John O'Donohue is a sage of the Burren and author of a deservedly best-selling book, Anam Chara, in which he applies imagination and learning in his search for "spiritual wisdom from the Celtic world".A poet, scholar and priest, trained in the philosophy of Hegel, Dr O'Donohue was born in a limestone valley, Caherbeanna, near Blackhead: "To live in a valley is to enjoy a private sky," he writes. "All around, life is framed by the horizon. The horizon shelters life yet constantly calls the eye to new frontiers and possibilities. The mystery of this landscape is further intensified by the presence of the ocean. For millions of years an ancient conversation has continued between the chorus of the ocean and the silence of the stone."A soul-friend/anam chara forms part of the Celtic monastic tradition which teaches us to become compassionate, generous and fearless. "The anam chara is God's gift. Friendship is the nature of God." O'Donohue writes with enthusiasm but without sentimentality. While each day is a journey, life can be unpredictable. "People change, often quite dramatically and suddenly. Bitterness and resentment quickly replace belonging and affection." Bitterness and coldness are, however, the ultimate defeat. Friendship needs nurturing.He quotes Shakespeare: "The friends thou hast and their attention tried, grapple them to your soul with hoops of steel." One cannot love another person unless one is involved in the "spiritual work of learning to love yourself. There is within each of us at the soul level an enriching fountain of love. In other words, you do not have to go outside yourself to know what love is. This is not selfishness, and it is not narcissism; they are negative obsessions with the need to be loved. Rather, this is the wellspring of love within the heart. Through their need for love, people who lead solitary lives often stumble upon this great inner fountain."Sensation-driven cultureOne of the sinister aspects of television in our sensationdriven culture, according to O'Donohue, is that people are constantly looking at empty and false images which fill up the inner world of the heart. The secret words of love have been vacated in the neon day of greed and consumerism. He warns that when the spiritual search is too intense the soul remains hidden.
"The light of modern consciousness is not gentle or reverent; it lacks graciousness in the presence of mystery; it wants to unriddle and control the unknown. Modern consciousness is similar to the harsh and brilliant white light of a hospital operating theatre. This neon light is too direct and clear to befriend the shadowed world of the soul."Celtic mysticism, devoid of aggression, recognises that we should let the soul find us. Christ is the secret anam chara of every individual, O'Donohue asserts.Each person has a unique destiny "to express the special gift you bring to the world. Sometimes this gift may involve suffering and pain that can neither be accounted for nor explained . . . It is in the depths of your life that you will discover the invisible necessity which brought you here. When you begin to decipher this, your gift and giftedness come alive. Your heart quickens and the urgency of living rekindles your creativity."Viktor Frankl, a survivor of Auschwitz, wrote in his classic work Man's Search for Meaning that suffering can be creative.SilenceMeister Eckhart, the German mystic about whom O'Donohue is writing a book, said there is nothing in the world that resembles God so much as silence. Yet silence is one of the great victims of modern culture. People are suffering from stress, he contends, because they allow so little time for silence. Silence and solitude are essential for spiritual development. Solitude, not to be confused with loneliness, is one of the most precious things in the human spirit. "When you acknowledge the integrity of your solitude, and settle into its mystery, your relationships with others take on a new warmth, adventure and wonder."Anam Chara (Bantam, £16.50) assures us that the phrase "do not be afraid", occurs 366 times in the Bible. "There is a welcome for you at the heart of your solitude. When you realise this, most of the fear that governs your life falls away. The moment your fear transfigures, you come into rhythm with your own self."One falls out of rhythm when one reneges on one's potential and settles for the mediocre. "Respectability and security are subtle traps on life's journey."Moreover, "one of the greatest conflicts in life is the conflict between the ego and the soul. The ego is threatened, competitive and stressed, whereas the soul is drawn more towards surprise, spontaneity, the new and the fresh. Real soul presence has humour and irony and no obsessive self-seriousness . . . To learn to love your adversaries is to earn a freedom that is beyond resentment and threat."It is startling how desperately we hold on to what makes us miserable, O'Donohue observes. "When you begin to let go, it is amazing how enriched your life becomes."This compendium of wisdom cites Rilke: difficulty can be one of the greatest friends of the soul; Stanislavsky: "The longest and most exciting journey is the journey inwards"; and Pascal: many of our major problems derive from our inability to sit still in a room. O'Donohue does not mention President McAleese's guru, the Christian meditation teacher John Main, but he is in tune with him.My father used to say that no one ever came back to tell us what the next world is like. O'Donohue has a good shot at it. He believes the dead are all around us (in a higher state of being); and that eternal life means "a life where all that we seek, goodness, unity, beauty, truth and love, are no longer distant from us but are now completely present with us".