John O’Donohue was an Irish poet, author, Catholic priest, and philosopher, and was an ardent devotee of Celtic spirituality. He had a PhD in philosophical theology from the University of Tübingen in Germany, focusing on the work of the German philosopher Hegel. To Bless the Space Between Us was his last published book before he died at the age of 52 in 2008.
To Bless the Space Between Us is a book of blessings for all situations and occasions, and uses language that, though he comes from a decidedly Catholic background, is not specific to Christianity, nor does he use the word God, stating that it “is too huge to allow any other word to breathe beside it.” He allows each of us to come to the blessings from our own spiritual traditions. He organizes the blessings into seven categories: Beginnings, Desires, Thresholds, Homecomings, States of Heart, Callings, and Beyond Endings, each section preceded by a short introduction.
O’Donohue points out that in our contemporary Western culture, we have lost the presence and value of ritual — “We have fallen out of belonging,” he writes. “Consequently, when we stand before crucial thresholds in our lives, we have no rituals to protect, encourage, and guide us as we cross over into the unknown.” A blessing, he says, “is not a sentiment or a question; it is a gracious invocation where the human heart pleads with the divine heart.”
The last section of the book, after that on Beyond Endings, is entitled To Retrieve the Lost Art of Blessing. Here, he talks of “the shoreline of the invisible” and how an invisible light accompanies a new infant into the world, and at the other end of life “how the shadows of old age are lit more and more from the invisible world.” He encourages us to be mindful of how short our time is on this mortal plane of existence and to learn how precious each day is.
Though Thresholds is one of the seven categories of blessings, O’Donohue explains that they are the most important parts of our lives: “Looking back along a life’s journey, you come to see how each of the central phases of your life began at a decisive threshold where you left one way of being and entered another.” And later in this section, “When we look back, we can identify the key thresholds where the vital happenings of our lives occurred. These were usually the times when we were confronted with decisions about the paths we wanted to travel.”
He returns to a theme he set out at the beginning of the book: “While we seem to have progressed to become experts in so many things — multiplying and acquiring stuff we neither need nor truly want — we have unlearned the grace of presence and belonging.” This is why we need blessings in our lives — blessings we give and blessings we receive. “A blessing,” he writes, “is a circle of light drawn around a person to protect, heal, and strengthen.”
Every morning and evening, I read the blessings that speak most to me. There are blessings to greet the new day, and blessings to greet the night. There are blessings for longing, for old age, for courage, for suffering, for beauty, for equilibrium, for the unknown self. There are eighty-six blessings in all.
I have not gone out of my way to specifically recommend any of the books I have reviewed thus far. I recommend this one. It’s one you’ll want to go out and buy for yourself.