"Human Heart is Never Completely Born"

He points out that the "human heart is never completely born" - that in baptism, from an ancient Jewish tradition, the heart is anointed during the ceremony, as the place "where all feelings will nest." The baptism prayer anoints the heart as the seat of the emotions.

[page 6] The prayer intends that the new child will never become trapped, caught, or entangled in false inner networks of negativity, resentment, or destruction toward itself. The blessings also intend that the child will have a fluency of feelings in its life, that its feelings may flow freely and carry its soul out to the world and gather from the world delight and peace.

How does a child become trapped in false networks of negativity?

Rightly understood, children absorb the true feelings of their parents and care-givers as those feelings are portrayed in front of the children.

How can they be false except that the feelings are not those of the child, but the feelings of those who raised the child. The child is filled with those feelings, and, as a maturing adult, must sort through those feelings, weeding out those that are unworthy or false to its nature and those are true and worthy of keeping.

In a world in which one absorbs and stores every physical body state until they reach five years old, and then has those physical substrates of their feelings recapitulated for the remainder of their life, one needs a way of removing those unwanted states before one becomes so enured of them as to accept them as one's true identity.

There is no better short definition of negative doyles ⁽¹⁾ than O'Donohue gives above, namely, "false inner networks of negativity, resentment, or destruction" towards oneself. With the advent of the science of doyletics, I'm pleased to say that those false inner networks are endangered species from now on. A simple thirty second speed trace is enough to disable the unwanted networks of negativity permanently.

In his chapter called "The Mystery of Friendship" we find some amazing thoughts on friendship. He explains the concept of anam cara in detail as "soul friend" or someone to whom we can confess our deepest intimacies. Here are a few quotes from that chapter:

[page 18] . . . "the hand of the stranger is the hand of God."

[page 19] a friend is a loved one who awakens your life in order to free the wild possibilities within you.

[page 23] Love opens the door of ancient recognition.

[page 26] The one you love, your anam cara, your soul friend, is the truest mirror to reflect your soul.

[page 33] When two people come together, an ancient circle closes between them. . . . When you really love someone, you shine the light of your soul on the beloved.

[page 41] The human person is a threshold where many infinities meet. There is the infinity of space that reaches out into the depths of the cosmos and the infinity of time reaching back over billions of years.

[page 47] A sacrament is a visible sign of invisible grace. In that definition there is a fine acknowledgment of how the unseen world comes to expression in the visible world.

In that last quote, O'Donohue gives us his understanding of how the physical and spiritual worlds intermesh. In the next quotation, he shares a poem filled with a magnificent meshing of the spiritual and physical worlds, the reality of the Christ Spirit in the Sun, but deals with it as if it were simply a metaphor.

[page 56] In this Gaelic poem, the sun is worshiped as the eye and face of God. The rich vitalism of the Celtic sensibility finds lyrical expression here. . . "Glory to thee/Thou glorious sun./Glory to thee, thou son/Face of the God of life."

O'Donohue's discussion in the section, "The Eye is Like the Dawn," where he tells that the "eye is the mother of distance" and the "eye is also the mother of intimacy" prompted me to write this short poem:

The Eye is the Mother of Distance
The Eye is the Mother of Closeness
The "I" is the Mother of Distance
The "I" is the Mother of Closeness

The phonological ambiguity of the English word for our organ of vision with the word for our individuality is deeply meaningful, as anyone can tell by replacing the one for the other in many contexts. Here, O'Donohue tells us about the materialistic or scientific eye (or "I") that must judge everything it sees:

[page 63] The judgmental eye harvests the reflected surface and calls it truth.

Below I have compiled a litany of "eyes" or "I's" that he lists for the reader spread over pages 62, 62, and 64:

To the fearful eye, all is threatening.

To the greedy eye, everything can be possessed.

To the judgmental eye, everything is closed in definitive frames.

To the resentful eye, everything is begrudged.

To the indifferent eye, nothing calls or awakens.

To the inferior eye, every else is greater.

To the loving eye, everything is real.