good and he said what do you do and I said I am a philosopher and he said what is philosophy about and I said it's about the meaning of life and I said what do you think the meaning of life is and he said Jesus ah I don't know he said I'll tell you one thing though he said I'd love to put in a 60 year peace between the ages of 20 and 30 Jah thought was a great all spake you know but because the whole thing is going so fast and one of the things and one of the sad things about humans is that very often we almost have to be on the edge of losing a thing before we begin to either seus our valuers our celebrations i've often seen that with people who worse working so hard and so meshed into their lives they didn't know they were on earth she's just bed work back again and then suddenly an illness hitch and all the webbing got caught and suddenly they were on their own and they got a new look at their lives and they woke up because they began to think not in the way that Rene Descartes thinks you know Descartes cogito ergo sum I think therefore I am somebody was telling me this job last week that Descartes goes into a bar and he's having a pint of beer and when he's almost half down to the end of the pint the barman says Monsieur Descartes would you like another pint and he said I think not and disappeared so one of the things about about about trying to I think another way to stay for I'm saying is one should try to live so that one can die very honorably and at one's deathbed you should be able to look back and say to yourself well what I dreamt of doing I actually tried to do whether it worked out right or whether I did it the right way that's another question but I didn't stand on the fence or sit on the fence and become a kind of Exile in my own life I actually entered it and got right into it Van Morrison the Belfast mystic says in one of her songs if you live the life you love you will get the blessings from above and I really believe that I think that life is the great sacrament and if we get into it it looks after us completely being raised a Catholic in the West of Ireland some years ago to the time when sin was all over the place like now nobody talks about sin but then there was sin every corner you turned black and there was catechism stuff and I often think now like it was like kind of Catholic rap you know like what is an occasion of sin an occasion of sin as any person place or thing that entices you to sin now I could zap it up a bit you'd have a rap kind of thing so there was sin everywhere but what they never told us was that one of the greatest sins was the on lived life and that nobody can convert you into your own life but yourself and one of the useful things to look us is to see what whole this is what I think sinners I think sin is woundedness that keeps you stuck and paralyzed in hungry anxious places and then poison comes from you that's destructive of others in the Christian tradition many of our theologies of sin all was dealt with the symptoms never with the causes of it and somebody who is hacked as contented and who's at peace and their own lives they're not causing destruction right left in front and and center it's all was the inner disturbance that causes outer disturbance and the goofin I was talking about this weekend master Eckhart in Oxford I mean he believed that totally he believed if you didn't get it right in here that the rest of the stuff never worked outside and I think in our times that there is a huge invitation to awaken your heart and your mind like people draw all kinds of distinctions between people people who have money people who don't people are gifted people or not people who are beautiful looking people or not for me the crucial difference between people is whether a person is awakened or not because an awful lot of people if you give them a comfortable pillow and look after this middle section with food OSes they'll sleep their way through most of our honest-to-god weave I remember doing a thing with psychiatrists in Scotland a few years ago there was an old psychiatrist there and I said to him what would you say about the human person after all your years in psychiatry and he said to me people only change he said when the prospect of not changing is more painful than to change and I think that one of the things about this Greenbelt festival is that it would make you it would be lovely if it could become a threshold for you should do something completely new and different in your life either in terms of thinking or in terms of your presence and like fur I always think that when all the talking is talked and the doing is done that everything depends on the integrity of individual presence the integrity of your own presence it's lovely to sit in front of a person of integrity they don't have to be all holy holy and pious and have a religious stuff on their mouths every time you hear them but it's nice to sit ins front to someone who is themselves and I always think to put it in technical terms that's the ontological duty of the human subject is to be who you are and an awful lot of people expend huge energy and trying to become someone else or to pretend that there's someone else and like the energy that goes into trying to be putting on a face on things it's just unbelievable so the relief of being able to just slip in to who you actually are and to live the life that your heart wants one of the loneliness in the world is that so many people are in positions of work that they would they're just dreaming their whole life as an imprisonment and their