A Greeting (Mid-week Message)

A Greeting

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

The other day I came across a poem I had stored away by Fr. John O’Donohue, the Irish priest, poet, and philosopher who died in 2008.  O’Donahue, an expert on thirteenth century mystic Meister Eckhart, was the author of Anam Cara: A Treasury of Celtic Wisdom, a book that made available to many the glories of Celtic spirituality.  Anam Cara is Gaelic for “Soul Friend.” 

The poem is a blessing that uses several images to describe the despair that the pains and sorrows of life sometimes bring us:  a weight on the shoulders that makes us fall, a window obscured by frost in the winter a leaky currach (an Irish boat made of stretched skins or canvas over a wooden frame) that is about to sink.  It uses several images to describe the healing and remedy for such sorrow:  the clay of earth, a rainbow, the moonlight on the sea.  It describes the human breath giving the blessing as a wind that draws a protective circle, a Caim, around the sufferer who is being blessed, as an invisible cloak of care.  The poem is named “Beannacht,” Irish for “Greeting.”

Beannacht 

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.

And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach 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,
may the clarity of light 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.

~ John O'Donohue, in Echoes of Memory

Grace and Peace, 

Fr. Tony+