THE QUESTION HOLDS THE LANTERN.

John O’Donohue, Ph.D.
Humans have an uncanny ability to domesticate everything they touch.
Eventually, even the strangest things become absorbed into the routine
of the daily mind with its steady geographies of endurance, anxiety and
contentment. Only seldom does the haze lift, and we glimpse for a
second, the amazing plenitude of being here. Sometimes, unfortunately,
it is suffering or threat that awakens us. It could happen that one
evening, you are busy with many things, netted into your role and the
phone rings. Someone you love is suddenly in the grip of an illness
that could end their life within hours. It only takes a few seconds to
receive that news. Yet, when you put the phone down, you are already
standing in a different world. All you know has just been rendered
unsure and dangerous. You realise that the ground has turned into
quicksand. Now it seems to you that even mountains are suspended on
strings.
If you could imagine the most incredible story ever, it would be
less incredible than the story of being here. And the ironic thing is
that story is not a story, it is true. It takes us so long to see where
we are. It takes us even longer to see who we are. This is why the
greatest gift you could ever dream is a gift that you can only receive
from one person. And that person is you yourself. Therefore, the most
subversive invitation you could ever accept is the invitation to awaken
to who you are and where you have landed. Plato said in The Symposium
that one of the greatest privileges of a human life is to become
midwife to the birth of the soul in another. When your soul awakens,
you begin to truly inherit your life. You leave the kingdom of fake
surfaces, repetitive talk and weary roles and slip deeper into the true
adventure of who you are and who you are called to become. The greatest
friend of the soul is the unknown. Yet we are afraid of the unknown
because it lies outside our vision and our control. We avoid it or
quell it by filtering it through our protective barriers of
domestication and control. The normal way never leads home.
Once you start to awaken, no one can ever claim you again for the
old patterns. Now you realise how precious your time here is. You are
no longer willing to squander your essence on undertakings that do not
nourish your true self; your patience grows thin with tired talk and
dead language. You see through the rosters of expectation which promise
you safety and the confirmation of your outer identity. Now you are
impatient for growth, willing to put yourself in the way of change. You
want your work to become an expression of your gift. You want your
relationship to voyage beyond the pallid frontiers to where the danger
of transformation dwells. You want your God to be wild and to call you
to where your destiny awaits.
You have come out of Plato’s Cave of Images into the sunlight and
the mystery of colour and imagination. When you begin to sense that
your imagination is the place where you are most divine, you feel
called to clean out of your mind all the worn and shabby furniture of
thought. You wish to refurbish yourself with living thought so that you
can begin to see. As Meister Eckhart says: Thoughts are our inner
senses. When the inner senses are dull and blurred, you can see nothing
in or of yourself; you become a respectable prisoner of received
images. Now you realise that ‘eternal vigilance is the price of
liberty’ and you undertake the difficult but beautiful path to freedom.
On this journey, you begin to see how the sides of your heart that
seemed awkward, contradictory and uneven are the places where the
treasure lies hidden. You begin to become true to yourself. And as
Shakespeare says in Hamlet: To thine own self be true, then as surely
as night follows day, thou canst to no man be false.
The journey shows you that from this inner dedication you can
reconstruct your own values and action. You develop from your own
self-compassion a great compassion for others. You are no longer caught
in the false game of judgement, comparison and assumption. More naked
now than ever, you begin to feel truly alive. You begin to trust the
music of your own soul; you have inherited treasure that no one will
ever be able to take from you. At the deepest level, this adventure of
growth is in fact a transfigurative conversation with your own death.
And when the time comes for you to leave, the view from your death bed
will show a life of growth that gladdens the heart and takes away all
fear.
https://www.johnodonohue.com/reflections/