dream of getting out of it our people are stuck in relationships that are so dysfunctional that even a reincarnated highly Ferrari Sigmund Freud wouldn't get them out of it and they still stick in there it's an interesting question about humans like why do we hold on with such commitment sometimes to that which robs us of spirit and makes us utterly miserable because one thing that the Christian message should tell us is that we deserve happiness and above all we deserve creativity and the challenge of becoming all that we could become and in this this part of the talk I'd like to say that I think that the amazing thing about about the human person is the possibilities for change within us are absolutely endless years ago I wrote 15 sonnets on the struck of the rosary and this is the one under nativity and it's really about transformation and birth the Nativity no man reaches where the moon touches a woman even the moon leaves her when she opens deeper into the ripple in her womb that encircles dog to become flesh and bone someone is coming ashore inside her a face deciphers itself from water and she curves around the gathering wave opening to offer the life at craze in a corner stall of pilgrim strangers she falls and heaves holding a tide of Tears a red wire of pain feeds through every vein on tonight on weaves and the child reaches dawn outside each other now she sees him first flesh of her flesh her dreamt son safe on earth I think that one of the things that has been neglected in the Western tradition is the imagination of God we've heard about the will of God like and people have crucified themselves and hammered their beautiful awkwardness into submission trying to do what someone else thought was the will of God for them and I to be honest I don't think the will of God is that interesting whereas I think the imagination of God is absolutely fascinating in medieval scholastic times they used to have huge arguments about whether God had to create or not and I always think God had to create because otherwise he'd be in some divine lunatic asylum if he didn't express the plenitude of possibility that was within him so if we are made in the image and likeness of God that means that each of us is a natural creator and that each of us should awaken our imaginations and a lot of people say like that's it is all right for the likes you your interest in imagination writing and all the rest of it I have no imagination at all or I'm not artistic as they say I don't believe that at all I think everyone has an imagination and there's two arguments I'd use in support to it first argument is that we're all no matter how respectable and serious humans look everyone is a next baby right you wouldn't think it looking at some people that they started off like that but actually we all did so when you were a child you lived in an imaginary world when your mother or father said you don't go over that wall because there's a monster or something there Jesus you people the whole thing with the whole plantation full of months Theriot possibility so you were always kids live in amazing well as the stuff that's gone on in their heads like just incredible possibility so each of us lived in that imaginative world that was the heart of romantic poetry course Wordsworth and all these people saying the child is father mother of the man or the woman that's one thing and the second reason that we're all imaginative is that each night while you sleep you dream and even the most respectable serious solemn severe scrupulous humans are up to incredible things often unspeakable things in their dreams sometimes after where they've been like it's quite an achievement to turn up for breakfast so a dream is a sophisticated imaginative text that you send to yourself each night and one of the interesting ways if you don't want to go therapy in yourself one of the interesting ways to begin to do a bit of work on yourself is to pay attention to your dreams and the trick is this I learned this from some buddies when you dream when you wake in the morning with the clock goes off or whatever don't to open your eyes first keep your eyes closed and try and just get the tail end of the dream and then if you just get two fingers on it you'll pull most of the thing back and then just note it down the Talmud says that a dream that is not interpreters is like a letter that has not been opened and you know if you're sending yourself these letters every night it's kind of only courtesy to call around sometime and to kind of pick them up like cuz you will if you keep an account of your dreams get a great sense of who you are and what's happening and like in folk traditions spare especially the Indian tradition in America they really charted their future according to the symbols that came in the dreams so your dreams are very wise about who you are because they come from your subconscious not from your controlled surface mind so like if you feel that you're not that interesting and that you might be a little touch boring and that nothing of major significance has happened to you for a long time and you get a little bit anxious shift from your day life towards your night life and have a look there and you'll find immense sophistication and passion happening in your dream life so if you can dream if you're a former baby then you can imagine and one of the most interesting things one of the most interesting ways are getting to look at who you are is through Doudna bitter writing I just want to throw out this suggestion maybe two people in this audience and do it