John O'Donohue, an Irish Catholic poet and philosopher, died in his sleep at the age 52 on January 3, 2008. He was a beautiful man with a beautiful soul. The following excerpt from his poem, “On the Death of a Beloved Friend,” was posted on O'Donohue's website after his untimely death.
Your love was like the dawn
Brightening over our lives
Awakening beneath the dark
A further adventure of colour….
Let us not look for you only in memory,
Where we would grow lonely without you.
You would want us to find you in presence,
Beside us when beauty brightens,
When kindness glows
And music echoes eternal tones.
In a book interview shortly before his death, O’Donohue was asked why so much of our culture’s attention to beauty focuses on external appearances.
“In the book I wrote on beauty, I was trying to say that one of the huge confusions in our times is to mistake glamour for beauty,” O'Donohue said.
“We...live in a culture which is very addicted to the image, and I think that there is always an uncanny symmetry between the way you are inward with yourself and the way you are outward. And, I feel that there is an evacuation of interiority going on in our times. And that we need to draw back inside ourselves and that we'll find immense resources there.”
Life without a sense of beauty and the beautiful, is a life deprived of any real meaning or purpose. Beauty gives life a sense of depth and rootedness. Without it, everything, including ourselves, are but withered leaves hanging for dear life on a dry limb waiting for the next wind to send us falling into darkness.
O’Donohue suggests love is itself beautiful. Love is not a possessive desire, but rather it is an expression of beauty shining in the dark, like the dawn.
With the death of a loved one, memory of the person only brings dark loneliness. What is needed is the loved one’s presence. That presence exists not in remembering what was, but in celebrating what is: the dawn that brightens the day, and in the sound of music that lifts us out of our dark time into the light of eternity. In the light we are with our loved ones.
Our lives are empty of beauty when we focus only on the external aspects of life. Beauty must be cultivated deep within the soul. O’Donohue suggests each of us lives in a kind of symmetry between the inward and outward life. Beauty requires these aspects of our lives need to be balanced. If too much of our life is focused outwardly, then the inner life suffers. If we focus only on the inward life, our presence in the world “out there” suffers.
The United States, and Western culture in general, is focused on the outward life. Our history is one of outward expansion. With but a few exceptions, we are not a self-reflective people. We do not cultivate the inward life. We are about proving ourselves in the outer world. It is our genius and, perhaps, our tragic flaw.
As we reflect on the thoughts of O’Donohue, we recognize for the most part we are not a whole and balanced people. We neglect the nurturing of the interior life. Even our religious practice, which ought, in part, to be about cultivating the life of the inward soul, is largely focused on outward expressions of evangelism. A deep sense of beauty and the beautiful life is missing from our national psyche.
The ancient Greeks, in philosophy, poetry and drama, reflected on beauty and the beautiful. It was always understood as balance and harmony. The Greek word for beauty was "kalos." It was literally a calling to balance and harmony, and so to beauty. A significant aspect of this harmonious life was the balance of the symmetry between the inward and outward life.
The adjective, beautiful, went by the word "horaios," from hora/hour. The implication was the truly beautiful was so by being fully present in the time in which it finds itself. In O’Donohue’s poem, he writes his dead friend “would want us to find you in presence.”
The truly beautiful is alive. It is a living thing. Like all living things it is only alive in the present where it is experienced. It is present and balanced and whole.
Ugliness is just the opposite. It is dead, and it attempts to be what it once was or what it hopes to be. The ugly is either totally self-absorbed or completely focused on the world outside. It is like the child pretending to be grown-up or the old man or woman behaving and looking like a child. Glamour is ugly. Though it sparkles and catches our attention, it is a poor substitute for the truly beautiful. It fools us into thinking that it is beautiful and it turns us ugly.
We live in a beautiful world. It is beautiful because it is alive. The world – not just this world, but also the whole cosmos – is alive and beautiful because it is the expression of the Living One that creates and sustains it. We can call that Living One God. O’Donohue calls God Beautiful. You and I can know this Beauty, the beauty of the world and its source, only in so far as we understand – stand under – the realization of our own beauty. We must cultivate the balance and harmony of our outward and inward lives.
We must be as fully present as possible in the time in which we find ourselves. We are, each of us, like beautiful flowers opening to the sun even as we are rooted in the earth. It is through beautiful eyes we are able to see and be with the beauty around us. To be such beauty and see such beauty is to know the Beautiful One.
Thomas Raphael-Nakos grew up in Connecticut, holds a bachelor of arts degree in history from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, and a master of divinity degree from the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary. He has been a social worker in Louisiana and Iowa, and is a retired United Methodist minister.
