A review by leelulah
To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings by John O'Donohue

1.0

Oh boy, am I choosing all the bad books? Am I? Because that seems to be the case. I wanted to mark this as the "devotional" prompt for the book challenge, I'm not going to. I'm severely disappointed. I suppose Celtic Christianity suffers the same new agey kidnapping as the Franciscan Order. After all, many people think of St. Patrick as some hippie.

I was hoping some poetic license from what I saw on reviews, and on accounts of knowing the author was "a poet". But not this. If you really like Celtic Spirituality, as in Monastic based- St. Patrick infused sort of stuff, this is not it. You've been warned. This is the ugly, annoying "cousin", New Age.

John O'Donohue, may he rest in peace, was an ex-Catholic priest. And it shows, man has internalized Scriptures and Augustinian, some Celtic Catholic insight like quoting parts of the Lorick of St. Patrick at random times or "May perpetual light shine upon the faces of all who rest here" (yes, copying the prayer for the deceased and the blessing given to Moses by God), the prayer to our guardian angel, Psalms, Maitins and Vespers, etc.

He can make some criticisms of contemporary culture, how consumerism is warped desire, and have some poignant lines and other points in the prologues of the sections.

However, that's where it ends. The blessings feel generic, repetitive and something out of an Anselm Grun or some such generic self-help book disguised as spirituality. In fact, the feeling is quite similar.

Unlike blessings, they rarely ever mention any of the Three Persons of the Trinity, mentions to God are sparse and casual. They seem more of the hit-enter variety of "lyricism" we have been seeing lately. Strangely enough, right away he mentions that the Holy Spirit is much less of a conflictive term than God (right). To then put a straightforward explanation of the Trinity in the prologue to the section "States of the Heart".

He also invents "angels" like he's talking about the nine muses of the arts as well. Look, I know you wanna feel good and fuzzy inside, I don't blame you, but... angels are terrifying "beings of light" (and not in the fuzzy, warm and meaningless contemporary sense).

I blinked at some of the verses, too focused on "the wonder of your own heart", as if sin didn't exist. But poems he intended to be too particular, like "At The Threshold of Womanhood" and "At The Threshold of Manhood" repeat the concepts of "grace and elegance", and though they might have some good intentions or advice in what it means to be a man or woman: not impose your will, to respect yourself and conduct yourself properly.... men and women are required to enter into the feminine, because that's what's required to become a woman, whose "body has a mind of its own" (I have two brains, wowzers, it explains the super fast reading!) and because the masculine is inherently silent, otherwise men cannot feel.

This feminine intergration mumbo jumbo is old as time and somehow is some Orientalist, Gnostic, Jungian, Petersonian stupidity that gets regurgitated in glitter every single time.

It also has Romantic Feelsies about How Animals Are Better Beings than Us, baptized in "the name of the wind, the light and the rain" and Nature, as it calls water "Our first mother", because Nature is "imaginative, humble", "rhythm of the universe", "infinte galaxies", etc.