which is what that for two people an awful lot of people now that I see in the land of the in the home of the exceptionally brave do what's called journaling and you see them with their journals and they're filling them up with every thought that comes into their head and like most of us the state coroner wouldn't find a pulse on it so the recommendation I'm making is buy yourself a really beautiful notebook a really lovely notebook that you like taking out and give it a title that excites you like last lent I give out of it I did that for myself and I called it a Lenten diary severe views and the hard mirror to try and get at places where I was stalked myself but you could call this book the diary of my most dangerous thoughts are things that occurred to me that I could never tell anybody our strangenesses I have known and keep it for unusual thoughts and watch the way it builds up because in our contemporary world like it's very hard to find places where you can show your heart and I think that a diary a creative diary like this is a place where you can actually talk to yourself because there's an awful difference between thinking attained and writing it down because in the act of writing it down something totally changes and the thing becomes part of yourself and if you have the diary of your most dangerous thoughts make sure you're sure to know about it just keep it private and let it build up its own density and resonance because one of the things in our culture that's very difficult is to find someone you can talk to one of the reasons that therapy has taken off all over the place like I don't know is it fried or young said that the Irish were on psycho analyzable and it's I think it's kind of half true like and so far as these things go but now it's breaking out all over the place and I have no problem at erä pay like if you're in trouble and you're entangled and you find a good therapist you're blessed because of a person like that will educate your fingers and show you how to disentangle yourself but it's all a lot of it is an expression of a great loneliness that is at the heart of postmodern society people want a best friend or someone they could talk to and then to bring creativity and imagination into this what I want to ask is like question that I find interesting to ask is when was the last time that you had a great conversation with someone a conversation that sang in your mind for days and weeks afterwards it's an interesting question because an awful lot of what passes for conversation in our culture is merely intersecting monologues and there's no real conversation because in real conversation you can be taken to places you never expected you can overhear things from yourself that you never knew you had in you and you can absolutely change in a great conversation it's like pure nourishment for yourself and like this is one of the beautiful gifts of friendship and if you a friend that you can have a great conversation with then you should do that often and regardless of where there are you should go to see them so that you can talk to them and be with them because I think in that you find new dimensions of yourself that in your normal day-to-day life nobody even suspects it's amazing how familiar we become to each other and I always think that one of in difficulties in a relationship is to kinda keep the crust of familiarity from forming over it completely Gabriel Garcia Marquez de grâce South American writer in a book of conversations with Pedro Mendoza called fragrance of guava was asked about his relationship with his wife Mercedes they've been together all their lives and he said I know her so well now he said that I haven't the slightest clue who she really is I think that's a great statement and I think that in friendship and in really good conversation that you get a chance to make a clearance in order to allow the other person to emerge as who they are in their other nests in a safe space where there won't be a Salter with either expectation or judgment and that's one of the things that friendship should be friendship and love should be safe spaces of clearance and healing and possibility because one of the lovely things about the imagination is that it's the great friend of possibility I used to always think that facts were the coolest things and I was studying in Germany learning German in Berlin and I was still in the same house as a great philosopher of science from Indy Gary had depended he was a friend of Karl Popper and all these dudes and dudettes and I remember one day we were walking down the street in Berlin and I'm a centum and the facts amazing things people are done philosophy tend to talk like this like so he said facts are really interesting he said but possibilities are far more interesting and I said really he said yeah and then I began to think about possibilities and I realized that there the name of the game because all facts are children of possibilities the possibilities come first the person to read on this if you really want to do some olympic training with your mind is Immanuel Kant in his critique of pure reason but you'd really want to feel that you need to be punished to do that for yourself but anyway so this is the trick not but this is simple abbreviated stuff say you have ten possibilities a cluster of possibilities and they're just possibility in a way they're among themselves at the possibility disco and then one of them becomes a fact right it rises up to become a fact then that's the one that gets all the attention but the really interesting