Each as soon as within the bluest moon, in case you are fortunate, you encounter somebody with such highly effective and beneficiant mild of their eyes that they rekindle the misplaced mild inside you and return it magnified; somebody whose calm, type, regular gaze penetrates the very heart of your being and, refusing to look away from even essentially the most shadowy components of you, falls upon you want a benediction.
That we will do that for one another, however that it occurs so hardly ever, is each the nice miracle and the nice tragedy, for there is no such thing as a loneliness just like the loneliness of getting your mild unmet.
The nice Irish poet and thinker John O’Donohue (January 1, 1956–January 4, 2008) takes up these immense and intimate questions within the opening pages of his altogether fantastic last ebook To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings (public library) — his parting present to the world, revealed simply earlier than his premature dying, celebrating “the present {that a} blessing could be, the doorways it may possibly open, the therapeutic and transfiguration it may possibly deliver” and alluring us to “rediscover our energy to bless each other.”
He writes:
There’s a quiet mild that shines in each coronary heart. It attracts no consideration to itself, although it’s at all times secretly there. It’s what illuminates our minds to see magnificence, our need to hunt risk, and our hearts to like life. With out this delicate quickening our days can be empty and wearisome, and no horizon would ever awaken our longing. Our ardour for all times is quietly sustained from someplace in us that’s wedded to the vitality and pleasure of life. This shy internal mild is what allows us to acknowledge and obtain our very presence right here as blessing.
The even better blessing is our presence right here collectively, as mirrors and magnifiers of one another’s mild. “Everytime you give a blessing, a blessing returns to enfold you,” O’Donohue reminds us. At their finest, at their rarest, these moments of profound light-to-light connection are thresholds, portals to transformation, invites to a extra radiant life.
With an eye fixed to “that tenuous territory of change that we should traverse when a threshold invitations us,” O’Donohue writes:
With out warning, thresholds can open instantly earlier than our toes… Within the ecstasy and loneliness of 1’s life, there are specific occasions when blessing is nearer to us.
To step throughout the brink with braveness and openheartedness is to honor the reality and sanctity of our expertise, of our mild — it’s to bless ourselves:
The buildings of our expertise are the home windows into the divine. After we are true to the decision of expertise, we’re true to God.
Complement with a blind hero of the French resistance on how to live in light, a Baldwin-lensed meditation on the light between us, and David Whyte’s “Blessing for the Light,” impressed by John O’Donohue, then revisit O’Donohue on why we fall in love and the essence of friendship.
