It’s easy to imagine John somewhere in the west of Ireland still. I can picture him walking the hills and gathering the vocabulary of his next book. His death in 2008 was a rupture, but his voice still resonates. John knew our culture moves too fast for its own interior life. His response was to insist, quietly but with great fidelity, that the soul is real and that it needs room to breathe.
He was a priest who had stepped outside the walls, not in rebellion but in search of a larger horizon. His theology was spacious. He refused the habit of drawing lines that imprison both the drawer and the drawn. Instead he returned readers to the ground of experience. It was there, in the raw material of encounter, that he believed truth disclosed itself. Revelation did not arrive as a decree. It emerged in the steady attention one gives to beauty, to grief, to longing and to the quiet movements of the interior life. For him doctrine without experience was a cage. Experience without reflection was a drift.
He unsettled some people in both church and academy because he did not play their games. He refused the combative posture that treats difference as threat. He was neither polemicist nor provocateur. He simply spoke from the centre of his convictions and trusted the reader to meet him there. He never belittled those who disagreed. He never entered the arena of point scoring. His manner carried an older philosophical intuition that debate is not always the path to wisdom. Often the more courageous act is to hold one’s ground without attempting to conquer someone else’s.
This groundedness shaped his understanding of thresholds, a notion he loved and one he returned to again and again. He believed that much of the spiritual life takes place on the trembling edges where one world is fading and another has not yet appeared. These thresholds can be perilous. They can also be gifts. They strip away pretence and ask for presence. His writing invited people to stay awake to those moments. He encouraged us to trust that the unknown is not empty but expectant. In his hands the idea of a threshold became not a poetic flourish but practical wisdom for how to move through life’s transitions with attention and grace.
His integration of Celtic and Christian vision gave him the language for this. He saw the natural world as a companion in our unfolding. Mountains became guardians of endurance, rivers became guides of change and the sea became the ancient memory of all that is unfinished within us. Nature was not background in his work. It was teacher, mirror and consolation. It held the wisdom that institutional religion had too often exiled.
This integration was not nostalgia. It was an argument for a renewed sense of presence. John knew that modern life fractures attention and that a fractured attention cannot sustain a soulful life. He invited readers to slow the pace of their looking and listening. He wanted them to see that the soul is not a metaphor. It is the depth dimension of human life. Ignore it and one becomes brittle. Attend to it and something within begins to cohere. He believed that beauty is not a luxury but a necessity. It is the language through which the soul recognises itself.
His influence has grown because he offered a path that was neither secular emptiness nor religious enclosure. It was a third way shaped by hospitality. We are never coerced. We are welcomed. He writes as someone convinced that no one needs to be diminished for truth to widen. That confidence, rare in any generation, has made him a companion for those who feel themselves in between worlds. He spoke to exiles of many kinds. He reminded them that belonging begins not with adherence but with attention.
On his seventieth birthday, it is tempting to imagine what he might have written had he been given the years. Yet his legacy is not an unfinished oeuvre but a way of seeing. He taught that the inner life is not an indulgence but the ground from which action takes its meaning. He taught that spirituality is impoverished when it forgets the body of the earth. He taught that wisdom is roomy, that it reveres experience and listens for the voice beneath the noise.
This morning, as a new year opens in brilliant winter light here in the west of Ireland and the stove glows against the deep cold, I find myself thinking of the hope John carried. That hope is ours now, not as sentiment but as task: to live with the same spaciousness, the same fidelity to the interior life, the same refusal to diminish another. In that fidelity his presence endures. And this, I’m reminded, is how the soul unfolds, quietly and steadily, in the warmth we tend and the light we notice. Even now. Even here. It is its own kind of blessing.
Consilium 
Leave a comment