question to ask is what happens to the other nine possibilities that never made it into fact where do they hang out and that's what interests the imagination the imagination is always interested in that which is not attended to but which is always present like putting it existentially in another way I believe that we're all was confronted by different possibilities and we make choices so choice is always about lasts in a way so say as a baby you made a choice I think babies make huge decisions like I love the American comedian Steven Wright and he said I kept a diary as a baby day too still tired after the big move my second birthday my age has doubled in a year if this keeps up I'll be 90 by the time I'm 6 Steven Wright I really recommend him he's the best comedian like another thing he says we've just put a new sky lash in our apartment it's driving the people upstairs crazy and I just leave you one last one with me says I'm having the experience of amnesia and deja vu together I think I've forgotten this before verse hab so like okay so you've role these possibilities as a child I think very soon after we hit the canvas of the art we're getting very fast read a survival read and where we've landed what the other creatures the bigger creatures are like and what we need to do so say as a baby you are confronted with six possibilities and you chose number one then when you were in childhood about seven you were confronted with three possibilities this time you chose to say in the middle of adolescence when you were in the hormone forest and it was very eye and stein space time everything and wearing this and you were confronted with two possibilities this time you took the first one said then when you were Trenton you met somebody in the jury they fell in love with you five possibilities this time you took four when you're 40 yeah three this time you took number three da da da so all the time the person that you are here this evening is a result of key choices that you made on thresholds that you've probably now forgotten and you chose along the way until you chose your way into this life now and that's why you are who you are but the interesting question in relation to possibility to ask is what happened to the other lives that you never chose where are they I think this is a really fascinating question and I have an old suspicion that life isn't just the time isn't just linear but that it's also a spiral thing and I feel that the lives that we never chose actually move along with us and maybe that's the secret of when we die is that we only finally get to leave the world when these forgotten lives have also somehow realized themselves I love that line in Jones I better say a couple of holy things in that you're all holy people it's true Jesus when I hear the hymns I was there I think kind of imagination I listen to all these hymns and I said get holy but um does the holy thing one of the lines that I've always loved in the New Testament is in John's letter where he says one day you will know as you are now known that's a very cool sentence because it means that right now you are being known by God and that that knowing is always accompanying you and that one day one day when you cross the old threshold and go into the death thing you'll meet that knowing coming towards you that that's a Jesus how you John and you look at the knowing and yet said god you're my knowing you're the knowing the way I was known and then you'd suddenly realize that even the most profound knowing that you had of yourself was just a little wisp in the wind compared to the knowing that the divine has of you and like I was saying that God is the great imagination and I think that's true and I think we're made in the image of likeness of God which means we're meant to create as well so to put it flag to pass on what I've been saying it's like this every time you're creative you're on holy ground because you're actually deepening extending and realizing creation and that's where I think the beauty of God comes in I think that there is a wonderful danger in God that we have totally forgotten because one of the things that humanoids like to do is they like to bring in the tamers the theology tamers to tame their deities down they don't like the idea of a wild God because it could get very awkward and deeply embarrassing so the respectability of theology confession all the rest of it comes in and makes the God nice and palatable the colors are inevitably pastels the music is nice and low like the schlocky music that you hear in supermarkets and that could be just the odd little beep when you realize God there is a God somewhere out there behind the whole thing and one of the reasons that so called young people which are a strange kind of species anywhere are leaving religion is that because God has died for them or become incredibly boring and uninteresting and I think that one of the tasks of our time for those who are interested in God is to make God dangerous again and the best person I know who does that is the fella I was talking about knocks for this morning is Meister Eckhart the thirteen 14th century mystic he is unbelievable just unbelievable and I'll end up by just telling you a couple of things about him one thing he said is nothing in the universe resembles God so much as silence nothing in the universe resembles God so much' silence then he says God is that wilderness in which each one is alone he also says and this is lovely about yourself you know I think one of the greatest gifts that anyone can have is a contented heart I think Norman else can give it to you but you can of all the world has to give but if you're not contented in your heart it's only torment in you and making you completely kind of miserable and there is I believe I believe you don't have to get a peaceful mind or contented heart I think there is an age of tranquility within each of us that's already there and through quieting your mind in your heart you can slip right down into it but one of the things like in in Ireland when you'd ask somebody a question you'd rarely get a straight answer you're not kind of it be gone around a bit around around run dry Cuba sin you know how you doing sure I'm not too bad how you nourish rubs off from worse then it kind of goes no information as being communicated that is true liked we're expert at this dances dancing but like when I went to America first given talks Jesus I got an awful shock because I suddenly discovered if you put too much sincerity into the question how are you you could unleash a biography in seconds you get levels of information that should be one one if their path nor even knew this and you just don't strike me Jesus I presented myself why would I be cringing and then you'd often be sitting in old workshop things like and you'd say someone who you so they tell you what's called telling your story this is coming to our door now - it's probably in England sweat so you tell your story what's your story so you give your story and your often be sitting in a group of people maybe with a woman who really interesting face I mean it's a god she's an amazing face and then you'd hear are coming out with a cliched second-rate version of a story about herself that would put cornflakes to sleep and you'd be said to yourself she's how is she on something like is she on automatic like this kinda took and what often happens is he is that people reduce identity to biography and if they have a story of they think of telling the story then that's who I actually am but an actual fact your identity is infinitely more complex nuanced sophisticated and mysterious than your biography or than anything that could ever unfold in your biography and perch what I am saying this afternoon is that one of your juices which only you can do is to imagine yourself you're not simply there you don't look in the mirror and it looks back at unit says John three four five two three dah-dah-dah blood cell bom bom-bom tells you nothing about who you are there used to be a Zen monk quiz to go to the mirror each morning when he got up and he'd say to the mirror who are you then he's looking in the mirror and say who you then you look in the mirror a third time and say who are you then he'd wink at the mirror and he'd say well whoever you are don't let them fool you today because the who question is the really magic question about who you are and the point I'm making is no one else can tell you that but yourself and if you don't have a sense of that then you're on sand and not on ground and I think one of the beautiful things about a relationship with God is that it gives you your own ground like when I was a child at home people that say you know standing up to yourself the way it was put was they'd say stand your ground stand your ground are you know when you meet somebody who is no grounding at all they're like a personal domesticated vortex you feel if you came too near them that you'd actually go like straight in and it's lovely and so wholesome then to meet someone who can stand on their own ground and who is themselves it's just really because you can trust someone who is themselves where somebody who is picking a bit of pastiche a little pastiche there and a bit here and a couple of sentences from delicious lingo and shown you a face you don't know whether you're standing in front of a lioness of Malaysia or a mystic from Connemara want you to clue so part of integrity is to imagine yourself honorably and integrity is also related to into integrators that the different complex dimensions within yourself have to have the invitation and the possibility of coming together and meeting each other and I think that the beauty of belief in God is that your concept of God should be feisty and imaginative and rich enough to incorporate all the hungers of your heart north alot of people have gone around you know the concept of God that they learned at 10 or 11 everything else in their life has grown and their little concept of God is like something out of a lucky back and it's so awful like especially fundamentalist stuff like it's just unbelievable when people get when people get thar macadam put inside to lay down the outer ban for the fundamentalist thing I was is really interesting I probably offend people by this number I don't mean to offend anybody really I don't but in the little village where I live nothing happens before 10 or 11 o'clock in the morning it's just Newtonian time instead of the Einstein model and especially on Saturday it's even a bit later but one Saturday morning I heard this knocking in my door at nine o'clock and I thought one of my neighbors was having a cow-calf in or that there was some trouble on the farm so I went down to be confronted by these two humans who were dressed in a beautiful collar and tie suit the male one and the human female was dressed in a very elegant kind of two-piece thing and I said uh-huh nine o'clock in the morning in downtown wilderness connemara two perfectly dressed corporate looking people appear and I was in Jesus what's up then the man said to me we'd like to have a conversation with you and I said why and the woman said we'd like to have a conversation with you and like I was living on my own doing all kinds of thinking and I said God has smiled upon me and send me two interlocutors that are going to push me to all the horizons I need to go to so I said you might have a conversation with me the man repeated we would like to have a conversation with you so I Fitz I felt I was just about to bring them in and felt so lucky when I noticed protruding from the woman's handbag a magazine called Watchtower and I said to myself aha you are a sister and brother of the great Jehovah said she said yes and I said you really don't want to have a conversation with me and she said he said but we really do I said you don't they said we do I said you don't they said we do I said you don't and I said I'll tell you why I'm a trained theologian I said and I know the old I said you're already watching me with a nice 10 minutes now and you know exactly from your kitchen scripture quotes the ones that you're going to use to nail this creature but I said I'm kind of handy enough at scripture too and I can do tennis as well so if he come in like we'll be back and forth we lose an hour to be squandered and nothing had happened because I said when I was in university is to try and have conversations with your brothers and sisters and it all was ended up as a pure kind of monologue and then they kind of looked at each other and said maybe we don't really want to have a conversation appear and off they went you know but the point about the fundamentalist and all the stuff is like I never realized how deep fundamentalism goes until I was at the University of Memphis one Saturday morning for a roundtable on spirituality and fundamentalism and there were a couple of people there who had been caught in the fundamentalist thing and the job that they had to try and reframe and re weave and retrieve their lives and my my fear is this is that as our times become more apocalyptic become more and more apocalyptic that there is going to be a greater rise and fundamentalism and it's an answer to nothing it's based on the invention of a past that never existed the creation of a false nostalgia for that past and the thing that I can't that let's not say I can't stand but the thing I found wrong or the difficult about fundamentalists is they want to keep it among themselves they want to tell everyone about it like and you'd love if they all meet often I an island and just fund heed away together like and their fundamentalist thing but they want to nail everybody so why not the last fanta making is that I think in the Christian tradition there is a huge resource in relation to God a mass of rich narrative of who God is and Meister Eckhart is one of the people that's done that and I'll leave you with something disturbing from him he says in middle high german middle oak dodge God yet won't got effect that means God becomes and God under comes so what he's saying actually which is kind of really make you draw your breath is God is only our named forest and the closer we come to it the more it ceases to be God and yet if we go towards us we will inherit every blessing and healing that we need and when the time comes for us to lie down to die we will be able to look back on a life that took honourable risks that pushed its own frontiers that tried to look after its own healing and exercise a psychological hygiene that that didn't let stuff spill out over other people that had nothing to do with them that was compassionate and didn't judge and the tried to look after the poor and the neglected and the unspoken farm like me I mean we are very privileged people and I was down in the car with a wonderful woman Sabina who works on the whole poverty thing and she was giving a talk on the whole poverty thing and like I always feel that we're so privileged and an old sentence that I have on the eternal echoes book which i think is not a bad little sentence like even if I say so myself because I think it's an awful lot of weak sentences but this sentence is kind of good and it was that the joushi of privilege is absolute integrity and in terms of our talk here the duty of privilege is integrity towards ourselves towards our possibilities and to live to the full the life that we'd love and to animate and realize everything because the time is so short and it will be soon gone and I finish with this chart poem called fluent Matt and said we take no questions now because he's going to bombard me in the morning was a public kind of interview so if you want to be victimized again you can come to that this is a poem called fluent sometimes when you be writing the poem you'd get a great line or great coupler lines then you try to follow it and you couldn't so I got these two lovely lines and I tried for three or four weeks to follow them and I couldn't so when I was putting the collection together I said geez them two lines aren't bad so I exercise poetic license and broke them in the middle and made this shock that the four line poem that I'd like to finish it and I'd like to thank you for your courtesy and attention it's really lovely this is called fluent I would love to live like a river flows carried by the surprise of its own unfolding I would love to live like a river flows carried by the surprise of its own unfolding thank you very much god bless

Channel: Your Infinite Way

Views: 35,420

Rating: 4.8551307 out of 5

Keywords: celtic, spirit, poet, irish

Id: RkXRaFm33Eg

Length: 56min 7sec (3367 seconds)

Published: Tue May 10 2016